Trends Identified
Autonomous Vehicles
The rise of the automobile transformed modern society. It changed where we live, what we buy, how we work, and who we call friends. As cars and trucks became commonplace, they created whole classes of jobs and made other professions obsolete. We are now on the cusp of an equally transformative technological shift in transportation: from vehicles driven by humans to vehicles that drive themselves. The long-term impact of autonomous vehicles on society is hard to predict, but also hard to overstate. The only certainty is that wherever this technology becomes ubiquitous, life will be different than it was. Google and other companies have been testing self-driving cars for several years now, with good success. These autos process vast amounts of sensory data from on-board radars, cameras, ultrasonic range-finders, GPS, and stored maps to navigate routes through ever more complex and rapidly changing traffic situations without any human involvement. Consumer use of vehicles with autonomous capabilities, however, is just beginning. Adoption will proceed gradually, through the steady implementation of increasingly intelligent safety and convenience features in otherwise ordinary cars. Some models, for example, already offer hands-off parallel parking, automatic lane-keeping, emergency braking, or even semi-autonomous cruise control. Last October, Tesla Motors made available a software package that enables a limited form of self-driving operation for owners of its vehicles to download. This trend is likely to continue as such technology matures and as legal and regulatory barriers start to fall. A half-dozen states have already authorized autonomous road vehicles, and more have plans to do so. Discussions are well underway among auto insurers and legislators about how to apportion liability and costs when self-driving cars get into crashes, as they inevitably will—although it is widely expected that these cars will prove to be much safer, on average, than driver-operated cars are today. There is plenty of room for improvement on that front. In the United States, crashes and collisions claim more than 30,000 lives and cause some 2.3 million injuries annually. Self-driving systems may have bugs—the software that runs them is complicated—but they are free from the myriad distractions and risk-taking behaviors that are the most common causes of crashes today. In the near term, semi-autonomous safety systems that engage only to prevent accidents, but that otherwise leave the driver in charge, will also likely reduce the human cost of driving significantly. Far more profound transformations will follow once cars and trucks can be trusted to pilot themselves routinely—even with no one inside. Exclusive car ownership could then cease to be the necessity of modern living that it is today for so many people. Shared cars and driverless taxi and delivery services could become the norm. This transition might help the aged and infirm—an increasing fraction of the population—to “age in place” more gracefully. Shared programmable vehicles could reduce the need for local parking structures, reduce congestion by preventing accidents and enabling safe travel at higher speeds and closer following distances, and unlock numerous secondary benefits. Like every technology, autonomous vehicles will involve drawbacks as well. In some distant day, commercial driving may no longer be a sustainable career. Shared vehicles raise some thorny privacy and security concerns. In some regions, increased affordability of car access may greatly exacerbate traffic and pollution problems rather than easing them. But the many benefits of self-driving cars and trucks are so compelling that their widespread adoption is a question of when, not if.
2016
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Organs-on-chips
Outside of Hollywood special effects shops, you won’t find living human organs floating in biology labs. Set aside all the technical difficulties with sustaining an organ outside the body—full organs are too precious as transplants to use in experiments. But many important biological studies and practical drug tests can be done only by studying an organ as it operates. A new technology could fill this need by growing functional pieces of human organs in miniature, on microchips. In 2010, Donald Ingber from the Wyss Institute developed a lung-on-a-chip, the first of its kind. The private sector quickly jumped in, with companies such as Emulate, headed by Ingber and others from the Wyss Institute, forming partnerships with researchers in industry and government, including DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. So far, various groups have reported success making miniature models of the lung, liver, kidney, heart, bone marrow, and cornea. Others will certainly follow. Each organ-on-a-chip is roughly the size of a USB memory stick. It is made from a flexible, translucent polymer. Microfluidic tubes, each less than a millimeter in diameter and lined with human cells taken from the organ of interest, run in complex patterns within the chip. When nutrients, blood, and test compounds such as experimental drugs are pumped through the tubes, the cells replicate some of the key functions of a living organ. The chambers inside the chip can be arranged to simulate the particular structure of an organ tissue, such as a tiny air sac in a lung. Air running through a channel, for example, can then very accurately simulate human breathing. Meanwhile, blood laced with bacteria can be pumped through other tubes, and scientists can then observe how the cells respond to the infection, all without any risk to a person. The technology allows scientists to see biological mechanisms and physiological behaviors never before seen. Organ microchips will also give a boost to companies developing new medicines. Their ability to emulate human organs allows for more realistic and accurate tests of drug candidates. Last year, for example, one group used a chip to mimic the way that endocrine cells secrete hormones into the blood stream and used this to perform crucial tests on a diabetes drug. Other groups are exploring the use of organs-on-chips in personalized medicine. In principle, these microchips could be constructed using stems cells derived from the patients themselves, and then tests could be run to identify individualized therapies that are more likely to succeed. There is reason to hope that miniature organs could greatly reduce the pharmaceutical industry’s reliance on animal testing of experimental compounds. Millions of animals are sacrificed each year to such tests, and the practice provokes heated controversy. Ethical considerations aside, it has proven to be immensely wasteful—animal trials rarely provide reliable insights into how humans will react to the same drug. Tests done on miniaturized human organs might do better. Military and biodefence researchers see the potential for organs-on-chips to save lives in a different way. The simulated lung, and other devices like it, could be the next big step in testing responses to biological, chemical or radiological weapons. It isn’t possible to do this today, for obvious ethical reasons.
2016
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Perovskite Solar Cells
The silicon solar cells that currently dominate the world market suffer from three fundamental limitations. A promising new way of making high-efficiency solar cells, using perovskites instead of silicon, could address all three at once and supercharge the production of electricity from sunlight. The first major limitation of silicon photovoltaic (PV) cells is that they are made from a material that is rarely found in nature in the pure, elemental form needed. While there is no shortage of silicon in the form of silicon dioxide (beach sand), it takes tremendous amounts of energy to get rid of the oxygen attached to it. Typically, manufacturers melt silicon dioxide at 1500–2000 degrees Celsius in an electrode arc furnace. The energy needed to run such furnaces sets a fundamental lower limit on the production cost of silicon PV cells and also adds to the emissions of greenhouse gases from their manufacture. Perovskites—a wide-ranging class of materials in which organic molecules, made mostly of carbon and hydrogen, bind with a metal such as lead and a halogen such as chlorine in a three-dimensional crystal lattice—can be made much more cheaply and with fewer emissions.Manufacturers can mix up batches of liquid solutions and then deposit the perovskites as thin films on surfaces of virtually any shape, no furnace needed. The film itself weighs very little. Those features thus eliminate the second big limitation of silicon solar cells, which is their rigidity and weight. Silicon PV cells work best when they are flat and housed in large, heavy panels. But those panels make large-scale installations very expensive, which is in part why you typically see them on rooftops and big solar “farms.” The third major limitation of conventional solar cells is their power conversion efficiency, which has been stuck at 25 percent for 15 years. When they were first described, perovskites offered much lower efficiency. In 2009, perovskite cells made of lead, iodide and methylammonium converted less than 4 percent of the sunlight that hit them into electricity. But the pace of improvement in perovskites has been phenomenal, thanks in part to the fact that thousands of different chemical compositions are possible within this class of material. By 2016, perovskite solar-cell efficiencies were above 20 percent—a five-fold improvement in just seven years and a stunning doubling in efficiency within just the past two years. They are now commercially competitive with silicon PV cells, and the efficiency limits of perovskites could be far higher still. Whereas silicon PV technology is now mature, perovskite PVs continue to improve rapidly. Researchers still need to answer some important questions about perovskites, such as how durable they will be when exposed to years of weathering and how to industrialize their production to churn out quantities large enough to compete with silicon wafers in the global market. But even a relatively small initial supply of these new cells could be important in bringing solar power to remote locations that are not yet connected to any electrical grid. When paired with emerging battery technology, perovskite solar cells could help transform the lives of 1.2 billion people who currently lack reliable electricity (see “Next Generation Batteries page 7”).
2016
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Open AI Ecosystem
One of the advantages that CEOs and celebrities have over ordinary workers is that they don’t need to spend much time handling the uninteresting, time-consuming aspects of daily life: scheduling appointments, making travel plans, searching for the information they want. The elite have PAs, personal assistants who handle such things. But soon— maybe even this year—most of us will be able to afford this luxury for the price of few lattes a month, thanks to the emergence of an open AI ecosystem. AI here refers, of course, to artificial intelligence. Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google’s OK Google, and Amazon’s Echo services are nifty in the way that they extract questions from speech using natural-language processing and then do a limited set of useful things, such as look for a restaurant, get driving directions, find an open slot for a meeting, or run a simple web search. But too often their response to a request for help is “Sorry, I don’t know about that” or “here’s what I found on the web.” You would never confuse these digital assistants for a human PA. Moreover, these systems are proprietary and hard for entrepreneurs to extend with new features. But over the past several years, several pieces of emerging technology have linked together in ways that make it easier to build far more powerful, human-like digital assistants— that is, into an open AI ecosystem. This ecosystem connects not only to our mobile devices and computers— and through them to our messages, contacts, finances, calendars and work files—but also to the thermostat in the bedroom, the scale in the bathroom, the bracelet on the wrist, even the car in the driveway. The interconnection of the Internet with the Internet of Things and your own personal data, all instantly available almost anywhere via spoken conversations with an AI, could unlock higher productivity and better health and happiness for millions of people within the next few years. By pooling anonymized health data and providing personalized health advice to individuals, such systems should lead to substantial improvements in health and reductions in the costs of health care. Applications of AI to financial services could reduce unintentional errors, as well as intentional (fraudulent) ones—offering new layers of protection to an aging population. The secret ingredient in this technology that has been largely lacking to date is context. Up to now, machines have been largely oblivious to the details of our work, our bodies, our lives. A human PA knows when you are interruptible, stressed, bored, tired or hungry. The PA knows who and what is important to you, and also what you would prefer to avoid. AI systems are gaining the ability to acquire and interpret contextual cues so that they can gain these skills as well. Although initially these AI assistants will not outperform the human variety, they will be useful—and roughly a thousand times less expensive. Various companies have already demonstrated AI systems that have some of these capabilities. Microsoft Research built one that knows when you are too busy to take a call (and which calls should ring through regardless) and that automatically schedules meetings at times you would likely choose yourself. Other companies such as Angel.ai have introduced services that search for flights that suit your preferences and constraints based on simple plain-English requests. Just as discretion and loyalty are prized among human PAs, digital versions will succeed only to the extent that we trust them with our security and privacy. Vendors will no doubt try to use such systems to influence our purchase choices. We will have to decide when and whether we are comfortable with that.
2016
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Optogenetics
Brains—even relatively simple ones like those in mice— are daunting in their complexity. Neuroscientists and psychologists can observe how brains respond to various kinds of stimuli, and they have even mapped how genes are expressed throughout the brain. But with no way to control when individual neurons and other kinds of brain cells turn on and off, researchers found it very difficult to explain how brains do what they do, at least not in the detail needed to thoroughly understand—and eventually cure—conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and major depression. Scientists tried using electrodes to record neuronal activity, and that works to some extent. But it is a crude and imprecise method because electrodes stimulate every neuron nearby and cannot distinguish among different kinds of brain cells. A breakthrough came in 2005, when neurogeneticists demonstrated a way to use genetic engineering to make neurons respond to particular colors of light. The technique, known as optogenetics, built on research done in the 1970s on pigment proteins, known collectively as rhodopsins and encoded by the opsin gene family. These proteins work like light-activated ion pumps. Microbes, lacking eyes, use rhodopsins to help extract energy and information from incoming light. By inserting one or more opsin genes into particular neurons in mice, biologists are now able to use visible light to turn specific neurons on or off at will. Over the years, scientists have tailored versions of these proteins that respond to distinct colors, ranging from deep red to green to yellow to blue. By putting different genes into different cells, they use pulses of light of various colors to activate one neuron and then several of its neighbours in a precisely timed sequence. That is a crucial advance because in living brains, timing is everything. A signal issued at one moment may have the complete opposite effect from the same signal sent out a few milliseconds later. The invention of optogenetics greatly accelerated the pace of progress in brain science. But experimenters were limited by the difficulty of delivering light deep into brain tissue. Now ultrathin, flexible microchips, each one hardly bigger than a neuron, are being tested as injectable devices to put nerves under wireless control. They can be inserted deep into a brain with minimal damage to overlying tissue. Optogenetics has already opened new doors to brain disorders, including tremors in Parkinson’s disease, chronic pain, vision damage and depression. The neurochemistry of the brain is clearly important for some brain conditions, which is why drugs can help improve symptoms—up to a point. But where the high-speed electrical circuitry of the brain is also disturbed, optogenetic research, especially when enhanced by emerging wireless microchip technology, could offer new routes to treatment. Recent research suggests, for example, that in some cases non-invasive light therapy that shuts down specific neurons can treat chronic pain, providing a welcome alternative to opoids. With mental disorders affecting one in four people globally and psychiatric diseases a leading source of disability, the better understanding of the brain that advanced optogenetics will provide cannot come soon enough.
2016
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Systems Metabolic Engineering
Trace the products we buy and use every day—from plastics and fabrics to cosmetics and fuels—back to their origins, and you’ll find that the vast majority were made using stuff that came from deep underground. The factories that make the products of modern life do so, by and large, out of chemicals of various kinds. And those chemicals come from plants powered primarily by fossil fuels that transform feedstocks—also mainly petrochemicals—into myriad other compounds. It would be much better for the climate, and possibly better for the global economy as well, to make many of the chemical inputs to industry from living organisms instead of from oil, gas, and coal. We already use agricultural products in this way, of course—we wear cotton clothes and live in wooden houses—but plants are not the only source of ingredients. Microbes arguably offer even more potential, in the long term, to make inexpensive materials in the incredible variety of properties that we now take for granted. Rather than digging the raw materials of modern life from the ground, we can instead “brew” them in giant bioreactors filled with living microorganisms. For bio-based chemical production to really take off, it must compete with conventional chemical production on both price and performance. This goal now seems within reach, thanks to advances in systems metabolic engineering, a discipline that tweaks the biochemistry of microbes so that more of their energy and resources go into synthesizing useful chemical products. Sometimes the tweaks involve changing the genetic makeup of the organism, and sometimes it involves more complex engineering of microbial metabolism and brewing conditions as a system. With recent advances in synthetic biology, systems biology, and evolutionary engineering, metabolic engineers are now able to create biological systems that manufacture chemicals that are hard to produce by conventional means (and thus expensive). In one recent successful demonstration, microbes were customized to make PLGA [poly(lactate-co-glycolate)], an implantable, biodegradable polymer used in surgical sutures, implants, and prosthetics, as well as in drug delivery materials for cancer and infections. Systems metabolic engineering has also been used to create strains of yeast that make opioids for pain treatment. These drugs are widely needed in the world, and in particular in the developing world, where pain is insufficiently managed today. The range of chemicals that can be made using metabolic engineering is widening every year. Although the technique is not likely to replicate all of the products currently made from petrochemicals, it is likely to yield novel chemicals that could never be made affordably from fossil fuels—in particular, complex organic compounds that currently are very expensive because they must be extracted from plants or animals that make them in only tiny amounts. Unlike fossil fuels, chemicals made from microbes are indefinitely renewable and emit relatively little greenhouse gas—indeed, some could potentially even serve to reverse the flow of carbon from Earth to atmosphere by absorbing carbon dioxide or methane and incorporating it into products that are eventually buried as solid waste. As biochemical production scales up to large industrial use, it will be important to avoid both competing with food production for land use and also accidental releases of engineered microorganisms into the environment. Although these highly engineered microbes will likely be at a great disadvantage in the wild, it’s best to keep them safely in their tanks, happily working away at making useful stuff for the benefit of humanity and the environment.
2016
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Fuel cell vehicles
“Fuel cell” vehicles have been long promised, as they potentially offer several major advantages over electric and hydrocarbon-powered vehicles. However, the technology has only now begun to reach the stage where automotive companies are planning to launch them for consumers. Initial prices are likely to be in the range of $70,000, but should come down significantly as volumes increase within the next couple of years. Unlike batteries, which must be charged from an external source, fuel cells generate electricity directly, using fuels such as hydrogen or natural gas. In practice, fuel cells and batteries are combined, with the fuel cell generating electricity and the batteries storing this energy until demanded by the motors that drive the vehicle. Fuel cell vehicles are therefore hybrids, and will likely also deploy regenerative braking – a key capability for maximizing efficiency and range. Unlike battery-powered electric vehicles, fuel cell vehicles behave as any conventionally fuelled vehicle. With a long cruising range – up to 650 km per tank (the fuel is usually compressed hydrogen gas) – a hydrogen fuel refill only takes about three minutes. Hydrogen is clean-burning, producing only water vapour as waste, so fuel cell vehicles burning hydrogen will be zero-emission, an important factor given the need to reduce air pollution. There are a number of ways to produce hydrogen without generating carbon emissions. Most obviously, renewable sources of electricity from wind and solar sources can be used to electrolyse water – though the overall energy efficiency of this process is likely to be quite low. Hydrogen can also be split from water in high-temperature nuclear reactors or generated from fossil fuels such as coal or natural gas, with the resulting CO2 captured and sequestered rather than released into the atmosphere. As well as the production of cheap hydrogen on a large scale, a significant challenge is the lack of a hydrogen distribution infrastructure that would be needed to parallel and eventually replace petrol and diesel filling stations. Long distance transport of hydrogen, even in a compressed state, is not considered economically feasible today. However, innovative hydrogen storage techniques, such as organic liquid carriers that do not require high-pressure storage, will soon lower the cost of long-distance transport and ease the risks associated with gas storage and inadvertent release. Mass-market fuel cell vehicles are an attractive prospect, because they will offer the range and fuelling convenience of today’s diesel and petrol-powered vehicles while providing the benefits of sustainability in personal transportation. Achieving these benefits will, however, require the reliable and economical production of hydrogen from entirely low-carbon sources, and its distribution to a growing fleet of vehicles (expected to number in the many millions within a decade).
2015
Top 10 emerging technologies of 2015
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Next-generation robotics
The popular imagination has long foreseen a world where robots take over all manner of everyday tasks.This robotic future has stubbornly refused to materialize, however, with robots still limited to factory assembly lines and other controlled tasks. Although heavily used (in the automotive industry, for instance) these robots are large and dangerous to human co-workers; they have to be separated by safety cages. Advances in robotics technology are making human-machine collaboration an everyday reality. Better and cheaper sensors make a robot more able to understand and respond to its environment. Robot bodies are becoming more adaptive and flexible, with designers taking inspiration from the extraordinary flexibility and dexterity of complex biological structures, such as the human hand. And robots are becoming more connected, benefiting from the cloud-computing revolution by being able to access instructions and information remotely, rather than having to be programmed as a fully autonomous unit. The new age of robotics takes these machines away from the big manufacturing assembly lines, and into a wide variety of tasks. Using GPS technology, just like smartphones, robots are beginning to be used in precision agriculture for weed control and harvesting. In Japan, robots are being trialled in nursing roles: they help patients out of bed and support stroke victims in regaining control of their limbs. Smaller and more dextrous robots, such as Dexter Bot, Baxter and LBR iiwa, are designed to be easily programmable and to handle manufacturing tasks that are laborious or uncomfortable for human workers. Indeed, robots are ideal for tasks that are too repetitive or dangerous for humans to undertake, and can work 24 hours a day at a lower cost than human workers. In reality, new-generation robotic machines are likely to collaborate with humans rather than replace them. Even considering advances in design and artificial intelligence, human involvement and oversight will remain essential. There remains the risk that robots may displace human workers from jobs, although previous generations of automation have tended to lead to higher productivity and growth with benefits throughout the economy. Decades-old fears of networked robots running out of control may become more salient with next generation robotics linked into the web – but more likely familiarisation as people employ domestic robots to do household chores will reduce fears rather than fan them. And new research into social robots – that know how to collaborate and build working alliances with humans – means that a future where robots and humans work together, each to do what it does best – is a strong likelihood. Nevertheless, however, the next generation of robotics poses novel questions for fields from philosophy to anthropology about the human relationship to machines.
2015
Top 10 emerging technologies of 2015
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Recyclable thermoset plastics
Plastics are divided into thermoplastics and thermoset plastics. The former can be heated and shaped many times, and are ubiquitous in the modern world, comprising everything from children’s toys to lavatory seats. Because they can be melted down and reshaped, thermoplastics are generally recyclable. Thermoset plastics however can only be heated and shaped once, after which molecular changes mean that they are “cured”, retaining their shape and strength even when subject to intense heat and pressure.Due to this durability, thermoset plastics are a vital part of our modern world, and are used in everything from mobile phones and circuit boards to the aerospace industry. But the same characteristics that have made them essential in modern manufacturing also make them impossible to recycle. As a result, most thermoset polymers end up as landfill. Given the ultimate objective of sustainability, there has long been a pressing need for recyclability in thermoset plastics. In 2014 critical advances were made in this area, with the publication of a landmark paper in the journal Science announcing the discovery of new classes of thermosetting polymers that are recyclable. Called poly(hexahydrotriazine)s, or PHTs, these can be dissolved in strong acid, breaking apart the polymer chains into component monomers that can then be reassembled into new products. Like traditional unrecyclable thermosets, these new structures are rigid, resistant to heat and tough, with the same potential applications as their unrecyclable forerunners. Although no recycling is 100% efficient, this innovation – if widely deployed – should speed up the move towards a circular economy with a big reduction in landfill waste from plastics. We expect recyclable thermoset polymers to replace unrecyclable thermosets within five years, and to be ubiquitous in newly manufactured goods by 2025.
2015
Top 10 emerging technologies of 2015
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Precise genetic-engineering techniques
Conventional genetic engineering has long caused controversy. However, new techniques are emerging that allow us to directly “edit” the genetic code of plants to make them, for example, more nutritious or better able to cope with a changing climate. Currently, the genetic engineering of crops relies on the bacterium agrobacterium tumefaciens to transfer desired DNA into the target genome. The technique is proven and reliable, and despite widespread public fears, there is a consensus in the scientific community that genetically modifying organisms using this technique is no more risky than modifying them using conventional breeding. However, while agrobacterium is useful, more precise and varied genome-editing techniques have been developed in recent years.These include ZFNs, TALENS and, more recently, the CRISPR-Cas9 system, which evolved in bacteria as a defence mechanism against viruses. CRISPR-Cas9 system uses an RNA molecule to target DNA, cutting to a known, user-selected sequence in the target genome. This can disable an unwanted gene or modify it in a way that is functionally indistinguishable from a natural mutation. Using “homologous recombination”, CRISPR can also be used to insert new DNA sequences, or even whole genes, into the genome in a precise way. Another aspect of genetic engineering that appears poised for a major advance is the use of RNA interference (RNAi) in crops. RNAi is effective against viruses and fungal pathogens, and can also protect plants against insect pests, reducing the need for chemical pesticides. Viral genes have been used to protect papaya plants against the ringspot virus, for example, with no sign of resistance evolving in over a decade of use in Hawaii. RNAi may also benefit major staple-food crops, protecting wheat against stem rust, rice against blast, potato against blight and banana against fusarium wilt. Many of these innovations will be particularly beneficial to smaller farmers in developing countries. As such, genetic engineering may become less controversial, as people recognize its effectiveness at boosting the incomes and improving the diets of millions of people. In addition, more precise genome editing may allay public fears, especially if the resulting plant or animal is not considered transgenic because no foreign genetic material is introduced. Taken together, these techniques promise to advance agricultural sustainability by reducing input use in multiple areas, from water and land to fertilizer, while also helping crops to adapt to climate change.
2015
Top 10 emerging technologies of 2015
World Economic Forum (WEF)