from MIT News Office

Survey gauges teens’ view of tech future

Gasoline-powered automobiles, compact discs and desktop computers are headed toward the technology scrap heap, according to a recent survey of American teenagers.

The 2006 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, which gauges Americans’ attitudes toward invention and innovation, found that a third of teens (33 percent) predict the demise of gasoline-powered cars by the year 2015. One in four teens (26 percent) expects compact discs to be obsolete within the next decade, and roughly another one in five (22 percent) predicts desktop computers will be a thing of the past.

Teens are also optimistic that new inventions and innovations will be able to solve important global issues, such as clean water (91 percent), world hunger (89 percent), disease eradication (88 percent), pollution reduction (84 percent) and energy conservation (82 percent).

“Perhaps more than any preceding generation, today’s young people are completely comfortable with rapid technological change,” Lemelson-MIT Program Director Merton Flemings said. “The rate of innovation, as reflected in U.S. patent applications, has more than doubled during their lifetime.”

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When asked to select the career field in which they are most interested, arts and medicine were teens’ top choices (17 percent each). Teen girls were significantly more likely to be interested in medicine or health-care careers than teen boys (25 percent vs. 9 percent). Engineering was the third most-attractive career choice (14 percent of all respondents), but it was significantly more popular with teen boys than girls (24 percent vs. 4 percent). Only 9 percent of respondents chose science and only 8 percent chose business as their top career choices.

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