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TR Picks 10 Emerging Technologies of 08
arktemplar suggests Technology Review for their annual list of 10 emerging technologies that the editors believe will be particularly important over the next few years. Quoting: "This is work ready to emerge from the lab, in a broad range of areas: energy, computer hardware and software, biological imaging, social interactions. Two of the technologies — cellulolytic enzymes and atomic magnetometers — are efforts by leading scientists to solve critical problems, while five — surprise modeling, connectomics, probabilistic CMOS, reality mining, and offline Web applications — represent whole new ways of looking at problems. And three — graphene transistors, nanoradio, and wireless power — are amazing feats of engineering that have created something entirely new."
Nikola Tesla would like to have a word with you about "new" wireless power.
What, is this Digg?
Anonymous Coward
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I'm liking where this could take encrypted trunking systems.
Anonymous Coward
Brain-Machine Interface | Flexible Transitors | Data Mining | Digital Rights Management | Biometrics | Natural Language Processing | Microphotonics | Untangling Code | Robot Design | Microfluidics
DRM hasn't really changed my life other than add one more annoyance.
"Data Mining" sounds basically like "Reality Mining" in the new list.
I'm sure there has been great strides in "Robot Design" that help in manufacturing, but what about the others?
I don't think these technologies have changed my life at all seven years after they were predicted, or have they?
*iza
Careful What You Wish For....
The summary reads like someone made a side trip through the jargometer.
Surprise modeling?
Connectomics?
Reality mining?
Nanoradio?
You gotta be freakin' kidding me.
--sugarman--
Here's hoping for flying cars next year!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I don't know if you guys have heard about reality mining, but it's some pretty fascinating technology.
Apparently, out there in the so-called "real world" -- you know, the place where the lights are only on for half the day and the heat doesn't work at night -- there's stuff to be found. Valuable stuff like gold, silver, copper, coal, diamonds... and you can just dig a hole to get access to it.
Now you might be wondering why it's called "reality mining" and not "hole digging". Well, it's not quite as easy as I made it sound. You can't just dig any old place, you have to know where to look. And you can't just use a shovel; most of the time you need some heavy duty equipment. You have to sort through all the possible places to dig, filter that information, and somehow figure out which places are more likely to have the stuff you're looking for, and which approaches will work best to get it out. So it's kind of like data mining, but you're using it to get something in the real world.
It's fun, profitable, and best of all: you get to wear a hat with a light on it! Reality mining is the future, folks. Better get on the bandwagon while there's still room.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Oil : First the embargo of 1973, now it's over $100 a barrel. No significant progress has been made to end the oil age. I guess no one in the world, USA or otherwise, has the brains or concentration needed to do a "manhattan project" that would solve this problem once and for all. Cheap compact cars in the late 1980's got higher mileage than the latest compacts do now (excluding expensive hybrids). We're getting ripped off every-fsking-day, and hardly anyone seems to notice, let alone complain.
This is the coolest thing on the list: *Cellulolytic Enzymes*
This "technology" basically involves feeding bacteria or protozoa on plant materials (AKA "Biomass") which are primarily composed of cellulose (which is really just chains of varying lengths of beta-glycosidic bonded glucose sugar molecules).
(NOTE: We call the Alpha-glycosidic bonded glucose sugar molecules STARCH, and we can eat those, but NOT the Beta-bonded variety.)
The 'Cellulolytic' Enzymes are from genetically-engineered Bacterium or Protozoans which are utilized to cleave the glycosidic linkage in the Cellulose and are additionally modified and/or chemically engineered into Butanol, Ethanol, Methanol, and other biofuel 'alcohols'.
Think of the process like a big container full of termite guts that basically partially digest (break the beta-glycosidic bonds of) the cellulose from your yard waste, grass trimmings, leaves, logs, switchgrass, tree bark, recycled paper, etc.. into their base glucose sugars which can then be easily modified into alcohols by the same (or different) single-celled critters.
This process will truly reveal the hyped artificial market (largely tax-subsidy supported) of the Corn Ethanol "market". POOF! it will go away and foodstuffs will be affordable again (and the price of beer will drop from farmers planing more cereals again!). Jimmy Carter did this with the Peanut in the 1970's... Take away the artificial market, Poof! Farmers plant what is in actual demand, not what is only profitable due to tax subsidies. (And yes, there is a $0.50 per gallon tax subsidy for ethanol production.) Cellulolytic Enzyme tech can produce alcohols without the need for those subsidies. (oh, but you can bet they will still be there... that is, unless the ADM, et al "Corn Lobby" does not set a caveat in the law subsidizing only ethanol produced from corn (you call it maize)! ) -Sort of reminds me of Zymergy (AKA Zymurgy)... but then again, that is the (yeast) anaerobic fermentation of sugars/starches, a similar yet very different process.
Gee, they are predicting that a technology that was released in 2002 on Lotus Domino 6.0 will be brand new this year. Hurray!!!
Of course when Adobe releases it, we can listen to the Notes trolls complain that Lotus didn't make their 6 year old technology conform to a 'standard' that was created in 2008.
someone apparently got a bobcat instead of office chair.
I do not see Duke Nukem Forever on that list anywhere
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
Quote: "The ambitious plan faces a significant hurdle, however: no one has yet demonstrated a cost-competitive industrial process for making cellulosic biofuels."
False.
This is an example of a specialist like Arnold having her head buried in her own specialty, and ignoring what is going on in other specialties around her.
The new "thermal reactor" method of making biodiesel is already under way commercially, and can (and does) make biodiesel cost-competitively from nearly anything organic, including cellulosic materials. The difference is that this process bypasses ethanol entirely, and produces oil instead.
The corporation behind the first large thermal biodiesel plant has claimed that they could create more NET USABLE energy (i.e., production minus cost) via oil from waste cornstalks than could ever be produced via ethanol from the kernels. And probably cheaper... they are economically viable now while ethanol is still shaky even with subsidies.
This is not to say that advances made by people like Arnold are not valuable! Of course they are. But they do need to poke their head out of their offices once in a while to find out what else is going on in the world.
The only real thing that will take off in the next two years is the offline webapps. And no - it's not Java applets. And I have doubts about the Adobe's AIR platform. My bet would be on Mozilla.
This is Technology Review! They are bound to mention some old tech with marginal real-world value from Microsoft over something really happening that has some value! They are looking for sensation, not today's news, and they want to support their corporate friends in the process.
Graphene: the 2D hexagonal carbon lattice made in every pencil scratching... boring, right? It seems everyone, myself included, in Condensed Matter (Solid State) Physics is working on this one. It's like high-Tc superconductivity, very promising. Unlike that field, however, it's open to much more reliable experiments and slightly simpler theory. The upload rate on arxiv is over 1 paper/day on this material*.
...) semiconductors are gapped, meaning there is some energy associated with the valence and conduction bands and there is an energy gap between them. Experimentally we can control certain parameters (doping, primarily) to change electron/hole occupation of the bands and thus make things like p/n junctions, transistors and so on. With graphene, there's no gap. On one hand, this means ballistic transport is approximately possible. Graphene has a ridiculously high mobility (ludicrous speed even). However, we need to come up with tricks to make it into traditional electronics. Ribbons are one approach. The edges break rotational symmetry and give rise to edge states, which can be manipulated to create a gap. Some other types of topological defects can do it too. There are probably over 1000 papers on the subject and in some sense the field is less than 5 years old. I'm glad to see the recognition this is getting and hopefully we'll be a part of some new groundbreaking tech.
The key to graphene (from a theoretical standpoint) is that its band structure is gapless and electrons (ok, quasi-electrons) are massless, moving at ~10^6 m/s! Normal (Si-based, GaAs,
*I'm currently working on a pretty interesting theory which may or may not solve the switching issue mentioned in the article; alas, the proof is too small to fit in the margins of this post!
On the NPR show "Talk of the Nation (Science Friday)" airing February 1, 2008, host Ira Flatow spoke to two guests who believe that the construction of a very large solar array in the Nevada desert could generate enough electricity to power the entire United States (with some caveats about the distribution system technology). Therefore, one could also imagine a society of electric vehicles all powered by the sun.
Unfortunately I don't have the transcript, but you can listen to the radio program in its entirety online at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18595746
Their predictions were not so bad. But the effects of the technologies have probably tipped the scales toward the "bad" side, for society.
Brain-machine interface has made some real progress, but sorry you can't get a videogame controller just yet. Wait another 5 years. (And such things must ALWAYS be voluntary! Never, ever, ever mandatory. Ever. Period.)
"Flxible" transistors are a reality and today you can buy a gadget with a roll-up screen. Okay, the transistors themselves are not flexible, but everything else is. The transistors are small enough to not matter.
Data mining has been undermining your privacy and personal security and property ownership rights as we discuss this, TODAY. If you think this is not affecting your life, you must have been living in a cave.
Same for "Digital Rights Management"
Same for biometrics.
Contrary to what others here have been saying, Dragon Naturally Speaking and similar programs are NOT "Natural Language Processing". They are, instead, language translaton programs. The former refers to extracting actual meaning, of some kind, from the input. The latter means little more than determining what words you said closely enough to perform some pre-programmed actions. The two things are worlds apart. There has been some real progress in the latter... but computers really don't "understand" language any better than they did decades ago.
I do not know about the others so far. But don't go thinking that these things have not affected your life. They have. And from what I can see, mostly negatively...
Despite what some folks have said here, "offline web apps" are NOT new. Not even a little bit. The sarcastic posters have been a lot closer to reality. "Offline" web apps REALLY (Yes, really. Truly. Technically and otherwise.) nothing more than desktop apps that access the web when you want them to. WE ALREADY HAVE THOSE. Really. We have for a long time now.
They may interact with their "online" counterparts when you go online... but again: there is NOTHING new there. This is NOT some late-breaking new technology. It is old technology under a new name.
NOTHING MORE. REALLY. It works with the new tools, but it does the same old thing. Like most automobiles today: they might be a bit more efficient, but they are still internal combustion.
(BTW, in case you were wondering, I am a Web developer who has been using cutting-edge web application tools professionally for quite a while now. I know whereof I speak. The ranch is more modern, and they might be calling it "giant chicken", but it's really the same old pork they have been feeding you for a long time. No joke. "New technology", my beautiful lily-white programming ass!)
Which, yet again, calls into question the motivations Technology Review has for including these particular items. Hmmmm... Adobe. Microsoft. Gee... I wonder...
It's also terribly inefficient. It HAS to be. There is no known way around that.
That is, if it is to work at ranges over a meter or maybe two. And in order to be very practical, it really has to. If I am within three feet of a charging station, I might as well just plug the little sumbitch in! After all, it's only an arm's length away!
At current effective ranges, it doesn't "solve" any problems, because your plug is no farther away. If the range is extended, then you lose efficiency...
of the wireless power, you can download the paper here: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0611063.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
Ezekiel 23:20
...surprises still crop up, and we probably can't eliminate them. But Eric Horvitz, head of the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research, thinks we can at least minimize them, using a technique he calls "surprise modeling. I can just imagine it now== MicrosoftSurprise® Alert ==
Microsoft Surprise has detected that your software is about to crash though there is nothing you can do about it.
Surprise Modeling: "To monitor surprises effectively, says Horvitz, the machine has to have both knowledge--a good cognitive model of what humans find surprising--and foresight: some way to predict a surprising event in time for the user to do something about it." You mean like weather forecasting? Isn't most, if not all scientific pursuit dedicated to the understanding of natural systems so that we can know what to expect where once we were attributing events to Zeus and such?
Connectonomics: "Lichtman is a neuroscientist, and the image is the first comprehensive wiring diagram of part of the mammalian nervous system. The lines denote axons, the long, hairlike extensions of nerve cells that transmit signals from one neuron to the next; the leaves are synapses, the connections that the axons make with other neurons or muscle cells. The diagram is the fruit of an emerging field called "connectomics," which attempts to physically map the tangle of neural circuits that collect, process, and archive information in the nervous system." --Well that's very nice, but perhaps he ought to examine the role DC currents play in cellular and nervous system activity. Broken bones don't knit back together through the application of electricity for no reason. What else does low-current DC electricity do in the human body? Actually, quite a lot; a fair bit is known about this subject, but that information seems to elude the Dr. Lichtmans of the world. --And why shouldn't it, what with such massive interest in the development of the following technological bonanzas. . .
Wireless Power: "Having difficulty imagining a vast infrastructure of wires extending into every city, building, and room, Tesla figured that wireless was the way to go. He drew up plans for a tower, about 57 meters tall, that he claimed would transmit power to points kilometers away, and even started to build one on Long Island. Though his team did some tests, funding ran out before the tower was completed. The promise of airborne power faded rapidly as the industrial world proved willing to wire up." --Yup. Tesla. And all this time I was thankful he never achieved his goal in this regard. Cell phones are bad enough as it is, which is why I expect out of all these 'emerging' technologies, that this one will be unstoppable.
Reality Mining: "Researchers have been mining data from the physical world for years, says Alex Kass, a researcher who leads reality-mining projects at Accenture, a consulting and technology services firm. Sensors in manufacturing plants tell operators when equipment is faulty, and cameras on highways monitor traffic flow. But now, he says, "reality mining is getting personal."" What? So the massive profit growth of the whole Air Miles thing has up until now been sold simply as a way to keep track of how much milk is left in stock at the local 7/11? Gosh. Who knew?
Other people have commented on the bio-fuels thing, and the fact that we've had Java and Flash for some time now, and anyway I have to leave the house in a few minutes. So enjoy the future. Ciao.
-FL
I have to apologize for this comment up front because my chemistry is really rusty and my biochem is non-existent, but here it is...
Thin-film PV was a problem last I checked due to the use of cadmium. While you get a nice solar product as a result, you also get a highly toxic, difficult to handle material to dispose of... somehow. (The nice thing about silicon is that it's not terribly reactive with much of anything.) AFAIK, CIGS *sometimes* uses a problematic form of cadmium. If there's one thing we need to remember from our experience with oil, it's that we need to check the life cycle analysis before jumping in whole-hog.
That said, the cadmium problem is probably easier than the emissions problem. Probably.
[|]
What happens when you try "surprise modeling" on a "probabilistic chip"-based system? I'm thinking the uncertainty of the calculations, which are based on somewhat imprecise or unknown inputs, might lead to less-than-ideal results; not exactly "garbage in, garbage out", but close...
Personally, I found this list to be a rehash of so many old things with new names as to be pretty much worthless....
you really expect me to be able to express my opinion of what's so fucked up in this world in 120 characters or less?
The examples you give are exactly the kind I refer to when I say that there is very little to gain and something to lose in the process. I have my charging plug(s) on my nightstand. I plug my mouse into my PC or keyboard (when not using a wireless anyway, which lasts for months on one charge of NiMH AA batteries) and so on. My phone, MP3 player, etc. all plug into the USB on my laptop, OR into convenient, standard 5V chargers that I already have by my desk and nightstand...
These are non-problems for anybody who wants to lift enough of a finger to plug in a little wire that is already within arm's reach! And it DOES add losses, so uses even more electricity than before.
Your examples don't make me "wrong" at all. Rather, they have reinforced my point. As for your final point, I have already addressed it: you don't want to bother plugging things in. Fine. Your choice. But for most of us I don't think that is a "problem" that needs solving. I mean this quite sincerely: if my father had lived long enough to hear something like that, he would have turned his back on you in disgust and walked away, calling you a "worthless lazy bastard".
But that's the way he was, not me.