What Industries Will Technology Have Disrupted by 2025?

In the past decade, we’ve seen technology disrupt several old, reliable industries.

First, the Internet and digital media joined together to shake up the music industry with MP3s, file sharing and digital-media players. While many have heralded Apple’s innovations with the iPhone and the iPad, the company likely wouldn’t have had the momentum to fuel the invention of those devices without its first success with the iPod.

Then came the remaking of the publishing industry. We’re still in the middle of this industry shift, as newspapers and magazines try to figure out new profitable business models with digital media, now that anyone and everyone can start a blog and build their own audience.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Mark Raskino, a Gartner vice president and fellow, recently met with a group of CIOs and asked them to predict the ways that technology would have disrupted various industries by the second decade of the 21st century. On the Gartner Blog, he shared some of the group’s ideas:

• The self-driving car will be commonplace
• We’ll shift to health-record openness
• Higher education institutions will undergo a massive consolidation
• Merchants will transition to cashless retailing
• We’ll be able to control our home appliances by remote
• Custom-fit clothing will become mainstream
• Virtual and telemedicine will keep more patients out of the hospital

Most of these are right on the money. For example, the self-driving car has seen significant progress, with Google being the pioneer in this field.

Google has already been given the go-ahead to use the prototype on real city streets, as demonstrated in a recent video. In fact, analysts are predicting that self-driving cars will go mainstream by 2019 or earlier.

And cashless retailing? Yeah, Square has that one all locked up, thanks to its recent partnership with Starbucks.

Are there any other revolutionary technologies you’d add to the list?