Seven Emerging Technologies That will Change the World Forever
Gray Scott
How will we live in the future? How will new and emerging technologies change our lives, our economy and indeed our businesses? We should begin to think about the future now. It will be here faster than you think.
Let’s explore seven current emerging technologies that I am thinking about that are set to change the world forever.
The dilemma of new innovation is that it is invariably not labour intensive. A country with more brawn than brain has to choose delicately between investments that will shed jobs and those which will create the much needed employment.
1. Age Reversal
We will see the emergence of true biological age reversal by 2025.
It may be extraordinarily expensive, complex and risky, but for people who want to turn back the clock, it may be worth it. It may sound like science fiction but the science is real, and it has already begun. In fact, according to new research published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, Professor Jun-Ichi Hayashi from the University of Tsukuba in Japan has already reversed ageing in human cellines by “turning on or off”mitochondrial function.
Another study published in CELL reports that Australian and US researchers have successfully reversed the aging process in the muscles of mice. They found that raising nuclear NAD+ in old mice reverses pseudohypoxia and metabolic dysfunction. Researchers gave the mice a compound called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide or NAD for a week and found that the age indicators in two-year-old mice were restored to that of six-month-old mice. That would be like turning a 60-year-old human into a 20-year-old!
How will our culture deal with age reversal? will we set limits on who can age-reverse? Do we ban criminals from this technology? These are the questions we will face in a very complex future. One thing is certain, age reversal will happen and when it does it will change our species and our world forever.
2. Artificial General Intelligence
The robots are coming and they are going to eat your job for lunch. Worldwide shipments of multipurpose industrial robots are forecast to exceed 207,000 units in 2015, and this is just the beginning. Robots like Care-o-bot 4 and Softbank’s Pepper may be in homes, offices and hotels within the next year. These robots will be our personal servants, assistants and caretakers.
Amazon has introduced a new AI assistant called ECHO that could replace the need for a human assistant altogether. We already have robots and automation that can make pizza, serve beer, write news articles, scan our faces for diseases, and drive cars. We will see AI in our factories, hospitals, restaurants and hotels around the world by 2020.
3. Vertical Pink Farms
Thankfully, several companies around the world are already producing food grown in these Vertical PinkFarms and the results are remarkable.
Vertical PinkFarms will use blue and red LED lighting to grow organic, pesticide free, climate controlled food inside indoor environments. Vertical PinkFarms use less water, less energy and enable people to grow food underground or indoors year round in any climate.
Traditional food grown on outdoor farms are exposed to the full visible light spectrum. This range includes Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue and Violet. However, agricultural science is now showing us that O, Y, G and V are not necessary for plant growth. You only need R and B.LED lights are much more efficient and cooler than indoor florescent grow lights used in most indoor greenhouses. LED lights are also becoming less expensive as more companies begin to invest in this technology. Just like the solar and electric car revolution, the change will be exponential. By 2025, we may see massive Vertical PinkFarms in most major cities around the world. We may even see small Vertical PinkFarm units in our homes in the future.
4. Transhumanism
By 2035, even if a majority of humans do not self-identify as Transhuman, technically they will be. If we define any bio-upgrade or human enhancement as Transhumanism, then the numbers are already quite high and growing exponentially. According to a UN Telecom Agency report, around 6 billion people have cell phones. This demonstrates the ubiquitous nature of technology that we keep on or around our body.
As human bio-enhancements become more affordable, billions of humans will become Transhuman. Digital implants, mind-controlled exoskeletal upgrades, age reversal pills, hyper-intelligence brain implants and bionic muscle upgrades. All of these technologies will continue our evolution as humans.
Reconstructive joint replacements, spinal implants, cardiovascular implants, dental implants, intraocular lens and breast implants are all part of our human techno-evolution into this new Transhuman species.
5. Wearables and Implantables
Smartphones will fade into digital history as the high-resolution smart contact lens and corresponding in-ear audio plugs communicate with our wearable computers or “smart suits.” The digital world will be displayed directly on our eye in stunning interactive augmented beauty. The Ghent University’s Centre of Microsystems Technology in Belgium has recently developed a spherical curved LCD display that can be embedded in contact lenses. This enables the entire lens to display information.
The bridge to the smart contact starts with smart glasses, VR headsets and yes, the Apple watch. Wearable technologies are growing exponential y. New smart augmented glasses like Google Glass, RECON JET, METAPro, and Vuzix M100 Smart Glasses are just the beginning. In fact, CastAR augmented 3D glasses recently received over a million dollars in funding on Kickstarter. Their goal was only four hundred thousand. The market is ready for smart vision, and tech companies should move away from handheld devices if they want to compete.
The question of what is real and augmented will be irrelevant in the future. We will be able to create our reality with clusters of information cults that can only see certain augmented information realities if you are in these groups. All information will be instantaneously available in the augmented visual future.
6. Atmospheric Water Harvesting
California and parts of the south-west in the US are currently experiencing an unprecedented drought. If this drought continues, the global agricultural system could become unstable.
Consider this: California and Arizona account for about 98% of commercial lettuce production in the United States. Thankful y we live in a world filled with exponential innovation right now.
An emerging technology called Atmospheric Water Harvesting could save California and other arid parts of the world from severe drought and possibly change the techno-agricultural landscape forever.
Several companies around the world are already using atmospheric water harvesting technologies to solve this problem. Each company has a different technological approach but all of them combined could help alleviate areas suffering from water shortages.
The most basic, and possibly the most accessible, form of atmospheric water harvesting technology works by collecting water and moisture from the atmosphere using micro netting. These micro nets collect water that drains down into a collection chamber. This fresh water can then be stored or channeled into homes and farms as needed.
A company called FogQuest is already successfully using micro netting or “fog collectors” to harvest atmospheric water in places like Ethiopia, Guatemala, Nepal, Chile and Morocco. Will people use this technology or will we continue to drill for water that may not be there?
7. 3D Printing
Today we already have 3D printers that can print clothing, circuit boards, furniture, homes and chocolate. A company called BigRep has created a 3D printer called the BigRep ONE.2 that enables designers to create entire tables, chairs or coffee tables in one print. Did you get that?
You can now buy a 3D printer and print furniture!
Fashion designers like Iris van Herpen, Bryan Oknyansky, Francis Bitonti, Madeline Gannon, and Daniel Widrig have all broken serious ground in the 3D printed fashion movement. These avant-garde designs may not be functional for the average consumer so what is one to do for a regular tee shirt?
Thankfully a new Field Guided Fabrication 3D printer called ELECTROLOOM has arrived that can print and it may put a few major retail chains out of business. The ELECTROLOOM enables anyone to create seamless fabric items on demand.
So what is next? 3D printed cars. Yes, cars. Divergent Microfactories (DM) has recently created a first 3D printed high-performance car called the Blade. This car is no joke. The Blade has a chassis weight of just 61 pounds, goes 0-60 MPH in 2.2 seconds and is powered by a 4-cylinder 700-horsepower bi-fuel internal combustion engine.
These are just seven emerging technologies on my radar. I have a list of hundreds of innovations that will change the world forever. Some sound like pure sci-fi but I assure you they are real. Are we ready for a world filled with abundance, age reversal and self-replicating Al robots? I hope so’.
I rationalised ‘very few of these exciting future markets will help with South Africa’s pressing employment problems. Very few of these future markets will demand unskilled, under-educated rural dwellers who would almost certainly be computer illiterate. South Africa was not even at the race which began a short while ago.
SA needs low-wage, labour-intensive growth strategy to boost economy
Posted by: Thabang Motsohi
Posted on: March 12, 2015
Posted in: Business, News/PoliticsComments: 14 Comments
Views: 2803
Faced with an economy that has been in decline for more than a decade and given the slowing demand from our trading partners, the State of the Nation address should have pointed in an emphatic way, to a radical and fundamental policy shift in strategies that are aimed at economic regeneration and the way we need to engage with business in order to develop a shared strategic vision.
The National Development Plan (NDP) is frequently being punted, by government and some privatesector business leaders, as the magical instrument that will provide the “radical” economic transformation required to propel South Africa on an accelerated and labour-intensive growth trajectory. The fundamental question we have to deal with is whether the current menu of growth policy documents: Reconstruction and Development Programme (1994), Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (1996), Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative-South Africa (2006), the New Growth Path (NGP of 2010) and the NDP, will indeed deliver the desired outcomes.
The reality we must face and acknowledge is that our economy has been shedding jobs consistently in all major formal sectors for more than 20 years as the key drivers of production gradually shifted from labour to capital. The mining sector has been shedding jobs for a long while and more job shedding is planned in the short and medium term. The result is that we now sit with mil ions of unskilled workers without jobs. They are typically uneducated, black and mainly women. We need jobs that are suitable for this category of job seekers.
But we must first have a specific diagnosis about the type of problem we must deal with in order to make appropriate choices about the remedy we need to apply. What I see is that there is gravitation towards fudging the issues in order to avoid the truth in front of us, because in doing so, we might dilute the ideological obsession within the ruling alliance about this undefined concept of “decent work”. In my view, this obsession is behind the ideological gridlock and confusion that explains the incoherence around the appropriate menu of policies that can deliver the high, labour-intensive growth that we need. In such a situation the result will always be lethargy and stagnation.
Different types of growth strategies will always have different types of impact and outcomes on employment. To ensure success, we must choose the growth strategy that targets the type of unemployment challenge we need to resolve. It follows therefore that the starting place must indeed be a debate about the characteristics of our employment problem; what types of people constitute the unemployed? For example, the decision by the leadership of China to implement a vigorous low-wage, mass-employment strategy over two decades ago was a response to a real threat of social instability because of widespread unskilled unemployment and entrenched poverty. The result was massive growth in the low-wage manufacturing sector that had a positive impact on employment and poverty.
Incomes improved and this had a definite impact on demand and the sustained economic growth that followed.
Consider the following observations.
The Medium-Term Strategic Framework (MTSF) 2014-2019 has recently been made public and is intended to give effect to the NDP and to “accelerate growth, create decent work and promote investment in a competitive economy”. But the following key issues raise serious questions on the credibility of the strategy:
Clearly there is need for more debate on the NDP and what it can achieve. All of the current growth strategies skirt the issue of a low-wage, labour-intensive growth strategy. The central theme is growth but what comes through is that there is a definite bias towards a decent job paradigm. And this ideological fixation is pushed by Cosatu and the SACP and the main beneficiaries will be their white-collar member workers.
What then must be done?
I think there is broad agreement, across ideological persuasions that growth is central to our ability to deal with and resolve our socio-economic challenges. The question that remains is what type of growth strategy?
A critical success factor for successful strategy execution depends on the need to identify constraints to its execution and to develop remedies to mitigate them. This is one factor that is often deliberately avoided because most constraints are uncomfortable to deal with. A key theme in the NDP is the achievement of a capable state machinery to deliver on the NDP objectives. But the time it will take to achieve the required turnaround at local-government level casts serious doubt on the targets set in the MTSF. A major challenge is the irrational deployment of party cadres in leadership positions for which they are not qualified. A sad outcome of this practice is that accountability is severely compromised.
This collapse in corporate governance is best manifested in the state of local government and municipalities. A number of initiatives and interventions were launched in the past 15 years to improve operational efficiency at this level. The last one was Operation Clean Audit 2014 launched in 2009. Its objective was that all 283 municipalities (now 278) and provincial departments should achieve a clean audit on their financial statements by 2014.
A report by researchers at the Multi-Level Government Initiative — Operation Clean Audit 2014: Why it Failed and What Can be Learned — examined the impact of the national government’s intended objectives with this undertaking and identified the risks that arise when policy is not based on statistical analysis.
Its conclusion was that by setting a fixed target for achieving clean audits in all municipalities that bucked actual trends, and not adjusting them to the annual audit trends, the intervention had no realistic prospect of success and merely measured failure. And the underlying reason, as the Auditor General has pronounced, is that people employed as accountants in these entities have no competence to prepare financial statements. They rely on consultants at the time of the audits. This is very scary. And it is a direct result of patronage and corrupt, cadre-deployment practices.
The reality is that South Africa is trapped in a low-growth scenario and finding solutions to create employment opportunities for the unskilled workforce cannot be deflected by ideological fixation on a decent job to the exclusion of other options. Having a low-wage job brings dignity and an opportunity to improve skills. We should rather look to introduce a targeted wage-subsidy policy to improve income levels. Breaking into the high-skills economy takes time given the constraints identified above. The rationale for the latest downgrades is largely based on pedestrian growth prospects.
Another downgrade is on the horizon.
