Roadmap & Timeline of Emerging Science & Technology

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We are still waiting on revise 2 of the map, but in the meantime (meme time?)
I thought I’d share a few of the entries that we thought about, but which didn’t make it onto the final map. This was usually because we didn’t think that these things were really possible by a certain date, might exist, but not in significant enough numbers, or because there just wasn’t room to include everything on the map.

Notably, whilst we are including a few ‘events’ on the map (e.g. number of mobile phones exceeds human population) we have dropped the idea of having a sphere of ‘appear’ and ‘disappear’ events around the outside of the map.

Anyway, some things NOT on the map…

All windows become solar panels
Monetary policy set by algorithms
Growing coloured finger nails
All roads individually priced
Pilotless cargo aircraft
Smart teeth
Ingestible robots
Crop pollination robots
Invisibility shields
Personal data as an asset class
Uploadable skills & experience (we had downloadable too)
Online vehicle theft
End of road traffic accidents
Internet search engines than can answer any question in real time
Programmable body cells
3D printing of high end consumer goods
Fabrics that change colour and texture on demand
‘Supervision’ contact lenses
Spider-silk textiles
Synthetic wombs

3 thoughts on “Roadmap & Timeline of Emerging Science & Technology

  1. In yesterday’s Observer there was a an article about human to animal communication during the 60s and 70s – mankind (especially NASA) thought we were on the cusp of being able to communicate with dolphins. A great demonstration of how some technology can appear to be within grasp, but actually decades (at least) away.

    Anyway, my point is that perhaps you could add this as a long term prediction. I’d put it very long term if I were you.

  2. I’m sure I’ve used this somewhere. I once met a guy at a conference about global risks and he said to me that one to watch out for as a game changer was precisely this. Not so much Dolphins saying “goodbye and thanks for all the fish”, but “what the hell do you humans think you are doing?”

  3. Pingback: Emerging tech timeline in Wired magazine | What's Next: Top Trends

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