According to a recent World Economic Forum analysis, the top 10 emerging technologies of 2023 include wearable plant sensors, sustainable aviation fuel, and generative AI. The top 10 technologies in the report, which evaluates “how each technology will impact people, planet, prosperity, industry, and equity,” also include flexible batteries (made of lightweight materials that can be twisted, bent, and stretched), flexible neural electronics, and spatial omics. The latter enables scientists to “see” biological processes at the molecular level inside cells.
According to the study, generative AI, which can create fresh and original material by learning from massive datasets, entered the public consciousness around the end of 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. It stated that generative AI, which is developing quickly, “is set to disrupt multiple industries, with applications in education, research, and beyond.” Sustainable sources of aviation fuel include biological (like biomass) and non-biological (like CO2) materials. According to the paper, it might provide a short- to medium-term solution for decarbonizing the aviation sector. The amount of temperature, humidity, moisture, and nutrients can be continuously monitored by individual plants using wearable plant sensors, which are discreet, non-invasive devices that can be “worn” by the plants.
Additional technologies on the list include “Designer Phages”, “Metaverse for Mental Health”, “Sustainable Computing”, and “AI-Facilitated Healthcare”
Additional technologies on the list include “Designer Phages” (viruses that selectively infect particular types of bacteria), “Metaverse for Mental Health” (shared virtual spaces to improve mental health), “Sustainable Computing” (which includes liquid cooling systems, AI analytics, and modular data centres that can be colocated with existing energy sources such as methane flares to move towards net-zero-energy data centres), and “AI-Facilitated Healthcare.” The most revolutionary innovations with the greatest potential to improve the world are highlighted in the World Economic Forum’s yearly list.
The report was created in partnership with Frontiers, a publisher of peer-reviewed, open-access, scientific publications. A group of specialists evaluated the top 10 candidates according to a number of criteria. “In addition to promising major benefits to societies and economies, they must also be disruptive, attractive to investors and researchers, and expected to have achieved considerable scale within five years,” the report said. “Since the first edition in 2011, the report has identified little-known technologies that went on to have a global impact. These include genomic vaccines, which were featured in the 2016 report and later became the technology underpinning most COVID-19 vaccines, as well as AI-led molecular design, which was featured on the 2018 list, two years before the first AI-discovered drugs entered clinical trials,” it added.