WEF Identifies Flexible Batteries and Designer Phages as Top Emerging Technologies of 2023

According to the WEF, in the next 3-5 years, technologies such as designer phages, flexible batteries, sustainable aviation fuel, and a new type of AI that can create unique content are expected to have a significant positive impact on the world.

Listing the top ten such emerging technologies, the WEF said the list also includes wearable plant sensors, the mental health metaverse, spatial omics, flexible neural electronics, sustainable computing and AI-enabled healthcare.

WEF’s “Top Ten Emerging Technology Report 2023” assesses the impact of each technology on people, planet, wealth, industry and equality, and was produced in partnership with Frontiers, a publisher of peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journals.

The annual list analyzed technologies that promise major benefits to societies and economies, as well as those deemed disruptive, attractive to investors and researchers, and expected to reach significant scale within five years.

Since its first edition in 2011, the report has identified little-known technologies that have had a global impact. These include genomic vaccines, which were introduced in the 2016 report and later became the underlying technology for most COVID-19 vaccines, and AI-led molecular design, which was introduced in the 2018 list, two years before the first AI-discovered drugs entered clinical trials.

Speaking about the shortlist of the top 10, the WEF said that conventional rigid batteries may soon be a thing of the past as thin, flexible batteries – made of lightweight materials that can be twisted, bent and stretched – hit the market.

This new generation of battery technology – with a market value expected to reach US$240 million by 2027 – has applications in medical wearables, biomedical sensors, flexible displays and smartwatches.

Regarding generative AI, it said that this new type of AI will be able to create new and original content by learning from large data sets, launched into public discussion at the end of 2022 with the public launch of ChatGPT.

The rapidly evolving generative AI is set to disrupt a number of industries with applications in education, research and elsewhere, the WEF said.

On sustainable aviation fuel, the report found that 2-3 percent of annual global carbon dioxide emissions come from aviation and there is no sign of long-haul electric flights, this fuel is made from biological (such as biomass) and non-biological (such as carbon dioxide ) sources could be the answer to reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the aviation industry in the short to medium term .

On engineering phages, the report stated that “phages” are viruses that selectively infect certain types of bacteria.

Armed with increasingly sophisticated genetic engineering tools, researchers can now reprogram phages to re-infect bacteria of their choice, allowing them to target a single type of bacterium in a complex community of co-existing types of bacteria, such as in the microbiomes of plants, animals and humans.

Although many near-term applications are under investigation, there are signs that these “designer” phages could eventually be used to treat microbiome-related diseases or eliminate dangerous bacteria from food chains.

Also to respond to the growing mental health crisis, product developers are starting to build shared virtual spaces to improve mental health.

“Video games are already being used to treat depression and anxiety, and VR-based meditation is on the rise. Coupled with next-generation wearables that allow the user to sense touch and/or respond to the user’s emotional state, the future metaverse may be ripe for improving mental health,” WEF said.

Additionally, it said drones and satellites have been game changers for monitoring large farms that traditionally relied on manual soil testing and visual observations.

“Now we have a new generation of plant sensors – small, non-invasive devices that can be ‘used’ by individual plants to continuously monitor temperature, moisture, humidity and nutrient levels. Assuming they can overcome the costs of scaling, wearable plant sensors could improve plant health and increase yields,” the report says.

On the other hand, “spatial omics” allows researchers to “see” biological processes at the molecular level inside cells by combining advanced imaging techniques with the specificity of DNA sequencing.

By revealing previously undetected biological structures and events, this powerful new technology is poised to accelerate our understanding of biology and help researchers develop new treatments for complex diseases, the report says.