TR Picks 10 Emerging Technologies of 08 76
arktemplar suggests Technology Review for their annual list of 10 emerging technologies that the editors believe will be particularly important over the next few years. Quoting: "This is work ready to emerge from the lab, in a broad range of areas: energy, computer hardware and software, biological imaging, social interactions. Two of the technologies — cellulolytic enzymes and atomic magnetometers — are efforts by leading scientists to solve critical problems, while five — surprise modeling, connectomics, probabilistic CMOS, reality mining, and offline Web applications — represent whole new ways of looking at problems. And three — graphene transistors, nanoradio, and wireless power — are amazing feats of engineering that have created something entirely new."
Not so bad, really, except that it's bad... (Score:3, Insightful)
Brain-machine interface has made some real progress, but sorry you can't get a videogame controller just yet. Wait another 5 years. (And such things must ALWAYS be voluntary! Never, ever, ever mandatory. Ever. Period.)
"Flxible" transistors are a reality and today you can buy a gadget with a roll-up screen. Okay, the transistors themselves are not flexible, but everything else is. The transistors are small enough to not matter.
Data mining has been undermining your privacy and personal security and property ownership rights as we discuss this, TODAY. If you think this is not affecting your life, you must have been living in a cave.
Same for "Digital Rights Management"
Same for biometrics.
Contrary to what others here have been saying, Dragon Naturally Speaking and similar programs are NOT "Natural Language Processing". They are, instead, language translaton programs. The former refers to extracting actual meaning, of some kind, from the input. The latter means little more than determining what words you said closely enough to perform some pre-programmed actions. The two things are worlds apart. There has been some real progress in the latter... but computers really don't "understand" language any better than they did decades ago.
I do not know about the others so far. But don't go thinking that these things have not affected your life. They have. And from what I can see, mostly negatively...
Re:OFFLINE WEB APPS ARE NOT (Score:3, Insightful)
New ideas? (Score:3, Insightful)
Surprise Modeling: "To monitor surprises effectively, says Horvitz, the machine has to have both knowledge--a good cognitive model of what humans find surprising--and foresight: some way to predict a surprising event in time for the user to do something about it." You mean like weather forecasting? Isn't most, if not all scientific pursuit dedicated to the understanding of natural systems so that we can know what to expect where once we were attributing events to Zeus and such?
Connectonomics: "Lichtman is a neuroscientist, and the image is the first comprehensive wiring diagram of part of the mammalian nervous system. The lines denote axons, the long, hairlike extensions of nerve cells that transmit signals from one neuron to the next; the leaves are synapses, the connections that the axons make with other neurons or muscle cells. The diagram is the fruit of an emerging field called "connectomics," which attempts to physically map the tangle of neural circuits that collect, process, and archive information in the nervous system." --Well that's very nice, but perhaps he ought to examine the role DC currents play in cellular and nervous system activity. Broken bones don't knit back together through the application of electricity for no reason. What else does low-current DC electricity do in the human body? Actually, quite a lot; a fair bit is known about this subject, but that information seems to elude the Dr. Lichtmans of the world. --And why shouldn't it, what with such massive interest in the development of the following technological bonanzas. . .
Wireless Power: "Having difficulty imagining a vast infrastructure of wires extending into every city, building, and room, Tesla figured that wireless was the way to go. He drew up plans for a tower, about 57 meters tall, that he claimed would transmit power to points kilometers away, and even started to build one on Long Island. Though his team did some tests, funding ran out before the tower was completed. The promise of airborne power faded rapidly as the industrial world proved willing to wire up." --Yup. Tesla. And all this time I was thankful he never achieved his goal in this regard. Cell phones are bad enough [amazon.com] as it is, which is why I expect out of all these 'emerging' technologies, that this one will be unstoppable.
Reality Mining: "Researchers have been mining data from the physical world for years, says Alex Kass, a researcher who leads reality-mining projects at Accenture, a consulting and technology services firm. Sensors in manufacturing plants tell operators when equipment is faulty, and cameras on highways monitor traffic flow. But now, he says, "reality mining is getting personal."" What? So the massive profit growth [dmnews.com] of the whole Air Miles thing has up until now been sold simply as a way to keep track of how much milk is left in stock at the local 7/11? Gosh. Who knew?
Other people have commented on the bio-fuels thing, and the fact that we've had Java and Flash for some time now, and anyway I have to leave the house in a few minutes. So enjoy the future. Ciao.
-FL