Quantum Leap

New decade promises miraculous tech innovations

Billionaire investor and PayPal founder Peter Thiel has been a proponent of the idea that technological innovation has decelerated. As the internet has helped create virtual worlds, recent innovations have focused on communications and digital technologies at the cost of progress in the physical world and in living standards.In wealthy households around the world, an AI-powered speaker is perhaps the only home appliance that hadn’t been invented in the 1980s or prior. All of this means that commonly used technology that feels like magic, as writer Arthur C Clarke put it, has been few and far between in the last two decades, outside of the internet and digital devices.

This is probably about to change, visibly and dramatically. The decade that’s knocking on our doors now — the 2020s — is likely to be a time when science fiction manifests itself in our homes and roads and skies as viable, everyday technologies.

Cars that can drive themselves. Meat that is derived from plants. Implanting kidneys that can be 3-D printed using your own biomaterial. Using gene editing to eradicate diseases, increase crop yield or fix genetic disorders in human beings. Inserting a swarm of nanobots that can cruise through your blood stream and monitor parameters or unblock arteries.Zipping between Delhi and New York on a hypersonic jet. All of this is likely to become possible or substantially closer to becoming a reality in the next 10 years.

Ideas that have been the staple of science fiction for decades — artificial intelligence, universal translators, sex robots autonomous cars, gene editing and quantum computing are at the cusp of maturity now. Many are ready to move out of labs and enter the mainstream.Expect the next decade to witness breakout years for the world of technology.

In some ways, the last two decades have laid the foundation well. Deeper penetration of basic technology infrastructure such as the internet, smartphones and 4G networks prepared the ground.The decades also democratized technology’s reach and access. Now a convergence of multiple factors such as improvements in data storage, processing capacity and lower bandwidth costs will help push some of these new innovations out of the lab.

These new technologies will disrupt businesses, redefine social norms and take man-machine relationship to another level.It will also throw up many dilemmas and existential questions.What is the difference between a man and a machine?What happens when machines become smarter than humans, as they inevitably will? How can regulatory frameworks keep up with the pace of innovation, especially where cost of mistakes can be large and irreversible?

On the one hand, these technologies will help solve many global problems such as energy shortage, hunger, global warming and epidemics. On the other, they will create new ones. For example, it is ironical that in an ever-so-connected world of seven billion - plus people, loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions. While humans are forging new emotional and sexual bonds with machines, trust among humans is at an all-time low.As the year winds down, we take a look at the technologies that will reshape our world in the next decade.