Trends Identified
Boosted brainpower
It’s already common to use drugs to boost brainpower (whether it’s coffee, or something stronger, like modafinil), and most of the developed world now relies on their smartphones as an ‘externalised’ memory – but let’s extrapolate that out a few decades. Imagine targeted pharmaceuticals that make us think faster than currently possible, and technological implants that help us concentrate beyond normal human ability for hours or days, for example – these advances are already well underway in laboratories around the world. The question it raises is: what happens to those that cannot afford such enhancements? Could it widen inequality, and allow the rich to get richer? Then there’s also the legal and ethical issues: it’s acceptable to drink a coffee before you sit an exam, but is it ok to use an implant or a smart drug? The challenges posed by intelligence enhancement are only just emerging.
2017
10 grand challenges we’ll face by 2050
The BBC
AI's dominance in our lives
Futurist Ray Kurzweil has made a host of predictions – some inspirational, others downright alarming. One of them is the sci-fi-sounding notion that suggests artificial intelligence will one day become more powerful than human intelligence and improve itself at an exponential rate, otherwise known as ‘the singularity’.It’s far from the majority view, but few would deny that AI is only going to get more powerful. So, like in the case of gene editing, the tech and AI community will need to consider the ethical and societal implications of their work as AI comes to shape more realms of our life, from healthcare to financial markets. As for end-of-the-world extinction scenarios, it’s frankly not likely – but that shouldn’t obscure the fact that AI is poised to change how we live and work in profound ways. It is also not impossible that specific AIs could malfunction or run out of their creators’ control, leading to very human disasters, where lives are lost or millions of dollars are wiped out.
2017
10 grand challenges we’ll face by 2050
The BBC
Space exploration will open up in 2018 - Eye-catching space missions could boost dreams of setting up bases on celestial bodies
If all goes well, on November 26th 2018 NASA’s InSight unmanned spacecraft will slice into Mars’s thin atmosphere at a blistering 3.2km (2 miles) a second, open a parachute, fire retrorockets, jettison its heat shield and softly land. It will be the culmination of an exciting year of space travel.
2018
The world in 2018
The Economist
Crash course - Scientists will learn whether an asteroid is likely to collide with earth
The asteroid Bennu first made headlines back in 1999. That was when scientists discovered this halfkilometre- wide ball of ice and rock and realised that its changing orbit, which brings it close to Earth every six years, could send it crashing into our planet in a century or so. The impact would be catastrophic, releasing 10,000 times more energy than from the asteroid which exploded so spectacularly over Chelyabinsk, in Russia, in 2013. Scientists made ambitious plans to learn more.
2018
The world in 2018
The Economist
Entangled web - A big year for quantum technology
Particles that can be in two places at once, or seemingly connected across vast distances: some of the predictions of quantum mechanics are downright weird. But after nearly a century of those effects being mere laboratory curiosities, engineers are finding that they have wide-ranging practical applications. In 2018 the world will hear a lot more about them.
2018
The world in 2018
The Economist
Putting Einstein to the test - The nearest supermassive black hole will give astronomers a great laboratory
In 2015, almost exactly a century after he concocted it, Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity got a spectacular confirmation when scientists detected gravitational waves. These undulations, launched by the dances of distant, massive objects, minutely stretch the weft and warp of space time itself (and thereby of experiments designed to intercept them).
2018
The world in 2018
The Economist
Human obsolescence - How quickly will machines sweep man aside?
Predictions about artificial intelligence (AI) have a patchy record. Any greybeard in the field will tell you tales of previous hype cycles in the 1970s and 1980s that crashed when their fabulous promises were not fulfilled. Now, though, times are good again. A spurt of progress in machine learning, a sub-field of AI, has companies piling in. The technology is being used for everything from working out how best to aim advertisements at web-surfers to how to develop selfdriving cars. A landmark was working out how to beat humans at Go, an East Asian strategy game that computers have historically found hard. An AI created by DeepMind, a British subsidiary of Google, beat a human champion of the game in 2015.
2018
The world in 2018
The Economist
Silencing is golden - A new era of medicine will come into view
Medical historians of the future will describe 2018 as the year that “advanced” medicines started to become a reality. It is hard, without the benefit of hindsight, to appreciate fully the long-term significance of any individual development. Nevertheless, it is clear from a pattern of expected events during 2018 that the world is on the threshold of an exciting medical future.
2018
The world in 2018
The Economist
A new malaria vaccine finally offers real hope - High hopes for a malaria vaccine
One unsung success of the 21st century has been the fight against malaria. In 2000 the disease killed 47 people per 100,000 of those at risk. In 2015, the most recent year for which figures are available, that had dropped to 19—a fall of 60%. Even so, malaria kills 430,000 people each year. Some 70% of those who succumb are children under five.
2018
The world in 2018
The Economist
A new age of discovery for biology - An age of discovery is in prospect for biology, predicts Feng Zhang, neuroscience professor at MIT and co-inventor of CRISPR
In the era of modern science, hardly a week goes by without a big advance in biology. Although such progress will continue in 2018, it will not bring a cure for cancer, a remedy for Alzheimer’s or a pill to slow ageing. That is because biology, as a field, is largely still about exploring and not yet about engineering. Some of the greatest scientific successes of the past century have come by marrying science and engineering, from the Apollo mission to the Large Hadron Collider. Similarly, the Human Genome Project required both basic research and technology development. The disciplines at the heart of these successes—mathematics, engineering, and material and computer sciences—have propelled the technology economy, giving rise to nearly all of the most dominant companies in the world today.
2018
The world in 2018
The Economist