!["The Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2012" [image courtesy the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies].](http://www.cccblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/rtxtomw-comp.jpeg "\"The Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2012\" [image courtesy the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies].")
Last week, the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies released a consensus list — the result of input from “some of the world’s leading minds within the entire [Global Agenda Council] network” — of “the top 10 emerging technologies for 2012.” These are the technologies that have the greatest potential to create new industries and impact new ones by providing solutions to global challenges. Atop the list — which is ordered starting with the technology with the greatest potential — is “informatics for adding value to information”:
The quantity of information now available to individuals and organizations is unprecedented in human history, and the rate of information generation continues to grow exponentially. Yet, the sheer volume of information is in danger of creating more noise than value, and as a result limiting its effective use. Innovations in how information is organized, mined and processed hold the key to filtering out the noise and using the growing wealth of global information to address emerging challenges.
And a number of the other technologies on the list require advances in computing (following the link):
