Academics at Imperial Tech Foresight , a branch of Imperial College London (UK), have been working to bring future technological advancements to life in ways we have never seen before.
The artboard was created by Richard Watson and Anna Cupani after reading a simple list of emerging technologies that appeared on Wikipedia . They spoke with experts to shape the table and produced a series of drafts using Post-it notes for each technological element before agreeing on a final version of the curious table inspired by the periodic table of chemical elements.
As it is, experts have created a disruptive technology table containing 100 innovations, ranging from the benign and mundane, to the mind-boggling and potentially terrifying.
This methodology has put smart diapers, wireless power transfer and autonomous vehicles in the same category, the closest and current. And compared to these, peer-to-peer energy exchange and transmission and automated knowledge discovery are considered “experimental technologies.”
Another example: cryptocurrencies (identified with the letters Cr in the table) are now part of our modern life, while battlefield robots ( Br element) sound more like something out of the movie “Iron Man” to us.
Each element of the Technological Periodic Table is color-coded and seated in a grid space on two axes : the Y-axis ranks the disruption potential from highest to lowest, while the X-axis determines how quickly this technology will turn into a reality.
Table colors
-The green elements in the lower left corner represent technologies that already exist at this time.
-Yellow blocks could happen in the near future.
-The red elements are a more distant concept, which in 20 years could become reality.
-The final section, in gray, is fringe science, which experts identify as “highly unlikely, but actually impossible.”
Additionally, technology items have numbers, which relate to an example of technology in action provided by the academics at Imperial Tech Foresight.
They are also grouped into themes: the initials that we will find in the lower right part of each grid. These topics include extreme automation and human augmentation.
Another example: 58 Nm – New Materials. They are located 20 years away, therefore, it seems that we still have a couple of decades left before we have this new technology.
However, not everyone agrees strongly with the location of emerging technologies. Placing asteroid mining in the farthest category might be a bit off.
What do you think of this periodic table?
Reference: Imperial College London
