Slashdot Mirror
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."
Read the original, then steal all the best quotes and look like a genius...
Offline web applications, aka applications...
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
The Mothership
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.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Probably last year.
Everything on that list is either evolutionary technology (growth down some already determined path) or lame. Some are both.
... too early to tell how it'll sort itself out.
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
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.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
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.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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...
Just one paragraph given to the skeptics. http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/12264/?a=f
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