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From Autonomous Cars To Green Hydrogen, Here Are The Top Techs For 2021 Posted on : Nov 25 - 2020

The world of technology moves fast, as Lux Research’s annual list of the top technologies to watch over the next decades proves.

After a tumultuous 2020, 10 of last year’s 20 technologies don’t appear on this year’s list, showing how dynamic changes in the innovation landscape have been over the past year. Notably, 5G networks, the top-ranked technology in last year’s report, are absent from this year’s list because, as the 5G rollout begins, they are now firmly established on everyone’s radar.

The new report, Foresight 2021: Top Emerging Technologies to Watch, identifies and ranks 12 key technologies that will reshape the world. The top three technologies cited in the report are:

Autonomous vehicles: All levels of vehicle automation are seeing improvements in safety and efficiency, benefiting both consumers and commercial operations. Level 4 and 5 autonomous vehicles will transform mobility and logistics by removing the need for a driver behind the wheel of a vehicle.

This will create opportunities in areas like sensors, high-definition mapping and connectivity for autonomous vehicles but it will also have a significant impact on mobility businesses more broadly, with many drivers being replaced in areas from ride-hailing services to trucking.

Natural language processing: Powering devices like voice assistants, machine translation, and chatbots, natural language processing (NLP) patents have grown by 44% CAGR over the past five years, to more than 3,000 publications annually.

Plastic recycling: Concern about plastic waste is nothing new, but major consumer product brands have committed to increasing recycling rates and innovations that can convert waste into higher-value products. Over the past decade alone, 155 startups addressing plastic waste have been founded. Extended producer responsibility (EPR) rules mean that materials collection must increasingly be validated, leading to a need for advances in tracking and sorting

This will create opportunities in areas such as waste collection and for companies that can use plastic waste as a feedstock. Innovations such as designing for recyclability and techniques to convert plastic waste into valuable products, enabling a circular economy and avoiding pollution, are likely to emerge in coming years. View More