The National Intelligence Council (NIC) sponsored this study by The RAND Corporation to inform the NIC’s 2020 project² and help provide US policymakers with a view of how world developments could evolve, identifying opportunities and potentially negative developments that might warrant policy action. From June 2004 through August 2005, RAND undertook the challenging task of identifying technologies and applications that have the potential for significant and dominant global impacts by 2020.

As RAND found in its prior study for the NIC,The Global Technology Revolution(2001), technology will continue to accelerate and integrate developments from multiple scientific disciplines in a...

We live in an era of increasing use of diverse technologies in all aspects of life, from ingestible radio transmitters and fluorescent quantum dots for medical diagnosis and treatment,¹¹to multifunctional cell phones that take digital photographs and receive and transmit electronic mail. In a previous RAND Corporation study,The Global Technology Revolution: Bio/Nano/Materials Trends and Their Synergies with Information Technology by 2015(hereafter referred to as GTR2015),¹²we investigated the pace and impacts of technology development, projected to 2015, and concluded that the world is undergoing a global technology revolution that is integrating developments in biotechnology, nanotechnology, materials technology,...

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,...

The net assessment in Chapter Two took us a step further in understanding sectors that might benefit from use of technology applications that might be technically feasible and ready for use in the year 2020. In this chapter, we will take our analysis a step further to examine what might determine implementation of these TAs, by different countries and across a number of problems and issues. Nations have different priorities. The resources they can command to implement TAs also differ. This chapter has five major sections. The first begins with a reporting of regional variation of technology application and implementation...

In previous chapters, we identified and described integrated technology trends to 2020 in bio/nano/materials/information technology. We then assessed technology applications likely to result from these trends and identified several that appear poised to influence multiple sectors of society. In addition to assessing the technical and implementation feasibility of these TAs, we examined their potential regional and international ramifications. In this chapter, we present conclusions based on our technology foresights and the analysis of capacity to acquire and implement TAs of the 29 representative countries selected for our analysis.

Based on our technical foresights (e.g., see Appendices A through E and...