Raul Crist
Never before has there been a time when technological progress has brought about such rapid developments on earth. Digitization and new technologies have fundamentally changed the world in recent years – but there is still no end in sight. Instead, the events stimulate the imagination of what may be possible in the foreseeable future. As of today, it can definitely be said that innovative technologies are already in the starting blocks, which will change the world again.
It’s not as if there hadn’t been numerous inventions in the past that count as milestones in history: the car, for example, electricity, or the internet. A world without all of these things would be unimaginable today and these developments were in turn the basis for new technologies. So it is a never-ending cycle, but it has always been difficult to predict where it will lead in the future.
When the internet was invented, few people believed that internet-enabled smartphones would one day become a part of everyday life. At this point in time, we can only guess which technologies will turn the world upside down in the coming years and what they will look like as a result. Some promising technologies which are currently still in their infancy definitely have potential. But which ones are they?
The World Wide Web is becoming the “Internet of Things”
To stay with the example of the Internet, its development is far from over. Instead, it’s changing from day to day, and here’s an interesting trend: there are now more “things” using the internet than people. It is therefore also referred to as the “Internet of Things”. This means that around 50 billion devices in the world will be connected to the Internet by 2020 and will be using it independently.
The level of automation is growing and growing, expanding into more and more areas. Sensors measure and collect data, analyze, evaluate, or even act automatically in one way or another on the basis of this data. So it will be technologies like Zigbee, Z-Wave, or 6LoWPAN that will fundamentally change the Internet and thus the whole world.
Cloud Technology: When Zettabytes Soar Above Clouds
The Internet has also produced a new technology that goes by the beautiful name of “cloud”. The language is from the cloud, which was once invented for data exchange, but now has significantly more areas of application. Digital storage has largely eliminated the need for external hard drives, floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other physical data storage devices of the past. With increasing security against Internet crime, it is being used more and more in the commercial sector and by private Internet users. The numerous advantages open up the best prospects for the future of the cloud, especially in view of the significantly strengthened networks that the development in the field of data exchange will bring with it. It’s only a matter of time here.
Artificial intelligence is like out of a sci-fi movie
Many technologies that are part of everyday life today were once visions of the future in sci-fi films. This raises the question of whether the human-like robots from current Hollywood films could one day be real. Experts are sure the answer to that is a resounding “yes.” Artificial intelligence is developing at a rapid pace and has already fundamentally changed many an industry. For example, in the first companies, job interviews are already being conducted with a computer during recruiting, which evaluates the choice of words, intonation, voice, etc. of the speaker and draws conclusions about his personality from this. But that’s just the beginning: Production robots have become indispensable in industry and in the foreseeable future, robots should be able to learn, understand, speak, and act independently. A vision that scares many people, but at the same time could make everyday life much easier. So it remains exciting to see how AI will continue in the future.
Autonomous vehicles make the streets safer
A world without cars? Unthinkable! But soon there could be a world in which no one has to sit behind the wheel themselves. The first prototypes of autonomous vehicles are already on the roads. From Tesla and Google to numerous car manufacturers, many people are currently working on concepts for autonomous driving. But they all agree that technology is not a question of the future, but that it will come faster than initially thought. “What we are discussing today will not come in 2020 or 2025 – but much earlier,” quotes Writs hafts Wyche the trend researcher Sven Gabor Jansky. First and foremost, autonomous driving will make roads safer and reduce the accident rate by up to 90 percent, according to forecasts. It remains to be seen whether mankind will actually give up control completely and when. After all, driving a car is simply a fun factor for many people.
Houses, body parts, airplanes – everything can be “printed”
A much-discussed technology is a 3D printer. It’s been a few years since it was invented and the whole world is talking about how promising this idea is and that one day almost anything could be produced with a 3D printer. So far, however, only slow progress can be seen. Nevertheless, the first successes have already been celebrated with prostheses from the 3D printer, as well as with aircraft parts, and in China entire settlements are said to be printed. In addition, researchers have succeeded in printing bones and the first organs from organic matter. The development is still progressing at a manageable pace and the market for 3D printing is “only” at 3.1 billion US dollars. But its potential is huge and its growth is estimated at at least 35 percent per year from now on.
Future of Medicine: Playing with the Human Body
Medicine has made enormous progress over the past decades and centuries. Nevertheless, there are illnesses and injuries against which humanity is still powerless. That should change in the future – and several technologies are in the starting blocks for this. One of them is the so-called gene therapy, by means of which a virus can be introduced into the body in a targeted manner in order to replace defective cells and genes there. In this way, genetic defects could be cured and diseases such as cancer prevented.
Medicine has not yet found a cure for paralysis either. However, based on the first successful studies, wireless implants in the brain are now giving hope that spinal cord injuries can soon be avoided – which would mean that the paralysis would be lifted. At the same time, genetic engineering is making great strides. It will soon be possible to determine a person’s appearance, intelligence, health, and other characteristics before they are born. Whether that will also be legal is another question. The “CRISPR/Cas9 gene scissors” also made headlines. This is a technology to remove damaged DNA sections and replace them with healthy ones. The “optimized” human being could therefore become a reality in the next few years.
The humanoid robot – or the robot-like human?
It is hard to predict where such developments will lead. If human genetics are deliberately manipulated, are they still really human? Or is he some sort of robotic being? Either way, the boundaries will one day be blurred, because implants are also making great strides and could become more important. Be it to support bodily functions such as the pacemaker or an implanted chip to open doors or to pay in the arm – there are hardly any limits to creativity. Smart eye implants, as they are often depicted in sci-fi movies, could soon become a routine procedure and the brain could even become an interface for computers. So it may actually be that mankind is on the way to becoming a “cyborg”.
