Technology applications affect society through the functions that they accomplish (e.g., health, food, shelter, climate control, transportation, communication, computation). The accelerating pace of technology development is important because it has brought new functions to large numbers of people worldwide (e.g., communication and information searching via the Internet), has improved the speed and accuracy of existing functions (e.g., lab-on-a-chip bioassays, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) for medical diagnostics), and is producing a variety of multifunctional applications (e.g., wearable computers).

In this chapter, we will describe applications of technology that may become feasible by 2020, explore the functions that these applications provide, and analyze their potential impact on society. We begin with brief summaries of the foresight papers prepared by RAND's technology experts (the full papers are presented in the appendices). We note that these papers and the TAs described below are representative of the trends we have analyzed. One can certainly envision other applications that combine the trends in different ways, but we believe that they reflect the breadth and depth of plausible technology futures to 2020.

As pointed out in GTR2015, the disciplinary categories (i.e., biotechnology, nanotechnology, materials technology, and information technology) are becoming increasingly blurred and almost artificial. Applications increasingly draw from more than one category to produce increasingly capable systems. Thus, many of the applications listed in the following summaries could have been listed in other summaries. For example, nanostructures and nanoscale coatings could be listed under nanotechnology rather than materials; bioassays and biosensors rely on nanoscale reactions...