Achievements of Technocratic Civilization 2018

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Since 2001, MIT Technology Review magazine has compiled a list of the most incredible technological breakthroughs that it believes will define our lives for years to come.

Not all of them are widely known, but some are close to entering the market.

1. Metallic 3-D printing

• Technological breakthrough. Now printers can make metal objects quickly and cheaply.

• Why is this important for a technocratic civilization? The ability to manufacture large and complex metal objects can optimize production.

• Key players. Markforged, Desktop Metal, GE.

• Availability. Available now.

Metal printing becomes cheap and easy enough.

In the short term, manufacturers won't need to have large inventories - they can simply print out an item, like a spare part for an aging car, when someone needs it.

In the longer term, large factories producing a limited range of parts can be replaced by larger ones, adapting to changing customer needs.

The technology can create lighter, stronger parts and complex shapes that are not possible with conventional metal fabrication methods.

The 3D printers were developed by the 3D printing company Markforged and GE. The latter plans to start selling the printer in 2018.

2. Artificial embryos

• Technological breakthrough. Without the use of eggs or sperm, the researchers made embryo-like structures from stem cells alone, providing an entirely new way of creating life.

• Why is this important for a technocratic civilization? Artificial embryos will make it easier for researchers to study the mysterious beginnings of human life, but they are sparking new bioethical debates.

• Key players. University of Cambridge, University of Michigan, Rockefeller University.

• Availability. Available now.

The researchers carefully positioned the cells in a three-dimensional scaffold and watched as they began to communicate and fit into the characteristic shape of a mouse embryo a few days later.

The next step is to create an artificial embryo from human stem cells, which is being worked on at the University of Michigan and Rockefeller University. Laboratories will be able to "edit" genes so that they can be examined as they grow.

However, artificial embryos pose ethical questions. What if they cannot be distinguished from real embryos? How long can they be grown in the laboratory before they become pain-sensitive? Biochemists say these issues need to be addressed before science moves on.

3. Sensitive city

• Technological breakthrough. Toronto is the first place to successfully integrate cutting edge urban design with modern digital technology.

• Why is this important for a technocratic civilization? Smart cities can make urban areas more accessible, livable and environmentally friendly.

• Key players. Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto.

• Availability. The project was announced in October 2017; construction can begin as early as 2019.

Numerous smart city schemes have faced various obstacles, including a lack of funding. A new project in Toronto, dubbed Quayside, hopes to change that model, reimagine the city block from the ground up and rebuild it with the latest digital technologies.

Alphab's Sidewalk Labs, based in New York, is partnering with the Canadian government on a high-tech project for the Toronto industrial waterfront. It will be equipped with an extensive network of sensors that collect data on everything from air quality to noise levels to human activities.

Sidewalk Labs says it will open up access to the software and systems it builds, and other companies can build services on top of them as they build apps for mobile phones.

The company intends to keep a close eye on public infrastructure and this raises concerns about data management and privacy. But Sidewalk Labs believes it can work with the community and local government to address these issues.

4. Artificial intelligence for everyone

• Technological breakthrough. Cloud-based AI makes technology cheaper and easier to use.

• Why is this important for a technocratic civilization? As a cloud service, AI can be widely available to many, even small companies, giving an impetus to the economy.

• Key players. Amazon, Google, Microsoft.

• Availability. Available now.

Artificial intelligence has so far been mainly the toy of big tech companies like Amazon, Baidu, Google and Microsoft, as well as some startups. For many other companies and parts of the economy, AI systems are too expensive and too complex to be fully implemented.

It is unclear which of these companies will take the lead in providing cloud-based AI services. But this is a huge business opportunity for the winners.

These products will be important if the artificial intelligence revolution spreads more widely in different parts of the economy.

Currently, AI is used primarily in the technology industry. Medicine, manufacturing and energy can also be transformed if they can more fully integrate technology with increased economic productivity.

5. Competitive Neural Networks

• Technological breakthrough. Two AI systems can compete with each other to create ultra-realistic original images or sounds that machines have never been able to do.

• Why is this important for a technocratic civilization? This gives machines something akin to a sense of the imagination that can help them become less dependent on humans, but also turns them into powerful tools for digital spoofing.

• Key players. Google pain, DeepMind, Nvidia

• Availability. Available now.

The solution first came to mind to Ian Goodfellow, a PhD student at the University of Montreal, during an academic discussion in a bar in 2014. This approach, known as a generative adversarial network, or GAN, takes two neural networks - the simplified mathematical models of the human brain that underlie most modern machine learning - and pits them against each other in a digital cat-and-mouse game.

Both networks are trained on the same dataset. One of them - a generator - is designed to create variations in images that she has already seen. The second, the discriminator, is asked to determine if the example she sees is similar to the images she was trained on, or if it is a fake generated by a generator.

Over time, the generator can become so good at generating images that the discriminator cannot detect forgeries. The technology has become one of the most promising advances in AI over the past decade, capable of helping machines produce results that deceive even humans.

The results are not always perfect. But because the images and sounds are often startlingly realistic, some experts believe there is a feeling in which GANs begin to understand the underlying structure of the world they see and hear. And this means that AI can gain, along with a sense of imagination, a more independent ability to understand what it sees in the world.

6. Headphones "Babylonian fish"

• Technological breakthrough. Near real-time translation now works for a wide range of languages and is easy to use.

• Why is this important for a technocratic civilization? In a globalized world, language is still an obstacle to communication.

• Key players. Google and Baidu.

• Availability. Already Available.

In the cult sci-fi novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you have to insert a yellow Babylonian fish into your ear to get instant translation into any language. Google has come up with an intermediate solution - a pair of Pixel Buds for $ 159. They work with their Pixel smartphones and the Google Translate app to translate almost online.

One person wears headphones and the other wears a phone. The owner of the headphone speaks his own language - English by default - the application translates the conversation and plays it aloud on the phone. The interlocutor answers the phone, and his answer is broadcast and played through the headphones.

So far, the development has many disadvantages: interference due to intersound, inconvenience of wearing, difficulty in setting up interaction with the phone. They promise that all this will be eliminated and the gadget will be able to greatly facilitate communication.

7. Natural gas with zero carbon content

• Technological breakthrough. The power plant efficiently and cheaply captures the carbon emitted by burning natural gas while avoiding greenhouse gas emissions.

• Why is this important for a technocratic civilization? About 22% of the world's electricity is generated by natural gas, which accounts for about 19% of the energy sector's carbon emissions.

• Major players. 8 Rivers Capital; Exelon Generation; CB & I

• Availability. Within 3-5 years.

The world is likely to depend on natural gas as one of our main sources of electricity for the foreseeable future. Cheap and readily available, it currently accounts for 22% of the world's electricity. Although it is cleaner than coal, it is still a huge source of carbon dioxide emissions. An experimental power plant near Houston is testing technology that could make clean energy from natural gas a reality.

If so, it would mean the world has a way to produce carbon-free energy from fossil fuels at a reasonable cost.

Net Power is a collaboration between technology development firm 8 Rivers Capital, Exelon Generation and power engineering firm CB&I. The company is in the process of commissioning the plant and has begun initial testing. She intends to release the results of early assessments in the coming months.

The plant puts the carbon dioxide emitted from burning natural gas under high pressure and heat, using the resulting supercritical CO2 as a "working fluid" that drives a purpose-built turbine. Most of the carbon dioxide can be recycled continuously.

8. Perfect online privacy

• Technological breakthrough. Computer scientists are perfecting a cryptographic tool for proving something without revealing the information underlying the proof.

• Why is this important for a technocratic civilization? If you need to disclose personal information in order to do something online, it will be easier to do so without risking your privacy or exposing yourself to identity theft.

• Major players. Zcash; JPMorgan Chase; ING.

• Availability. Available now.

The tool is a new cryptographic protocol called zero-knowledge proof. Although researchers have worked on this for decades, interest only peaked in the past year, thanks in part to a growing obsession with cryptocurrency, most of which are not private.

The Zcash developers used a technique called zk-SNARK (for "zero knowledge of a concise, non-interactive knowledge argument") to provide users with the ability to perform anonymous transactions. This is usually not possible in Bitcoin and most other public blockchains where transactions are visible to everyone.

For banks, this can be a way to use blockchains in payment systems without compromising the privacy of their customers.

However, for all their promises, zk-SNARKs are still very complex and slow. They also require so-called "secure configuration", which creates a cryptographic key that could jeopardize the entire system if it falls into the wrong hands. But researchers are looking at alternatives that make better use of zero-knowledge proofs and do not require such a key.

9. Genetic predictions

• Technological breakthrough. Scientists can now use your genome to predict your chances of getting heart disease or breast cancer, and even your IQ.

• Why is this important for a technocratic civilization? DNA-based predictions may be the next big public health success, but they will increase the risk of genetic discrimination.

• Key players. Helix; 23andMe; Myriad Genetics; UK Biobank; poad Institute

• Availability. Available now.

It turns out that most common diseases and many behaviors and traits, including intelligence, are not the result of one or more genes, but many work in concert. Using data from large ongoing genetic studies, scientists create so-called "polygenic risk assessments."

While new DNA tests provide credibility rather than diagnosis, they can be of great medical benefit. Pharmaceutical companies can also use points in clinical trials of preventive drugs for diseases such as Alzheimer's or heart disease. By selecting volunteers who are more likely to get sick, they can more accurately test how well medications are working.

The trouble is, predictions are far from perfect. Who wants to know if they might develop Alzheimer's disease? Polygenic scores are also controversial because they can predict any trait, not just disease. For example, they can now predict about 10 percent of a person's performance on IQ tests. As the results improve, it is likely that DNA IQ predictions will become constantly available. But how will parents and educators use this information?

10. Quantum Leap of Materials

• Technological breakthrough. IBM has modeled the electronic structure of a small molecule using a seven-cyclic quantum computer.

• Why is this important for a technocratic civilization? Understanding molecules in detail will enable chemists to develop more effective drugs and improve materials for the production and distribution of energy.

• Key players. IBM; Google; Harvard's Alán Aspuru-Guzik

• Availability. Within 5-10 years

One plausible and tempting opportunity: precise molecular design.

Chemists are already dreaming of new proteins for much more effective drugs, new electrolytes for better batteries, compounds that could turn sunlight directly into liquid fuel, and much more efficient solar cells.

We don't have these things because molecules are ridiculously difficult to model on a classical computer.

But this is a natural problem for quantum computers, which, instead of digital bits representing 1s and 0s, use “qubits,” which are themselves quantum systems. Recently, IBM researchers used a seven-qubit quantum computer to simulate a small molecule made up of three atoms.