MIT Picks Top 10 Emerging Technologies

DeviceGuru writes "MIT's Technology Review magazine has just published its annual list of the top ten emerging technologies. Dubbed the TR10, these revolutionary innovations are poised to have a dramatic impact on computing, medicine, nanotechnology, our energy infrastructure, and more, say the magazine's editors. The TR10 technologies this time around are: cellulolytic enzymes, reality mining, connectomics, offline web apps, graphene transistors, atomic magnetometers, wireless power, nanoradio, probabilistic chips, modeling surprise. More details on the TR10 appear in the March/April edition of Technology Review."

Comments

Deja Vu?

[Jax Omen]

hasn't this been posted before?

Check out the original

[brianerst]

Read the original, then steal all the best quotes and look like a genius...

Re:Check out the original

[courseofhumanevents]

Nikola Tesla would like to have a word with you about "new" karma-whoring techniques.

Re:Check out the original

[i_liek_turtles]

I only have 1.2 gigawatts.

Offline web apps

[Annymouse Cowherd]

Offline web applications, aka applications...

Re:Offline web apps

[QuantumG]

Yes, all the undocumented apis and annoying workarounds of the web, now in your desktop app!

Was talking to a guy the other day who said he was once going to write an xml/css/javascript rendering engine for wxWidgets. So the same app could run on your desktop or through a web browser and you never have to deal with web 2.0 crap.

Re:Offline web apps

[Belial6]

Offline web applications have been available via the Domino server since 2002.

Re:Offline web apps

[vuffi_raa]

Was talking to a guy the other day who said he was once going to write an xml/css/javascript rendering engine for wxWidgets. So the same app could run on your desktop or through a web browser and you never have to deal with web 2.0 crap. couldn't you just write a plain old app to do the same thing? why do you need to run a widget that does a dumbed down version of something an os is designed to do already (good example... clocks are some of the more popular widgets)? personally it seems to me that the only advantage of running any web app is on an intranet (mainly in a school or business) where you want to distribute the functionality of an application in a shared environment with a closed set of data or database functionality- otherwise the whole web app thing though kitchy isn't really an "emerging technology".

Re:Offline web apps

[QuantumG]

You're actually asking me why webapps are popular?

Because install software is too damn hard and insecure?

I'm not a huge *fan* of webapps but they exist for a reason.

Re:Offline web apps

[some guy I know]

clocks are some of the more popular widgets)? personally it seems to me that the only advantage of running any web app is on an intranet

If you run a clock as a web app, make sure that you don't cache the results, because, well, you know: "Hey, it's been 11:41 for the past hour! WTF?"

Re:Offline web apps

[plopez]

you forgot "slow and bloated"

Re:Offline web apps

[plopez]

Because install software is too damn hard and insecure?
Ever here about pushing out installs from a central server. Hell, you can even do that with MS apps these days.

Re:Offline web apps

[vuffi_raa]

install software is more seure for the manufacurer but less secure for the user- we ceratainly couldn't use it in my line of work

just announced... two weeks ago.

[snsh]

This is somewhat old news. The nanoradio is probably picoradio by now.

Re:just announced... two weeks ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

and Intel already tried making CPUs that give *mostly* right answers - I think it was called "Pentium".

Instead, chips could be designed to produce the correct answer sometimes, but only come close the rest of the time.

Don't forget TR10: 2007

[Naughty Bob]

It's equally relevant....

Re:Don't forget TR10: 2007

[MightyYar]

All the way back to 2003 (PDF alert!):
(Coral versions)
2003
2004
2005
2006

(Original Links)
2003
2004
2005
2006

And this is some random crap to make the lameness filter go away.

Re:Don't forget TR10: 2007

[Naughty Bob]

You have been busy... I was just trying to point out the ludicrous pointlessness of these lists. They will one day identify the slack, vinegary lobe of the human brain that gets juiced by the thought of top 10s. If I don't get to mine first with a soldering iron through the ear that is.

Re:Don't forget TR10: 2007

[MightyYar]

Ha! I just thought that some enterprising slashdotter would go through the 2003 list and see what has come of those things, which surely must have emerged by now :)

Re:Don't forget TR10: 2007

[ksd1337]

Just wanted to tell you that the Coral proxy operates on port 80 by default now. You can leave off the ':8080'.

For the Top 10 Meaningless buzz words of 2008

[goatpunch]

just RTFA

Is this worth much?

[The Ancients]

Is this so much the top 10 emerging technologies, or what TR find interesting?

"emerging" is ambiguous - does it mean technologies that will have a definite effect on our way of life, technologies that show promise as maybe some day becoming useful, or...? This seems a little hit and miss to me, although I guess by definition it has to be.

Re:Is this worth much?

[wizardforce]

Is this so much the top 10 emerging technologies, or what TR find interesting?

the latter. top ten lists like these are subjective by nature. What I may find interesting and worth putting on a top ten list, you may think are not and vice versa. Arguably they glance over *a lot* of tech that has potential to change this whole planet in dramatic ways. protein design and synthetic biology for example. being able to control the properties of a lifeform to the point where it is capable of doing things that biology hasn't evolved in the last 3.5 billion years. quantum computers that can crack codes in hours rather than the many millenia it takes us now. DNA based data storage- two fold applications- allowing storage of data billions of times that of what is currently possible and the synthetic biology allowing it can be used in biological systems with unimaginable redundancy and capabilities. computationally driven AI- modelling brains from the neuron up such as deep blue which is now modelling a system of 10,000 neurons. space travel with solar sails and air breathing rocket engines with the possibility of taking the cost of launching things into orbit down 10-100 fold. there's a lot more stuff going on that make this list fairly irrelevant.

Re:Is this worth much?

[The Ancients]

See - I found your list a whole lot more interesting!

Re:Is this worth much?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not. MIT's opinion is ridiculously overhyped. They were pushing VR like it was the second coming, and they ignored the WWW as it developed right under their noses. [Not going to look for the citation, if you were around back then, you remember it.] Their predictions only serve to identify what is over-hyped.

Re:Is this worth much?

[ColdWetDog]

DNA based data storage- two fold applications- allowing storage of data billions of times that of what is currently possible and the synthetic biology allowing it can be used in biological systems with unimaginable redundancy and capabilities. computationally driven AI- modelling brains from the neuron up

A woman who never forgets and is always right?

Oh no you don't. Step away from that lab bench. Now.

It is an annual list, so...

[i_liek_turtles]

Probably last year.

Re:It is an annual list, so...

[Jax Omen]

I meant that it's already been posted this year. I haven't been at Slashdot long enough to know last year's.

Re:It is an annual list, so...

[Brian Gordon]

Uh we're already doing it. See MPT.

Nothing revolutionary

[Hoplite3]

Everything on that list is either evolutionary technology (growth down some already determined path) or lame. Some are both.

Here's my take:

Cellulolytic enzymes -- we already (a) have some that work and (b) use them to process biomass into biofuel. Better ones are of course great, but this is an evolution...

Reality mining -- What a douch-bag term. Devices watch your every move and report helpful hints to the government -- er, I mean you.

Connectomics -- Brain wiring diagrams. Neat, but it's too soon to tell if it'll reveal anything exciting.

Offline Web applications -- I've got an idea, instead of running my offline web app in a browser, let's cut out that part and run it with native system libraries. Okay, now lets deliver the application through a simple package system. I'll call this "dpkg"! (Alternative smart-ass comment: Oh, you mean Java?)

Graphene transistors -- Damn cool. But we have transistors. These are just smaller transistors. Evolutionary.

Atomic magnetometers -- Really small sensors are neat. Lose the "war on terror" retoric in the summary. These might actually allow some neat things, but it's a bit early to say.

Wireless power -- People have wanted to do this for a while, but all comers so far have big losses associated with them. Why, in a power-short future, would we be doing this?

Nanoradio -- Nifty. Especially if used for communication between multiple tiny machines ... too early to tell how it'll sort itself out.

Probabilistic chips -- Right. So lets run our calculation enough times that we can have good statistics about the mean result and the standard deviation. Wait, now we've lost out power savings?

Modeling surprise -- Douche-baggery.

Look, my main point is that we can't predict revolutions in science and technology. All we can do is say advance x will help with problem y, but that's evolutionary thinking. Revolutions, by their very nature, cause huge changes in what people do and what they think can be done. You can't predict it ahead of time. We've gotten very good at grinding away at the next evolutionary step in technology, and that's really neat. Many of the ideas above have exciting applications. But I really hate the "revolutionary" and "disruptive" technology ideas.

Re:Nothing revolutionary

[wizardforce]

Look, my main point is that we can't predict revolutions in science and technology. All we can do is say advance x will help with problem y, but that's evolutionary thinking. Revolutions, by their very nature, cause huge changes in what people do and what they think can be done. You can't predict it ahead of time.

exactly. a great deal of the science and technology we now enjoy couldn't possibly have been forseen as it was developed by accident! who would have thought penicillin from a mold could keep millions from dying of bacterial infections? or that gel electrophoresis was developed after a chance observation that clay particles in a liquid environment migrate under an applied electrical field- this is now used for analysis of DNA- it has even lead to the freeing of wrongfully convicted people. sulfanilamide drugs were originally dyes found to have an antibiotic effect. the drug now known as viagra was originally developed to help with heart disease [vasodilator] it didn't help with that but it did help with something completely different... point being that to attempt to predict the next 20 years is idiotic, 50 years is utter lunacy and any list of revolutionary tech fails to account for the fact that a lot of what we have and will have won't be developed on purpose.

Re:Nothing revolutionary

[BountyX]

Yeah agree...the offline web application made me laugh. Most of the applications I develop already leverage the web with HTTP parsing and MySql...It pisses me off when people start treating vitrual machines and web browsers as an operating system.

Pretty soon everyone will be programming for a browser built inside of another browser thats built on a virtual machine...

Re:Nothing revolutionary

[DynaSoar]

> Connectomics -- Brain wiring diagrams. Neat, but it's too soon to tell if it'll reveal anything exciting.

It won't. No neuron is more than 6 connections from any other, the average being around 3. The connections do not dictate the function, the simultaneous activity (synchrony) of a collection of 1000 to 10000 neurons do. These are called Hebbian Cellular Assemblies.

Without knowing which neurons are operating with certain others, we'd have to consider all the possibilities, which is 10 billion neurons with 100,000 connections on each. Someone with the temerity can work out the degrees of freedom for that map, or at least estimate the calculation time required to determine it. And without the dynamics of the Hebbian activity, the map would be as "exciting" as a dead brain.

Re:Nothing revolutionary

[Belial6]

Offline Web based applications are useful in limited cases. Basically, first you get a list of applications that make sense to have in a browser in the first place, then trim that down to the ones that do not need immediate feedback from other people or systems. Email is a good example of this. While I prefer a native client, I have to admit that a web based email client is just fine for many people. The big problem with most web based email clients is that when you are not connected to the server/internet, to cannot read your email, much less write email. Taking this kind of application off line can make sense for some users, as it makes more sense to give them a single interface.

That being said, Off-Line web apps have been available since 2002 with the release of Domino 6.0. I find it hard to believe that software that has been widely available for half a decade can be considered an emerging technology.

Re:Nothing revolutionary

[grumpygrodyguy]

Look, my main point is that we can't predict revolutions in science and technology.

James Burke reads slashdot? Cool.

Most of these are totally ridiculous

[WillAffleckUW]

And I work in medical genetics and follow new technologies in energy and other fields, so I think somebody just did a braindump without thinking about what the implications are, quite frankly.

News?

[TurinPT]

I might be missing something but what exactly does this story say that wasn't said 1 month ago? it even links to the same article...

Interesting double-standard.

[Valdrax]

Graphene transistors -- Damn cool. But we have transistors. These are just smaller transistors. Evolutionary. Okay, so this technology is lame because it's just a smaller version of something we have....

Atomic magnetometers -- Really small sensors are neat. Lose the "war on terror" retoric in the summary. These might actually allow some neat things, but it's a bit early to say.
[...]
Nanoradio -- Nifty. Especially if used for communication between multiple tiny machines ... too early to tell how it'll sort itself out. But these are "neat" and "nifty?" I'm not following the logic here.

Re:Interesting double-standard.

[F34nor]

These are neat and nifty becasue we may have moved the detectors from the equivilent of tubes to transistors. That is a revolutionary change to this technology. This is especaily interesting when combined with the recent visual mapping techniques for fMRI. With smaller, lower power, cheaper detectors, that also require a far lower magnetic fields that mythical ability to read minds is one serious step closer. I for one welcome our new brainscan overloards.

my take

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Modeling Surprise

All this does is move the goal post. It's crap. Insurance companies will dump millions into it only to find that surprises still happen. Hurricanes plow into cities. Cities drown. The govt is too incompetent to help, so it farms it all out to their buddies in related industries. Naomi Wolf can tell you how such Modeling surprise ideas would work for Certain People.

Probabilistic Chips

This is not revolutionary or even interesting, as we teeter on the brink of optical computing.

NanoRadio

Great. Now head lice can listen to Coldplay. I'm so happy I could just plotz.

Wireless Power

Great. Plug in the cellphone, go to bed and the thing will zap bugs all night. And your cat.

Atomic Magnetometers

Fine - piss all this money into that, but defund free clinics, let people die from treatable diseases, etc. jusst because they're uninsured. Frankly, I could do with a little more focus on basic preventive health and health maintenance work, and a little less medical techno heroics. the tech stuff is easy because you don't have to care. dealing with some pregnant 14 year old from the ghetto, now that takes some attention...

Offline Web Applications

Oh lordy bullshit. It's just Adobe trying to find ways to keep people from stealing photoshop.

Graphene Transistors

But will it make my porn look better?

Connectomics Wanna get rid of autism? Don't let a kid watch TV or use a video game until he's 10. That would clear up a good 20% of the autism AND ADHD cases would disappear. The rest of the autistics? They're tards. It's why we invented factories and WalMart. They need to work somewhere.

Reality Mining

Ummm yeah - and considering the govt is reviving the Big Brother Machine it'll be so much easier to monitor your every thought, and you can change your name to THX1138, or LUH1734 if you're a girl...

Cellulolytic Enzymes

Sure - until some tiny bacteria crittur finds it tasty and infects the vats. Biofuels = genocide.

So that about raps it up for this years techno wankfest. Thanks for tuning in! Come back next year for yet another pile of misguided wishful thinking posing as science. Til then, buh bye!

RS

Re:my take

[vuffi_raa]

Offline Web Applications Oh lordy bullshit. It's just Adobe trying to find ways to keep people from stealing photoshop. and FTA about offline web apps:

But cloud computing has drawbacks: users give up the ability to save data to their own hard drives, to drag and drop items between applications, and to receive notifications, such as appointment reminders, when the browser window is closed. awesome you can't crack photoshop anymore, but who would want to if you can't save anything or open anything in it-

Re:my take

[Btarlinian]

How the hell is any of this interesting or insightful. It's a troll/flamebait. Nothing he said isn't obvious. Everyone knows that these top 10 lists are highly unlikely to actually be the top 10 lists of what will happen in the future. It's a list of what the editors of TR find interesting.

Modeling Surprise

All this does is move the goal post. It's crap. Insurance companies will dump millions into it only to find that surprises still happen. Hurricanes plow into cities. Cities drown. The govt is too incompetent to help, so it farms it all out to their buddies in related industries. Naomi Wolf can tell you how such Modeling surprise ideas would work for Certain People.

And how is moving the goal post crap. Knowing that people are going to be more surprised by a hurricane in Oklahoma than in Kansas is useful for insurance companies. No prediction will ever be 100% accurate. I don't think anyone is claiming that.

Probabilistic Chips

This is not revolutionary or even interesting, as we teeter on the brink of optical computing.

Did you even RTFA? The article is talking about having chips run correctly a given percentage of the time. The probability inherent in optical computing (which we almost definitely do not teeter on the brink of) has more to do with quantum mechanics than with design tradeoffs.

NanoRadio

Great. Now head lice can listen to Coldplay. I'm so happy I could just plotz.

Wireless Power

Great. Plug in the cellphone, go to bed and the thing will zap bugs all night. And your cat.

Atomic Magnetometers

Fine - piss all this money into that, but defund free clinics, let people die from treatable diseases, etc. jusst because they're uninsured. Frankly, I could do with a little more focus on basic preventive health and health maintenance work, and a little less medical techno heroics. the tech stuff is easy because you don't have to care. dealing with some pregnant 14 year old from the ghetto, now that takes some attention...

If the above three aren't flamebait, I don't know what is. Small radios have uses other than for listening to music, such as smaller cellphones, and maybe even those magical tiny earpieces you always see in spy movies. And by the parent's standards, his poor cat is getting zapped every second by radio waves. Last time I checked, radio waves were nonionizing radiation. Besides, I don't think anyone plans on distributing power throughout an entire house this way. And as for the supposedly misguided "medical-techno heorics", you can just take care of that pregnant 14 year old without an ultrasond. Have fun!

Offline Web Applications

Oh lordy bullshit. It's just Adobe trying to find ways to keep people from stealing photoshop.

It's also a plausible way to write crossplatform applications. Admittedly, I also think this one is rather silly.

Graphene Transistors

But will it make my porn look better?

Actually it could. Faster trasnsistors==Faster computer chips==more prevalent use of better, more computationally intensive video codecs==better porn (unless you were implying production quality, but sorry, can't help you much there). But in case you forgot, there are more uses for faster computers than porn. Changing the material that transistors have been made out of would be revolutionary. After all, we've had silicon devices nearly since the invention of the transistor itself and most definitely since the invention of the IC.

Connectomics Wanna get rid of autism? Don't let a kid watch TV or use a video game until he's 10. That would clear up a good 20% of the autism AND ADHD cases would disappear. The rest of the autistics? They're tards. It's why we invented factories and WalMart. They need to work somewhere.

I'm sorry, but do you even

Re:my take

[Fred_A]

Modeling Surprise

All this does is move the goal post. It's crap. Insurance companies will dump millions into it only to find that surprises still happen. Hurricanes plow into cities. Cities drown. The govt is too incompetent to help, so it farms it all out to their buddies in related industries. Naomi Wolf can tell you how such Modeling surprise ideas would work for Certain People.

Ah. Right...
So this isn't even remotely related to party strippers then I gather...

In 2001 #4 was Digital Rights Management

[KarmaRundi]

Just one paragraph given to the skeptics. http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/12264/?a=f

This is basically marketing for their magazine

[TaeKwonDood]

I have never seen their magazine before but this is basically just an advertisement to get people to subscribe. I get the marketing value of it but usually Slashdot folks see through this sort of thing.

Cellulolytic Enzymes

[lazy genes]

I really dont understand this. Out of pure speculation ,it seems to me that taping the sap from a live tree and turning that into biofuel would be more practical ????? Please comment ...

MIT TR

[oldhack]

TR is (has become?) a promotion rag, and Jason Pontin is a douche.

Re:MIT TR

[JasonPontin]

I don't complain, it's OK to call me a douche--but what is "promotional" about Technology Review? It's the least commercial magazine in America. Indeed, if you designing a technology magazine for commercial success and advertising revenue, you would never give it so broad a range of subjects (essentially all technology) and make it focussed on emerging technologies (essentially technologies that aren't products yet and can't be sold).

Re:MIT TR

[oldhack]

Darn, I cuss out somebody, and they actually reply.

I've received TR a few years ago, when I believe you took over as the editor. One memorable article is about this guy that was working on aging and (im)mortality, and your editorial attacking him in a highly personal manner as a loon on some moral ground that is incomprehensible to me (and apparently many of the readers according to the letters published). My calling you "douche" is crude, but equivalent to your personal attack on that guy - no, I'm not related to him.

As for TR being a promo rag, I noticed it covered generally IT, biotech, and nanotech at the time. That's pretty big arena to cover, and your coverage was extremely superficial, too shallow even to provide basic description of their working principles, but nevertheless rating them in terms of timeframe, risk, progress (time to market?), possible payoff, etc. It was geared toward investors/VC chasing tech hype rather than lay people/engineers/scientists wanting to keep abreast of new technologies.

Was commercial appeal not the new direction for TR when you took it over? I've heard it used to be a alumni journal sorta thing before.

Re:MIT TR

[JasonPontin]

Well, kind of... I was hired by the previous publisher because I had been the editor of Red Herring, a business and technology magazine during the boom that was popular with entrepreneurs and VCs. The old publisher wanted me to make TR like the magazine you describe: focused on risk, progress, time-to-market, payoff. But when MIT made me the publisher as well as the editor the chief three years ago, I returned the magazine to its historical focus on emerging technologies. It's not a business magazine at all any more: it's very much concerned with applied science and the content and potential of new technologies. You should look at it again: you'd probably like it now. As for Aubrey de Grey and his attempt to defeat aging, I mainly disapprove of the effort on scientific grounds: I think Aubrey is spouting pseudo-science and is appealing to psuedo-scientific people as a kind of religious prophet. There's no reason to think that we can therapeutically treat aging as a disease in our lifetimes. But when you speak of the moral component, I am an agnostic. I think I wrote in the piece you remember that "While I might want indefinite life for me and my loved ones, it **might** be a bad thing for the world if every one were to live indefinitely." (Or words to that effect.) I was thinking of Kants objective correlative, which says we must act on those principles that we can at the same wish were general laws.

Wireless Power

[tecker]

Nikola Tesla would be proud. People havent given up on what made him broke. You can get some of the story on what he did over at the Mind Course page. Amazing to think what was "radical" back then is now "the next big thing" today. Sad.

Re:Wireless Power

[Anonymous Coward]

Nikola Tesla would be proud. People havent given up on what made him broke.

But Free Trade has already been invented.

Some of those seem kind of iffy

[ceoyoyo]

To start with, I'm not sure how the magnetometer guy is going to revolutionize MRI. The signal recorded in MRI isn't magnetic, it's a radio signal. I suppose you could detect that with a good enough magnetometer, but would it be worth it? A coil of wire is awfully sensitive. The magnet is used to produce the signal, and a magnetometer doesn't help you do that. The big magnets are needed to produce a stronger signal, which gives you a better signal to noise ratio.

The probabilistic processors extending battery life by a factor of 10? I don't think the processor in my notebook uses 90% of the power anyway, so even if you dropped its power consumption to zero you're still not going to get a factor of 10. Reducing the voltage of a few circuits that calculate least significant bits isn't going to come anywhere near reducing a processor's power usage to zero. Maybe they meant 10%? Or 1%?

"close enough is often good enough"

[Tablizer]

Palem has developed a way for chips to use significantly less power in exchange for a small loss of precision. ... chips could be designed to produce the correct answer sometimes, but only come close the rest of the time. Because the errors would be small, so would their effects: in essence, Palem believes that in computing, close enough is often good enough.

I liye thet ideb. Msre pow4r t8 Dr' Salem!

Forget this crap!

[PPH]

Where's my friggin flying car??!!!

Surprise, surprisal

[tgv]

Well, I can't see surprise (or surprisal as it is also known) as a major breakthrough, at least not in cognitive psychology. All it does it tell you how far something (e.g. a word) deviates from some (corpus based) expectation. It does provide another way of looking at things like reading times and difficulty of sentences, but it is just another measure of something like relevance, probability (actually, surprisal is defined as the -log of the conditional probability of an event, just like in information theory).

The traffic example in the link is a cute application, but not really what something that will have a dramatic impact on computing. It's probably in the list because they got one example from 10 different disciplines, so nobody would feel left behind...

Totally uninspiring.

[v(*_*)vvvv]

Reality mining? Offline web apps? Surprise modeling? OMG!! Microsoft researchers!? How did microsoft get in there!!! Maybe their work was lacking surprise. What next, XML2?

looked 2001, 2003 & 2004 compilation

[peter303]

People are seriously working on about six of those thirty topics. 20% hit rate.

Offline Web Applications

[lwriemen]

Hmmm. Pretty soon all we'll need are these computers, let's call them "workstations", that have local storage for running applications faster and ...

Where have I seen this before? ;-)

Cool! A Sarah Connor/Summer Glau Love Scene!

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> The TR10 technologies this time around are: cellulolytic enzymes, reality mining,
> connectomics, offline web apps, graphene transistors, atomic magnetometers, wireless
> power, nanoradio, probabilistic chips, modeling surprise.

No flesh clones of Sandra Bullock, with an AI brain programmed to love me, deeply and physically love me?

3rd time posted in the past couple of weeks

[strangeattraction]

Old Sews is no News

In 2009...

[meatmanek]

This will become the new "Vaporware" list.

Probabilistic chips...

[GWBasic]

Probabilistic chips are essentially analog. In the analog world; the hiss is the inaccuracy in the least-significant digits.