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Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered their predictions today on technologies that could foster the next tech boom. I’d put as much stock in these predictions as anybody’s top ten predictions list. I think some of these will offset each other. We’re going to need take Bromberg’s prediction of converting waste into fuel in order to deal with all of the electronic pollution that comes from embedding almost everything with low-cost electronics, per Strano. Here are their brief comments with a link to the complete answers:

Leslie Bromberg: Using plasma to convert waste to fuel (imagine using garden and household waste to make energy).

Rod Brooks: Robots that are practical and affordable.

Neil Gershenfeld: The digitization of fabrication, the consequence of which will be personalization — allowing anyone to make almost anything anywhere.

Paula Hammond: Electrochemical energy: The reduction and oxidation of materials to either generate energy or to store it.

William J. Mitchell: Rebuilding our cities in “smart” sustainable form, with ubiquitous networking that will allow cities to respond like intelligent organisms to dynamic changes in the needs of their inhabitants.

Phil Sharp (pictured): Merging engineering and biology, which will ultimately yield better medicines, agriculture and materials.

Michael Strano: Embedding low-cost electronics into almost every object that we encounter on a day-to-day basis.

Mehmet Faith Yanik: Significant extension of the human lifespan by disease-preventative and tissue-regenerative technologies.

Shuguang Zhang: Low-cost, nanoscale solar cells.

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