MIT Technology Review's 25th-anniversary list of breakthrough technologies leans more practical than aspirational. The selections this year tend toward things that have crossed from lab into deployment, with second-order consequences just now becoming visible.
On the AI side, two entries matter most. AI coding tools are restructuring how software actually gets built — full-stack feature work, testing, and deployment increasingly handled by models with humans in review rather than execution. The flip side is hyperscale data centers: the new generation of AI training infrastructure has a staggering energy footprint, and the grid implications are now a real conversation, not a hypothetical.
Beyond AI, sodium-ion batteries promise grid-scale storage at much lower cost than lithium. Genetic testing has crossed into a far thornier territory — embryo trait selection sold direct-to-parent. Base editing is being engineered patient-by-patient. Commercial space stations are starting their handover from ISS. The list reads as the substrate of the next ten years, not the next ten months.
Source: MIT Technology Review. Read the full list at https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/12/1130697/10-breakthrough-technologies-2026/.