Imagining possible applications of technology two or three decades from now calls for a better understanding of the ways in which performance trends interact with societies’ readiness to embrace economic, social and technical change. In venturing a vision of technological possibilities rather than simply projecting linear or exponential changes in performance, it is crucial to think not only of how technical improvements lead to the substitution of a new generation of tools for existing ones, but also of how entirely new uses, and indeed new needs, might emerge. Significant progress is likely across a broad spectrum of technologies,computing, genetics, brain technology, new materials (in particular miniaturisation and smart composites), energy, transportation and environmental tools and systems. The technical foundation (as distinct from the economic and social) for this continuing wave of innovation will emerge, in large part, from powerful developments in the fields of digital and genetic information. The exploration and manipulation of these two building blocks – one of calculation, the other of nature – are likely to unlock vast treasures for both tool-builders and -users. Indeed, there seems to be a strong virtuous circle between better information and higher performance tools, as each insight provided by digital computation or genetic mapping (still at an early stage) helps to drive forward new ideas about how to design and use technology.
This complementarity is particularly powerful in the digital realm. Improvements in the quantity and quality of the information transformed into strings of zeros and ones are allowing rapid advances to be made in many other domains of 8 science and engineering.
Twenty-five years from now, after more than five decades of development, the microprocessor, information technologies in general, and networks will probably have penetrated every aspect of human activity. Many parts of the world will be wired, responsive and interactive. Beyond simply accelerating the pace of change or reducing the cost of many current activities, the use of these high performance digital tools opens up the possibility of profound transformations.
