A wonderful table on Disruptive Technologies

Roberto Saracco March 17, 2018 Blog 2,210 Views

The table of technology induced disruptions in the coming decades. A great tool to stimulate reflections. Credit: Imperial College, London

A team at Imperial College, London, has published what I think is a thought provoking table of 100 disruptive technologies that may, or may not, happen in the next decade or in the next 100 years. Some of them are really improbable, and we may not even know how to tackle them, but none is impossible in a scientific sense (e.g. none is aiming at creating perpetual motion). You may want to contact the authors: they are willing to discuss their work with you!

They have arranged them in a matrix, with:

the lower left quadrant including those disruptive technologies that are already finding an application space –Horizon 1, executable. These technologies are placed there because are the ones that have an impact sooner and that impact can be seen smaller, although significant, to the ones created by technologies we are unprepared for.
Around this quadrant they placed technologies that may become reality in the next or the following decade – Horizon 2, experimental.
Moving farther they placed those technologies that are beyond 2030, we will have to wait over 20 years to see some become reality – Horizon 3 – exploratory.
The outer layer comprises technologies that with today’s knowledge and foresight we can consider unlikely to materialise but that are not impossible from a scientific point of view – Horizon 4, dreamable.

You can look at the table in full resolution and at their commentaries here. I ensure it is really worth your time.

They have classified the technologies based on their expected impact: Data Ecosystems, Smart Planet, Extreme Automation, Human Augmentation and Human Machine Interaction.

Of course, other forms of classification may be found, but I consider the classification they chose interesting because it is highlighting:

Data Ecosystems – the future will be more and more about data and they will create ecosystems within which economy, culture and societies will thrive. As they provide value they will also attract malicious attack and will force new ways of dealing with “things”;
Smart Planet – our Planet is an immense, almost inexhaustible, of resources. However it is crucial to use them in a proper way, since we are not “consuming” them and move on to get some more: we are transforming them and we have to deal with the management of this transformation process. We have to be smart globally, it is not enough be be smart locally, hence the need to look at a Smart Planet;
Extreme Automation – automation has made incredible progress, yet we have just scratched the surface of what is possible. What we have done so far has been mostly mechanical automation and it has already resulted in dramatic changes in our society. What lays ahead is in the realm of intelligence automation and its impact will be much greater,
Human Augmentation – we have been augmenting ourselves for as far as we can look back in time. What is new is the pace this augmentation has taken and all signs indicate for an even faster pace in the coming decades. Possibly more important than the speed of evolution is the quality of evolution. We are now augmenting our “intelligence” and our “knowledge”: in the coming decades we might need to use different words to represent intelligence and knowledge, they will both distributed and “immanent”.
Human Machine Interaction – here again we have been interacting with machines for a long time, from the time when machines were pieces of stones, then carts … Today we interact with robots and the trend is towards an interaction where it is the machine that adapts to us, whilst so far it has been us who needed to adapt to the machine. We were the ones needing “training”. Now we are starting to talk about training the machines to interact with us. In the longer terms we may see interactions disappearing from our perception as we will reach a symbiosis with machines.

In this series of posts I would like to take a look into these 4, thought provoking, horizons as well as in their areas of impact.