Top 10 emerging technologies for 2014
Technology has become perhaps the greatest agent of change in the
modern world. While never without risk, positive technological
breakthroughs promise innovative solutions to the most pressing global
challenges of our time, from resource scarcity to global environmental
change. However, a lack of appropriate investment, outdated regulatory
frameworks and gaps in public understanding prevent many promising
technologies from achieving their potential.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies identifies recent key trends in technological change in its annual list of
Top 10 Emerging Technologies.
By highlighting the most important technological breakthroughs, the
Council aims to raise awareness of their potential and contribute to
closing gaps in investment, regulation and public understanding. For
2014, the Council identified ten new technologies that could reshape our
society in the future.
The 2014 list is:
- Body-adapted Wearable Electronics
- Nanostructured Carbon Composites
- Mining Metals from Desalination Brine
- Grid-scale Electricity Storage
- Nanowire Lithium-ion Batteries
- Screenless Display
- Human Microbiome Therapeutics
- RNA-based Therapeutics
- Quantified Self (Predictive Analytics)
- Brain-computer Interfaces
Body-adapted Wearable Electronics
From Google Glass to the Fitbit wristband,
wearable technology has generated significant attention over the past
year, with most existing devices helping people to better understand
their personal health and fitness by monitoring exercise, heart rate,
sleep patterns, and so on. The sector is shifting beyond external
wearables like wristbands or clip-on devices to “body-adapted”
electronics that further push the ever-shifting boundary between humans
and technology.
The new generation of wearables is designed to adapt to the human
body’s shape at the place of deployment. These wearables are typically
tiny, packed with a wide range of sensors and a feedback system, and
camouflaged to make their use less intrusive and more socially
acceptable. These virtually invisible devices include earbuds that
monitor heart rate, sensors worn under clothes to track posture, a
temporary tattoo that tracks health vitals and haptic shoe soles that
communicate GPS directions through vibration alerts felt by the feet.
The applications are many and varied: haptic shoes are currently
proposed for helping blind people navigate, while Google Glass has
already been worn by oncologists to assist in surgery via medical
records and other visual information accessed by voice commands.
Technology analysts consider that success factors for wearable
products include device size, non-invasiveness, and the ability to
measure multiple parameters and provide real-time feedback that improves
user behaviour. However, increased uptake also depends on social
acceptability as regards privacy. For example, concerns have been raised
about wearable devices that use cameras for facial recognition and
memory assistance. Assuming these challenges can be managed, analysts
project hundreds of millions of devices in use by 2016.
Nanostructured Carbon Composites
Emissions
from the world’s rapidly-growing fleet of vehicles are an environmental
concern, and raising the operating efficiency of transport is a
promising way to reduce its overall impact. New techniques to
nanostructure carbon fibres for novel composites are showing the
potential in vehicle manufacture to reduce the weight of cars by 10% or
more. Lighter cars need less fuel to operate, increasing the efficiency
of moving people and goods and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
However, efficiency is only one concern – another of equal importance
is improving passenger safety. To increase the strength and toughness
of new composites, the interface between carbon fibres and the
surrounding polymer matrix is engineered at the nanoscale to improve
anchoring – using carbon nanotubes, for example. In the event of an
accident, these surfaces are designed to absorb impact without tearing,
distributing the force and protecting passengers inside the vehicle.
A third challenge, which may now be closer to a solution, is that of
recycling carbon fibre composites – something which has held back the
widespread deployment of the technology. New techniques involve
engineering cleavable “release points” into the material at the
interface between the polymer and the fibre so that the bonds can be
broken in a controlled fashion and the components that make up the
composite can be recovered separately and reused. Taken together, these
three elements could have a major impact by bringing forward the
potential for manufacturing lightweight, super-safe and recyclable
composite vehicles to a mass scale.
Mining Metals from Desalination Brine
As
the global population continues to grow and developing countries emerge
from poverty, freshwater is at risk of becoming one of the Earth’s most
limited natural resources. In addition to water for drinking,
sanitation and industry in human settlements, a significant proportion
of the world’s agricultural production comes from irrigated crops grown
in arid areas. With rivers like the Colorado, the Murray-Darling and the
Yellow River no longer reaching the sea for long periods of time, the
attraction of desalinating seawater as a new source of freshwater can
only increase.
Desalination has serious drawbacks, however. In addition to high energy use (a topic covered in last year’s
Top 10 Emerging Technologies),
the process produces a reject-concentrated brine, which can have a
serious impact on marine life when returned to the sea. Perhaps the most
promising approach to solving this problem is to see the brine from
desalination not as waste, but as a resource to be harvested for
valuable materials. These include lithium, magnesium and uranium, as
well as the more common sodium, calcium and potassium elements. Lithium
and magnesium are valuable for use in high-performance batteries and
lightweight alloys, for example, while rare earth elements used in
electric motors and wind turbines – where potential shortages are
already a strategic concern – may also be recovered.
New processes using catalyst-assisted chemistry raise the possibility
of extracting these metals from reject desalination brine at a cost
that may eventually become competitive with land-based mining of ores or
lake deposits. This economic benefit may offset the overall cost of
desalination, making it more viable on a large scale, in turn reducing
the human pressures on freshwater ecosystems.
Grid-scale Electricity Storage
Electricity
cannot be directly stored, so electrical grid managers must constantly
ensure that overall demand from consumers is exactly matched by an equal
amount of power fed into the grid by generating stations. Because the
chemical energy in coal and gas can be stored in relatively large
quantities, conventional fossil-fuelled power stations offer
dispatchable energy available on demand, making grid management a
relatively simple task. However, fossil fuels also release greenhouse
gases, causing climate change – and many countries now aim to replace
carbon-based generators with a clean energy mix of renewable, nuclear or
other non-fossil sources.
Clean energy sources, in particular wind and solar, can be highly
intermittent; instead of producing electricity when consumers and grid
managers want it, they generate uncontrollable quantities only when
favourable weather conditions allow. A scaled-up nuclear sector might
also present challenges due to its preferred operation as always-on
baseload. Hence, the development of grid-scale electricity storage
options has long been a “holy grail” for clean energy systems. To date,
only pumped storage hydropower can claim a significant role, but it is
expensive, environmentally challenging and totally dependent on
favourable geography.
There are signs that a range of new technologies is getting closer to
cracking this challenge. Some, such as flow batteries may, in the
future, be able to store liquid chemical energy in large quantities
analogous to the storage of coal and gas. Various solid battery options
are also competing to store electricity in sufficiently energy-dense and
cheaply available materials. Newly invented graphene supercapacitors
offer the possibility of extremely rapid charging and discharging over
many tens of thousands of cycles. Other options use kinetic potential
energy such as large flywheels or the underground storage of compressed
air.
A more novel option being explored at medium scale in Germany is CO
2 methanation
via hydrogen electrolysis, where surplus electricity is used to split
water into hydrogen and oxygen, with the hydrogen later being reacted
with waste carbon dioxide to form methane for later combustion – if
necessary, to generate electricity. While the round-trip efficiency of
this and other options may be relatively low, clearly storage potential
will have high economic value in the future. It is too early to pick a
winner, but it appears that the pace of technological development in
this field is moving more rapidly than ever, in our assessment, bringing
a fundamental breakthrough more likely in the near term.
Nanowire Lithium-ion Batteries
As
stores of electrical charge, batteries are critically important in many
aspects of modern life. Lithium-ion batteries, which offer good energy
density (energy per weight or volume) are routinely packed into mobile
phones, laptops and electric cars, to name just a few common uses.
However, to increase the range of electric cars to match that of
petrol-powered competitors – not to mention the battery lifetime between
charges of mobile phones and laptops – battery energy density needs to
be improved dramatically.
Batteries are typically composed of two electrodes, a positive
terminal known as a cathode, and a negative terminal known as an anode,
with an electrolyte in between. This electrolyte allows ions to move
between the electrodes to produce current. In lithium-ion batteries, the
anode is composed of graphite, which is relatively cheap and durable.
However, researchers have begun to experiment with silicon anodes, which
would offer much greater power capacity.
One engineering challenge is that silicon anodes tend to suffer
structural failure from swelling and shrinking during charge-discharge
cycle. Over the last year, researchers have developed possible solutions
that involve the creation of silicon nanowires or nanoparticles, which
seem to solve the problems associated with silicon’s volume expansion
when it reacts with lithium. The larger surface area associated with
nanoparticles and nanowires further increases the battery’s power
density, allowing for fast charging and current delivery.
Able to fully charge more quickly, and produce 30%-40% more
electricity than today’s lithium-ion batteries, this next generation of
batteries could help transform the electric car market and allow the
storage of solar electricity at the household scale. Initially,
silicon-anode batteries are expected to begin to ship in smartphones
within the next two years.
Screenless Display
One
of the more frustrating aspects of modern communications technology is
that, as devices have miniaturized, they have become more difficult to
interact with – no one would type out a novel on a smartphone, for
example. The lack of space on screen-based displays provides a clear
opportunity for screenless displays to fill the gap. Full-sized
keyboards can already be projected onto a surface for users to interact
with, without concern over whether it will fit into their pocket.
Perhaps evoking memories of the early Star Wars films, holographic
images can now be generated in three dimensions; in 2013, MIT’s Media
Lab reported a prototype inexpensive holographic colour video display
with the resolution of a standard TV.
Screenless display may also be
achieved by projecting images directly onto a person’s retina, not only
avoiding the need for weighty hardware, but also promising to safeguard
privacy by allowing people to interact with computers without others
sharing the same view. By January 2014, one start-up company had already
raised a substantial sum via Kickstarter with the aim of
commercializing a personal gaming and cinema device using retinal
display. In the longer term, technology may allow synaptic interfaces
that bypass the eye altogether, transmitting “visual” information
directly to the brain.
This field saw rapid progress in
2013 and appears set for imminent breakthroughs of scalable deployment
of screenless display. Various companies have made significant
breakthroughs in the field, including virtual reality headsets, bionic
contact lenses, the development of mobile phones for the elderly and
partially blind people, and hologram-like videos without the need for
moving parts or glasses.
Human Microbiome Therapeutics
The
human body is perhaps more properly described as an ecosystem than as a
single organism: microbial cells typically outnumber human cells by 10
to one. This human microbiome has been the subject of intensifying
research in the past few years, with the Human Microbiome Project in
2012 reporting results generated from 80 collaborating scientific
institutions. They found that more than 10,000 microbial species occupy
the human ecosystem, comprising trillions of cells and making up 1%-3%
of the body’s mass.
Through advanced DNA sequencing, bioinformatics and culturing
technologies, the diverse microbe species that cohabitate with the human
body are being identified and characterized, with differences in their
abundance correlated with disease and health.
It is increasingly understood that this plethora of microbes plays an
important role in our survival: bacteria in the gut, for example, allow
humans to digest foods and absorb important nutrients that their bodies
would otherwise not be able to access. On the other hand, pathogens
that are ubiquitous in humans can sometimes turn virulent and cause
sickness or even death.
Attention is being focused on the gut microbiome and its role in
diseases ranging from infections to obesity, diabetes and inflammatory
bowel disease. It is increasingly understood that antibiotic treatments
that destroy gut flora can result in complications such as
Clostridium difficile
infections, which can in rare cases lead to life-threatening
complications. On the other hand, a new generation of therapeutics
comprising a subset of microbes found in healthy gut are under clinical
development with a view to improving medical treatments. Advances in
human microbiome technologies clearly represent an unprecedented way to
develop new treatments for serious diseases and to improve general
healthcare outcomes in our species.
RNA-based Therapeutics
RNA
is an essential molecule in cellular biology, translating genetic
instructions encoded in DNA into the production of the proteins that
enable cells to function. However, as protein production is also a
central factor in most human diseases and disorders, RNA-based
therapeutics have long been thought to hold the potential to treat a
range of problems where conventional drug-based treatments cannot offer
much help. The field has been slow to develop, however, with initial
high hopes being dented by the sheer complexity of the effort and the
need to better understand the variability of gene expression in cells.
Over the past year, there has been a resurgence of interest in this
new field of biotech healthcare, with two RNA-based treatments approved
as human therapeutics as of 2014. RNA-based drugs for a range of
conditions including genetic disorders, cancer and infectious disease
are being developed based on the mechanism of RNA interference, which is
used to silence the expression of defective or overexpressed genes.
Extending the repertoire of RNA-based therapeutics, an even newer
platform based on messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules is now emerging.
Specific mRNA sequences injected intramuscularly or intravenously can
act as therapeutic agents through the patient’s own cells, translating
them into the corresponding proteins that deliver the therapeutic
effect. Unlike treatments aimed at changing DNA directly, RNA-based
therapeutics do not cause permanent changes to the cell’s genome and so
can be increased or discontinued as necessary.
Advances in basic RNA science, synthesis technology and in vivo
delivery are combining to enable a new generation of RNA-based drugs
that can attenuate the abundance of natural proteins, or allow for the
in vivo production of optimized, therapeutic proteins. Working in
collaboration with large pharmaceutical companies and academia, several
private companies that aim to offer RNA-based treatments have been
launched. We expect this field of healthcare to increasingly challenge
conventional pharmaceuticals in forging new treatments for difficult
diseases in the next few years.
Quantified Self (Predictive Analytics)
The
quantified-self movement has existed for many years as a collaboration
of people collecting continual data on their everyday activities in
order to make better choices about their health and behaviour. But, with
today’s Internet of Things, the movement has begun to come into its own
and have a wider impact.
Smartphones contain a rich record of people’s activities, including
who they know (contact lists, social networking apps), who they talk to
(call logs, text logs, e-mails), where they go (GPS, Wi-Fi, and
geotagged photos) and what they do (apps we use, accelerometer data).
Using this data, and specialized machine-learning algorithms, detailed
and predictive models about people and their behaviours can be built to
help with urban planning, personalized medicine, sustainability and
medical diagnosis.
For example, a team at Carnegie Mellon University has been looking at
how to use smartphone data to predict the onset of depression by
modelling changes in sleep behaviours and social relationships over
time. In another example, the Livehoods project, large quantities of
geotagged data created by people’s smartphones (using software such as
Instagram and Foursquare) and crawled from the Web have allowed
researchers to understand the patterns of movement through urban spaces.
In recent years, sensors have become cheap and increasingly
ubiquitous as more manufacturers include them in their products to
understand consumer behaviour and avoid the need for expensive market
research. For example, cars can record every aspect of a person’s
driving habits, and this information can be shown in smartphone apps or
used as big data in urban planning or traffic management. As the trend
continues towards extensive data gathering to track every aspect of
people’s lives, the challenge becomes how to use this information
optimally, and how to reconcile it with privacy and other social
concerns.
Brain-computer Interfaces
The
ability to control a computer using only the power of the mind is
closer than one might think. Brain-computer interfaces, where computers
can read and interpret signals directly from the brain, have already
achieved clinical success in allowing quadriplegics, those suffering
“locked-in syndrome” or people who have had a stroke to move their own
wheelchairs or even drink coffee from a cup by controlling the action of
a robotic arm with their brain waves. In addition, direct brain
implants have helped restore partial vision to people who have lost
their sight.
Recent research has focused on the possibility of using
brain-computer interfaces to connect different brains together directly.
Researchers at Duke University last year reported successfully
connecting the brains of two mice over the Internet (into what was
termed a “brain net”) where mice in different countries were able to
cooperate to perform simple tasks to generate a reward. Also in 2013,
scientists at Harvard University reported that they were able to
establish a functional link between the brains of a rat and a human with
a non-invasive, computer-to-brain interface.
Other research projects have focused on manipulating or directly
implanting memories from a computer into the brain. In mid-2013, MIT
researchers reported having successfully implanted a false memory into
the brain of a mouse. In humans, the ability to directly manipulate
memories might have an application in the treatment of post-traumatic
stress disorder, while in the longer term, information may be uploaded
into human brains in the manner of a computer file. Of course, numerous
ethical issues are also clearly raised by this rapidly advancing field.