Top Tech 2023: A Special Report

Each January, the editors of IEEE Spectrum provide up some predictions about technical developments we anticipate to be within the information over the approaching yr. You’ll discover a couple dozen of these described within the following particular report. Of course, the variety of issues we might have written about is way larger, so we needed to be selective in choosing which tasks to characteristic. And we’re not ashamed to confess, gee-whiz attraction typically formed our selections.

For instance, this yr’s survey contains an odd pair of recent plane that can be taking to the skies. One, whose design was impressed by the enormous airships of years previous, is longer than a soccer subject; the opposite, a futuristic single-seat vertical-takeoff craft powered by electrical energy, is concerning the size of a small automobile.

While a few of the different tales may not mild up your creativeness as a lot, they spotlight essential technical points the world faces—just like the challenges of shifting from fossil fuels to a hydrogen-based vitality economic system or the menace that new plutonium breeder reactors in China would possibly speed up the proliferation of nuclear weapons. So whether or not you favor studying about matters which might be heavy or mild (even lighter than air), you need to discover one thing right here to get you warmed up for 2023.