Advanced Search

The story appears on

Page A2

May 25, 2019

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

Home » Feature » People

About science and technology in the coming decades

Source: Shanghai Daily | 00:00 UTC+8 May 25, 2019 | Print Edition

ALEXANDER Sokolov
Director of Foresight Center at Russia’s National Research University’s Higher School of Economics

When you talk about foresight technology, you should take into account global challenges and what will happen in the future. Artificial intelligence will fully change the labor market, and people will live more and more in big cities. They will not be driving automobiles anymore in 15, 20, 40 years. In 10 years machines will make surgery better than the doctor in most cases. Another point is that due to development of technologies, I saw on the news that scientists have produced a human heart in the smallest scale, it means in five or 10 years, they will be capable of producing it in its real volume. It means that thousands of people who need to replace their heart won’t need donors anymore. New medicines will be designed by computers, and it will define the genome of individual humans.

Robin Williams

Director of the Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation at Edinburgh University

It’s interesting to look at these organizations that create futures and how they build understandings of the future and expectations about the future, which then eventually turn into the futures that we see. So that we can understand the future by looking now at the organizations which are trying to create the future. In my own work, I have come to conclusions that it’s difficult to anticipate what future technologies will look like and what their impact on society will be.

Niall Smith

Head of research at Cork Institute of Technology

From an Irish perspective, it’s similar to the smart city — we’re bringing the citizen into everything. So we’re trying to figure out how we make things better for the citizen in 2035. Some of the technological improvements will be more important to bring in. For example, healthy aging and living in such a way that you are healthier. Better living as well as longer living is one of the things we need to look at. So healthcare systems which provide us with that are very critical. We see technologies that are greener as critical because we all know what’s happening with climate change. So technologies will need to move toward a sustainable and sustained world.

Steven W. Popper

Senior economist at RAND Corporation

I think there is an important point that we don’t know exactly what the future will bring, so what we need to do is we need to help ourselves understand how we cannot just prepare, but actually shape the future to some extent, and that requires a more sophisticated understanding of the change, the change technologies will bring, how we can change the technologies, and so on.

Yoslan Nur

Program specialist with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Technology foresight is very important. But for the time being, with the current situation of the world of innovation, it changes very quickly so the technology foresight is very difficult to do. We need to investigate our future. With the Pujiang Innovation Forum, Shanghai mobilizes a lot of experts and collects a lot of knowledge about how to create a smart city.

People


 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend