Progress and disruption go hand in hand. The history of human civilization is characterized by periodic dances between old technologies resisting newer ones, with the latter ultimately ending up victorious — before inevitably becoming old and ripe for disruption once more. The horse and buggy made way for the gasoline-powered automobile, which is bound to be replaced by electric vehicles; the radio quickly lost ground to the television, which — along with print press and virtually every other form of traditional media — became disrupted by the internet.

What about the next wave of disruptions? Richard Watson, a leading futurist and lecturer at the London Business School, recently compiled some of the most promising technologies that seem set on shaking different industries from the ground up.

Watson teamed up with colleagues from Tech Foresight at Imperial College London, as well as an ex-BBC researcher to help list companies that are leading the way for each disrupting tech. Be it retail, finance, food, transport, computing, energy, or health, no industry seems to be spared by the waves of innovation.

“The idea for the table initially came from me stumbling upon a list of emerging technologies on Wikipedia. This felt fairly accurate, but also rather lifeless. It wasn’t especially contextual either. Other lists from MIT Tech Review and McKinsey were better, but somehow these weren’t showing the bigger picture either,” Watson wrote.

“Using all this as a good starting point I did some further research to identify candidate technologies and then spoke with Anna and academics at Imperial College to validate the thinking. This was the easy bit.”

“The tricky part was then deciding which technologies to leave out and how to rank both the disruptive potential of each technology and time (both near impossible, but we had a good go using small post-it notes that could be moved around easily). What results is far from perfect, but it’s better than anything else I’ve seen and it’s hopefully a foundation for people being wrong in really useful and interesting ways.”

Watson has been kind enough to offer a high-res version of his table of disruption, which can download for free here.

Some disruptions are happening right now, while others are still incubating, waiting for the right moment to hatch. Watson highlighted the fact by dividing the nearly 100 technologies he listed into four groups. Colored in green are horizon 1 disruption — those that are happening right now, and which companies should waste no time jumping on board with. Yellow, or horizon two, are probable near-future technologies (10-20 years from now), which companies are advised to experiment with. Red, or horizon three, are technologies thought to emerge in the more distant future (20 years plus); companies should keep a close eye on their developments. Finally, the outer edge, colored in grey, are the so-called Ghost Technologies, fringe territory where you’ll find technologies that are highly improbable or downright impossible to mature with our current level of understanding.

Some items are super obvious and predictable, such as autonomous vehicles and smart energy grids, while other disruptions are extraordinarily outlandish or downright ludicrous — human head-transplants, telepathy, and artificial consciousness.

On the X-axis are technologies ranked by their potential for disruption in time, while the Y-axis ranks the probability of disruption from low to high. In this case, time relates to common usage, not initial invention.

So the next time you get your groceries delivered by an Amazon drone, don’t act too surprised. Revisit this table and prepare for the next big thing.

The full list of technologies that the team looked at:

The list 100 disruptive technologies

Smart nappies

Deep ocean wind farms

Vertical agriculture

Wireless energy transfer

Cryptocurrencies

Concentrated solar power

Predictive policing

Micro-scale ambient energy harvesting

Robotic care companions

Smart control of appliances

Cultured meat

Delivery robots and passenger drones

Distributed ledgers

Precision agriculture

Autonomous vehicles

Intention decoding algorithms

Balloon-powered internet

Powered exoskeletons

Computerised shoes and clothing

Airborne wind turbines (high altitude)

Avatar companions

Metallic hydrogen energy storage

Autonomous ships and submarines

Resource gamification

Water harvesting from air

Drone freight delivery

Autonomous passenger aircraft

3D-printing of food and pharmaceuticals

Medical tricorders

Smart flooring and carpets

Diagnostic toilets

Smart energy grids

Algal biofuels

Human organ printing

Artificial human blood substitute

Mega-scale desalination

Self-writing software

Public mood monitoring machines

Programmable bacteria

Peer-to-peer energy trading and transmission

Lifelong personal avatar assistants

Smart dust

Predictive gene-based healthcare

Automated knowledge discovery

Autonomous robotic surgery

Emotionally aware machines

Humanoid sex-robots

Human biohacking

Internet of DNA

Vacuum-tube transport

Scramjets

Smart glasses and contact lenses

Pollution-eating buildings

Broadcasting of electricity

Bio-plastics

Swarm robotics

4-dimensional materials (and printing)

New (Nano) materials

Fusion power

Low-cost space travel

Colonisation of another planet

Thought control machine interfaces

Dream reading and recording

Planetary-scale spectroscopy

Implantable phones

e-tagging of new-borns

Male pregnancy and artificial wombs

DNA data storage

Genomic vaccines

Quantum safe cryptography

Cognitive prosthetics

Data uploading to the brain

Conversational machine interfaces

Life-expectancy algorithms

Stratospheric aerosols

Battlefield robots

AI advisors and decision-making machines

AI board members and politicians

Invisibility shields

Factory photosynthesis

Transhuman technologies

Digital footprint eraser

Personal digital shields

Human head transplants

Human cloning and de-extinction

Distributed autonomous corporations

Space solar power

Space elevators

Fully immersive VR

Artificial consciousness

Telepathy

Reactionless drive

Whole Earth virtualisation

Shapeshifting matter

Self-reconfiguring robots

Zero-point energy

Beam-powered propulsion

Force fields

Asteroid mining

(Source: https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/table-disruptive-technology-042343/)

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Resources for the DIY alternative engineer

Energy storage is crucial for taking full advantage of solar power, which otherwise suffers interruptions from cloudy skies and nightfall. In the past few years, concentrating solar power plants have begun producing additional electricity at night and during peak demand periods by using stored heat energy to propel a steam turbine.

Current thermal energy storage systems rely on materials that store less energy per kilogram, requiring more material at a greater cost to meet energy storage requirements.

Now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory have designed an inexpensive thermal energy storage system that will be significantly smaller and perform more than 20 times better than current thermal systems.

With funding from DOE’s SunShot Initiative, the Argonne team is building a pilot-scale prototype of their high-efficiency latent heat thermal energy storage system (LHTES) for testing. The SunShot Initiative is a national collaborative effort to make unsubsidized solar energy cost-competitive with other forms of electricity production by 2020.

Argonne’s thermal energy storage system relies on a “phase-change” material that melts as it stores thermal energy and releases energy as it re-freezes — similar to the charge-discharge cycle in a battery.

Inexpensive salts like rock salt (sodium chloride) can be used as phase-change materials, but their use in existing thermal storage systems is limited because of the poor thermal conductivity of the salts.

However, the Argonne LHTES system drastically improves the conductivity of these salts by integrating them with a high-conductivity graphite foam. This combination reduces the overall amount of material needed to build the system and its cost, while making the thermal energy transfer significantly more efficient and still providing up to 8 to 12 hours of energy storage — a typical night of storage for a concentrating solar power plant.

“Phase-change materials tend to have low conductivity but meet the heat energy storage requirements,” said Dileep Singh, leader of Argonne’s Thermal-Mechanical Technologies group. “High-conductivity graphite foam meets the conductivity requirements, so we thought: why not combine the two?”

The porous graphite foam traps the salts in pores, facilitating rapid melting and freezing. The team demonstrated that this rapid phase change holds up over time. After building and testing an initial prototype about the size of a blender, the team is now scaling up the prototype size by 50 times.

Although still smaller than a full-scale power plant system, the pilot-scale modular system will be tested this fall and could expand on applications, such as providing back-up power on a microgrid or storing waste heat from another energy source. The pilot system will also further improve 3-D thermal modeling used for estimating performance and planning the design of a full-scale system.

“We are looking at developing the full-scale power plant system as a modular system, and the pilot-scale system we are building this year can actually be used as one module within a full-scale system that is made of many modules stacked or organized together,” said Argonne mechanical engineer Wenhua Yu. “Therefore, the performance characteristics we will measure from testing the pilot can directly reflect those of a power plant system.”

The full-scale design is expected to meet the needs of current power plants that operate steam turbines at about 450 to 600 degrees Celsius (850-1100 degrees Fahrenheit) using magnesium chloride as the storage medium. When advanced supercritical carbon dioxide turbines — which are more efficient than steam turbines but operate at a hotter 700 degrees Celsius (1,300 degrees Fahrenheit) — come online, the same design can be used with sodium chloride.

(Source:  sciencedaily.com; September 12, 2016; http://tinyurl.com/jur5h54)