The stage beyond artificial intelligence (AI) is opening. This year's top 10 emerging technologies selected by the World Economic Forum (WEF) place emphasis on foundational technologies that extend AI into real-world industries such as power grids, healthcare, and materials. Rather than standardized mass production or treatment, "personalization" tailored to a single person or situation is rising, and "decentralization" — in which production and supply scatter close to where they are needed rather than being tied to large facilities — stands out.
Each year, the WEF selects and announces 10 innovative technologies expected to have a major impact on society and industry as a whole within the next three to five years, following review by experts from the scientific and industrial communities. They span energy transition and power infrastructure, securing critical resources and the environment, bio production and precision medicine, and foundational technologies for the AI and quantum era.
The Seoul Economic Daily examined this year's top 10 emerging technologies, dividing them into four keywords and reviewing their content and significance, through analysis by Lee Sang-yup, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Vice President for Research at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the only Korean participating as a selection committee member.
Energy — Energy Transition and Power Infrastructure
1. Everything-to-Grid
"Everything-to-Grid" is a technology that uses every electricity-consuming device — electric vehicles, home energy storage systems (ESS), factories, large buildings, and data centers — as part of the power grid. Energy transition and power infrastructure are emerging as a core foundation of future industry, as the importance of technologies that stably manage electricity demand grows amid the expansion of renewable energy and the increase of AI data centers. The existing power grid was a one-way structure that delivered electricity produced at power plants to consumers. But Everything-to-Grid stores electricity when there is surplus and supplies it again when needed, enabling stable operation of the power grid, and is regarded as a technology that opens the era of the "prosumer," in which consumers simultaneously become producers.
2. Passive Radiative Cooling Materials
Recent worldwide heat waves have sharply increased cooling demand, raising electricity consumption. Passive radiative cooling technology is an innovative technology that can lower surface temperatures without using electricity. By reflecting most sunlight while emitting surface heat into outer space as infrared rays of specific wavelengths, it can lower the temperature of buildings and equipment, and is expected to play an important role in the construction and energy fields going forward.
Resources — Securing Critical Resources and Environmental Cleanup
3. Direct Lithium Extraction
Direct lithium extraction technology is a method that selectively separates only lithium ions from brine using special adsorbents or membrane separation technology. Currently, when producing lithium, brine is exposed in massive evaporation ponds for months to years to evaporate the water before recovery. This process uses enormous amounts of water and has a major environmental impact. Direct lithium extraction technology not only reduces the time for lithium extraction but is also efficient, with a recovery rate reaching 90%. Using this technology, lithium can be recovered from geothermal power plant brine, wastewater from oil production processes, and even from waste battery recycling processes, allowing diversification of the lithium supply chain that is concentrated in specific countries and regions.
4. PFAS Degradation Technology
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) hardly degrade in nature and accumulate in the environment, potentially harming the human body. Until now, PFAS has been removed by simply moving it from contaminated water to another location, but recently technologies that completely break down PFAS molecules using supercritical water oxidation, electrochemical degradation, and photocatalyst technology are being developed. If PFAS degradation technology is commercialized, it can be used not only for purifying contaminated soil and groundwater but also for treating industrial wastewater, giving it a high possibility of growing into a core field of the environmental industry.
Healthcare — Bio Production and Precision Medicine
With the growing need for patient-tailored treatment due to an aging population and the rise of intractable diseases, and with the sustainability of food and pharmaceutical production emerging as an important challenge, bio production and precision medicine are emerging as major axes of future technology competition.
5. Precision Fermentation
Precision fermentation is a technology that produces specific proteins or compounds using genetically engineered microorganisms. By using microorganisms like micro-factories, it can make milk proteins, egg proteins, pharmaceuticals, cosmetic ingredients, and industrial chemicals. It can reduce the land and water use needed for food production and lower greenhouse gas emissions from livestock farming, and is regarded as a core technology of the future bioeconomy.
6. Exosome Drug Delivery
Exosome-based drug delivery technology uses nano-sized vesicles naturally secreted by cells as therapeutic carriers. It can deliver drugs to desired cells or tissues, and in particular has the potential to cross the blood-brain barrier, so it can be used to treat intractable diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and brain tumors.
7. Personalized mRNA Cancer Vaccines
Personalized messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) cancer vaccines are a technology that analyzes a patient's tumor cells to find mutations present only in that patient's cancer cells and trains the immune system to recognize them. It shows that cancer treatment is moving from a method of using the same drug for all patients to treatment tailored to each patient.
Optimization — Foundational Technology Optimization for the AI and Quantum Era
8. Quantum Simulation for Drug Discovery
Quantum simulation for drug discovery has been listed as a foundational technology for the AI and quantum era. Developing a single new drug requires an average of more than 10 years and trillions of won, but because it is difficult to accurately predict molecular structures, most candidate substances fail during clinical trials. Quantum computers can more accurately predict complex molecular structures that were difficult to calculate with existing supercomputers, and are expected to provide greater opportunities for drug development using AI.
9. World Models
World models are a technology that makes AI learn the operating principles of the real physical world, beyond the level of generating text and images. AI that understands space, time, and causality can predict future situations and perform virtual simulations, and can be used in autonomous vehicles, robots, manufacturing process automation, climate prediction, and scientific research.
10. Lattice-Based Cryptography
Lattice-based cryptography is a representative quantum-resistant cryptographic technology for implementing security systems that remain safe even in the quantum computing era. The core of internet security is based on public key cryptography systems, but future quantum computers are expected to be able to crack most of the cryptography currently in use within a short time. Because lattice-based cryptography generates encryption using lattices, a high-dimensional mathematical structure, it has a high possibility of becoming an essential technology across digital infrastructure as a whole, including finance, defense, healthcare, telecommunications, and cloud. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has already adopted lattice-based cryptography as a next-generation cryptographic standard.
"This Year's Top 10 Technologies Are Anchored by the AI Expansion Ecosystem"
Distinguished Professor Lee Sang-yup interpreted this year's top 10 selected technologies, saying, "Technology is becoming increasingly personalized, and production and supply are becoming decentralized." Rather than standardized mass production or treatment, personalization technologies tailored to a single person, a single situation, and a single condition are rising, and production and supply are decentralized rather than tied to specific regions or large facilities, taking place close to where they are needed. This approach leads to "resource efficiency," producing greater effects with less. Furthermore, the shift of scientific research methods from the laboratory to models is one of the important features. AI predicts whether candidate drugs will bind to targets, analyzes patient tumor mutations, and designs biological pathways before they go into fermentation tanks. As a result, areas that were previously too difficult or
