Top Ten ICT for the 21st Century

• ICT will become powerful extension of human beings designed to augment intelligence, learning, communications, and productivity.
  
• ICT will become intuitive—they will “learn,” “recognize,” and “know” what we want, who we are, and even what we desire.
• Computer chips will be used everywhere, and they become invisible-embedded in everything from brains and hearts, to clothes and toys.
• Computers will manage essential global systems, such as
  transportation and food production, better than humans will.
  
• Online resources will enable us to download applications on-demand via wireless access anywhere and anytime.
  
• ICT will be voice-activated, networked, video-enabled, and connected together over the Net, linked with each other and humans.
  
• Computers will have digital senses-speech, sight, smell, hearing-enabling them to communicate with humans and other machines.
  
• Neural networks and other forms of artificial intelligence will make computers both as smart as humans, and smarter for certain jobs.
  
• Human and computer evolution will converge. Synthetic intelligence will greatly enhance the next generations of humans.
  
• As computers surpass humans in intelligence, a new digital species and a new culture will evolve that is parallel to ours.

Source : globalfuturist.com

Top Trends in 2013 - IEEE

"Sustainable Development Through Effective Man-Machine Co-Existence"

1. Technical advances in disaster management (Tsunami), humanitarian de-mining and rehabilitation: This includes disaster management techniques especially applied to rescue operations in Tsunami, landslides, earthquakes & floods, robots & sensors in landmine detection & removal, navigation of mobile robots in rugged terrain, robot manipulators and control, prosthetic devices, tele-operation & remote manipulation, robotics
in physiotherapy etc. 

2. Industrial Automation and modern civilization: This will try to discuss the latest developments in industrial automation. 

3. A wired society and Tele-presence: A discussion on novel concepts in virtual reality,kansei systems, and tele-presence in the context of a networked system. It is expected to cover novel results as to how these technologies have revolutionized distributed production and marketing, education, medicine and surgery, space travel, defense etc. 

4. Intelligent robots and man-machine co-existence: This will cover new developments in intelligent robots, their hardware, learning algorithms, sensory systems, and actuators.

Source IEEE