There’s a staggering range of new technologies that are driving the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and you even might not be aware of it. The boundaries between people, the physical and the Internet are getting blurred, which means that different spheres of life are becoming converged. From self-driving cars and intelligent robots to gene editing – technological change is all around us and is happening at lightning speed.
The thing we all realize about technology is that it can be used for both good and bad, a massive number of uses. Today, we present you with a list of technologies that are potentially world-changing. Let’s see what the greatest tech-minds have in development, technology that will transform our lives in the years to come.
AI salting
AI (Artificial Intelligence) is able to learn of human behaviors. If an AI could be made to be humanly empathetic or come to the point where we can’t tell the difference between a human and an AI, the improvement in the effectiveness and the interaction of the AI would be vastly improved. The biggest challenge to everyone is to create and train AIs to be more human-like, which could forever change the way we use and interact with them.
The potential use of AI technologies is massively diverse. We could implement this technology as a way of handling dangerous jobs (bomb defusing and welding) or for creating automated transportation, like self-driving cars. Google began testing their self-driving car in 2012, which was classified as the first level down from automation. Other transportation means such as trains and buses are closer to full automation.
Wireless power
Broadcasting power has been a known game-changer, ever since Tesla talked about being able to do it. Just imagine not needing batteries? This would mean that trains, planes, and electric cars will become smaller and more reliable. Right now, Qualcomm is working on “Halo”, a technology being designed to charge electric cars without its drivers having to plug them in. It would charge your car while you’re driving, so you’ll never have to charge your car ever again.
Technology like this, even though not as good as true broadcast power, could work in offices, planes and cars, and we would never have to worry about recharging our vehicles and electronic devices ever again.
Organic printing
Today, 3D printers can be used for making metals, ceramics, plastics, and some blends, but printing food is still out of reach. What if we could use nonperishable components to affordably print food? Food manufacturing costs will be cut, food borne illnesses would be eliminated, thus reducing global hunger and other food-related issues. As for research in the food printing area, there’s a lot of activity happening recently, and it is suggested that we might have this technology by the year 2030. Organic printing technology could have an enormous impact on how we live, as this is an important point in an early stage of technological evolution.
Ultracapacitor batteries
Ultracapacitors’ life cycle is much longer than current batteries, and are much lighter, which means increased efficiency for things like vehicles. They can be instantly charged and discharged, and have no level of temperature problems like current batteries do. The only problem with ultracapacitors now is that they’re unable to store energy for any length of time. However, we may be close to sorting this out, according to some recent news from the scientific community. If ultracapacitor batteries get into mass use, it would be a giant steps toward making electric-powered cars and off-grid home power to use batteries that produce far more energy and could charge instantly.
image source: wafflesatnoon.com
Advanced bio-engineering
There is a division of Google that works on creating and manufacturing millions of bioengineered mosquitoes that can address certain health problems, eliminating those mosquitoes that carry sickness. Namely, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) has created a robot that manufactures about a million mosquitoes every week in their automated lab. They are infertile male mosquitoes that carry Wolbachia bacteria, and mate with female mosquitoes that carry diseases such as Zika virus and dengue fever. Male mosquitoes don’t bite humans, and when they mate with female disease-carrying mosquitoes, the eggs can’t hatch or develop. The first group of 20 million sterile mosquitoes have been released in Fresno County, California.
These kinds of bio-engineered life forms can undo much of the damage we’ve done to the world, addressing air, sea, and land pollution, as well as global warming, being able to go to places where people can’t go.
Bettering our energy distribution and storage, getting our food in any form, at anytime, and anyplace we want, with bugs flying around us and making the world a better place to live, is what we can get by putting all of these technologies together. AI technologies could be put to different uses to “take care” of us. This all sounds like a near-future Utopia. However, we must realize that this technology carries a huge potential that could also be put to bad use, and that we must be very cautious about it. The future will surely be different than the present reality we’re experiencing.
