5 Technologies That Will Change the World
© Dr. Terry J. van der Werff, CMC

Fast Company has weighed in with a list of 5 innovative technologies being developed or deployed which have the potential to change the world.

I have written previously about MIT's 2001 and 2003 lists of emerging areas technologies that will have a profound impact on the economy and how we live and work.  This week, in their September, 2003, issue, Fast Company has weighed in with its own list of 5 innovative technologies now being developed or deployed which they believe will change the world.

In a brief introduction to the five technologies, themselves described far too succinctly, Fast Company makes the extremely important point that despite the dot.com crash, stock market fall, and general economic malaise, technological innovations keep popping up.  I couldn't agree more - the technological juggernaut is unlikely to stopped, or even slowed, in your and my lifetimes.

Fast Company's five technologies they believe will change the world are:

	3-D Printing - For inexpensive, rapid prototyping, it's hard to beat a "copier" that lays down materials such as wax or plaster in successive layers to create the new product or part.  If you have ever seen a CAT scan, which takes a series of x-ray "slices" of an object, e.g. your body, 3-D printing is exactly the reverse: it creates an object by assembling the slices.
	Biosimulation - To bring a new drug to market takes about a decade and costs nearly $1 billion.  Half of potential new drugs fail in their final clinical trials  which are mandated before FDA approval.  Biosimulation's promise is to lower drug costs by creating detailed mathematical models of diseases, testing new drug ideas in these computer models, and weeding out early in the development process those with little likelihood of eventual success.
	Self-Aware Computers - People are self-aware; computers are not.  However, autonomic computers will have the ability to predict failures, fix software, anticipate user actions, prioritize workload requirements, and learn from experience.  Initial elements of these behaviors have been incorporated in software in recent years.
	Networked Power - Electricity is brought to us through an interconnected national power grid.  Energy upheavals two years ago turned the attention of many companies to distributed generation of electricity, i.e. they would have their own power "plant" to produce their electricity.  The concept of networked power is effectively to turn the grid upside down, in a fashion akin to the Internet - to produce power locally, share excess capacity with the grid, and tap into the grid when needs exceed local generating capacity.
	Smart Tags - These radio frequency ID tags essentially are souped up versions of the ubiquitous product bar codes.  Already in use by gas stations, distributors, and Navy, miniaturization will allow smart tags to be placed inconspicuously on clothing and other products, beaming information about location and condition, for example.  Of the five technologies, this one is fraught with privacy issues.

Comparing Fast Company's list with MIT's 2001 and 2003 lists of 10 technologies each, MIT's are more important, farther in the future, and far more likely to change the world.  (In my view, only smart tags have the potential to change the world.)  This is not meant to denigrate Fast Company's list, merely to note the five listed above are basically ready to use or already in use, so there's relatively little to speculate about. 

Some of these five technologies might affect your company.  You would do well to investigate them for potential use in your own operations.

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