Your technologies of the 2020s

What will the next decade bring?

A wise friend asked me a probing question last month.

What are the biggest technologies of the 2020s and why? More specifically, what are the key technologies that will have a potentially massive impact in the next decade? Which are less obvious?

I put the question to the members of Exponential View, and the responses were characteristically thoughtful and stimulating. The answers fell into three primary categories: compute (think artificial intelligence), biology (synthetics, genomics), energy (the climate crisis), and other (primarily blockchain).

It is interesting enough to hear what other readers and community members think, so I’m presenting this without much editorialisation on my side. I haven’t been able to bring out every idea in the discussion, so I’d encourage you to go back through it. The “Dig Deeper” sections are links to longer analyses we’ve written on these topics.

What’s remarkable about our moment is that a great number of technologies needed to affect structural cha…