10 World Changing Technologies

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

MIT Identifies 10 World Changing Technologies

In the recent publication of MIT's Technology Review a list of 10 technologies were described as having the potential to change the world. I subscribe to this magazine and was excited when I read the article abstract on the site thinking it would lay out the likely suspects of nanotechnology and genetics but it turned out to be much more specific than that. When I quickly glanced through the list I was surprised by the inclusion of cement as a top ten technology, maybe for Rome I thought. Obviously, there is a little more to it than that. This story will be released in the May/June issue.

The list did have some surprises that I wouldn't have thought about, below is a quick summary of the 10 items listed in the article. Each entry has a short video or abstract associated with it, click on the associated image to open the link. I've also included any relevant links that can supply a more descriptive explanation about the technologies described here. Also, here is the primer video for the article from the editor and publisher of Technology Review, Jason Pontin.

1. Solar Fuel: This doesn't mean solar energy but fuel derived from an organic, solar driven process. The idea is to use genetically engineered microorganisms that can convert sunlight into ethanol or diesel fuel as an alternative to current biofuel processes. The argument is that this technology will finally produce a viable, cost effective and scalable alternative to fossil fuels. Using microorganisms to produce the fuel from sunlight would be incredibly cheap, and because it could use the same infrastructure to deliver the product success would seem certain. This is only the beginning of organic machines and our ability to manipulate genes in order to create organisms with specific features and a purpose. It is possible that a bigger impact of this type of technology will be in the context of geoengineering, this is currently being discussed as an approach to deal with climate change. The obvious problem with this as a fuel alternative is issue of clean, biofuels burn cleaner than fossil fuels but they may not be as clean.
2. Mobile 3-D: This is a huge stretch and leads me to believe somebody in the editorial staff at TR really, really likes Avatar and their iPhone. The company, Dynamic Digital Depth has developed software that can turn 2d video streams into 3d video streams. Sounds impressive and I'm sure it is but software handling this kind of conversion on any scale would seem to be a stretch. I do think 3d has lots of applications beyond entertainment just not on cellular devices, maybe iPads or tablets. In order for 3d to be implemented in the way everybody wants the actual production process has to change, like Avatar did by specifically creating a 3d render-able version of the movie.
3. Duel-Action Antibodies: This comes from some work done at Genentech where using a duel-action antibody can deliver two drugs for the price on one, this reduces cost but more importantly should increase efficiency and effectiveness of various cancer and aids related drug therapies. The European Commission recently approved a drug called Removab which is an engineered antibody specifically designed to grab a cancer cell and an immune cell such that the immune cell can kill the cancer. The ability to target two things at one with these bispecific antibodies represents some amazing possibilities for innovative treatments and therapies. Like the engineered microorganisms described above, these engineered proteins are just the beginning of what we will be able to do.
4. Real-Time Search:  The focus here seems to be Google's ability to harvest social content, in real-time, and make it available via the search engine. First, I think this is already happening with Twitter and Facebook as they both opened their fire hose a couple of weeks ago, I'm sure Google is tapped in. Second, the real issue with social network data is security and privacy, I think Google may damage themselves here just as Bing or Yahoo would be likely to do. Beyond the social stuff I do agree that real-time web (a little broader) will have an impact on Internet consumption and on search. The bigger impact isn't real-time search but deep web search, the ability to dive into and index the real content instead of high level meta data as is done today. Since Google is always downstream to the creation process the best they can ever do is near real-time, just to be clear.
5. Light Trapping Photovoltaics: The idea here is increasing the efficiency of solar cells by using nanotechnology as means to boost light scattering in thin solar cell devices. While thin solar cells are considerably cheaper to manufacture then traditional solar cells they are also much less efficient, this process is changing that. The implementation is conceptually simply, they are using silver nanoparticles deposited on the solar cells to increase light scattering towards the cell, the light then becomes trapped between the solar cell and the nanoparticle. This process is inexpensive according to Kylie Catchpole, a research fellow from Australian National University, and is done primarily through self-assembly inspired by simple processes like evaporation and condensation. It will be interesting to see if organic processes steal the show here, its possible that engineered organic materials will be far more efficient than anything we can do mechanically.
6. Engineered Stem Cells: To put it in computer terms, engineered stem cells represent the possibility of having a simulator that allows you can debug disease states and drug effectiveness. The focus here is much more on education and learning than it is on creating organ farms or some other right wing fear. This makes a ton of sense and probably represents the only real possibility for us to create a way to really, truly simulate living processes under all kinds of conditions. The focus has always been on organ growth or tissue generation, this shift in thinking represents (I think) considerably more benefit both short term and long term. Think of what it means to be able to debug the human body, ultimately that's what this represents.
7. Social TV: This is an interesting idea, social media is clearly being integrated into the entertainment experience, especially with television. What is suggested here is that social interaction will be tightly integrated into the television watching experience. Today this is accomplished by people Twittering or Facebooking as they are watching something on the television, in the future this type of social interaction is likely to become much richer and more deeply integrated into the overall experience. This is done online now, there are multiple video streams where viewers chat and comment, these interactions become part of the video record and represent, in many cases, a big part of the overall experience. For example, MLB.com offers a service where you can watch the game online and simultaneously interact with anyone else on the service and watching the game, everybody can see the stream. For me, this adds a lot more interest to the game and definitely makes it a more interactive and fun experience.
8. Green Concrete: This one certainly caught my eye, learn something new everyday. It turns out that cement accounts for about 5% of the global carbon emissions based on the fact that it is primarily limestone and requires extreme heating during preparation. A new type of cement, created by British statup named Novacem promises to not only eliminate the carbon emissions but turn cement into a carbon sinkhole. This is accomplished by using magnesium silicates processed at low temperatures instead of the carbon dioxide containing limestone. Once the magnesium oxide is produced it is mixed with various carbonates that turn it into cement and cause it to have a negative carbon footprint. Changing the basic chemistry of something that has been around for a few thousand years is pretty amazing, creating an ecological benefit at the same time, priceless.
9. Implantable Electronics: This topic can certainly take on several different connotations, everything from pacemakers to cyborgs. The technology described here is focused on drug delivery, monitoring bio-markers and other types of treatment and research, all at the nanoscale. One of the remarkable features of these implantable devices is that when they have completed their life cycle they simple dissolve, a version of cyber-apoptosis. Unfortunately, the video explanation is terrible and difficult to make sense of. This is the type of professor that would cause kids to to find another career path, he tries to explain two different technologies but isn't successful explaining either. I do know they are using silk extensively in their work. Apparently, this technology is small enough to fly under the radar of the body's defense mechanisms and avoid being attacked by antibodies or white corpuscles.
10. Cloud Programming: The discussion here revolves around cloud computing tools that are specifically designed for data management, Joseph Hellerstein from UCB believes that what his team is working on will unlock the potential of cloud computing. The basic idea is to expose a set of tools that allows developers to take advantage of cloud resources (via parallel computing) without dealing with the associated underlying complexity. The initial focus is on datasets and the dynamic organization of them, the efforts hint at a crowd sourced solution where the software can augment the crowd's efforts. This is huge problem as new data is released into the cloud every second of every day, since there are not any adopted standards for dataset design and construction this situation promises to be an on-going problem unless a group like this is successful.

Lists are like standards in new technologies, during the initial stages of development everybody has their own standard or interpretation. That is the case here as well, surely this list can be debated as to whether it represents the right mix of technologies, but as Jason indicates in his preamble this list was selected because they said so. I think it is fair to say that this list does represent some meaningful solutions but I could easily argue that some of the items are a little questionable. Specifically, the mobile 3D and real-time search seem like a stretch, both of which represent incremental innovation and not anything truly new and innovative.

So, what would I have included to replace the two questionable items? Ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things would replace real-time search as a technology that is likely to change the world, much more so than real-time search. In fact, it is the success of ubiquitous computing and IoT that will act as the biggest driver for real-time search, not the social networks. I would also replace mobile 3D with our increasing ability to peer deeper and deeper into space with better resolution, this is very likely to identify life harboring planets within the next decade, the impact of this discovery would change mankind more than the other nine put together. We are getting closer and closer to finding not just planets that meet the criteria for life but also identifying the constituents that make up the atmosphere and mass, really amazing.

All in all this is a great list, it represents some very specific predictions about technologies that have the potential to change the world. The best part of the list is that the technologies described are all within our grasp, everything here is beyond theory and quickly becoming a practical reality. For me, the item with the biggest impact is likely to be the engineered stem cell research as this represents the potential for much better disease identification, management and ultimately elimination via a new class of very targeted drugs that will be developed as a result. The ability to perform real-time debugging on living tissue and organs is beyond the beyond, it is where fiction becomes reality. Hopefully TR will do a retrospective in a couple years to see how their predictions panned out and whether or not any of these technologies actually did change the world.

Make sure to check out the article and some of the videos by clicking on the images. I welcome any comments relative to the list, my suggestions or any adjustments you think should be made, have at it.

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