Abstract

Imagine 10 years further. The concept of a pandemic and of life-threatening viruses, both for humans and machines, has just become an everyday fact. We have also learned to live with the fact that we cannot truly fight this, but that we have to go with the flow and look for impactful innovations in the chaos created by the situation. Meanwhile, exponential technologies have taken a central place in our lives. The evident things are the self-steering car, the refrigerator that keeps track of its own inventory and automatically replenishes it, e-health devices (with health monitoring and immediate primary care), and sustainable and smart homes, everything controlled remotely from our smartphones. However, more complex situations are also handled differently. We will have learned how to collaborate remotely, how this could improve our work-life balance (if we wanted that), and how we could make medical care and even education accessible to many more people, including in geographically (remote) areas where it truly matters.