Mal Fletcher reports on the technologies you & your organisation can't afford to ignore.

Meanwhile, GE has spider bots climbing and cleaning huge wind turbines in the US. Some American hospitals use bots to dispense medications in non-life-threatening cases.

The next five years will see ever greater developments in the design and manufacture of social bots, which can read human biometric signals and simulate human emotion responses.

The technology for this has been developed in innovation hubs such as the Cambridge Science Park, the home of software called simply 'Emote".

Right now, the US Navy's research wing is looking at whether robotic machines can be programmed to learn to make ethical or moral decisions. This is a sign of the importance governments and industries are placing on breaking ground in the area of artificial intelligence.

Already, robots are a core feature in the evolution of the so-called Industry 4.0. This will see the replacement of old-style, everything-under-one-roof factories with highly specialised, fully automated production units spread over large distances, all hooked up via the Cloud.

Another important feature will be progress in cognitive computing and brainwave interfaces. The Free University of Berlin has already developed BrainDriver, a software platform which allows a driver to control a car using nothing more than the power of brain waves, transmitted through a head-mounted array of sensors.

Meanwhile, we will see huge strides forward in the design and application of exo-suits. These will be used to boost productivity in industry - by a factor of 27 times in some cases. In medicine, they will help people recover from limb injuries and strokes.

Within a few years, injectable nanobots, built from the atomic level up, will be widely used to help identify and destroy harmful cells within the human body.

This will be a big year for drone-based technologies, too. Commercially, drones represent an important aspect of robotics.

More sophisticated varieties of drone will be programmed to 'learn' from their environment, in much the same way that passenger jets' computers 'read' their environment to direct and correct flight paths.

In the US, the private and commercial drone industry is expected to be worth $2 billion (USD) globally by 2020 - those projections will grow rapidly if Amazon and others are given permission to fly deliveries using drones. Meanwhile, on the military side, the industry will be worth five times that amount by 2020.

Social Media

Despite the seeming ubiquity of social media apps and devices in today's cluttered business space, there's every reason to say, 'You ain't seen nothing yet'.

This year will see a growing courtship between social media and virtual reality. Once firmly married, this couple will give birth to a new form of avatarism.