These 5 Breakthrough Technologies will Influence the life of everyone in 2017

These Technologies will have an effect on everybody.  It will affect politics and the economy, improve medicine and even influence culture.  Some are new at the moment and some are developing at the moment and will develop further through decades to come.  These Technologies all have the possibility of staying power. Technology now and developing for the future:

  1. Medicine: Reversing Paralysis; remarkable progress has been made to restore freedom of movement, caused by spinal cord injuries, through using brain implants.  This technology will be available to all in 10 to 15 years time.
  2. Photography: Spherical images made by Inexpensive Cameras; are opening a whole new world of taking pictures and sharing stories.  An ecological researcher needed a system to broadcast images continuously to collect data and devised a camera that can create 360-degree pictures.  This technology is available now for all to take their 360-degree selfies, etc.
  3. Education: Computers are experimenting and figuring out how to perform things a programmer would be able to teach them.  This approach is known as, “Reinforcement Learning”, and is not done through programming in a conventional way, at all.  The computer is learning to perform certain tasks, etc. simply by practicing.  This technology will be freely available in 1 to 2 years time.
  4. Economy: Self-Driving Trucks; Tractor-trailers without drivers might soon be passing you on the highway.  Many technical problems still exist, but it is claimed that self-driving trucks will be less costly as well as safer.  Availability will come in about 5 to 10 years time.  This is also the time in which the world can think about what this technology will mean for the millions of truck drivers that will lose their jobs.
  5. Environment: Hot Solar Cells; converting sunlight into heat firstly and then turning it back into light-energy, focused in beams, can dramatically increase efficiency.  This smaller solar device, smaller than the usual solar panels, can absorb more energy and could create continuous, cheap power.  This will only become available within 10 to 15 years from now.

Most of these technologies are future technologies, still in the developing phases, but it is good to know about them.  It will give time to consider the influences, good or bad, that it might have on the world and its inhabitants.