Giving Compass' Take:

• Business Insider reports on Academics at Imperial Tech Foresight, who have created a periodic table of disruptive technology, featuring 100 innovations that are changing our world — or will soon.

• Much of the tech on the table have applications to philanthropy, including vertical agriculture (Va), smart energy grids (Se) and predictive gene-based healthcare (Gh). Which ones should we be funding?

• Here's how digital technology can help solve world problems. 

Academics at Imperial Tech Foresight (ITF), an offshoot of Imperial College London, have been working to bring to life nebulous and intangible technological advances in a way you've never seen before.

They have created a table of disruptive tech, taking inspiration from the periodic table of chemical elements. It contains 100 innovations, ranging from the benign and everyday, to the mind-blowing and potentially terrifying.

To give you an example, cryptocurrencies (identified as Cr) are now part of our modern life, while battlefield robots (Br) sounds like something straight out of "Iron Man."

Each element is colour-coded and slotted into a space across two axis: The Y-axis ranks the potential for disruption from high to low, while the X-axis determines how soon it will become a reality. Here's how it breaks down:

  • The green elements in the bottom left-hand corner are happening now.
  • The yellow blocks could come to pass in the near future.
  • The red elements are a more distant concept, which could be 20 years away from becoming a reality.
  • The final section of grey is fringe science, which TF identifies as "highly improbable, but not actually impossible."

Read the full article about the periodic table of disruptive tech by Jake Kanter at Business Insider.