Yes, there is a burger on a thumbnail of an article about the impactful technology. Although this might seem odd, it actually symbolises an important trend of the tech world in 2019. Technology that’s only aim is to make the world a better place is now more hype and interesting than they ever used to be.
Today, you can read about it on the example of three new techs presented at CES 2019.
1. Smart Cities
By the predictions of the World Health Organization, by 2050 75% of World’s population will live in urban areas. Cities become the primary habitat of humanity, but also bring forth new challenges: greater poverty, intensive air and soil pollution, waste-associated health hazards.
Smart Cities are a concept that seeks to solve these problems by utilising the potential of the industry and modern technology. With the help of the Internet of Things, big data, mobile apps, cloud computing, Smart Cities strive to make the lives of their citizens better.
As you can see, it’s not a single technology, yet a framework of combining technologies for a purpose.
It first entered CES in 2018, and this year it was there yet again — but this time as a part of larger Resilience Pavilion fully focused on saving the world. If this change indicates something that would be rising attention to tech like this — and it’s great.
2. Vehicle to Everything
While urbanisation is indeed a problem, it carries along others, such as road traffic deaths. According to WHO, 1.35 million people die each year due to traffic accidents. Conservative measures against it seem to be not too effective, and the number does not decline significantly. However, modern technologies can help with that, too — and we’re not talking about self-driving cars.
During CES, Ford’s Don Butler announced that Ford would integrate Qualcomm’s vehicle integration technology (C-V2X). This technology may allow vehicles to communicate automatically with other cars, buildings, roads, traffic lights, and cameras.
All this integration will allow much better collision avoidance, more efficient infrastructure management, and smaller fuel waste.
3. The Impossible Burger
Now, to probably the most interesting and unexpectedly important technology —fully plant-based, beef tasting Impossible Burger.
Cutting meat consumption may be incentivised for many reasons. Those may include carcinogenicity of certain meat products and ethical concerns of consuming meat. Yet the most pressing issue might be the pollution effect of meat industry: it is one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gases and probably the largest source of water pollution in developed countries. Even the Chinese government was forced to acknowledge the problem and asked its citizens to halve their meat consumption.
Yet many of us know on our own experience how difficult it may be to just stop eating meat — after all, it’s just so tasty. That’s where The Impossible Foods comes in with their technology of producing ground beef substitute which is fully plant-based. And turns out, their patties do taste just like beef: The Impossible Burger was named the Top Tech of CES 2019 and received a whole lot of very positive reviews. After all, there may be a way to make people eat less meat and more plants!
Now, this CES was very rich with ambitious world-changing tech — and that is definitely an amazing trend. Let’s just hope next year’s CES will have even more of those!
