technological trends essay

Technology over the long run: zoom out to see how dramatically the world can change within a lifetime

It is easy to underestimate how much the world can change within a lifetime. considering how dramatically the world has changed can help us see how different the world could be in a few years or decades..

Technology can change the world in ways that are unimaginable until they happen. Switching on an electric light would have been unimaginable for our medieval ancestors. In their childhood, our grandparents would have struggled to imagine a world connected by smartphones and the Internet.

Similarly, it is hard for us to imagine the arrival of all those technologies that will fundamentally change the world we are used to.

We can remind ourselves that our own future might look very different from the world today by looking back at how rapidly technology has changed our world in the past. That’s what this article is about.

One insight I take away from this long-term perspective is how unusual our time is. Technological change was extremely slow in the past – the technologies that our ancestors got used to in their childhood were still central to their lives in their old age. In stark contrast to those days, we live in a time of extraordinarily fast technological change. For recent generations, it was common for technologies that were unimaginable in their youth to become common later in life.

The long-run perspective on technological change

The big visualization offers a long-term perspective on the history of technology. 1

The timeline begins at the center of the spiral. The first use of stone tools, 3.4 million years ago, marks the beginning of this history of technology. 2 Each turn of the spiral represents 200,000 years of history. It took 2.4 million years – 12 turns of the spiral – for our ancestors to control fire and use it for cooking. 3

To be able to visualize the inventions in the more recent past – the last 12,000 years – I had to unroll the spiral. I needed more space to be able to show when agriculture, writing, and the wheel were invented. During this period, technological change was faster, but it was still relatively slow: several thousand years passed between each of these three inventions.

From 1800 onwards, I stretched out the timeline even further to show the many major inventions that rapidly followed one after the other.

The long-term perspective that this chart provides makes it clear just how unusually fast technological change is in our time.

You can use this visualization to see how technology developed in particular domains. Follow, for example, the history of communication: from writing to paper, to the printing press, to the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, all the way to the Internet and smartphones.

Or follow the rapid development of human flight. In 1903, the Wright brothers took the first flight in human history (they were in the air for less than a minute), and just 66 years later, we landed on the moon. Many people saw both within their lifetimes: the first plane and the moon landing.

This large visualization also highlights the wide range of technology’s impact on our lives. It includes extraordinarily beneficial innovations, such as the vaccine that allowed humanity to eradicate smallpox , and it includes terrible innovations, like the nuclear bombs that endanger the lives of all of us .

What will the next decades bring?

The red timeline reaches up to the present and then continues in green into the future. Many children born today, even without further increases in life expectancy, will live well into the 22nd century.

New vaccines, progress in clean, low-carbon energy, better cancer treatments – a range of future innovations could very much improve our living conditions and the environment around us. But, as I argue in a series of articles , there is one technology that could even more profoundly change our world: artificial intelligence (AI).

One reason why artificial intelligence is such an important innovation is that intelligence is the main driver of innovation itself. This fast-paced technological change could speed up even more if it’s driven not only by humanity’s intelligence but also by artificial intelligence. If this happens, the change currently stretched out over decades might happen within a very brief time span of just a year. Possibly even faster. 4

I think AI technology could have a fundamentally transformative impact on our world. In many ways, it is already changing our world, as I documented in this companion article . As this technology becomes more capable in the years and decades to come, it can give immense power to those who control it (and it poses the risk that it could escape our control entirely).

Such systems might seem hard to imagine today, but AI technology is advancing quickly. Many AI experts believe there is a real chance that human-level artificial intelligence will be developed within the next decades, as I documented in this article .

Technology will continue to change the world – we should all make sure that it changes it for the better

What is familiar to us today – photography, the radio, antibiotics, the Internet, or the International Space Station circling our planet – was unimaginable to our ancestors just a few generations ago. If your great-great-great grandparents could spend a week with you, they would be blown away by your everyday life.

What I take away from this history is that I will likely see technologies in my lifetime that appear unimaginable to me today.

In addition to this trend towards increasingly rapid innovation, there is a second long-run trend. Technology has become increasingly powerful. While our ancestors wielded stone tools, we are building globe-spanning AI systems and technologies that can edit our genes.

Because of the immense power that technology gives those who control it, there is little that is as important as the question of which technologies get developed during our lifetimes. Therefore, I think it is a mistake to leave the question about the future of technology to the technologists. Which technologies are controlled by whom is one of the most important political questions of our time because of the enormous power these technologies convey to those who control them.

We all should strive to gain the knowledge we need to contribute to an intelligent debate about the world we want to live in. To a large part, this means gaining knowledge and wisdom on the question of which technologies we want.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank my colleagues Hannah Ritchie, Bastian Herre, Natasha Ahuja, Edouard Mathieu, Daniel Bachler, Charlie Giattino, and Pablo Rosado for their helpful comments on drafts of this essay and the visualization. Thanks also to Lizka Vaintrob and Ben Clifford for the conversation that initiated this visualization.

Appendix: About the choice of visualization in this article

The recent speed of technological change makes it difficult to picture the history of technology in one visualization. When you visualize this development on a linear timeline, then most of the timeline is almost empty, while all the action is crammed into the right corner:

In my large visualization here, I tried to avoid this problem and instead show the long history of technology in a way that lets you see when each technological breakthrough happened and how, within the last millennia, there was a continuous acceleration of technological change.

The recent speed of technological change makes it difficult to picture the history of technology in one visualization. In the appendix, I show how this would look if it were linear.

It is, of course, difficult to assess when exactly the first stone tools were used.

The research by McPherron et al. (2010) suggested that it was at least 3.39 million years ago. This is based on two fossilized bones found in Dikika in Ethiopia, which showed “stone-tool cut marks for flesh removal and percussion marks for marrow access”. These marks were interpreted as being caused by meat consumption and provide the first evidence that one of our ancestors, Australopithecus afarensis, used stone tools.

The research by Harmand et al. (2015) provided evidence for stone tool use in today’s Kenya 3.3 million years ago.

References:

McPherron et al. (2010) – Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia . Published in Nature.

Harmand et al. (2015) – 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya . Published in Nature.

Evidence for controlled fire use approximately 1 million years ago is provided by Berna et al. (2012) Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa , published in PNAS.

The authors write: “The ability to control fire was a crucial turning point in human evolution, but the question of when hominins first developed this ability still remains. Here we show that micromorphological and Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy (mFTIR) analyses of intact sediments at the site of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa, provide unambiguous evidence—in the form of burned bone and ashed plant remains—that burning took place in the cave during the early Acheulean occupation, approximately 1.0 Ma. To the best of our knowledge, this is the earliest secure evidence for burning in an archaeological context.”

This is what authors like Holden Karnofsky called ‘Process for Automating Scientific and Technological Advancement’ or PASTA. Some recent developments go in this direction: DeepMind’s AlphaFold helped to make progress on one of the large problems in biology, and they have also developed an AI system that finds new algorithms that are relevant to building a more powerful AI.

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Technological Trends and Their Impact on Society: A Comprehensive Analysis

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• Margi Shah 13 ,
• Dhwanil Chauhan 13 ,
• Sachin Patel 13 ,
• Arpit Bhatt 13 ,
• Chirag Patel 13 ,
• Rushi Patel 13 ,
• Ankur Patel 13 ,
• Jay Patel 13 ,
• Dipak Ramoliya 13 ,
• Hitesh Makwana 13 ,
• Amit Nayak 13 ,
• Radhika Patel 13 ,
• Ritika Jani 13 ,
• Ashish Katira 13 ,
• Rajesh Patel 13 ,
• Shital Sharma 13 &
• Akash Patel 13  

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 833))

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The advancement of technology has dramatically affected the way society lives. The majority of human actions today are impacted by modern technologies. Different technical trends have emerged with the development of technology. Social media’s growth, cloud computing, and mobile computing are a few examples. The world is becoming smarter thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT), a network of gadgets that may be connected to the outside world via sensors and microchips. This paper aims to comprehensively analyze the various technological trends and their impact on the way society and business work. It also explores the ways in which IT experts can benefit from these changes. The paper covers various technological trends, such as the rise of cloud computing, social media, and mobile computing. It also explores the ways in which IT experts can benefit from these changes.

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Shah, M. et al. (2024). Technological Trends and Their Impact on Society: A Comprehensive Analysis. In: Iglesias, A., Shin, J., Patel, B., Joshi, A. (eds) Proceedings of World Conference on Information Systems for Business Management. ISBM 2023. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 833. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8346-9_33

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Technology and the future of growth: Challenges of change

Subscribe to global connection, zia qureshi zia qureshi senior fellow - global economy and development.

February 25, 2020

This blog is part of a project  exploring how the agenda for economic growth is being reshaped by forces of change, particularly technological change.

Economic growth has been lackluster for more than a decade now. This has occurred at a time when economies have faced much unfolding change. What are the forces of change, how are they affecting the growth dynamics, and what are the implications for policy? A recently published book, “ Growth in a Time of Change, ” addresses these questions.

Three basic ingredients drive economic growth—productivity, capital, and labor. All three are facing new challenges in a changing context. Foremost among the drivers of change has been technology, spearheaded by digital transformation.

Slowdown in productivity and investment

Productivity is the main long-term propeller of economic growth. Technology-enabled innovation is the major spur to productivity growth. Yet, paradoxically, productivity growth has slowed as digital technologies have boomed. Among advanced economies over the past 15 years or so, it has averaged less than half of the pace of the previous 15 years. Firms at the technological frontier have reaped major productivity gains, but the impact on productivity more widely across firms has been weak. The new technologies have tended to produce winners-take-most outcomes. Dominant firms have acquired more market power, market structures have become less competitive, and business dynamism has declined.

Investment also has been weak in most major economies. The persistent weakness of investment despite historically low interest rates has prompted concerns about the risk of “secular stagnation.” Weak productivity growth and investment have reinforced each other and are linked by similar shifts in market structures and dynamics.

Shifts in labor markets

Technology is having profound effects on labor markets. Automation and digital advances are shifting labor demand away from routine low- to middle-level skills to higher-level and more sophisticated analytical, technical, and managerial skills. On the supply side, however, equipping workers with skills that complement the new technologies has lagged, hindering the broader diffusion of innovation within economies. Education and training have been losing the race with technology.

Most major economies face the challenge of aging populations. Many of them are also seeing a leveling off of gains in labor force participation rates and basic education attainments of the population. These trends put an even greater focus on productivity—and technological innovations that drive it—to deliver economic growth.

Rising inequality

Growth has also become less inclusive. Income inequality has been rising in most major economies, and the increase has been particularly pronounced in some of them, such as the United States. The new technologies favoring capital and higher-level skills have contributed to a decline in labor’s share of income and to increased wage inequality. They have also been associated with more concentrated industry structures and high economic rents enjoyed by dominant firms. Income has shifted from labor to capital and the distribution of both labor and capital income has become more unequal.

Rising inequality and mounting anxiety about jobs have contributed to increased social tensions and political divisiveness. Populism has surged in many countries. Nationalist and protectionist sentiment has been on the rise, with a backlash against international trade that, alongside technological change, is seen to have increased inequality with job losses and wage stagnation for low-skilled workers.

Changing growth pathways

While income inequality has been rising within many countries, inequality between countries has been falling as faster-growing emerging economies narrow the income gap with advanced economies. Technology poses new challenges for this economic convergence. Manufacturing-led growth in emerging economies has been the dominant driver of convergence, fueled by their comparative advantage in labor-intensive production based on their large pools of low-skill, low-wage workers. Such comparative advantage is eroding with automation of low-skill work, creating the need to develop alternative pathways to growth aligned with technological change.

AI, robotics, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Technological change reshaping growth will only intensify as artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, and cyber-physical systems take the digital revolution to another level. We may be on the cusp of what has been termed the “Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).” And globalization is going increasingly digital, a transformation that, analogous to 4IR, has been termed “Globalization 4.0.”

Related Books

Hyeon-Wook Kim, Zia Qureshi

Technological change recently has not delivered its full potential in boosting productivity and economic growth. It has pushed income inequality higher and generated fears about a “robocalypse”—massive job losses from automation. This should not cause despair, however.

Advances in digital technologies hold considerable potential to lift the trajectory of productivity and economic growth, and to create new and better jobs to replace old ones. As much as two-thirds of potential productivity growth in major economies over the next decade could be related to the new digital technologies. But technological change is inherently disruptive and entails difficult transitions. It also inevitably creates winners and losers—as does globalization. Policies have a crucial role to play. Unfortunately, they have been slow to adapt to the challenges of change. With improved and more responsive policies, better outcomes are possible.

An agenda to harness the potential of new technology

The core of the forward policy agenda is to better harness the potential of the new technologies. Reforms must seek to improve the enabling environment for firms and workers—to broaden access to opportunities that come from technological change and to enhance capabilities to adjust to the new challenges.

• Policies and institutions governing markets must keep pace as technological change transforms the world of business. Competition policies should be revamped for the digital age to ensure that markets continue to provide an open and level playing field for firms, keep competition strong, and check the growth of monopolistic structures. New regulatory issues revolving around data, the lifeblood of the digital economy, must be addressed. Flexibility in markets will be key to facilitating adjustments to disruptions and structural shifts from digital transformation.
• The innovation ecosystem should keep pushing the technological frontier but also foster wider economic impacts from the new advances. With the intangible asset of knowledge becoming an increasingly important driver of economic success, research and development systems and patent regimes should be improved to promote broader diffusion of technologies embodying new knowledge.
• The foundation of digital infrastructure and digital literacy must be strengthened. The digital divide is narrowing but wide gaps remain.
• Investment in education and training must be boosted and reoriented to emphasize the skills for the jobs of the future. With the old career path of “learn-work-retire” giving way to one of continuous learning, programs for worker upskilling and reskilling and lifelong learning must the scaled up. The key to winning the race with technology is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines.
• Labor market policies should become more forward-looking, shifting the focus from seeking to protect existing jobs to improving workers’ ability to change jobs. Social protection systems, traditionally based on formal long-term employer-employee relationships, should be adapted to a more dynamic job market. Social contracts need to realign with the changing nature of work.
• Tax systems should be reviewed in light of the new tax challenges of the digital economy, including the implications of the transformations occurring in business and work and the new income distribution dynamics. The potential tax reform agenda spans taxes on labor, capital, and wealth.

Reforms are needed at the international level as well, although the dominant part of the agenda to make technology—and globalization—work better and for all rests with policies at the national level. Not only must past gains in establishing a rules-based international trading system be shielded from protectionist headwinds, but new disciplines must be devised for the next phase of globalization led by digital flows to ensure open access and fair competition. Sensible policies on migration can complement national policies, such as pension reform and lifelong learning, in mitigating the effects of population aging.

The era of smart machines holds much promise. With smart policies, the future could be one of stronger and more inclusive growth.

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Thinking Through the Ethics of New Tech…Before There’s a Problem

• Beena Ammanath

Historically, it’s been a matter of trial and error. There’s a better way.

There’s a familiar pattern when a new technology is introduced: It grows rapidly, comes to permeate our lives, and only then does society begin to see and address the problems it creates. But is it possible to head off possible problems? While companies can’t predict the future, they can adopt a sound framework that will help them prepare for and respond to unexpected impacts. First, when rolling out new tech, it’s vital to pause and brainstorm potential risks, consider negative outcomes, and imagine unintended consequences. Second, it can also be clarifying to ask, early on, who would be accountable if an organization has to answer for the unintended or negative consequences of its new technology, whether that’s testifying to Congress, appearing in court, or answering questions from the media. Third, appoint a chief technology ethics officer.

We all want the technology in our lives to fulfill its promise — to delight us more than it scares us, to help much more than it harms. We also know that every new technology needs to earn our trust. Too often the pattern goes like this: A technology is introduced, grows rapidly, comes to permeate our lives, and only then does society begin to see and address any problems it might create.

• BA Beena Ammanath is the Executive Director of the global Deloitte AI Institute, author of the book “Trustworthy AI,” founder of the non-profit Humans For AI, and also leads Trustworthy and Ethical Tech for Deloitte. She is an award-winning senior executive with extensive global experience in AI and digital transformation, spanning across e-commerce, finance, marketing, telecom, retail, software products, services and industrial domains with companies such as HPE, GE, Thomson Reuters, British Telecom, Bank of America, and e*trade.

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Young people’s technological images of the future: implications for science and technology education

• Tapio Rasa   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1315-5207 1 &
• Antti Laherto   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5062-7571 2  

European Journal of Futures Research volume  10 , Article number:  4 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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Modern technology has had and continues to have various impacts on societies and human life in general. While technology in some ways defines the ‘digital age’ of today, discourses of ‘technological progress’ may dominate discussions of tomorrow. Conceptions of technology and futures seem to be intertwined, as technology has been predicted by experts to lead us anywhere between utopia and extinction within as little as a century. Understandably, hopes and fears regarding technology may also dominate images of the future for our current generation of young people. Meanwhile, global trends in science and technology education have increasingly emphasised goals such as agency, anticipation and active citizenship. As one’s agency is connected to one’s future perceptions, young people’s views of technological change are highly relevant to these educational goals. However, students’ images of technological futures have not yet been used to inform the development of science and technology education. We set out to address this issue by investigating 58 secondary school students’ essays describing a typical day in 2035 or 2040, focusing on technological surroundings. Qualitative content analysis showed that students’ images of the future feature technological changes ranging from improved everyday devices to large-scale technologisation. A variety of effects was attributed to technology, relating to convenience, environment, employment, privacy, general societal progress and more. Technology was discussed both in positive and negative terms, as imagined technological futures were problematised to differing extents. We conclude by discussing the potential implications of the results for the development of future-oriented science and technology education.

Introduction

Modern technology has had and continues to have an impact on human life and civilisation that is hard to overstate. While technology in some ways defines the ‘digital age’ of today, discourses of ‘technological progress’ may dominate discussions of tomorrow. Meanwhile, predicting the ‘real future’ and figuring out how to do it well is a field in itself, and experts within and outside specific technological fields project a wide range of predictions for the coming decades: technology has been predicted to lead us anywhere between human extinction [ 10 ] and planet-sized self-aware computers [ 32 ] within the timescale of a century, with more cautious predictions forecasting a ‘third industrial revolution’ by 2030 ([ 16 ], p. 33). Understandably, hopes and fears regarding technology may also dominate the images of the future for our current generation of young people (see, e.g. [ 3 , 36 ]).

Obviously, the fact that developments in science and technology can have great desirable and undesirable societal implications is reflected in science education. This element is central to research currents such as STSE (science, technology, society, environment—see, e.g. [ 6 ]), SSI (socioscientific issues—e.g. [ 49 ]) and the various visions of scientific literacy (e.g. [ 45 ]). Interestingly, however, these socioscientific leanings rarely address explicitly the temporal aspects of socioscientific thinking. Thus, even if local and global SSIs ‘are all related to important aspects of our future’ ([ 44 ], pp. 2–3) and environmental education should address ‘Where do we want to go?—knowledge about alternatives and visions’ ([ 28 ], p. 331), the connection to futures thinking is often unaddressed when contextualising science as societally relevant. For example, the focus of STSE has been applying science and technology in social (more or less real-world) contexts, understanding the sociocultural embeddedness of such activity and exploring holistic, value-centred approaches to evaluating technoscientific issues [ 39 ]. These aspects of scientific literacy certainly have a ‘time component’, but seem to lack a more nuanced relationship with futures. This oversight seems to reflect a general pattern in education (see, e.g. [ 24 ]).

Understandably this ‘blind spot’ has been criticised in the futures field: according to Gidley & Hampson [ 22 ],

[s]chool education seems to be mostly stuck in an outdated industrial era worldview, unable to sufficiently address the significance and increasing rapidity of changes to humanity that are upon us. An integrated forward-looking view should, now more than ever, be of central importance in how we educate. Yet there is little sign that – unlike corporations – school systems are recognising the true value of futures studies.

While the field of science education has seen some recent initiatives for developing students’ futures thinking [ 29 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 38 , 41 ], much work remains to be done in communicating between the two fields. One approach to strengthening the foothold of futures thinking in schools may be identifying practical contexts for future-oriented education and joining with natural ‘allies’ within the range of educational fields [ 23 ], or formalising the concept of ‘futures literacy’ in education, eliciting students’ images of the future, and supporting their agency [ 24 ]. A further goal may be formalising relevant capacities to also enable evaluation of learning processes and outcomes, where constructions such as ‘futures consciousness’ [ 1 ] may prove useful.

Meanwhile, young people’s future thinking has been analysed in several studies (e.g. [ 3 , 15 , 43 ]), revealing both pessimistic and optimistic future outlooks. Such studies also support the notion that technology is strongly associated with imagined future worlds—a connection embodied in science fiction, which arguably could also be called ‘technology fiction’ or ‘future fiction’, demonstrating a strong association between the concepts. Within futures studies, this link may seem obvious (see, e.g. the role of technology in the ‘future archetypes’ of [ 27 ]), but it is underrepresented in science education literature; students’ hopes, fears and expectations regarding the future are rarely addressed.

There may also exist a discontinuity between the approaches taken when addressing socioscientific thinking within education, and those taken when studying young people’s perceptions of the future. Namely, societally oriented science education research and practice may tend to be based on individual issues [ 6 ] and case studies, while research on young people’s perceptions of technology may look at technology more generally [ 7 ].

Thus our goal in this paper is to explore the following question:

What kinds of technology and what desirable and undesirable impacts of technology are present in upper-secondary school students’ images of the future?

Specifically, we examine a set of Finnish upper secondary school students’ essays that describe imagined future worlds, set in years 2035 and 2040. We analyse what technologies are present in these essays, what aspects of the world and human life are affected by technology and whether these effects are framed as positive, negative or in neutral or conflicted terms.

Our goal is to diversify the meaning of the term ‘technology’ in (young) people’s futures thinking by providing an exploratory study on expectations, hopes and fears associated with specific envisioned technological developments or the processes of technologisation in general. Finally, we conclude by discussing potential implications of the results for the development of science and technology education, and the potential of using socioscientific and sociotechnical issues as a context for futures thinking in education.

Definitions and rationale

In this paper, we examine the role of technology in upper-secondary school students’ images of the future. By images of the future we mean ‘snapshots of the major features of interest at various points in time’ ([ 42 ], p. 14). Images of the future do not necessarily contain ‘an account of the flow of events leading to such future conditions’ (Ibid., p. 14); this temporal perspective would turn an image into a scenario (which are more commonly explored in futures studies and also in future-oriented science education—see, e.g. [ 35 ]).

Images of the future are widely addressed in futures studies. However, as they exist in people’s imaginations and are by nature complex, they are difficult to fully pin down. Perceptions about the future are an integral part of one’s worldview [ 36 ], and at least in the case of nonexpert futures thinking, they can be expected to lack some systematicity. Imagined futures are often inconsistent [ 30 ] and can perhaps be better understood as reflecting the present [ 9 ]. An example of inconsistency is the common finding of a disconnection between optimistic personal and gloomy global futures [ 15 , 43 , 47 ].

In the case of images of technological futures, one’s understanding of technology is naturally a component, but only one of many. To quote Zeidler et al. [ 49 ], p. 360, ‘knowledge and understanding of the interconnections among science, technology, society, and the environment (...) do not exist independently of students’ personal beliefs’. For our purposes, no attempt to separate these components is necessary: our goal is to give voice to the image that emerges from these influences.

Defining technology is something of an arduous task, partly because the meaning of the word seems to vary greatly between contexts—it is a ‘slippery term’ ([ 5 ], p. 7). Thus for example the ‘T’ of STS (Science and technology studies) may be different from the ‘T’ of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). The students who wrote the essays that form the dataset for our study were asked to address the role of technology in their image of the future, and no theoretical definition was provided with this prompt. We expect students to have relied on some commonsense meaning of the word, and for the purposes of our study, we consider technology to be related to artefacts, tools, methods and systems that are based on the application of knowledge specific to STEM subjects. We expect this meaning to correspond to some extent with students’ thinking.

This study uses a unified view of science and technology education, or scientific and technological literacy (see, e.g. [ 33 ]) that is typical in current trends of interdisciplinary and societally oriented science education, or STEM education (see, e.g. [ 12 ]). As a clarification, we do not wish to convey the idea that the relationship between science and technology is obvious and uncomplicated (see, e.g. [ 4 ]). However, this is a context-dependent issue: firstly, technology experts and technologically literate citizens are expected to gain much of their education within science education, and secondly, the boundary between science and technology tends to disappear (or lose some of its meaning) in societal and future-oriented contexts [ 26 ]. Thus, studies of students’ images of technological futures can be expected to provide insight into the expectations, opportunities and sociotechnical thinking that will eventually be reflected in both the practice of technology experts and the actions of nonexpert citizens [ 31 ].

Perceptions of (technological) futures

Research on young people’s futures thinking has shown that science and technology are typical ingredients in young people’s dystopian views [ 13 ] but also central to their hopes of sustainable or otherwise progressive futures [ 15 , 36 ]. According to Cook ([ 15 ], p. 528), young people may generally feel ‘a loss of faith in the notion that humanity is progressing towards a positive future’—and thus society is ‘due for another break through’ with the help of technology.

Similarly, according to a study by Heikkilä et al. [ 25 ], Finnish people aged 16-20 seem to feel positively about technology amid a general trajectory of societal decline—while being reserved towards many areas of technology or new technologies in general, and feeling mostly optimistic about their own futures. In their study, young people’s images of the future involved robots, entertainment technology, home automation and new ways to travel, but also considerations against using robots as workforce, and in favour of ecological energy production and general ‘high technology’. It is notable that while such attitudes towards technology may be vague and inconsistent, they are nearly universal: in a nationwide survey, the increasing significance of technology was the most common future belief for Finnish 15- to 29-year-olds [ 37 ].

In Angheloiu et al.’s [ 3 ] paper, young people (ages 16-17) were found to mostly see an optimistic future where technology is strongly embedded in people’s daily lives, improving their quality of life and creating sustainability. However, optimism was not universal: some youth were found to e.g. fear environmental or health crises that would give rise to totalitarian regimes. In fact, the authors (p. 5) recognised the motif of “trade-offs between tech that makes our lives convenient at the price of ‘ethics and morals’”. This corresponds with the common discourses of technology as a ‘double-edged sword’ or ‘Faustian bargain’ (see, e.g. [ 14 ]). Across many outlooks, young people in Angheloiu et al.’s [ 3 ] study shared worries of accelerating inequality and increasing social isolation, also caused largely by technology, with similar findings reported by e.g. Kaboli & Tapio [ 30 ].

At a population-wide scale, van der Duin et al. [ 48 ] analysed Dutch adults’ views of the year 2040 (similarly to the present paper). They focused especially on societal, economical, environmental and technological issues. In the last category, questions of robotisation, digitisation and biotechnology were specifically addressed in both likelihood and desirability. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dutch people (88%) believe science and technology to greatly advance in the next few decades, while their attitude towards technology was almost evenly split between positive, neutral and negative. Expectations of ‘making life easier’ and ‘having a positive impact’ were reported: examples include electric transport and automatised household tasks, but to a lesser extent also advances such as teleportation and colonisation of other planets. The respondents’ technological worries related to cybersecurity, privacy, behaviour prediction systems, robotisation, diminishing human contact and ‘unnatural’ outcomes, among others.

At an even wider scope, Special Eurobarometer 419 [ 18 ] found that Finnish people and Europeans in general (aged 15 and over) expect technology (or ‘science and innovation’) to contribute to many important issues in the near future. These included health, jobs, education, skills, environment, energy supply, security and inequality. Interestingly, with the exception of inequality, in all of these issues, Europeans expect ‘science and innovation’ to contribute more to progress than ‘people’s actions’. In a similar manner, general opinion on futures was more divided than the role of technology in futures, which was seen in mostly positive light (opinions were most divided on cybersecurity). This connects well with Cook’s [ 15 ] notion of technology as a ‘refuge of hope’.

More recently, in Standard Eurobarometer 94 [ 19 ] it was found that Europeans’ general future perspectives are somewhat gloomy, even if inconsistent: future generations are expected to face more difficulties, and nations are seen as going downhill, even if these feelings coexist with ‘confidence in the future’ (p. T118 in Data Annex).

Most people indeed believe that ‘science has a positive impact on society’, and especially young people feel informed with technological developments ([ 17 ], p.5). Technology is expected to make life easier, more comfortable and healthier, even if the rapid pace of development is perceived somewhat negatively by the majority. However, as Kerschner & Ehlers [ 31 ] have pointed out, these attitudes seem to be diversifying, and Eurobarometer surveys may address this issue too superficially. To quote Kerschner & Ehlers (p. 139):

In the past any diversion from unquestioned optimism was interpreted as a bad sign and attributed to the public's ignorance. Today it is often welcomed as a sign of an increasingly emancipated public.

Accordingly, we emphasise the point that critical attitudes are not simply ‘luddite pessimism’, nor are hopeful attitudes always ‘sci-fi romanticism’—and attempt in this paper to give adequate voice to both critical and enthusiastic views.

Some scholars have also argued that attitudes towards technology may be different from attitudes towards any specific area of technology [ 7 ], or that there is no single direction in which sociotechnical transitions can take us, or metric by which to judge them [ 46 ]. In this paper, we address both general and specific views of future technology with the explicit intention of diversifying discourses of sociotechnical conceptions.

Thus there is considerable even if in some ways limited literature on how people perceive technology and technological futures. Similar questions have been a matter of some discourse in educational research as well, even if not as exhaustively. For instance, Clough [ 14 ] has noted that the pedagogies around the nature of technology should address how technology may impact behaviour, thinking, privacy and values among other facets of life, Hodson [ 26 ] has discussed connections between technological and scientific literacy and sociopolitical action, and Aikenhead & Ryan [ 2 ] have long before suggested researching students’ conceptions on the many impacts technology has. Equipping students with tools to understand how socioscientific and sociotechnical issues shape their lives is certainly one of the goals of modern science education. However, as Facer ([ 20 ], p. 99) has argued,

[r]hetoric about young people’s ‘ownership’ of future socio-technical change is a familiar part of much educational and political discourse. This does not, however, translate in practice into a meaningful dialogue with young people about the sorts of futures they might wish to see emerge.

We wish to argue that while emphasising the societal relevance of science and allowing students to practice socioscientific argumentation in the classroom is worthwhile, these questions should be adequately linked to students’ perceptions of the future, and specifically their own future.

Data collection

The data for this paper consists of 58 student essays. These were collected from 57 Finnish upper-secondary students from schools in the Helsinki region. 20 essays were collected in 2018 with the title ‘A typical summer day in 2035’ and 38 in 2019 with the title ‘A typical summer day in 2040’. One student wrote two different essays in two consecutive years.

In addition to the topic, students were given the instruction to describe what kind of general and technological environment they would like to live in (i.e. a preferable future—see, e.g. [ 8 ]). They were prompted to approach this task by addressing the topics of what one’s life is like, the problems one and one’s communities face, the opportunities one perceives, what items and objects are present, what kind of the city or country lives in and the social life one leads. Finally, they were asked to fill in sentences beginning with ‘my dream is’, ‘my dream place is/has’, ‘my ideal world is/has’, and ‘my biggest fears and concerns are’.

The data collection took part within the European Erasmus+ project ‘I SEE’ (2016-2019) [ 35 ]. The essays were collected as prerequisites for volunteers attending experimental courses, i.e. before any teaching intervention took place. All essays were translated into English before analysis, with student names replaced with pseudonyms. All these students (or with underage students, also their guardian) gave written consent to participate in the research.

In order to analyse what technologies and effects of technology are present in students’ images of the future, we employed thematic analysis [ 11 ] with inductive coding. We began by cataloguing passages in the essays based on the subject matter. A total of 385 passages relating to technology were identified, forming the set of our analysis units. Typically, an analysis unit would be one to five sentences long, and describe one (although sometimes more) technology, and one (or more) effects of the technology in one continuous argument. Many passages were also found to discuss technology generally without further specification.

The effects of technology were identified strictly by what was addressed in the essays. For example, a unit that mentioned ‘greener air travel’ was seen as discussing ‘transportation technology’ with effects relating to ‘the environment’ while another passage that described casual commuting between Finland and Italy was seen linking transportation technology to increased mobility. As these examples also demonstrate, by ‘effect of technology’ we mean aspects of life, society and the world that are influenced in some way by technology or technological change. The focus on ‘technology’ and ‘effect’ is employed here for analytic simplicity: for some students, technology seemed to drive change, but for some, expectations of sociotechnical transformation were also drivers of technology. Thus ‘effect’ covers a range of causal systems. By definition, every unit of analysis discusses either one or more specific technologies or technology in general. However, in some cases, no clear effects were addressed within the text. An example is the short unit ‘I own an electric car’.

These categories were formed inductively based on multiple rounds of coding, which included some redefinition, combination and subdivision of initial coding categories. The specificity of each technology or effect (e.g. coding both greener aeroplanes and electric cars under the technology code ‘transportation’) was done by the authors with the intention of creating codes with meaningfully different contents.

Finally, we separated the analysis units into three categories, based on whether the effects of the technology were phrased in terms that convey these effects as desirable, undesirable or whether they are discussed in neutral terms. To be precise, we checked each unit against the following criteria:

Positive: Changes described or framed as mostly positive—improvement, desirable effects, solved problems

Neutral: indifference; neutral descriptions; positive and negative aspects balance out

Negative: Changes described or framed as mostly negative—problems, reluctance, disequilibration

The authors negotiated codes for unclear units until consensus was found. In addition, every unit was checked against coding criteria to eliminate mistakes and inconsistencies. The codes with less than eight occurrences were also merged with other, similar codes. Finally, to structure the presentation of our results, the final set of technologies, as well as the set of effects of technology, were grouped into 5 and 6 sections respectively (see Tables 1 and 2 ).

General observations

A somewhat wide range of images of the future presents itself in our data. Ranging from highly imaginative to conservative, and simplistic to highly detailed, the essays cover many societal transformations and systemic interactions within society, but focus mainly on technology and the routines of adult life. Derek (all student names given here are pseudonyms) imagined a post-scarcity world, Andre thought that ‘most problems are solved’ in 2035, and Damian imagined himself in the future, missing the ‘old days’ before overtechnologisation. Some students described worlds where climate change is ‘solved’, while in others’ images increasing climate issues serve as a looming backdrop. Quite interestingly, a ‘typical summer day’ in a preferable future also included a wealth of worries related to technology.

Almost all students described in some detail the technological advances apparent on a day in 2035 or 2040. For some students, these were creative, fantastic or narratively distant (ranging from a hub of sky-high glass tubes that serves as public transport to living on a Mars colony ruled by AI). For others, advances were more modest, such as longer-lasting smartphone batteries. Interestingly, a few students stated or implied that technology will likely not impact their lives: Thomas likened new innovations to useless things like ‘electric nailclippers’, while Robyn focused solely on changes in social issues such as human rights and (non-technologically) sustainable lifestyles. We also noted that some students addressed, even in length, aspects of the social construction of technology, such as risk-benefit analysis or democratisation of technological development. Such meanings students gave to technology in their essays will be presented elsewhere [ 40 ]—here we focus on the types of technology and the fields of influence, as described above.

Future technology and its effects

Overview of the analysis.

Various types of technology were identified from the data, ranging from general discussion of technology to smartwatches and from fusion reactors to neural implants. All the technology types in our coding are shown in Table 1 .

In essence, discussions of technology typically focused on everyday devices (e.g. phones, cars, household machines), technological systems and broad categories of technology (e.g. vague or general use of the word ‘technology’, energy production systems, large-scale automation of service jobs). Elements resembling typical science fiction scenarios were found to be relatively rare: these included advances in robotics, artificial intelligence and a few mentions of spacefaring or brain-computer interfaces. The full range of technologies present in students’ images was thus found to be somewhat conservative, perhaps reflecting the given time span of two decades, or perhaps due to the context of imagining one’s own future.

Despite students’ restraints in describing more imaginative or fantastical technological changes, the effects of technology show notable variation. Technology was usually seen as affecting everyday convenience (often specifically household activities), the structure of job markets and environmental issues. Technology was also associated with social life, equality, health and privacy, or connected with larger issues such as overtechnologisation or general progress (for a full list of our effect codes, see Table 2 ).

As the examples selected for Table 2 demonstrate, technology was depicted influencing the world in both positive and negative ways, again showing considerable range: at one extreme are nuclear wars and ‘loss of humanity’, at the other are happiness and ‘a better future’. In total, 244 units were coded as positive, 55 as negative and 86 as neutral. However, it is notable that students were instructed to focus on a preferable future. Thus, while valence counts are reported in Tables 1 and 2 , the goal of our exploratory study is to analyse qualitatively various themes identified in the dataset.

Let us now look at how the technology and effect codes interconnect. Our analysis revealed a somewhat complex web of connections between technology, impacts of technology, and the desirability of such developments. This is illustrated by Fig. 1 , a Sankey diagram of the entire coded dataset. As one notices by looking at the diagram, due to constraints of space we cannot in this paper give examples of every type of connection in the data. Instead, we will present some key findings in the following sections, moving from more obvious roles of technology (practical uses) to more complex ones (societal challenges and the systemic effects of technology).

The connections between technologies and their effects. The width of the lines indicates the frequency of the connection. Green colour indicates positively, yellow neutrally and red negatively depicted change

Everyday life and relationships

Some of the connections are rather unsurprising, such as the idea that smart home technology has a positive effect on everyday convenience. In fact, the ‘easier everyday life’ of the future is one of the most salient features in our data. These imagined technological advances were related to handing tasks such as household chores over to robots, paying purchases with one’s phone more often, faster commuting and self-driving cars, wireless phone chargers or a more general expectation of adult life that is not limited or burdened by mundane tasks.

Laptops would also be paper-thin and easy to carry with you. (Willow)

Unless I wanted to, I would not have to do anything to maintain my house. In the modern world, everything revolves very closely around technology. Life is easy, because everything that is ‘unpleasant’ is handled by artificial intelligence. (Andre)

While in students’ visions technology often makes life easier and frees up time for more fulfilling activities, self-actualisation was rarely seen as stemming directly from technology. Similarly, technology was depicted providing an easy way of managing one’s social life, but it could not replace social activity not mediated by technology. In fact, some students saw technology as a force driving people apart: either by creating a culture of superficial acquaintances or by allowing people to retreat into lonely virtual worlds. However, the technologies students proposed as future ways of communication were typically not radically different from technologies that exist today.

I would like to live in a technologically advanced environment where a single lightweight, easy-to-carry device could be used to accomplish a lot of things. (...) one downside to this may be that our social life is likely to become more distant. (Oliver)

Environment

Alongside hopes of easier everyday life, other technological impacts that were seen positively were those relating to the environment. As Fig. 1 clearly shows, the connection between technology and environment was overwhelmingly positive. This was sometimes discussed as ‘solving’ climate change, and sometimes simply as a more incremental move towards greener technologies:

Climate change and other environmental problems have already been solved successfully, and all energy production is renewable or utilizes, for example, fusion power. (Manuel)

Electric cars are used for long-distance travel, since they are ecological. (Claire)

Technologies relevant in overcoming environmental unsustainability included energy production, recycling, production and transportation, but also geoengineering. While some students regarded fighting climate change as a hopeless battle against indifference, in most students’ essays climate and sustainability issues were discussed as either ‘solved’ problems or tackled by ongoing action:

However, new technologies have solved many climate-related problems, such as carbon dioxide and sulphur emissions. These can now be removed from the atmosphere to the surrounding space in a controlled way. (Natalie)

Despite technological development efforts, climate change is still a very relevant problem, and we will probably have had to create global technological solutions to slow it down. (Lily)

Not all efforts to mitigate climate change were based on new technologies—other kinds of sociotechnical change, such as banning cars and increased demand for green energy production were also mentioned. However, while students often discussed climate change mitigation in their essays, almost none of them imagined any technologies related to adapting to a changed climate, with the following exception:

While the worst of the predicted climate catastrophe is yet to come, these new automated fans that follow along with you are just not enough. (Isabella)

Employment, equality and privacy

While students saw potential in technology impacting environmental issues positively, in many other societal issues technology was linked to worries and fears. These included questions of privacy, the risks and vulnerabilities of digital systems, people becoming passive consumers of entertainment or losing the ability to concentrate, increasing social inequality (often caused by the automation of entire professions) and sometimes an AI catastrophe, technological weapons or misuse of mind-reading technology. For example, in Nina’s vision, society was still recovering from ‘the big data leak of 2037’, a nationwide data security catastrophe, and in Derek’s future, people ‘spend their time brainlessly staring at the screen’.

A large portion of the essays depicted a society dealing with impending or ongoing mass unemployment of people in automated service or manual work sectors:

There are not so many jobs these days, so many people are working in research and technology, just like me. Many of the professions that required human contact in the past have been replaced by robots that do the work as well as humans, except they are cheaper and more efficient. (Zelda)

Typically more intellectual jobs were expected to remain viable, including those in science, design, cybersecurity, innovation, programming or undefined ‘new professions’. In these visions, working life was often portrayed as competitive and hectic, with a constant need to keep up with changing demands:

Through social media, you are in contact with every organization in the world, and every organization is in contact with you. If you know what is expected of you (…) you can be very successful in this world. (Aurora)

Many students foresaw technology causing inequality in the future. This effect took place mostly through the unemployment in large work sectors discussed above. Students also expressed fears that technology could marginalise less educated people or ‘widen the gap between the rich and the poor and enable the latter to be oppressed on a global scale’. In fact, even in more positive visions, the connection between technology and equality was sometimes phrased in ways that seem to imply concern:

I want to live in a place where technology benefits everyone, not just those who are more fortunate than others. (Mel)

Divisions, overtechnologisation and progress

Technology (and the increasing embeddedness of technology in human life) was also connected with what appear to be technomoral questions. In other words, technology was not only seen benefiting various stakeholders or communities differently, but also as an issue where values and beliefs surface, creating societal and cultural tensions and polarisation:

By 2040 (...) technology used to study the brain and the functional systems of digital devices will be tightly integrated, and information technology can often be used just by thinking a few thoughts. (...) Our society is divided into groups: those who see nothing bad or unpredictably dangerous in this technology, and those who oppose it completely. (Aurora)

Curiously, similar mind-reading technology was described in solely positive terms by other students, but in these cases it was contextualised as easy-to-use interfaces for smart devices. This illustrates how some students seemed to concentrate on new possibilities, while others (even in a ‘desirable future’ framing) seemed to be more trade-off oriented, especially in larger, society-wide contexts. A similar pattern is seen in the way individual innovations were often discussed as positive developments, while forecasts of larger technological trends were more often paired with some worry. This is most clearly reflected in discourses of ‘overtechnologisation’:

The biggest fear is that with the advancement of technology and electronics, we might lose our humanity (…). (Brian)

(...) I do not want to live on technology’s terms in a world that is chock-full of technology. (Emilia)

Similar developments are possibly implied by students who emphasised that they wanted to live in cities where greenery has ‘not been replaced’, or surrounded by nontechnological objects. In fact, many students had written about a balance between technology and nature (or humans), whether in conjunction with overtechnologisation or not. Relatedly, students pictured futures in which one needs to consciously ‘unplug’ from time to time to retain connection with other facets of life:

It is important to me to not spend my entire life surrounded by machines, even though they make my life easier. (Mel)

Thus, technology was associated with a dangerous allure that individuals or humankind as a whole should guard against. However, the general fear related to the direction of humanity’s technological progress is in stark contrast to ideas centred on possibilities and progress. Several students expressed general trust or hope in technology being a part of a better future, or even a sign of humanity’s success:

I am sure we will live in the era of amazing technology. We can expect huge breakthroughs in physics and information technology that can benefit everyone. The place where I want to live is a place where you can clearly see the development of technology and humanity as a whole (...). (Malcolm)

I would wake up in the morning and, instead of waking up to the news of how humanity is failing, I would wake up to news of new technology being invented. (Lianna)

Lianna’s comparison between humanity’s failings and new technology—as well as Malcolm’s pairing of development of technology and development of humanity—seems far removed from fears of overtechnologisation or loss of humanity. Furthermore, Lianna described only exponential positive progress, while in Malcolm’s image of the future technology also creates unemployment. This exemplifies how students’ images of technological futures seem to reflect views of technology in general, hopes and fears of the overall future of humanity, and mediation between such elements.

Systems perspectives and complexity of sociotechnical change

The causal links between technology and effects also showed diversity. A contrast can be seen, for example, in two quotations provided earlier: Aurora’s complicated narrative of computer-brain interfaces stirring cultural polarisation and Manuel’s straightforward recounting of solving climate change. Technological change was not always seen influencing the world in immediate and instrumentalist ways, but also through systemic, higher order effects. This is a key observation and is well worth another example. Caden saw the future becoming even more globalised via technology-driven location independence and explained this process in some depth:

As communication and traffic systems evolve, I believe that travelling and exchanging thoughts and information across the world will be very common in the future. As a result of globalization, cultures and states will become more and more alike in the future, citizens will continue to move from place to place, and states will no longer exist in their traditional form. (Caden)

These somewhat ‘historical’ narratives were constructed around both positive and negative developments. On the clearly positive side, Lex imagined technology creating prosperity which allows universal basic income, ushering in a new age of people working for passion rather than money. However, for some students the intended use of technology and its direct effects were overshadowed by collateral damage to society, as in this rather dystopic vision:

(...) our society is unstable and environmental problems are a major problem, but people are not interested, because they are locked into their own bubbles. In their own virtual worlds. Sometimes I miss the old days. (Damian)

This quotation was extracted from a relatively rich context: the rather unrecognisable sci-fi cityscape in Damian’s vision and his portrayal of himself as a protagonist who is ‘ready to change the world’ (through his scientific career, in a time where most jobs are automated) is a powerful representation of the range of meanings science and technology may take in young people’s futures views. For some students, these meanings seemed to cause some dissonance that was sometimes addressed or resolved in the essays, for example by weighing the excitement of robot waiters against the perspective of the unemployed service staff. In the case of conflicted feelings towards technology, some students reflected on their positions either by identifying as their future self or explaining their hopes and fears from the present perspective:

I am grateful for all the inventions and technologies that I get to use today. But at the same time I am a little worried – for example life is no longer as private as it used to be. In the past, I might have been somewhat shocked if I had seen the present-day society. I talk a lot about this with my friends and family, and they, too, completely agree on both the opportunities and concerns. (Claire)

I believe there are both good and bad aspects to technology, and I cannot imagine a future where only one or the other would occur. (Natalie)

Conclusions

Discussion of results.

In our study, we examined Finnish upper-secondary school students’ images of desirable technological futures. As Tables 1 and 2 and diagram 1 summarise, students’ futures thinking shows a somewhat wide range of technological futures thinking. While students’ images involve an arguably limited perspective of areas of technology that may be relevant for their futures, these technologies, and technology in general, were associated with a fairly wide range of effects. Of these effects, most salient were hopes of easy day-to-day life, advances in environmental issues, and the automation of jobs.

Students’ views correspond to a large extent to the results of earlier studies on images of the future. Technological points of interest that students examine in their essays included robots and automation, smart homes, transportation and energy (cf. [ 25 , 48 ]), technology for sustainability (cf. [ 3 , 15 ]), the role of technology in everyday life (cf. [ 3 , 17 , 48 ]), inequality and isolation (cf. [ 30 , 48 ]), privacy and cybersecurity (cf. [ 18 ,  48 ]), and technology as progress as opposed to fall or stagnation (cf. [ 15 , 25 ]). Our study builds on these results firstly by not predetermining what technologies should be addressed in imagined futures, thus allowing respondents to construct a vision based on their own ideas, and secondly by explicitly addressing the difference and the associations between technological change and its societal or individual effects. Furthermore, by utilising a written assignment as the basis of the study, we were able to elicit students’ own sense-making of these connections both in the context of specific technologies that they associated with their own future, and the wider trend of technologisation.

Our results demonstrate how some students quite readily problematise sociotechnical change, identifying moral questions, considering trade-offs, stakeholder perspectives and systemic long-term effects. Technology was given both instrumentalist and unproblematic meanings (such as increased convenience) and much wider and more abstract meanings such as general progress or a dangerous trajectory leading to overtechnologisation of life. Interestingly, positive effects were commonly attributed to incremental improvements of existing technologies or specific new innovations, while the larger trends of automation, digitalisation and technologisation were seen in more conflicted terms.

These elements in students’ essays form a somewhat multifaceted picture of the roles technology may take in young people’s futures thinking; no single element captures the multitude of these roles and meanings. For example, it is not straightforward to determine whether students’ images of technological futures are overall ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. Given that students were asked to describe the kind of technological future they would like to see, it is worthwhile to note the frequency of both negative expectations and the ‘Faustian bargain’ discourse. On some level, many students seem to share the belief that positive and negative aspects go hand in hand. However, it is equally worthwhile to note that 24 student essays did not contain any negative effect codes, and of these eight discussed only positive effects. For example, Violet’s technological future featured smooth everyday life, the tools ‘to cure deadly diseases’, an atmospheric cleaner, fusion power and superhuman AI with endless uses.

The difference between purely positive and mixed images of technological futures could be attributed to variation in students’ views, but it is equally arguable that the difference may stem from students focusing to different degrees on ‘preferable’ (as opposed to ‘probable’ or ‘plausible’) futures—i.e. whether students focused on possibilities or critical perspectives. It is partly because of this interpretative ambiguity that we have here focused on analysing the ‘micro-level’ roles of technology in images of the future rather than the overall sociotechnical futures (i.e. each essay as a whole), with the intention of capturing the diversity of students’ ideas, hopes and fears about technology.

Limitations of this study and opportunities of further research

As the writing prompt given to students asked for a description of a desirable future, the strong leaning on positive effects of technology does not necessarily signify technological optimism. Similarly, asking students to think of a typical day may have primed students to think primarily of familiar (i.e. conservative) future worlds. However, perceptions of the future are complex, and any singular image is only a component of a larger whole. Further research is needed on the way individuals navigate various or even contradicting ideas about the future that they may simultaneously hold. As a related challenge, the essays analysed here can be seen exhibiting varying degrees of perceived ‘realness’ to the students. For example, one very short essay described the author living on a Mars colony ruled by an AI system. For us, this entry seemed unserious, possibly indicating some challenge in imagining (or writing about) one’s actual future. Thus, further research may need to gauge how likely students believe their imagined futures are to actually manifest.

Our study tentatively indicates that there are multiple layers of the entanglement of technology and futures that may exist in young people’s thinking: the everyday devices and general technological landscape of one’s life, various positive and negative societal transformations related to technological change, and general trends of technologisation that indicate whether humanity is ‘headed in the right direction’. Further research is needed to identify and operationalise how images of the future are constructed with relation to specific and general beliefs, hopes and fears about technology. An additional key issue unexplored by the present study is the sources from where young people draw elements of their images of the future.

Accordingly, there is much room for similar work to be carried out with various focus points. Here we have operated on the level of individual connections between technology, its effects and their desirability in order to reveal some of the complexity of students’ images of the future. Further studies could investigate students’ beliefs regarding the agents that drive sociotechnical change, the values they associate with these changes (see, e.g. [ 21 ]), and how they connect larger trends to their own lives and their own agency. For this end, this paper lays groundwork for further work carried out in the FEDORA project to discuss the desirable effects of technology in the light of students' values [ 40 ].

In addition, it may be worthwhile to examine what kinds of (science) pedagogies could meaningfully address students’ future views. Such initiatives have been carried out, for example the I SEE project (2016-2019) (see e.g. [ 35 , 41 ]) and the FEDORA project (fedora-project.eu). The implications of the present study for science education are discussed in the following section.

Finally, we note that the sampling is very likely not representative of Finnish youth, as the participants of the study were volunteers enrolling for an additional science course on futures thinking. Thus, they were likely to be interested in science subjects and think positively about scientific ideas. Our study may underrepresent views of the future that are common to other cohorts. The frequency of various perceptions among different age groups, genders and cultural backgrounds also demands broader samples and is left for further investigations.

Implications for science education

As our results demonstrate, images of the future provide a rich perspective into the interaction of students’ futures thinking and sociotechnical thinking. However, as we have shown, images of technological futures differ in many ways from each other. Therefore, science education oriented towards socio-scientific issues (SSIs) [ 49 ] should not address the future as a separate SSI but integrate it in a variety of scientific, social, cultural, ethical, environmental and economic aspects. Our results on the breadth and connectedness of students’ sociotechnical future visions give support and contribute to the holistic type of SSI teaching suggested by Rundgren and Rundgren [ 44 ] and invite science education researchers and practitioners to develop tools to help students connect their technological and socioscientific reasoning with their future outlooks and their futures thinking skills.

Such tools have already been developed for science classrooms in a few initiatives during the past two decades [ 29 , 36 , 38 ]. In Europe, future-oriented science education has been advanced in the I SEE project. The research presented here lays the groundwork and contributes to initiatives of this type by building a more nuanced understanding of students’ images of the future with relation to science and technology.

For science educators, a particularly interesting phenomenon seen in the data reported here concerns the depth of students’ spontaneous socioscientific thinking. In vastly different ideas such as Caden’s technologically united globe, Aurora’s polarising neurotechnology and Damian’s world of VR-induced indifference, a seemingly limited area of technology has effects that range well beyond the immediately obvious. This illustrates how complex and multilayered one’s future perception can be: even a singular and tightly expressed image of the future may contain a wealth of interacting beliefs and ideas. When constructing an image of the world students went beyond addressing simplistic cause-effect socioscientific discourse and engaged in thinking of systemic, higher order effects of sociotechnical change.

Thus, our results imply that constructing images of the future can be a pedagogically rich and meaningful task that taps into the transversal learning objectives in science curricula. While such future-oriented pedagogies face the challenge of addressing the inherently unknowable, in the context of science education they can also harness students’ curiosity about the future, their existing futures thinking skills, and the prevalent idea that scientific and technological ideas may come to determine the future to a great extent. As Facer (2012) [ 20 ] has argued, framing the future as ‘lived’ and ‘local’ seems to encourage students to think meaningfully and critically of sociotechnical change. This approach could also address the need to help students contextualise the ‘core knowledge’ of science, which is a focus of STSE and SSI education (see, e.g. [ 6 ]), to promote scientific literacy (see, e.g. [ 45 ]), and to give students a more nuanced representation of the nature of technology (see, e.g. Clough et al., 2013).

Our results also brought out a variety of technology-related hopes and fears that students may typically hold. In order to foster students’ agency, science and technology education should find ways to address and elaborate such feelings and escape simplistic visions that may be either dystopian, utopian or static. Teachers should help students perceive both opportunities and pitfalls in technology and, for example, problematise the naïve expectations of ‘technological fix’ for sustainability challenges. Relatedly, the diversifying attitudes towards technology should be linked to a belief in the malleability of (sociotechnical) futures through informed agency.

Our study offers evidence that upper-secondary students can be quite capable of engaging in futures thinking in a manner that combines creativity, value-based evaluation, a systems perspective and scientific literacy. However, for the purposes of science education, and the goal of understanding young people’s futures perceptions, it may prove useful for educators and researchers to distinguish between different types of sociotechnical transformations, such as complex systemic transformations (relevant from the SSI perspective) and more incremental and limited technological change (e.g. from a problem-solving, instrumentalist perspective).

Finally, it seems reasonable that practicing formulating images of desirable futures is necessary to acquire the skills needed for technology experts’ reflective practice (see, e.g. [ 4 ]), or steering technology towards sustainability. After all, ‘[w]hen students’ images of possible futures are elicited, valued and acted upon students are empowered to work towards a future they would prefer’ [ 36 ]. This goal requires further exploration of young people’s conceptions and pedagogies inspired by futures studies to evoke and evolve these conceptions—a task that we hope to have demonstrated to be feasible, fruitful and necessary. However, for this purpose there needs to be much more dialogue between the fields of futures studies and educational research.

Availability of data and materials

The dataset analysed during the current study is available in the Zenodo.org repository, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5517595 .

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Elina Palmgren for organising the data collection, Paula Pekkala for assisting in the coding process and Pia Erkko for translating the essays. We also thank Prof. Jari Lavonen for some helpful comments on the manuscript and the partners of the FEDORA project, coordinated by Prof. Olivia Levrini in University of Bologna, for their helpful comments on the design of the study. We also thank Steve Bogart for the free SankeyMATIC tool that was used for Fig. 1 . Finally, our warmest thanks to the upper secondary school students who participated in the research.

The collection of the data analysed in this study was supported by the European Commission Erasmus+ programme under Grant Agreement no. 2016-1-IT02-KA201-024373 (project "I SEE").

The analysis of the data and writing of the manuscript was supported by the European Commission Horizon2020 programme under Grant Agreement no. 872841 (project "FEDORA"). Open access funded by Helsinki University Library.

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TR carried out the data analysis and was the main contributor in all parts of the manuscript. AL planned and lead the data collection in the I SEE project and framing the research in the FEDORA project and helped with writing the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Rasa, T., Laherto, A. Young people’s technological images of the future: implications for science and technology education. Eur J Futures Res 10 , 4 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40309-022-00190-x

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Technology Trends and Ethical Considerations Essay

The rapid development of modern technology has facilitated a quickening of the speed of change and development. However, this year a lot more has been witnessed than just a shift in technological trends and developing technologies; the outbreak of COVID-19 has made IT workers aware that their job will not be the same in the future contactless world. As a result, an IT professional in 2022-2023 will be in a continual state of education (Dana et al., 2022). These trends include computing power, artificial intelligence, smarter devices, datafication, and others. The technology trends that are evident today vary from one to another. For instance, some trends are more beneficial in terms of the advantages offered to society. It is important to note that all the trends are significant to society, but some have fewer impacts on the community.

I think Robotic process automation (RPA) is one trend that offers less benefit to society. This trend involves the automation of jobs, for example, data interpretation, emailing, and even processing transactions. If RPA is optimized, statistics have proven that an average of more than 230 million workers are at risk of losing their jobs. This trend can sometimes cause unemployment in different sectors (Syed et al., 2020). Despite the argument that RPA creates new jobs, many employees will still lose their jobs. In addition, higher skills are required to secure the jobs offered by the trend. Another less beneficial trend is cloud computing; this trend is mainly essential to the company using it and not society. Additionally, edge computing has more benefits compared to cloud computing.

Several ethical considerations have to be made when robotics are implemented. The first consideration is unemployment; the impact of robots learning everything and replacing humans as the source of labor should be evaluated. It is argued that robots are essential in doing work that humans do not enjoy. However, the question of joblessness is yet to get a satisfying solution (Mendling et al., 2018). Another ethical consideration is inequality between artificial agents and humans. The revenue distribution, the sector enjoying the benefits, and an economy based on a fair labor structure must be analyzed before implementation.

The third ethic relating to the RPA technology trend is humanity. Today’s robots are getting better and better at mimicking human speech. They employ relatively elementary technology often deployed on the web to grab people’s attention (Syed et al., 2020). Several questions arise; for example, what societal implications could arise if humans and machines are capable of human-like dialogue and interaction? Is it possible to teach a robot to influence human behavior? Is it possible for humans and robots to cooperate effectively? Is it possible to improve office morale with socially adept robots?

In addition, the ability of the robots to have their rights is considered. Robots’ communication is on a superficial level; however, the chances of them changing to feeling humans should be considered. The RPA technology should evaluate the issue of the robots being more of humans and thus causing them to have human requirements like treatment. More questions arise concerning how society is expected to associate with the feeling robots in case this point is attained. The last ethic consideration relating to RPA is the chances of an artificial error. Incredible as robots are, and despite their potential for perfection, they are not always error-free (Mendling et al., 2018). Artificial intelligence may turn out to be less than human intelligence. Robots are prone to error when confronted with unfamiliar settings. The gravity of a robot’s error depends on the nature of the task it is assigned. Therefore, it is essential to know who takes the blame when the robots make mistakes, the extent to which a robot can recover from the error, and measures to prevent the recurrence of the error.

Dana, L. P., Salamzadeh, A., Mortazavi, S., Hadizadeh, M., & Zolfaghari, M. (2022). Strategic futures studies and entrepreneurial resiliency: a focus on digital technology trends and emerging markets. Tec Empresarial , 16 (1), 87-100. Web.

Syed, R., Suriadi, S., Adams, M., Bandara, W., Leemans, S. J., Ouyang, C…. & Reijers, H. A. (2020). Robotic process automation: contemporary themes and challenges. Computers in Industry , 115 , 103162. Web.

Mendling, J., Decker, G., Hull, R., Reijers, H. A., & Weber, I. (2018). How do machine learning, robotic process automation, and blockchains affect the human factor in business process management? Communications of the Association for Information Systems , 43 (1), 19. Web.

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Latest Update 19 Jan, 2024

Table of content

1. Artificial Intelligence

2. machine learning, 3. automation or rpa robot method, 4. wireless computing, 5. virtual reality, 6. blockchain, 7. internet of things (iot), 8. cyber protection.

The software is now so rapidly evolving that quarterly trend forecasts seem so redundant before they even go on life as a blog post or article. As technology evolves, it can be created and enhanced quickly, and rates are that before they eventually become exponential.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)   has been strongly influenced in recent years but is still a trend to be seen as the effect of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the way we live, work and play are only at an early stage. Certain types of AI have been developed to which we will refer, including machine learning. AI refers to computer systems programmed to mimic the understanding of people and execute tasks such as pictures, speech, patterns, and decision-making. Such tasks can be done faster and more accurately than people can.

AI is a component of what we commonly refer to as automation and a hot topic due to the potential reduction of jobs. The artificial intelligence programmer is another such feature. Many people say that he will challenge data scientists who need skilled professionals rapidly. Read before beginning an AI career or why you should get an AI certification and read more about future AI work.

The AI group is machine learning. Computers are programmed to recognize something that is not meant to be achieved through machine learning: by patterns and observations into data. Therefore, two types of knowledge were tracked and unattended.

While machine learning is a subset of the AI, machine learning sub-sets include neural networks, NLP and profound training are also available. That sub-set offers an opportunity to specialize in a slowly developing sector.

The Automation or RPA Robot software, like AI and machine learning, is the automation or RPA of the automated process that automates staff. RPA is using corporate operations streamlined tools, such as system evaluation, storage of payments, data management and even e-mail replies. RPA automates replicated work performed by humans automatically. These are not just menial activities for low-paid workers: up to 45% of our occupations can be remotely handled, like financial management, physicians, and CEOs.

Cloud computing is historically a technological trend and is operated by major players such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud (Amazon Web Services). As companies move ever further towards a cloud solution, the rise in cloud computing grows. Still, though, this is not the new technology.

In some instances, we have seen drawbacks in cloud computing, as the information we manage continues to grow. Advanced computing has been developed to address these problems to eliminate network software jamming and access to information at a data centre. When you like, the computation can be performed "on the edges." it helps Edge Calculation to store time-sensitive information on remote sites with or without a link to a central location. In those instances, specialized technology is used as micro data centres.

Virtual reality   plunges the consumer into an area while it improves the atmosphere. Although VR is mainly used in sports, it is also used as a device of modelling, for instance, Virtual Vessel.

Each VR and AR has tremendous training, news, study and marketing ability, and even rehabilitation after injury if this is helpful for training physicians, for supplying museum visitors with more experiences or improving theme parks or advertising, as with the Pepsi Max bus shelter.

In the VR market, there are significant players, including Facebook, Samsung and Oculus. Yet, many companies arise and will be interested so that interest for VRs and ARs will only be boosted. Beginning with VR does not take much expertise. Requisite expertise in coding and a forward outlook create work even if other programmers pursue optics as hardware engineers and specialists.

In many other ways, most people consider block chain software to be of interest to   crypto currencies , such as Bit coin. The chain block can be described as data that can only be added, removed or changed as easy as possible. it is the term ' chain,' when you create a series of data. It is so secure that the prior frames cannot be changed. Also, a group supports block chains so nobody can manipulate the data. To supervise or verify transactions for the block chain, you do not need a competent third party. See our Block chain guide for a detailed and structured review of the program. Various industries include the block chain, and the need for skilled experts grows with the use of block chain software.

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There are now many "materials" developed for Wi-Fi networking that enables it to be linked to and from the web. The internet of things is the future. Computers, home equipment, cars, and many more can already be connected to the network. However, experts say that, despite such advantages in the design and implementation of IoT, not enough IT practitioners are educated for the IoT work. A survey in IT Pro Today says we need over 200,000 IT workers who are not in the process stage, and 25.7% recognize that the most significant barrier to growth for the sector is a skills gap. It makes it easy for anyone involved in an IoT profession to become motivated by a variety of options. The skills required include IoT protection, cloud computing, data analysis, automation, embedded system experience, software expertise. After all, the Internet of Things is very different, meaning that the skills needed are varied.

Cyber security   may not sound like new technologies because it has existed for a long time, but because of the always new threats, some other developments evolve. Malicious hackers who want to access data remotely won't give up and still discover ways to implement the most stringent security measures. The implementation of new health-enhancing technologies was partly responsible for it. So long as we have malware, we will have cyber security as emerging technology which is continuously evolving to defend against hackers.

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Tensions Rise in Silicon Valley Over Sales of Start-Up Stocks

The market for shares of hot start-ups like SpaceX and Stripe is projected to reach a record $64 billion this year.

By Erin Griffith

Reporting from San Francisco

Sohail Prasad, an entrepreneur, launched a fund in March called the Destiny Tech100 . The fund owns shares in hot tech start-ups like the payments firm Stripe , the rocket maker SpaceX and the artificial intelligence company OpenAI.

Few people get the chance to invest in these privately held companies since their shares are not openly traded. Mr. Prasad’s intention with Destiny was to let the rest of the world get a piece of them through his fund.

But soon after Destiny debuted, two tech start-ups — Stripe and Plaid, a banking service — said the fund did not legally own their shares. A competitor criticized Destiny as “too good to be true.” Robinhood, the stock trading app, stopped letting investors buy into the fund, saying it had been added to its app by mistake.

Mr. Prasad was not surprised by the uproar. It was a sign of “a true cultural movement in which DXYZ is at the forefront,” he said, referring to Destiny by its ticker symbol.

Tensions over the shadowy and often enigmatic market of private company stocks have reached a boiling point, just as the buying and selling of such shares has grown bigger than ever. At its center is an age-old debate: Should everyone have access to the riches and risks of investing in Silicon Valley start-ups?

The market for private company stocks, also known as the secondary market, is on track to hit a record $64 billion this year, up 40 percent from last year, according to Sacra , a research firm focused on private investments. A decade ago, the private company stock market was roughly $16 billion, according to Industry Ventures , a firm focused on secondary transactions.

As the appetite for private company shares has soared, so have the headaches. If a company is publicly traded, like Apple or Amazon, anyone can easily buy and sell its stock. But privately owned tech start-ups like Stripe typically have a small circle of owners, such as their founders and employees, as well as the wealthy individuals and venture capital firms that provided financing for the companies to grow. The companies’ stocks do not usually change hands.

Now, as these start-ups mature and don’t appear to be in a rush to go public, a wider range of investors are becoming eager to own their stock. New online marketplaces that match sellers of start-up stock with interested buyers have sprung up.

And funds like Destiny have appeared. Destiny is among the only options for retail investors, since most other funds and marketplaces are restricted to “accredited” investors with high incomes or net worth.

The activity has increasingly rattled some start-ups, which have long resisted letting their shares freely change hands. The more people who own their stock, the more unwieldy the number of shareholders, which can lead to difficulties complying with securities laws, among other complications. While some start-ups are allowing some trading of their stock, other trades are happening without permission.

“We’re coming to a point where something has to give,” said Noel Moldvai, the chief executive of Augment, a marketplace for private start-up shares.

‘Hey, I Own Some SpaceX’

Among the online marketplaces for buying and selling private company stocks is Hiive, which started in 2022. It is currently offering customers shares in Anthropic , a hot artificial intelligence start-up.

Hiive bought $15 million of Anthropic stock and is letting investors buy chunks as small as $25,000, said Sim Desai, the company’s chief executive. The site oversees an average of around $20 million in deals a week.

At Augment, which opened last year, investors interested in owning shares in Stripe can peruse four “sell orders,” or people trying to sell Stripe shares. Augment did more than $20 million of transactions in March, Mr. Moldvai said.

Some investment funds — including Stack Capital, Fundrise, Private Shares Fund and ARK Invest’s ARK Venture Fund — are also pitching the ability to own a piece of private start-ups. Destiny, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange and contains shares in 23 start-ups worth around $53 million, is one of a few options that are publicly traded.

The activity has alarmed some start-ups. Stripe, valued at $65 billion in the private market, has issued a strongly worded statement about offers to buy its stock. Any offer to invest in its shares that does not come from the company is “ very likely a scam ,” it said. Stripe has encouraged shareholders to report such offers to law enforcement.

Stripe and Anthropic declined to comment for this article.

Even so, people remain eager to get shares of the start-ups, said Jeff Parks, chief executive of Stack Capital, which offers investors access to companies including SpaceX and Canva, a design software start-up.

“You want to be on the golf course like, ‘Hey, I own some SpaceX,’” he said.

Risky Deals

Private stock sales go back more than a decade — and have always felt a bit like the Wild West.

Before Facebook went public in 2012, its privately held shares changed hands on marketplaces such as SharesPost and SecondMarket. The Securities and Exchange Commission warned that such marketplaces were risky “for even savvy investors” and fined SharesPost $80,000 for not registering as a broker-dealer.

In the aftermath, start-ups tried restricting sales of their stock. But middlemen including Forge Global, then known as Equidate, found ways around it. They popularized “forward contracts,” which paid start-up employees cash if they pledged to transfer their company shares to an investor in the future.

Forward contracts caught on at start-ups like Airbnb . When Airbnb publicly listed its stock in 2020, Forge oversaw the transfer of $475 million of shares pledged by the vacation rental site’s employees to more than 100 investors.

“It was an administrative nightmare,” said Kelly Rodriques, Forge’s chief executive. Forge has since built technology to handle that process and no longer strikes forward contracts.

Some companies that have stayed private the longest, including Stripe, which is 14 years old, and SpaceX , which is 22 years old, have begun offering regular opportunities for employees to sell a portion of their stock at a set price.

Even though companies historically resisted the trading of their private stock, more are coming around to the idea, Mr. Rodriques said.

“The market has never been more accepting of secondary liquidity than it is now,” he said.

A Time of Destiny?

Mr. Prasad, a co-founder of Forge, left in 2019 to create Destiny. He raised $94 million in 2021 to buy stakes in start-ups with the plan of taking the fund public.

Mr. Prasad said his goal was to give more investors access to private start-up shares. “We’re trying to drive a world where it becomes less binary from being private to being public,” he said. Change, he added, “can make people uncomfortable at first.”

To obtain private company shares for the fund, he used forward contracts to buy $1.7 million of stock in Stripe and Plaid.

Both companies have bristled at Destiny’s claim to the shares. Such deals would violate its rules, Plaid said in a statement last month, and it “does not recognize shares acquired in this manner.”

Stripe also published a notice on its website. “We have become aware of certain investment funds that do not own any Stripe stock claiming to offer retail investors access to Stripe,” it said, warning that “their investments may have no value at all.” Stripe forbids forward contracts and has said such deals are void.

Mr. Prasad said he was confident that Destiny’s shares were legal.

Last month, Destiny’s share price soared, with the fund hitting a market capitalization of over $1 billion. A subsidiary of Ark Invest, the firm led by the well-known investor Cathie Wood , posted on social media that Destiny’s strategy was flawed because its market capitalization was so much higher than the value of its start-up investments. Ark offers a competing fund, the Ark Venture Fund, which is structured differently.

Ark declined to comment beyond a blog post in which it argued that its fund provided better access to private companies than funds like Destiny’s.

In response, Mr. Prasad posted an image of the “ distracted boyfriend ” meme, implying Ark was jealous of his fund, and the “ waiting ” meme from the Netflix show “Narcos,” implying Ark investors would take many years to liquidate their investments.

On April 16, Robinhood removed the ability to buy Destiny’s stock from its app. A Robinhood spokesman said that it did not allow closed-end funds, the type of investment fund used by Destiny, and that Destiny’s fund had been mistakenly labeled by one of its vendors as a stock.

Mr. Prasad revealed plans to raise more money to “accelerate our momentum.” But Destiny’s share price crashed. On Friday, it was trading at a market capitalization of $141 million.

An earlier version of this article misstated the amount Hiive bought in Anthropic stock. It was $15 million, not $50 million.

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Erin Griffith covers tech companies, start-ups and the culture of Silicon Valley from San Francisco. More about Erin Griffith

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More From Forbes

Bridging the semiconductor talent gap with ai copilots: a strategic dilemma.

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Erfan Rostami, CTO of Voltai , building AI for semiconductors.

The semiconductor industry is a bastion of innovation, driving advancements in technology that support the modern digital world. However, these advancements demand the cultivation of specialized skills, typically acquired through advanced degrees in engineering. The learning curve is steep, and the necessary education requires a deep understanding of chip architecture and systems.

The complexity of semiconductor design and manufacturing is daunting. Each chip contains billions of transistors, each needing meticulous arrangement and interconnection. This requires not only a keen eye for detail but also an in-depth knowledge of the design process.

Furthermore, the industry is characterized by high-precision manufacturing processes. The fabrication of semiconductors involves several intricate steps, including photolithography, etching and doping. Each requires a high level of accuracy. The margin for error in each step is minuscule, as even minor mistakes can lead to significant losses due to the high cost of taping out semiconductor designs. This leaves no room for the kind of mistakes that inexperienced designers are more likely to make.

The Talent Gap

The semiconductor industry is at a critical juncture, facing a significant talent gap that threatens to impede its growth and innovation. As the demand for more advanced chips continues to rise, the industry requires a substantial increase in skilled labor to meet these needs. However, the specialized nature of semiconductor manufacturing and the challenges associated with developing skills in this field are leading to a shortage of qualified workers.

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According to a Deloitte report, the semiconductor industry is projected to need more than one million additional skilled workers by 2030 to keep pace with demand. In the United States alone, the workforce in this sector is expected to grow by approximately 115,000 by the end of the decade. Despite this anticipated growth, an estimated 67,000 of these jobs are at risk of remaining unfilled .

This talent gap reflects the broader challenge of attracting and retaining individuals with the necessary skills and expertise. The industry's ability to innovate and maintain its global competitiveness is at stake, making it imperative to find solutions to bridge this talent gap.

The Role Of AI In Addressing These Challenges

As semiconductor manufacturing grows more complex, the industry should turn toward advanced technologies like AI to tackle these talent gap challenges. AI is becoming an indispensable tool across many domain-specific verticals, such as healthcare and legal. Within the semiconductor industry, it has the potential to impact the entire value chain, from research and chip design to manufacturing, significantly enhancing engineering productivity and reducing time to market​​.

One of the most promising applications of AI in the semiconductor industry is the development of AI copilot systems. These systems are designed to work alongside human operators, providing real-time insights, recommendations and automation to streamline the process. For example, AI copilots could help with generating Verilog and VHDL code or debugging error messages generated from electronic design automation (EDA) tools when they're integrated into engineers' workflows.

Furthermore, AI copilots can sift through thousands of highly technical IP and design documentation to provide a simple interface for engineers to find necessary design information in seconds. Ultimately, such features will allow engineers to iterate much faster on their prototypes and designs, and reduce the tedious and error-prone parts of their tasks.

Potential Challenges Of Integrating AI Copilots

The integration of AI copilot systems into semiconductor manufacturing is not without its challenges. It requires significant investment in technology and talent. The development and implementation of AI technologies require skilled machine learning and data engineers.

Unfortunately, these individuals are often attracted to more prominent names in the tech world, such as Google, DeepMind and OpenAI, or to startups with a more direct focus on AI innovation. The competition for AI talent is fierce, with Microsoft-backed OpenAI reportedly offering pay packages worth up to $10 million to lure top artificial intelligence staffers away from chief rival Google. Such lucrative offers are part of the tech industry’s ongoing arms race to control the market for AI technologies.

For semiconductor companies, this presents a significant dilemma. To leverage AI effectively and stay competitive, they need to attract and retain talent that is in high demand across the tech sector. However, competing with the pay packages and prestige offered by leading AI firms and startups is challenging. Despite its critical role in enabling AI technologies, the semiconductor industry may not have the same allure or visibility as companies at the forefront of AI innovation.

The Path Forward

The semiconductor industry stands at a critical inflection point. Demand for advanced chips is skyrocketing, but the skilled talent needed to design and manufacture them is in short supply. Despite the challenges, integrating AI copilot systems into semiconductor design and manufacturing may be the most promising solution to bridging the looming talent gap.

While attracting top AI talent away from leading tech firms is an uphill battle, semiconductor companies must find ways to leverage AI to remain competitive. AI copilot systems, while not a silver bullet, provide a path forward to get more done with less.

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These are the top 10 emerging technologies of 2023: Here's how they can impact the world

The 'Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2023' report lists this year's most impactful emerging technologies. Image:  Midjourney, Studio Miko

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Stephan kuster.

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Stay up to date:, technological transformation.

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• The World Economic Forum's newly-launched ' Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2023 ' report lists this year's most impactful emerging technologies.
• The Top 10 list includes environmental innovations, such as sustainable aviation fuels and wearable plant sensors.
• Other emerging technologies range from innovations harnessing the power of AI to reengineering molecular biology.

Technology is a relentless disruptor. It changes the context for how we live, work and play, redefines businesses and industries, and offers unprecedented solutions for addressing complex planetary and societal challenges. But in a quick-changing world where ideas come and go, what emerging technologies should raise to the top of the agenda for decision-makers, entrepreneurs and citizen in the years to come? The World Economic Forum’s ' Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2023 ' Report, in collaboration with Frontiers , brings together the perspectives of over 90 academics, industry leaders and futurists from 20 countries around the world, to discover the technologies most likely to impact people and the planet in the next three to five years.

From sustainable solutions that help combat climate change to step-change generative AI models, here are the top 10 emerging technologies most likely to improve our future lives.

Combatting the climate and nature crises

Sustainable aviation fuel.

The aviation industry generates between 2-3% of global CO2 emissions, but all regions of the world are set to see big increases by 2050. Unlike many other industries, the weight-to-power ratio of batteries makes electrification a challenge. That’s where sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) comes in. Synthetic fuels are made from biological sources like biomass or non-biological sources like CO2, and can be used with existing aviation infrastructure and equipment. Today, SAFs meet around 1% of aviation industry fuel demand, but this must increase to 13-15% by 2040 to help the industry reach net-zero emissions by 2050, says the report.

Wearable plant sensors

Global food production will need to increase by 70% by 2050 to feed a growing world population, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Crop monitoring is a key part of achieving this goal. Traditional soil testing and visual inspections of crops are expensive and time-consuming, giving rise to monitoring using low-resolution satellite data and later sensor-equipped drones and tractors.

However, micro-sized needle sensors embedded in individual plants could harvest a wealth of data to improve plant health and increase agricultural productivity, says the report. These devices monitor temperature, humidity, moisture and nutrient levels to help optimize crop yields, reduce water and fertilizer use and detect early signs of disease.

The Forum’s Artificial Intelligence for Agriculture Innovation (AI4AI) initiative aims to transform the agriculture sector using AI and other cutting-edge technologies.

Led by the Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) in India, the initiative has already helped more than 7000 chilli farmers increase their yields and reduce costs.

C4IR India is sharing its learnings with other centres in the C4IR Global Network, including Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Colombia.

Sustainable computing

Exponential growth in AI, cloud computing and other technologies requires bigger, more powerful and more plentiful data centre capacity. Data centres consume 1% of total global electricity production, but powering our increasingly data-hungry digital society means this is set to increase. Several technologies are emerging, aimed at making the goal of net-zero-energy data centres a reality, says the report. These include using water or dielectric liquid cooling to dissipate heat, alongside technologies that repurpose excess heat to warm buildings, heat water or for industrial processes.

Also, AI-enabled systems can analyze and optimize energy use in real-time, maximizing efficiency and performance – reducing energy consumption by as much as 40% at Google’s data centres. And making data processing and storage infrastructure modular and demand-based means systems like cloud and edge computing can be distributed across multiple devices, systems and locations to optimize energy use.

Have you read?

How emerging tech could mitigate emerging human crises, ‘tech for good’ had a very good year in 2022. here are 6 companies that led the way, how can technology help in a holistic approach to ensure inclusion, powered by artificial intelligence, generative ai.

Generative artificial intelligence models are fast becoming a part of everyday life. The models use complex algorithms to recognize and utilize patterns in data. The recent introduction of AI-based language models, like ChatGPT, has already impacted life at schools, universities and workplaces, but if used properly, such tools can enhance productivity and creative output. However, Gen AI technology goes beyond producing written texts, images and sound, with applications including drug design to target specific medical conditions, architecture and engineering. NASA engineers are developing AI systems to create lightweight space instruments, reducing development time and improving structural performance, for example.

AI in healthcare

Emerging AI-based technologies and machine learning tools could help the global healthcare sector both anticipate and better prepare for future pandemics or other challenges.

Such systems could help increase the efficiency of national and global healthcare systems to tackle health crises and improve access to healthcare. Innovations like this could also reduce treatment waiting times, by aligning treatment needs with available medical resources and increasing medical outreach, says the report.

The benefits of AI in healthcare could be magnified in developing countries, which often lack sufficient infrastructure and staff to provide widespread access to healthcare services.

How is the World Economic Forum creating guardrails for Artificial Intelligence?

In response to the uncertainties surrounding generative AI and the need for robust AI governance frameworks to ensure responsible and beneficial outcomes for all, the Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) has launched the AI Governance Alliance .

The Alliance will unite industry leaders, governments, academic institutions, and civil society organizations to champion responsible global design and release of transparent and inclusive AI systems.

Emerging Technologies in Health

Metaverse for mental health.

There’s been a lot of hype surrounding the metaverse, and we are a long way from this concept becoming a reality. That said, the virtual world can create shared digital spaces where people can meet each other socially and professionally. Virtual environments open up new opportunities to provide mental health treatments, covering a range of telemedicine applications, including prevention, diagnostics, therapy, education and research. Several gaming platforms have been established to help people with conditions like depression and anxiety or encourage mindfulness and meditation, for example.

Designer phages

Human, animal and plant microbiomes are home to vast communities of microbes that are crucial to each organism’s health. Recent advances in bioengineering allow scientists to engineer microbiomes to increase human and animal well-being and agricultural productivity. The technology centres around phages, which are viruses that identify and infect specific types of bacteria with genetic information, says the report. Bioengineers can reprogramme a phage’s genetic information so it transmits genetic instructions to bacteria to change how it functions, enabling microbiome-associated diseases to be targeted and treated.

Spatial omics

The human body is a collection of around 37.2 trillion cells that work together. To understand how microbiological processes like this work, scientists have developed a method called spatial omics, which combines advanced imaging techniques with sophisticated DNA sequencing processes to map biological processes at the molecular level. Using spatial omics, scientists can observe intricate details of cell architecture and biological processes that were previously unobservable, according to the report.

Engineering

Flexible batteries.

As electronic devices become ever more flexible, a more pliable type of battery is emerging to power them. Flexible batteries are made of lightweight materials that can be twisted, stretched, bent into shape and even coated onto carbon-based materials like carbon fibre or cloth. These rechargeable, bendable batteries are increasingly energizing growing markets – like roll-up computer screens, smart clothing and wearable electronics, including healthcare devices and biometric sensors, says the report.

Flexible neural electronics

Brain-machine interfaces (BMI) allow direct communication between the brain and external computers. So far, the technology has been based on rigid electronics and limited by the mechanical and geometrical mismatch with brain tissue. But breakthroughs in flexible electronics and more biocompatible materials mean a less invasive experience for patients.

BMI-type technologies are already in use to treat patients with epilepsy and with prosthetic limbs that use electrodes to connect with the nervous system.

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World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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News & Insights

Technology Sector Update for 05/06/2024: PRFT, MU, GRRR

May 06, 2024 — 01:40 pm EDT

Written by MT Newswires for MTNewswires  ->

Tech stocks were higher Monday afternoon, with the Technology Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLK) adding 0.6% and the SPDR S&P Semiconductor ETF (XSD) up 1.3%.

The Philadelphia Semiconductor index rose 1.8%.

In corporate news, Perficient ( PRFT ) shares surged almost 53% in recent trading after the company on Sunday reported lower adjusted earnings and revenue but said it has agreed to be acquired by EQT for about $3 billion.

Micron Technology ( MU ) shares spiked 4.7% as Baird upgraded the company to outperform from neutral and raised the price target to $150 from $115.

Gorilla Technology ( GRRR ) shares rose 3.4% as it said Monday it formed a partnership with Misr Trade & Investment to set up a manufacturing plant in Egypt.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

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