Issue Left to default, benefits concentrate where capacity already exists

Summary

The report identifies access as the second tension that will determine whether its ten emerging technologies deliver broad benefits. If nothing is done, the gains will gather in the regions and populations already best placed to capture them. Personalized cancer therapies could remain available only in well-resourced health systems, widening gaps between and within countries. The transition to precision fermentation may hit hardest the agricultural regions and livelihoods that currently supply the affected food categories. Grid flexibility rewards households that own an electric vehicle and a home battery, while renters without either may end up subsidizing a system whose advantages they do not share. The report stresses that none of these outcomes is inevitable, but each becomes the default without deliberate policy and design choices.