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

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: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: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.