New Technology Trends We Will See In The 2021

The year 2010 doesn’t sound like it was that long ago, but technology moves fast. A decade ago Tinder, Uber and Instagram didn’t exist. No one wore wearables, nobody talked to their gadgets at home and the Tesla was just an idea. The next decade looks set to move even faster. So here’s our tour of the new science and tech trends to look out for this decade. 

Synthetic media will undermine reality

You know about deepfake technology, where someone’s face is switched into an existing video scene. But deepfakes are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to synthetic media – a much wider phenomenon of super-realistic, artificially generated photos, text, sound and video that seems destined to shake our notions of what is actually ‘real’ over the next decade. 

There will be a revolution in cloud robotics

Until now, robots have carried their pretty feeble brains inside them. They’ve received instructions – such as rivet this, or carry that – and done it. Not only that, but they’ve worked in environments such as factories and warehouses specially designed or adapted for them.

Cloud robotics promises something entirely new; robots with super-brains stored in the online cloud. The thinking is that these robots, with their intellectual clout, will be more flexible in the jobs they do and the places they can work, perhaps even speeding up their arrival in our homes.

Google Cloud and Amazon Cloud both have robot brains that are learning and growing inside them. The dream behind cloud robotics is to create robots that can see, hear, comprehend natural language and understand the world around them. 

Diseases will be edited out of our DNA

The birth of the world’s first gene-edited babies caused uproar in 2018. The twin girls whose genomes were tinkered with during IVF procedures had their DNA altered using the gene-editing technology CRISPR, to protect them from HIV. CRISPR uses a bacterial enzyme to target and cut specific DNA sequences. 

We will begin to see living machines

Synthetic biologists have been redesigning life for decades now, but so far they’ve mostly been messing about with single cells – a kind of souped-up version of genetic modification. 

We will take mushrooms with us to space

If we have to flee Earth to take up residence elsewhere in the galaxy, you know what we need to take with us? Mushrooms. Or rather, fungal spores. Not to feed us on the flight over there, but to grow our houses with.

That’s the thinking behind NASA´s myco-architecture project. The space agency is concocting a plan to grow buildings made out of fungi on Mars. According to astrobiologist Lynn R. who works on the project, it’s a no-brainer when you consider the cost of launching a full-size building into space, versus some practically weightless life-forms that happen to be natural builders. “We want to take as little as possible with us and be able to use the resources there,” she says.