Nowadays, there are a lot of promising technologies under development, but not all of them will reach their true potential unless we do something to sustain our long-term existence. Energy, health, and artificial intelligence rest at the core of that achievement.
New transportation methods are being invented and in the attempt to implement them, significant challenges arise from the fact that powering them is costly. Similar obstacles are on the way of interplanetary travel, with more and more people eyeing Mars as the next frontier.
The core processing power needed to make exact calculations and fraction-of-a-second decisions will mostly rely on advanced AI, while inherently human tasks need living people to carry them out. Here are three aspects of society that need a great technological bump.
Better batteries, better future
Enhancements in sustainable and clean energy technologies are necessary for human progress. Recent developments seem to be headed in the right direction, with the most important landmark being the increasing shift from fossil fuels to renewable sources.
The sun has been deemed the perfect candidate for an infinite power supply, and companies like Tesla are taking note on how best to produce electricity from our home star. Their battery technology is getting better, but it needs to get more along supercapacitor lines to work as intended.
This way, houses, cars, and even entire cities could be powered from solar grids of batteries instead of coal plants or other facilities used today. That same technology could unlock the answer to spacecraft propulsion and long-distance travels across the universe.
Bioengineering and organic farming will save lives
Synthetic organs and prosthesis are already a reality that has helped save thousands of lives or at least improve them greatly. The next logical step is to come up with an organic solution made of the very same tissue we are made of and reduce the dependence on human donors.
3D printing organs would not only help save lives directly but it could also, theoretically, support the production of food at mass scales without traditional farming and raising methods that take time and resources.
A little further down the line, bioengineering could help us combat diseases by modifying plants and animals to fight the threat directly with the sources, such as viruses and bacteria carried by mosquitoes and present in contaminated water and polluted air.
AI will either save us or doom us
Last but not least, the ever-growing paradigm of humanity’s evolution: artificial intelligence. People will need to come to terms with machine learning technology, and shape it to be the aiding tool they need without accidentally unleashing a civilization that could overthrow humans.
Many believe it sounds far-fetched, but many others better versed on the subject do not. Elon Musk, for example, has time and time again insisted on the fact that we need to regulate AI before it is too late.
Others, like the British government, think we should not only create governing bodies but also democratize the technology. Google agrees, and there rests the notion that if people have access to artificial intelligence, it will be easier to learn how to live with it and make it what we want it to be.