Emerging technologies

Emerging technologies are a broad array of technologies that are poised to introduce significant technological, cultural, or economic change. Typically, these technologies are considered "emerging" because, although they have been developed, they either have not yet been widely adopted or remain expensive enough to use that they are too rare to have caused the changes they are considered potentially capable of bringing about. Some emerging technologies are ones invented previously that become newly affordable or newly widespread. For instance, television, personal computers, and cellular phones were invented decades before they became common enough to have significant cultural impact.

Background

An emerging technology can be considered in terms of three characteristics: its current stage of development, its cost or other practical considerations bearing on its implementation, and the impact it will have on culture (such as the technologies it will displace or new capacities it will provide). A common example of emerging technology in the early twenty-first century is 3D printing, because although it was developed in Japan in the early 1980s and used in manufacturing, it was not until the 2010s that it saw implementation as a consumer technology. Even that implementation developed gradually: while 3D printers became available for home purchase, they remained expensive for most households, especially relative to the crudeness of what most home models could produce. More commonly, consumers have either interacted with 3D printing through a third-party company that prints items on demand or benefitted from the availability of custom-made products as a result of 3D printing. In the latter case, consumers may not even realize 3D printing is involved in their transaction, just as computers were critical to the business world for many years before the "personal computer revolution" of the 1980s. Still, 3D printing has been seen as a potential disruptive innovation, with many assuming that as quality improved and prices declined it would continue having an even greater impact in many areas.

Not all emerging technologies are consumer technologies like 3D printing. Many medical technologies, for instance, are emerging technologies, but are also infamously difficult to forecast. What seems to be a promising "emerging" technology may well turn out to be a dead end in clinical trials. As post-trial bodies of data accumulate, even treatments that initially seem successful may prove disappointing. The osteoarthritis supplement glucosamine is a classic example. Still widely used into the twenty-first century, because of the positive results of clinical trials in the 1990s, glucosamine has been found by comprehensive metastudies (analyses of medical research) to be no more effective than a placebo. In a sense, glucosamine was an emerging technology that "resubmerged."

Topic Today

The term "disruption" has become overused in the business world, but emerging technologies are often framed as those technologies poised to disrupt their industry or the culture at large. There is something significant enough about them, in other words, that they will change either the way an industry works or change something in the culture. For example, the internet—a communications technology—changed not only communications but also commerce, community, entertainment, and politics. It encouraged the development of other technologiaes such as the smartphone, MP3 player, streaming video, peer-to-peer file sharing, and digital media. Websites such as Facebook changed modern social groups; Amazon changed how people shop; Netflix put brick-and-mortar video rental stores out of business; and X (formerly Twitter) became a new vector for the transmission of news during political revolutions and in the aftermath of natural disasters. While this great variety in change has been possible partly because communication, by its nature, has great potential for cultural impact, it also helps to show how varied and unpredictable the effects of a revolutionary technology can be.

Many of the emerging technologies of the early twenty-first century fell into several broad categories. Nanoscale technologies are any technologies that produce products by manipulating matter at the nanoscale (1–100 nanometers), and include applications in medicine, electronics, materials science, robotics, and the aerospace industry. Neural sensing allows for the interpretation of neural impulses from the skin surface, with applications as varied as video games, medical prosthetics, and aerospace. Magnetic refrigeration is a more energy-efficient form of refrigeration than conventional refrigeration, and is used in laboratory settings; it has potentially practical applications for consumer refrigerators and air conditioning.

Lists of "breakthrough technologies" have included CRISPR, a technology used for precise editing of genes (used to grow fungus-resistant wheat to fight famine in China); voice-operated conversational interfaces such as Apple’s Siri; reusable rockets; knowledge-sharing robots with the ability to teach each other; high-efficiency, low-cost solar panels; Tesla automobiles’ autopilot feature; brain implants to reverse paralysis; artificial embryos; integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into cloud-based machine-learning tools; and automatic language translation technology. Some considered the widespread commercial and personal use of generative AI, following the release of the experimental chatbot ChatGPT in late 2022, representative of a revolutionary change in the impact of this technology. However, like with others, full emergence of these technologies depended greatly on financial and other practical considerations. Though generative AI advanced and became more accessible, critics also noted its questionable energy sustainability and higher implementation costs.

Some emerging technologies have benefited from influxes of funding and other support as a result of specific economic or cultural conditions. The fuel price shocks of the 2000s, even more than concern over climate change, led to development of hybrid vehicles, biofuels, solar power, and wind power at a level previously unseen, as well as encouraged research in energy projects such as gravity turbines, ocean power, and smart grids. The spread of cellular phones and increased use of mobile data plans motivated the creation of more sophisticated cellular communications infrastructure and transmissions protocols, as well as more efficient data compression.

Bibliography

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