I had looked at what will be the technologies and changes that can eventually lead to
1. Economic abundance
2. Radical life extension
3. Physical and Cognitive enhancement
4. Blood Stream Robots
5. Supermaterials
6. Open Access to space
7. Pollution elimination
8. Computer Advancement
9. Shape changing functional devices like utility fog
Here was the list with updates for the first eight out of 18
1. Pro-growth Policies
World economic growth has slowed
Global growth is projected at 3.3 percent in 2015, marginally lower than in 2014, with a gradual pickup in advanced economies and a slowdown in emerging market and developing economies. In 2016, growth is expected to strengthen to 3.8 percent.
Growth in advanced economies is projected to increase from 1.8 percent in 2014 to 2.1 percent in 2015 and 2.4 percent in 2016, a more gradual pickup than was forecast in the April 2015 WEO. The unexpected weakness in North America, which accounts for the lion’s share of the growth forecast revision in advanced economies, is likely to prove a temporary setback. The underlying drivers for acceleration in consumption and investment in the United States—wage growth, labor market conditions, easy financial conditions, lower fuel prices, and a strengthening housing market—remain intact.
India stumbled to a couple years of 4-5% or so GDP growth in 2012 and 2013 but now appears to be heading back to 7-8% GDP growth.
World financial policies are very loose in an attempt to get growth out of weak economies.
India and China are attempting to boost growth to not slowdown too much.
Instead of trying to achieve abundance it is use whatever policies that will first get back economies from bad back to pretty good.
China is trying to keep its growth going at 6.5% or higher for as long as possible.
This is a driving force for the One Belt One Road policy.
China is shifting to building out rail, energy and infrastructure in Africa, Asia and towards Europe.
I would talk about future altering high growth policy from Europe and North America but I am not aware of it.
The US is doing what it can with finance policy and trade deals.
2. Energy Efficiency - superconductors, thermoelectrics, improved grid
Superconductors and thermoelectrics have products but the big breakthrough in price and market size are taking longer to achieve.
3. Energy Revolution - Mass produced fission, fusion, and maybe cold fusion
Very low cost energy is important because energy has a larger impact on the economy than was officially recognized until recently.
According to the cost-share theorem, reductions of energy inputs by up to 7%, observed during the first energy crisis 1973–1975, could have only caused output reductions of 0.35%, whereas the observed reductions of output in industrial economies were up to an order of magnitude larger. Thus, from this perspective the recessions of the energy crises are hard to understand. In addition, cost-share weighting of production factors has the problem of the Solow residual. The Solow residual accounts for that part of output growth that cannot be explained by the input growth rates weighted by the factor cost shares. It amounts to more than 50% of total growth in many countries.
Horizontal multi-frac oil and gas has boosted US production which has contributed to lower global oil and gas prices. Natural gas which is less than half as polluting as coal has displaced about 40% of the coal used in the USA.
China wants to shift from coal energy dependency to reduce air pollution. China is looking to scale up nuclear power to provide energy at least as low cost as current coal energy. China will have built up all of the hydro by 2020 and will then turn to getting really serious about scaling up nuclear power.
China's 200 MWe HTR-PM pebble bed reactor will now be completed about 2017. This will then be built into several 600 MWe units.
China is also looking at supercritical water reactors. These have a similar supply chains to existing pressure water reactors and are potentially could supply energy at about half the cost.
Terrestrial Energy in Canada is working on a molten salt reactor prototype which could be completed by 2020.
Fast neutron reactors appear ready to become mainstream commercial in the 2020s and should then ramp up for major deployment in the 2030s.
China's larger gigawatt reactors are interesting because those are ones that China will mass deploy in 2030 and beyond.
Nuclear fusion projects continue to develop.
The closest to possible commercialization are
General Fusion in Canada
Helion Energy
Tri-alpha Energy
LPP Fusion
Possible super-controversial breakthroughs
Cold Fusion aka Low Energy Nuclear Reactions - Rossi Energy Catalyzer continues to make claims. Blacklight Power makes claims.
4. Additive manufacturing
Applications that can help develop space industry or for tissue engineering have the potential to have most big future impact.
5. Not so mundane - neuromorphic chips, quantum computers, photonics
There was a detailed analysis of a roadmap to human brain scale neuromorphic systems using FPGAs. There was also an analysis of some commercial applications for signal processing and image recognition.
There has been major funding of neuromorphic and brain emulation projections. Europe has a 1 billion euro ten year project. DARPA and US projects are of similar scale when funding is added together. There are major neuromorphic projects at IBM and Qualcomm and other companies.
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Reposted via Next Big Future
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