Game Changers: The Technology That Will Add $33 Trillion to the Economy

RealClearTechnology ^ | August 1, 2013

[2ndDivisionVet]

One of the most common words attached to technology these days is "disruption." The very term conjures up something uncomfortable, but while technology unquestionably impacts and disrupts established methods of doing things, it also delivers enormous value to our lives.

The global research firm McKinsey has spents years quantifying this value in concrete dollar terms. They've released a new, wide-ranging report that identifies 12 potentially game-changing technological developments that will deliver significant economic impacts to the global economy by 2025. To make the cut, the technology had to have a broad scope with the potential for massive economic impact. What's more, McKinsey has put an estimated price tag on each one of these disruptive innovations, claiming they will deliver tens of trillions (yes, with a "t") of dollars of economic impact worldwide, should they come to pass.

The report, as you might guess, is fundamentally optimistic about the potential for new technology to "raise productivity and provide widespread benefits across economies." Here are the technologies that McKinsey sees adding trillions of dollars to the global economy by 2025.

Renewable Electricity

As McKinsey wrote, renewable energy "holds a simple but tantalizing promise: an endless source of power to drive the machinery of modern life without stripping resources from the earth." Yet while promise has to date been "elusive" McKinsey sees the potential "for rapidly accelerating growth in the next decade" thanks to increases in solar panel efficiency and wind turbine construction. Advances are also expected in harnessing geo-thermal and ocean-wave power.....

[saganite]

Found it.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23519-commercial-quantum-computer-leaves-pc-in-the-dust.html?cmpid=RSS|NSNS|2012-GLOBAL|online-news#.Uf1OecsaySM

[Vince Ferrer]

I agree with you about water desalinization and thorium. If electricity were cheap enough, instead of battery powered cars, we could electrify the roads. Quantum computing will be big, but it is a very new programming paridigm and will take a while to learn how to program them.

[Delta Dawn]

I need a Grande Latte to think about this...

[tbw2]

Solar isn’t very practical on Mars, given the lower solar radiation levels. Wind power, maybe?

[ckilmer]

yeah I saw that. that company actually announced that google and nasa were two of its customers. things may move faster but I think the true potential of quantum computers is much higher and much more versatile than the D wave shows. and that will take time to reveal that potential.

[ckilmer]

If electricity were cheap enough, instead of battery powered cars, we could electrify the roads.
........
I wouldn’t invest in Tesla but if imho if anyone can make an industry model work—it would be Elon Musk. (That’s actually why his stock is so high. The bet is not on the car but on the man.)

Maybe the infrastructure would be cheaper for electrified roads—than for batteries...but likely not. Even though the electricity would be cheap —people would be killed by the capital and maintenance cost of the electrified road infrastructure. Ideally they would just make the batteries take more charge and charge faster easier cheaper. Rather than rig the us interstate system with some kind of electric trolly system.

[ckilmer]

Solar isn’t very practical on Mars, given the lower solar radiation levels. Wind power, maybe?
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There’s lots of thorium on Mars and the moon. That’s part of the reason for the excitement surrounding thorium reactors.

[Teacher317]

Rearden steel

[Vince Ferrer]

Wireless power could revolutionize highway transportation, Stanford researchers say

I haven't done any cost comparisons between something like this and battery powered cars, but it seems like with an electrified road, you get to distribute the costs of the road among the cars, and the cars themselves wouldn't need as big of batteries, and could be made cheaper. I would think it would be less expensive per vehicle.

[2ndDivisionVet]

They’ll only be around another 3 years. If we dodge the Hillary bullet we’ll be okay.

[GeronL]

I don’t think the wind is very consistent except during the global dust storms that occasionally happen

[GeronL]

The eco-nuts dream of a world in which everyone but themselves is a subsistence farmer and earning about $E2 a day.

[roadcat]

Sort of by definition, nobody sees the truly game-changing stuff coming.

Lots of mainstream sci-fi movies about the future, even up to the mid-1990's, had big CRT screens, even in spaceships. The producers couldn't even imagine thin-screen monitors and TV sets. I always laugh at that, as well as the control panels with lots of hardware dials and knobs. They couldn't imagine control displays within windows on a display panel, let alone a touch-screen interface.

[roadcat]

Strange as it sounds, self-drivable cars would eliminate most of the traffic jams. An interstate with no rubberneckers, accidents and slow drivers would be an efficient one. And we have the technology now.

That's one approach. Mine, is to eliminate the need for this many cars. But not in the same fashion that the control freaks in local government are forcing on us. Stricter licensing rules (no illegal alien drivers as a start, criminal drivers permanently banned). More buses, jitneys and taxis along with more lenient rules allowing more professional drivers. I mean, why can't you or I pick up carpoolers and earn extra money without requiring an expensive taxi license? A lot of stuff can be changed at the political level without the need for fancy expensive technology, like boondoggle high-speed trains to no where.

[Vince Ferrer]

Molten salt reactors look interesting as well. Here is a video that talks about one design. They explicitly mention using the reactor as a producer of feedstock chemicals, such as hydrogen for ammonia. Ammmonia can be added to gasoline much like ethanol. It can replace all the corn derived ethanol, plus extend our petroleum reserves using only a few reactors, air, and water.

The Dual Fluid Reactor - A new Concept for a Fast Nuclear Reactor

[roadcat]

Meanwhile, I think he grossly under estimates the impact of 3D printing and consigns quantum computing to the also ran category.

Want to have fun? Look into TechShop. I spent time there with my son-in-law, helping him build prototypes of electronic equipment he later sells in large production elsewhere. Lots of expensive equipment to play with, along with courses on how to use the tech, including 3D printers. We spent a lot of time on $250G CNC machines, on the cheap, making control panels and parts from aluminum, steel and stainless steel. He then used metal brakes and powder coat tools while there and finished fabrication. Techies who will create future technology may be at TechShop using their equipment. You want to play but not commit big bucks in equipment, check out TechShop.

[ckilmer]

I didn’t know about the wireless angle. That would cut the capital and maintenance cost of the infrastructure—especially if they could move energy over distance via microwave. (You’ll see proposals for solar collectors in space that beam their collected energy to earth via microwave.)

However, this technology looks even more nascent than quantum computers. It looks like it’ll be more than a decade or two before it becomes sufficiently robust for implementation.