What are the big technologies to watch going forward? Everybody has an opinion, so here are just a few.

Dominic Barton, global managing director of McKinsey & Company:

Fortunately, today’s private-sector labs are bursting with innovations that could spark major productivity-enhancing technological and operational improvements. Advanced materials like nanolaminates (edible lipids) can, when sprayed on food, provide protection from air or moisture and reduce spoilage. Carbon-fiber composites are making cars and airplanes both more resistant and lighter, reducing their fuel consumption. And the “Internet of things” will rationalize production processes by detecting potential failures early, boost crop yields by measuring the moisture of fields, and dramatically reduce the cost of remotely monitoring patients’ health.

Just a little further out on the productivity frontier are commercially viable self-driving cars and trucks. Likewise, synthetic biology will be possible before too long, with scientists using the huge amount of increasingly available and inexpensive genetic data to design DNA from scratch – a practice that has applications in medicine, agriculture, and even biofuel production.

Wait a second… “nanolaminates (edible lipids) can, when sprayed on food, provide protection from air or moisture and reduce spoilage”…where have we heard something like this before?

Susan Hockfield, President Emerita and Professor of Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

An accelerating convergence of the biological, physical, and engineering sciences promises a stunning array of new technological solutions. Imagine a coal-fueled power plant that emits only water and clean air. Inside the plant, designer yeast cells transform the carbon dioxide released during the coal’s combustion into raw materials for floor tiles and other construction supplies.

Or imagine a simple and inexpensive urine test that can diagnose cancer, eliminating the need for a surgical biopsy. And, when cancer treatment is needed, its toxic punch hits cancer cells selectively, with far fewer damaging side effects.

Or imagine a future with plentiful food and fuel crops. Through improved seed stocks and more efficient water management, we can have crops that require less water, grow at higher density, and thrive in wider temperature ranges. And data-driven agriculture supply chains will move them more effectively to the market. These advances will enable us to feed and provide power – at a lower economic and environmental cost – to the anticipated 2050 population of nine billion people.

Guy Ryder, Director-General of the International Labor Organization:

In the midst of a major employment crisis, technology continues to reduce the labor needed for mass production, while the automation of routine legal and accounting tasks is hollowing out that sector of the job market as well. The science of robotics is revolutionizing manufacturing; every year, an additional 200,000 industrial robots come into use. In 2015, the total is expected to reach 1.5 million. Adapting the labor market to a world of increasingly automated workplaces will be one of the defining challenges of our era.

Finally, the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks report 2015:

The pace of technological change is faster than ever. Disciplines such as synthetic biology and artificial intelligence are creating new fundamental capabilities, which offer tremendous potential for solving the world’s most pressing problems. At the same time, they present hard-to-foresee risks. Oversight mechanisms need to more effectively balance likely benefits and commercial demands with a deeper consideration of ethical questions and medium to long-term risks – ranging from economic to environmental and societal.