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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Technology is a blank slate, but when it is combined with human or machine based creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship it is a tool that can help us transform the world, and as new powerful emerging technologies become increasingly affordable and democratised our ability to use them to disrupt and transform global business, culture, and society at speed accelerates.

THE 2025 GRIFFIN EMERGING TECHNOLOGY STARBURST

WELCOME TO THE Griffin Emerging Technology Starburst 2025 Edition, which is part of our overall 311 Institute Emerging Technology Starburst Collection, and which is complimented by the companion 311 Institute Exponential Technology Codex which explores the future and deep future and all of the exponential technologies listed on our Starbursts in greater detail.

Firstly, I’d like to wish you all a prosperous 2025 albeit with a need for continued vigilance as we continue to see increasing global competition and instability shaking the foundations of many of our societies.

Now in its ninth year, and building on the firm foundation of the previous 2017, 2018, 20192020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 Griffin Annual Emerging Technology Starbursts this year’s 2025 Starburst is the culmination of years of ceaseless investigating, monitoring, and tracking the appearance and development of new emerging technologies from every corner of the globe, and I am now tracking 633 of them which is a staggering number when you think about the potential power and impact many of them could and will have on global business, culture, and society in the years and decades to come.

Looking back at 2023 there was a sharp drop in notable world firsts compared to 2022 which, as the global pandemic becomes a distant memory for many, was somewhat surprising. However, when we consider the sharp downturn in the investment environment, and then the impact of significantly lower investment levels globally in key sectors as threats of recession continued to loom large, this fall in world firsts would be in line with expectations. Despite this though there are signs that R&D investments are returning to pre pandemic levels and that the world is getting back to normal – albeit the new normal. While the number of world firsts softened significantly I saw a tripling in the number of new emerging technologies that I spotted suggesting that we could be in for an interesting 2024 with Biotech, Energy, and Materials seeing large gains with Compute, Intelligence, Security, Sensors, and User Interfaces seeing more modest gains.

In this year’s Starburst, which extends to 2075 and displays 167 of the world’s most promising emerging technologies, each with an addressable market value of at least $500 Billion spread across 13 categories, I have promoted 13 new emerging technologies that weren’t in last years’ edition which makes the number of new breakthroughs in 2024 look quite average when compared to some previous years.

While the Starbursts might look visually appealing they have a more practical purpose which is to help governments, individuals, and organisations alike envision and predict new disruptive threats to their countries, industries, and companies. And, furthermore, when used in conjunction with our How to Build Exponential Enterprises Codex and our first of a kind ExPLORER Innovation Framework, they can be used to help organisations accelerate the development of innovative new policies, products, and services.

By creating and publishing these Starbursts I also hope they help spark people’s imagination, and demonstrate to us all, young and old, rich and poor, that nothing is impossible. For example, this year alone, in a sea awash with sci-fi like breakthroughs, unexpected surprises, and all manner of newsworthy new concepts this is just a sliver of what I saw: After almost a decade of predicting it finally the FCC approved the first 5G satellite to smartphone services launch with SpaceX and T-Mobile, I also saw the first dry run of the fastest cross border payments system which completes transactions in a staggering 60 seconds, and then on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) front there were huge numbers of firsts. We saw the first Agentic AI’s being released, and then being used to create entire human-like civilisations in Minecraft and being used to autonomously hack military grade systems, AI’s beating humans again in dogfights, including a Mach 11 simulated dogfight in China, AI bots bullying one another and going absolutely psycho while not only creating money but also pumping junk crypto memecoins to valuations of over $600 Billion. Then, of course, again predicted for a decade or so we saw the first AI coders get jobs at the likes of Amazon and Google, AI getting to work creating synthetic genomes, running a UK NHS clinic better than humans, AI scientists, autonomous AI’s designing new autonomous AI, and so much more.

We also finally saw the much lauded “GPS for the human body” Atlas of Cells launch, Bacterial displays running Doom, the first Bio-Circular Datacenter opening in France, Brain computing platforms being scaled up, drugs that regrow human teeth, the use of Extinction Genes to render viruses harmless, genetic engineering being combined with next generation Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) to beat cognitive transmission records, software based GPSless drone navigation systems, Graphene semiconductors, as well as the scaling up of Huawei’s Nvidia GPU competitor.

Flicking back to BMI we also saw the first human experience Human-BMI Cognitive compartmentalisation which took his multi-tasking skill levels into sci-fi territory, the rise of the Humanoid robots race, mega drones from China, the first photosynthesising animals, even more quantum radars that render US stealth obsolete, the first reasoning AI’s, solar materials that exceed 190% energy efficiencies, synthetic content getting ready for prime time as we saw more videos producers ditching their old tools, two people communicate via lucid dreams, China developing new unhackable Mechanical Metamaterial data storage technologies, URLs that hid Malware, and the opening of the world’s largest Hypergravity facility, again in China … and of course hundreds more.

It’s no understatement, therefore, to say that I look forwards to seeing what amazing new technology concepts will emerge in 2025.

Signing off for now in traditional fashion if I could give you one piece of advice from all my years of being a “futurist,” it would still be be forget what you know and get rid of your preconceptions of what’s possible, keep learning, and keep exploring. And if my Starbursts have left you wanting to learn more about our collective future and deep future then dive into the wormhole and explore this site and all its awesome content, most of which will push your thinking to the limits.

Explore more,

MATTHEW GRIFFIN.

Founder

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