A comprehensive study of technological change

MIT News  August 2, 2021 Researchers at MIT have provided predicted yearly performance improvement rates for nearly all definable technologies by creating a correspondence of all patents within the US patent system to a set of 1757 technology domains. A technology domain is a body of patented inventions achieving the same technological function using the same knowledge and scientific principles. The domains contain 97.2% of all patents within the entire US patent system. From the identified patent sets, they calculated the average centrality of the patents in each domain to predict their improvement rates, following a patent network-based methodology tested […]

10 Exciting Engineering Milestones to Look for in 2021

IEEE Spectrum  January 7, 2021 According to the IEEE Spectrum the following areas may make significant progress in 2021: A Shining Light – Care222 lamp modules, Quantum Networking, Wind power, Driverless Race Cars, Robots Below, Mars or Bust, Stopping Deep fakes, Faster Data, Your Next TV, Brain Scans Everywhere…read more.

Creating Silicon Valley 2.0

IEEE Spectrum  January 12, 2021 Silicon Valley’s magical concentration of talent, capital, and culture in a single place has led to decades of unparalleled wealth creation. This spectacular success has induced attempts to emulate it in such enclaves as Silicon Mountain (one in the African nation of Cameroon, and another in the U.S. state of Colorado), Silicon Hills (Texas), Silicon Desert (Arizona), and many more. These seedlings may indeed grow to become forests, but the ingredients are there for even more promising transformations—metamorphoses that would bring far greater resources together at abstracted, or virtual, focal points. According to the author […]

Science Academies submit recommendations to the G20 countries

EurekAlert  September 28, 2020 In the run-up to the summit of the G20 countries in November 2020 to be held in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), the academies of science of 20 countries’ joint statement “Foresight: Science for Navigating Critical Transitions” emphasizes the necessity to consider global challenges in all their complexity and cross-linkage and emphasize the contribution of science to the management of upheavals. The statement draws on insights gained from the current coronavirus pandemic and provides valuable impulses from the international scientific community for all participants of the G20 summit. In the field of health, among other things, they recommend an […]

The Rodney Brooks Rules for Predicting a Technology’s Commercial Success

IEEE Spectrum  October 25, 2018 Rodney Brooks, Chairman and CTO of Rethink and cofounder of Robotics,  presents a short list of technology projects that are now under way or at least under serious discussion. In each case he points out features that tend to make a technology easy or hard to bring to market. In pointing out the differences that make one technology harder than another he is not preaching technological defeatism but suggesting that we properly gauge the difficulty of whatever we are told could be the next big thing… read more.

Forecasting Military Technology 2020-2040

Next Big Future  October 9, 2018 In reviewing the last 20 years (2000-2020), researchers at the Brookings Institution believe only computers and robotics had revolutionary change. This would include drones. Seven categories of military technology had high change—chemical sensors, biological sensors, radio communications, laser communications, radio-frequency weapons, nonlethal weapons, and biological weapons. Technological change of relevance to military innovation may be faster and more consequential in the next 20 years than it has proven to be over the last 20. Multiple countries (most notably China and Russia) are having the resources to compete with Western nations in military innovation…read more. Open […]

The Scientific Prize Network Predicts Who Pushes the Boundaries of Science

Arxiv  August 28, 2018 Using comprehensive new data on prizes and prizewinners worldwide and across disciplines, researchers at Northwestern University examine the growth dynamics and interlocking relationships found in the worldwide scientific prize network. They focus on understanding how the knowledge linkages among prizes and scientists’ propensities for prizewinning are related to knowledge pathways across disciplines and stratification within disciplines. They found that despite a proliferation of diverse prizes over time and across the globe, prizes are more concentrated within a relatively small group of scientific elites, and ties within the elites are more clustered, a relatively constrained number of […]

Impact of AI and Mobile Internet compared to Growth of China and India 2013-2025

Next Big Future  July 20, 2018 Applications of the 12 technologies discussed in the report, Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy could have a potential economic impact between $14 trillion and $33 trillion a year in 2025. Technologies detailed in the report have been gestating for years and are familiar. A review in 2018 is that most of these are heading to the high end of the estimated impact. The overall GDP impact is less positive since there is quite a lot impact of technology is taking existing business from other technology. The report […]