I'm actually excited about... fake meat. I think this has huge potential to reduce the amount of land and resources we need to use for agriculture. Of course, with that, will probably come an explosion in population...<p>Any of the genetic/medical things will (IMHO) have annoyingly slow progress. The body is an incredibly complex system (duh), one I think that will defy efforts to "reverse engineer" is (so to speak).<p>Put it this way: we need massive amounts of computing power just to figure out the shape of proteins, which is important to figure out what they react to and how. Extending that to figuring out the interactions and it gets even more complicated.<p>I also believe that nothing will replace the convenience of (largely) non-volatile fuels to the point where considerable effort will be spent to make artificial fuels viable. Giant tubs of algae making them, fuel trees (Anathem), that sort of thing.<p>As much as I like the idea of a space elevator, I'm not sure how viable it is. Firstly, just to create a material strong enough to withstand the forces involved is still something largely theorized about (buckeyballs notwithstanding). It will also be incredibly costly to produce. Imagine what acts of terror could do to that.<p>I see the future of mass long-distance travel being underground vacuum trains. It's a huge engineering effort but would solve so many problems (eg air congestion, travel times).<p>And as much as it depresses me I don't see a big future in space. The economics are terrible (particularly for interstellar travel). IIRC I read that getting one ton of spacecraft to the nearest star system accelerating to 10% of the speed of light would require roughly 10^18 joules of energy or roughly 1kg (being 0.1% of the total mass) of matter being converted to energy perfectly. And this assumes you've solved the reaction mass problem.
Why is "reducing air pollution" a potential application of driverless cars? The other benefits allow people to driver faster and safer on the same amount of roads, but I don't see how that would encourage less driving that would lead to less air pollution.<p>Faster driving = less gas mileage, and if driverless cars dramatically lowers the opportunity cost of driving people may be encouraged to put even more miles on their car. Wouldn't that all <i>increase</i> air pollution? Don't get me wrong, I think the other benefits are enormous, but am I missing something obvious?<p>Edit: Thanks for the great answers below.
It's interesting to note that GPGPU is on there but general-purpose computation on FPGAs isn't. It amazes me how the former has taken so much mindshare.
A much better article than I would expect, really.<p>Coolest technology I had never heard of: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-reconfiguring_modular_robot" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-reconfiguring_modular_robo...</a>
The whole head transplant[1] has got to be the most disturbing thing on that list.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant</a>
Why do people always think that this <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocortex" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocortex</a> is far off?<p>The lady with the arm has a 96 electrode implant.. you could probably type with that many electrodes.<p>Seems to me its just a matter of getting more electrodes in there and/or doing more training in order to be able to interface with an exocortex.<p>I think if people are less afraid of sticking things in their brains, things would look a lot more like a cyberpunk novel already.
My (tech/business) University has an obligatory seminar, where all students choose an emerging technology from a similar list and try to evaluate its path to reality, influence on markets and society, etc.<p>We all were in awe when hearing the amazing stuff the other teams where working on – definitely one of the coolest classes I have ever taken!
I'd love to see the space elevator come soon using carbon nanotubes. We could put nuclear (and other) waste on it and shoot it out into space. With such high costs in waste disposal, and how profitable such a device could be, you'd think it'd happen sooner rather than later.<p>More exciting than the moon landing or the Facebook IPO!
I work for a company working on RFID (radio frequency identification technology on the wiki) for the jewelry industry. Some of the biggest wholesalers on the planet have recently bought our system and we have had requests for proposals from Rolex and more. We're currently looking for paid interns in NYC, feel free to contact.