Mind-reading technology
AGI
Star Trek-style matter replicator/recycler. Just imagine being able to empty a garbage dumpster into a bin, shut the lid, press a button, and an hour later you get stacks of industrially useful metals & materials, bolts of cloth, and sacks of fertilizer.
Specifically, I think the abilty to make hydrogren from renewable resources at large-scale will change everything. Hydrogen fuel cells are more space efficient, and require less toxic manufacturing, when compared to current renewable energy generation and storage methods. If hydrogen is seen as cheaper or more green than other power sources, it will change the market completely.
Hydrogen generation is also an active research area, and just this year they’ve have some promising results for renewable hydrogen.
Room temperature superconductors would represent the greatest leap forward since electricity itself. Ultra-cheap, ultra-high resolution MRIs, lossless power transmission across vast distances, massive gains in computing power, much lower cost supercolliders for advanced physics, low-cost magnetic confinement for fusion power experiments, and so on.
Just a note: Superconductivity is not only destroyed by temperature, but also by magnetic fields or a too high current. We might find a room temperature superconductor that is basically useless for energy transportation or high magnetic field applications.
Another problem: almost all known high-temperature superconductors are ceramics and thus very brittle and hard to work with.
What we want is a cheap, metallic, high temperature superconductor with a high maximum critical magnetic field and high critical max current density…
But of course any improvement could give big improvements in some applications. Having a nitrogen cooled MRI wound be awesome.
