Shaping Our Technological Futures

Some important, long-term, social and economic challenges that we face can potentially be addressed by existing and emerging technologies. This article draws on the future technology growth trends and technology lists identified by Evans [3] in the paper "Securing Australia\´s Future - Future Technology Overview." Our focus is on how technological change can be channeled to address the critical challenges of our time and how we can shape the new and emerging technologies and systems to address these challenges. We include a list of basic technology advances that will, within the next ten years, underpin a large range of application technologies. We then identify some of the critical issues facing society, such as urbanization, water, and climate change, and discuss how the convergence of underpinning technologies can be shaped to address these issues. While the paths of technological change cannot always be predicted and impacts are highly uncertain, there are some clearly emerging trends, which point to real possibilities of steering technology in the direction of addressing critical societal issues.