Posted on 08/03/2013 12:14:07 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
One of the most common words attached to technology these days is "disruption." The very term conjures up something uncomfortable, but while technology unquestionably impacts and disrupts established methods of doing things, it also delivers enormous value to our lives.
The global research firm McKinsey has spents years quantifying this value in concrete dollar terms. They've released a new, wide-ranging report that identifies 12 potentially game-changing technological developments that will deliver significant economic impacts to the global economy by 2025. To make the cut, the technology had to have a broad scope with the potential for massive economic impact. What's more, McKinsey has put an estimated price tag on each one of these disruptive innovations, claiming they will deliver tens of trillions (yes, with a "t") of dollars of economic impact worldwide, should they come to pass.
The report, as you might guess, is fundamentally optimistic about the potential for new technology to "raise productivity and provide widespread benefits across economies." Here are the technologies that McKinsey sees adding trillions of dollars to the global economy by 2025.
Renewable Electricity
As McKinsey wrote, renewable energy "holds a simple but tantalizing promise: an endless source of power to drive the machinery of modern life without stripping resources from the earth." Yet while promise has to date been "elusive" McKinsey sees the potential "for rapidly accelerating growth in the next decade" thanks to increases in solar panel efficiency and wind turbine construction. Advances are also expected in harnessing geo-thermal and ocean-wave power.....
(Excerpt) Read more at realcleartechnology.com ...
World changing technology enables crops to take nitrogen from the air
Pretty short sighted. Mainly an extrapolation of today’s tech with an unfounded belief in renewable energy and a focus on improving the Internet. Meanwhile, I think he grossly under estimates the impact of 3D printing and consigns quantum computing to the also ran category.
bump
Would that allow farming on Mars? Isn’t that called tera-forming or some such?
I was going to read it, and then I got to the last paragraph before having to go to the story. If he had to start off with solar and wind energy, the rest was going to poop out.
Right. Such stories are almost always mainly extrapolations or expansions on today’s tech.
As late as the 60s some of the best SF writer were writing stories in which computers didn’t play much of a role.
Sort of by definition, nobody sees the truly game-changing stuff coming.
And thin. Each section was 3-4 sentences of obviousness. Take energy storage, all they think about is electric cars but I think about the value of smoothing the grid. Right now we subsidize the heck out of at-home power generation as shown in their slide with solar panels on a roof. That is pretty stupid since the actual need is not to create more (unreliable) power when it is not needed, but to store power for when it is needed. The latter is what needs to be subsidized based on reliability.
The revolution will come as soon as they toss the politically correct, green is good mantra, and let unbiased engineers determine what is valuable and pay people for that value.
All of the scientific and technological predictions of yesteryear come true!
The differences between the United States with countries like it on one side, and North Korea with countries like it on the other is not due to technology. The real game-changer is politics, and that will be changing in the wrong direction to judge by current trends.
Where’s my flying car!
Elroy took it for a joyride, George.
And when we were in high school in the ‘50s, the “futurists” predicted we’d all get around by personal back-pack aircraft by the year 2000. Instead, we sit in traffic jams all over America.
The only thing that is predictable is that the future is unpredictable.
Lotta hype and little information.
At the same time, politics is heavily driven by technology. Some would say primarily. If the most significant power available at a given era, especially in weapons, requires a huge infrastructure of men to wield—such as old-fashioned, crew-served field guns needing hundreds of men to manufacture and 10 men to move and fire—that tilts the advantage to central government. Same with the gathering of intel.
But as death-dealing force and the ability to gather and use game-changing intel become miniaturized, with an individual man able to cause huge disruption—like an Afghan soldier in the 1980s shooting down a Soviet helo with a stinger, or one NSA geek who decides to download the regime's secrets and leak them—the advantage moves to the individual (all the way to chaos, sometimes).
The politics of the centralizers attempt to starve out innovation by penalizing it and keeping capital from reaching unauthorized innovators such as entrepreneurs—so the central government can have a monopoly on force and information. That's North Korea and NSA. In our day, the culture of disparate entities like CATO Institute, the Occu-tards, the Catholic Church, and Internet geeks pushes toward the individual. The question is whether the borders of the world turn out to be so porous that the Snowdens and 3-D printers and fly-sized aircraft in our era pull the rug out from under the centralizers.
As Rees-Mogg and Davidson observe (in The Great Reckoning), the landscape of history is a see-saw between centralized vs. individualized power, driven significantly by the developments in technology. They were actually citing someone else's work in this thesis—I forget who. Both extreme central government and its opposite, the world of Mad Max, are quite unpleasant to inhabit.
EXACTLY!
Not if Elmer Fudd keeps up his destruction of the economy. There won’t be anybody left willing to work.
And to the NSA trolls, FU.
Strange as it sounds, self-drivable cars would eliminate most of the traffic jams. An interstate with no rubberneckers, accidents and slow drivers would be an efficient one. And we have the technology now.
Well, dayum! Ten to fifty cents in 12 years? SIGN ME UP!
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