8 tech innovations you need to know about

Power implants

Back in 1998, a neurologist fitted electrodes in the brain of a paralysed builder, and after months of training, he was eventually able to control a cursor on a computer screen. Now brain implants could reverse paralysis entirely; they have already let people with prosthetics develop a sense of touch in their robotic arms. One of Elon Musk’s newest ventures is Neuralink, a brain-computer interface company which aims to move beyond medical applications. In the future, say experts, we could have chips that increase our memory or intelligence, or give access to Google just by thinking rather than typing. Imagine…

Cars might fly

Roads? Where Uber’s going, it doesn’t need them. Los Angeles, Dallas and Dubai are all working with the taxi app to trial autonomous aerial vehicles by 2020. Uber is serious enough about this to have teamed up with Nasa on a new air-traffic control system, and numerous other players are not far behind. Here in London, Airbus Helicopters will soon trial its own flying taxi, and expect it to be a certified ‘part of the urban transport mix’ by 2023. Don’t imagine tailbacks above Hackney, though: Airbus says flying taxis will largely stick to designated airport routes.

In-gene-ious editing

As well as being the latest tech lexicon entry to dispense with its final vowel, Crispr is a technique that allows scientists to edit genes quickly, cheaply and precisely. It was first used on human DNA in 2013 but progress is accelerating. The next stage is applying it to cure diseases in humans; in China scientists have already used gene-editing techniques on 86 human patients suffering from cancer and HIV. The therapy involves taking immune cells from patients, editing their DNA, then transfusing them back into the patient’s blood.

China rising

Chinese tech products were once derided as knock-off versions of Western innovation — and, to be fair, they mainly were. But the Communist Party’s determination to block Silicon Valley from its 1.4 billion-person-strong internal market has unleashed a wave of creativity, and now the West is playing catch up. Ideas developed and perfected in China, like all-encompassing messaging apps, truly frictionless payments and ubiquitous facial recognition, are being imitated over here, and the country’s three biggest online companies — Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — are expanding abroad.

Back to basics

The vogue for packing schools full of iPads in the hope of producing the next generation of Mark Zuckerbergs is over. Steve Jobs thought that children should be raised without technology and parents in Silicon Valley have followed his lead, sending their kids to tech-free schools where pen and paper rule. And it’s catching on over here, too. The London Acorn School in Morden, for example, has banned all gadgets.

Water world

The Seasteading Institute plans ‘to build floating start-up societies with innovative governance models’. Said ‘innovative governance models’ would not, a cynic might suggest, be in much of a hurry to tax them, either, but whatever the motivations, it’s happening. Last year, French Polynesia gave the organisation permission to build a prototype floating city near 100 acres of beachfront, and the plan is to set up a dozen buildings by 2020. The Institute hopes that there will be thousands of floating cities — some complete with golf courses — by 2050, and beyond that a new, hyper-competitive conception of society, where cities could float away to join others depending on their political outlook. Or the tax breaks they offer.

The New Space Race

Earlier this month, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched the most powerful rocket in the world ­— and then landed it. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, runs Blue Origin, which is developing its own reusable rockets. The first step is space, but both have talked about going to Mars and turning humans into an interplanetary species. And Nasa’s not out for the count just yet: its newest project, the Space Launch System, should be ready for take-off by 2020.

Immortality, found

Being a billionaire is a lot of fun, so it’s not a huge surprise that many are investing in ways to prolong their lives indefinitely. Calico, a Google company, has set aside more than £1 billion to cure ageing, while California-based AgeX, headed by British researcher Aubrey de Grey, is working on ‘the immortal regeneration of tissues in the body’. Believers such as Google’s director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, anticipate two ways to live forever: either by continuously patching up bodies using nanorobots or uploading our consciousness to the internet, Black Mirror style.

Tom Cheshire is tech correspondent for Sky News