2020 visions of emerging tech
Eminent researchers predict where the future lies ten years from now for their areas of expertise.
Nature magazine asked a bunch of eminent researchers where the future lies ten years from now for their areas of expertise. Below is a selection of GNTIS’s (or should that be techNyou’s) favourites.
Search
Peter Norvig, Director of research at Google
Internet search as we know it is just one decade old; by 2020 it will have evolved far beyond its current bounds. Content will be a mix of text, speech, still and video images, histories of interactions with colleagues, friends, information sources and their automated proxies, and tracks of sensor readings from Global Positioning System devices, medical devices and other embedded sensors in our environment.
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The majority of search queries will be spoken, not typed, and an experimental minority will be through direct monitoring of brain signals. Users will decide how much of their lives they want to share with search engines, and in what ways.
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The results we get back will be a synthesis, not just a list. For example, today if I ask ‘compare approaches to nuclear fusion’, the major search engines agree that a general encyclopaedia article on fusion power comes first, followed by other similar articles. A decade from now, the result will summarize the major approaches, contrast their differences, automatically translate any foreign documents into my language, and then rank the results by efficacy or place them in a table or chart as appropriate. If I then ask for ‘background mathematics for fusion theory’, I will get an outline for an impromptu course concentrating on the necessary complex analysis, customized to specific applications in fusion and to my level of mathematical understanding. If I stumble, the course will be readjusted to fit my needs, or perhaps the search engine will connect me to a tutor or another student in a similar plight. Interaction with search engines will be an ongoing conversation; one that is integrated with the other ongoing tasks of our lives.
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One big challenge for search engines is to implement a measure of quality that is not based solely on popularity. Search engines must determine both relevance (is the item pertinent to the user’s query?) and quality (is the item inherently accurate, useful and understandable, independent of the query?). Current relevance measures do reasonably well. Measures of quality require better models of the concepts and relations expressed in documents and how they relate to the reality of the world, as well as models of the trustworthiness of authors. Thus, a site that claims that the Moon landings were a hoax and seems to have a coherent argument structure will be judged to be lower quality than a legitimate astronomy site, because the premises of the hoax argument are at odds with reality. Understanding and improving these models is a key challenge for the coming decade.
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Personalized medicine
David B. Goldstein, Duke University
Over the past decade, powerful genotyping tools have allowed geneticists to look at common variation across the entire human genome to identify the risk factors behind many diseases. Two striking findings will define the study of disease for the decade to come. First, common genetic variation seems to have only a limited role in determining people’s predisposition to many common diseases. Second, gene variants that are very rare in the general population can have outsized effects on predisposition.
For example, rare mutations that cause the elimination of chunks of the genome can raise the risk of diseases such as schizophrenia, epilepsy or autism by up to twentyfold. Some researchers view these major risk factors as aberrations. My guess is that as more genomes are sequenced, many other high-impact risk factors will be identified.
If so, here’s one confident but uncomfortable prediction of what personalized genomics could look like in 2020. The identification of major risk factors for disease is bound to substantially increase interest in embryonic and other screening programmes. Society has largely already accepted this principle for mutations that lead inevitably to serious health conditions. Will it be so accommodating of those who want to screen out embryos that carry, say, a twentyfold increased risk of a serious but unspecified neuropsychiatric disease?
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Some advances will be relatively uncontroversial, such as the development of tailored therapeutic drugs based on genetic differences that are otherwise innocuous. Others will be transformational, such as the identification of definitive genetic risk factors that provide new drug targets for conditions that are often poorly treated such as schizophrenia, epilepsy and cancers. Over the next decade millions of people could have their genomes sequenced. Many will be given an indication of the risks they face. Serious consideration about how to handle the practical and ethical implications of such predictive power should begin now.
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Synthetic biology
George Church, Professor of genetics, Harvard Medical School
In the past decade, the cost of reading and writing DNA has dropped a million-fold, outstripping even Moore’s law for exponentially increasing computer power. The challenge for the next decade will be to integrate molecular engineering and computing to make complex systems. The development of engineering standards for biological parts, such as how pieces of DNA snap together, will permit computer-aided design (CAD) at levels of abstraction from atomic to population scales. Biologists will have access to tools that will allow them to arrange atoms to optimize catalysis, for example, or arrange populations of organisms to cooperate in making a chemical.
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The obvious application will be in manufacturing and delivering drugs more efficiently. However, these treatments might be superseded by smarter ones, such as oral vaccines and ‘programmable’ personal stem cells or bacteria (which exploit sensors, logic and actuators harvested from natural and lab evolution) that could, for example, sense a nearby tumour, coordinate an attack and drill into the cancer cells to release toxins. Another application is in the production of chemicals, biofuels and foods — for example, the development of parasite-resistant crops or photosynthetic organisms that can double their biomass in just three hours. As costs drop, such technology will allow developing nations to leapfrog fertilizer-wasting, fossil-fuel-intensive and disease-rife farming for cleaner, more efficient systems, just as they are leapfrogging costly landlines in favour of mobile-phone networks.
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Synthetic biology is already having an impact beyond its field, and by 2020 this will have increased significantly. Myriad technologies will be possible, such as nano-memory devices that harness the ability of certain bacteria to navigate Earth’s weak magnetic field using magnetite nanoparticles. As electronic chips hit conventional manufacturing limits, they will be replaced by atomically precise and fault-tolerant biological circuits. Three-dimensional ‘bio-printers’ could make nearly all manufactured goods much less expensive. The grand challenge will be to anticipate the many unintended consequences of the synthetic biology revolution — ecological, economic and social — and to safeguard against them.
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Lasers
Thomas M. Baer, Stanford Photonics Research Center
Nicholas P. Bigelow, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester
Those who conceived and invented the laser 50 years ago this year could not have predicted the roles that it has had over the past half-century: from communications to environmental monitoring, from manufacturing to medicine, from entertainment to scientific research.
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By 2020, lasers will probably emit beams with spot sizes of the order of 1 nanometre — the size of a small molecule. Objects with dimensions less than a wavelength cannot usually be resolved using lasers or microscopy unless the photons are emitted from an aperture smaller than the object. Microscopes that incorporate laser sources with apertures the size of a single molecule will be useful in fast, direct sequencing of biomolecules such as DNA and RNA. These miniature beams will also provide hard-disk storage at densities 100 times greater than those available today — petabytes of storage in a personal computer.
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Ultraprecise, laser-based clocks will measure the drift in fundamental constants as the Universe expands, challenging our theories describing the origin and evolution of the cosmos.
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Next-generation lasers will allow the creation of new states of matter, compressing and heating materials to temperatures found only in the centres of massive stars, and at pressures that can squeeze hydrogen atoms together to a density 50 times greater than that of lead. The resulting fusion reactions may one day be harnessed to provide almost limitless carbon-free energy. Enough fusion fuel is present in the oceans to supply the current energy needs of the entire world for longer than the age of the Universe.
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By 2020, lasers will generate ultrashort bursts of photons — with pulse widths shorter than the time it takes for light to traverse an atom. These attosecond pulses will allow strobe pictures to be taken of chemical reactions — stop-action pictures of electrons in motion. When amplified to ultrahigh intensities, these lasers will be used as engines to accelerate electrons and protons to velocities close to the speed of light. This will mean that table-top accelerators can be created to generate particles with kinetic energies that rival those in today’s biggest particle accelerators at a fraction of the size and cost.
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What are the challenges to achieving these remarkable goals? Developing new laser materials, sources, optics that can survive enormously high intensities and new nanofabrication technologies. Will all of this happen in the next decade? We believe so. Like the inventors of 1960, we are probably still underestimating the full potential and impact of lasers.
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Nature 463, 26-32 (7 January 2010) | doi:10.1038/463026a; Published online 6 January 2010