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 change already exist. We have supply-side technologies such as machine learning, mRNA, blockchain, and various forms of climate tech. Many of these will find markets in the next years, that market demand will incentivise improvements in the technologies, and prices will fall, performance will improve and pervasiveness will increase.

Technologies

One particularly exciting development on the horizon could be the field of hybrid AI, which merge “old-fashioned” symbolic AI with newer deep learning approaches. (Dig deeper: I briefly touched on these approaches in EV#286.)

GPT3-like technologies which are language models that produce human-like text, also seemed interesting. Glenn Calvert noted that GPT3 and its offspring “will make us reimagine the very essence of the written word and hopefully give people the chance to focus on deeper work and not basic updates and comms.” (Dig deeper: AI & the Word.)

On climate change and energy, we have the technologies to create safer nuclear power, better battery designs along with more efficient solar options. Tom Grogan pointed out that breakthroughs in lithium-ion energy density capabilities or entirely new energy storage technologies could impact everything from vertical flight to smartphone life. (Dig deeper: On recycling lithium ion batteries.)

Food scarcity is another area connected to energy and it will certainly continue to be a significant challenge for emerging markets as more people move into cities. From artificial meats to vertical farming and regenerative agriculture, the knowledge is there (Dig deeper: The cow is facing an existential crisis; EV100 on precision farming).

The rush for a Covid-19 vaccine represents a giant leap forward in our abilities to sequence disease and create vaccines to fight them. With the same amount of demand, we might well witness breakthroughs in our fight against diseases like certain cancers and diseases of aging. 

Combinations

Some of your suggestions took the form of combinatorial projects which brought together several breakthrough ideas. Take decarbonising energy. EV reader Spencer Anderson pointed out that,

“new small modular nuclear reactors becoming operational, fusion research reaching new heights, high-voltage transmission lines and grid-scale batteries to dispatch renewables more effectively, batteries and algorithms replacing natural gas peaker plants. Not just one technology but many are coming together and pushing us towards the clean energy transition.”

Our digital lives may also change, become more privacy-centric, secure and controllable than inhabiting a world of surveillance-social networks and targeted ads. From new forms of tech regulations patrolling the major platforms to the continued expansion of blockchain systems with improved privacy controls, our digital lives could get more secure. Kevin Werbach summed up the point neatly with an explanation of the “privacy-protecting tech” that we should expect soon. 

This includes “zero-knowledge proofs, differential privacy, secure multiparty computation, federated learning, controllable anonymity. The last one is at the heart of China's central bank digital currency. Mandating or banning these techniques will be the great tech policy fight of the 2020s. And they will define our new digital world the way public key encryption did for the current one.” (Dig deeper: EV 205 on privacy commons) 

Kevin added that “we just might finally see the realization of General Magic's intelligent agents, 30 years later, with the maturation of AI, smart contracts, crypto assets, and DAOs on 5g network infrastructure. Creating both huge efficiency gains and the kinds of black swan instabilities we see now with stock market flash crashes.”

One thread of discussion was particularly interesting. There was lots of debate about how Chinese innovations in the 2010s would inevitably expand to the rest of the world in the 2020s. This includes everything from new payment platforms to super applications that are now commonplace in China. But what about the technologies that will emerge in China over this period? This question was raised but surprisingly there wasn’t a lot of insight as to what we should expect. This is a key point.

As Chris Michaels observed, “the Chinese 'New IP' looks likely to have the biggest impact. A fundamental restructuring of the web would both accelerate geopolitical tensions and enable new innovations within systems and at boundaries between systems. A category of technologies that works between the Chinese and Western webs as a kind of boundary agent would be interesting.” (Dig deeper: My podcast discussions with Kai Fu Lee #1, #2)

I’ll leave one comment which is more about my view of what we didn’t talk about much that I expected us to. Perhaps this reflects my own blindspots!

• Quantum computing: With more than 17 companies pursuing quantum hardware platforms across six different technology approaches, we should start to see some impact from quantum computing across industry in the next decade. It might even be a lot.

• Additive manufacturing, which I think will move into scale in certain industrial areas. (This months SPAC-listing of Desktop Metal arming a leading player with more capital being one clue.)

• Technologies to tackle the climate crisis were not as strongly emphasised as I had thought. Given that more than 300 companies and dozens of nations have now committed to decarbonising their activities in the next 10-30 years, I expect a ton of large and small technologies to emerge in this area. It should since it is a pressing problem with customers we have de facto committed tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars a year to make changes that help them decarbonise.

If you want to add your thoughts, comments are open.

Cheers, 

Azeem

P.S. Thanks to all those who contributed 😄