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MIT Picks Top 10 Emerging Technologies 70

Posted by Zonk from the emerge-you-might-techs dept.
DeviceGuru writes "MIT's Technology Review magazine has just published its annual list of the top ten emerging technologies. Dubbed the TR10, these revolutionary innovations are poised to have a dramatic impact on computing, medicine, nanotechnology, our energy infrastructure, and more, say the magazine's editors. The TR10 technologies this time around are: cellulolytic enzymes, reality mining, connectomics, offline web apps, graphene transistors, atomic magnetometers, wireless power, nanoradio, probabilistic chips, modeling surprise. More details on the TR10 appear in the March/April edition of Technology Review."
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MIT Picks Top 10 Emerging Technologies More

MIT Picks Top 10 Emerging Technologies

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  • hasn't this been posted before?

  • Check out the original (Score:5, Funny)

    by brianerst ( 549609 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2008 @07:35PM (#22734110) Homepage
    Read the original [slashdot.org], then steal all the best quotes and look like a genius...

  • Offline web apps (Score:5, Funny)

    by Annymouse Cowherd ( 1037080 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2008 @07:36PM (#22734124) Homepage
    Offline web applications, aka applications...

    • Re:Offline web apps (Score:4, Funny)

      by QuantumG ( 50515 ) * <qg@biodome.org> on Wednesday March 12, 2008 @07:40PM (#22734168) Homepage Journal
      Yes, all the undocumented apis and annoying workarounds of the web, now in your desktop app!

      Was talking to a guy the other day who said he was once going to write an xml/css/javascript rendering engine for wxWidgets. So the same app could run on your desktop or through a web browser and you never have to deal with web 2.0 crap.

      • Was talking to a guy the other day who said he was once going to write an xml/css/javascript rendering engine for wxWidgets. So the same app could run on your desktop or through a web browser and you never have to deal with web 2.0 crap.

        couldn't you just write a plain old app to do the same thing? why do you need to run a widget that does a dumbed down version of something an os is designed to do already (good example... clocks are some of the more popular widgets)? personally it seems to me that the only advantage of running any web app is on an intranet (mainly in a school or business) where you want to distribute the functionality of an application in a shared environment with a closed set of data or database functionality- otherwise t

        • Re:Offline web apps (Score:5, Insightful)

          by QuantumG ( 50515 ) * <qg@biodome.org> on Wednesday March 12, 2008 @11:51PM (#22735810) Homepage Journal
          You're actually asking me why webapps are popular?

          Because install software is too damn hard and insecure?

          I'm not a huge *fan* of webapps but they exist for a reason.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by plopez ( 54068 )
            Because install software is too damn hard and insecure?
            Ever here about pushing out installs from a central server. Hell, you can even do that with MS apps these days.

          • install software is more seure for the manufacurer but less secure for the user- we ceratainly couldn't use it in my line of work

        • clocks are some of the more popular widgets)? personally it seems to me that the only advantage of running any web app is on an intranet
          If you run a clock as a web app, make sure that you don't cache the results, because, well, you know: "Hey, it's been 11:41 for the past hour! WTF?"

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by plopez ( 54068 )
        you forgot "slow and bloated"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Belial6 ( 794905 )
      Offline web applications have been available via the Domino server since 2002.

  • Is this worth much? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The Ancients ( 626689 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2008 @07:49PM (#22734240) Homepage

    Is this so much the top 10 emerging technologies, or what TR find interesting?

    "emerging" is ambiguous - does it mean technologies that will have a definite effect on our way of life, technologies that show promise as maybe some day becoming useful, or...? This seems a little hit and miss to me, although I guess by definition it has to be.

    • Re:Is this worth much? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wizardforce ( 1005805 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2008 @08:04PM (#22734356) Journal

      Is this so much the top 10 emerging technologies, or what TR find interesting?
      the latter. top ten lists like these are subjective by nature. What I may find interesting and worth putting on a top ten list, you may think are not and vice versa. Arguably they glance over *a lot* of tech that has potential to change this whole planet in dramatic ways. protein design and synthetic biology for example. being able to control the properties of a lifeform to the point where it is capable of doing things that biology hasn't evolved in the last 3.5 billion years. quantum computers that can crack codes in hours rather than the many millenia it takes us now. DNA based data storage- two fold applications- allowing storage of data billions of times that of what is currently possible and the synthetic biology allowing it can be used in biological systems with unimaginable redundancy and capabilities. computationally driven AI- modelling brains from the neuron up such as deep blue which is now modelling a system of 10,000 neurons. space travel with solar sails and air breathing rocket engines with the possibility of taking the cost of launching things into orbit down 10-100 fold. there's a lot more stuff going on that make this list fairly irrelevant.
      • See - I found your list a whole lot more interesting!

      • DNA based data storage- two fold applications- allowing storage of data billions of times that of what is currently possible and the synthetic biology allowing it can be used in biological systems with unimaginable redundancy and capabilities. computationally driven AI- modelling brains from the neuron up

        A woman who never forgets and is always right?

        Oh no you don't. Step away from that lab bench. Now.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No, it's not. MIT's opinion is ridiculously overhyped. They were pushing VR like it was the second coming, and they ignored the WWW as it developed right under their noses. [Not going to look for the citation, if you were around back then, you remember it.] Their predictions only serve to identify what is over-hyped.

  • Nothing revolutionary (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Hoplite3 ( 671379 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2008 @07:58PM (#22734302)
    Everything on that list is either evolutionary technology (growth down some already determined path) or lame. Some are both.

    Here's my take:

    Cellulolytic enzymes -- we already (a) have some that work and (b) use them to process biomass into biofuel. Better ones are of course great, but this is an evolution...

    Reality mining -- What a douch-bag term. Devices watch your every move and report helpful hints to the government -- er, I mean you.

    Connectomics -- Brain wiring diagrams. Neat, but it's too soon to tell if it'll reveal anything exciting.

    Offline Web applications -- I've got an idea, instead of running my offline web app in a browser, let's cut out that part and run it with native system libraries. Okay, now lets deliver the application through a simple package system. I'll call this "dpkg"! (Alternative smart-ass comment: Oh, you mean Java?)

    Graphene transistors -- Damn cool. But we have transistors. These are just smaller transistors. Evolutionary.

    Atomic magnetometers -- Really small sensors are neat. Lose the "war on terror" retoric in the summary. These might actually allow some neat things, but it's a bit early to say.

    Wireless power -- People have wanted to do this for a while, but all comers so far have big losses associated with them. Why, in a power-short future, would we be doing this?

    Nanoradio -- Nifty. Especially if used for communication between multiple tiny machines ... too early to tell how it'll sort itself out.

    Probabilistic chips -- Right. So lets run our calculation enough times that we can have good statistics about the mean result and the standard deviation. Wait, now we've lost out power savings?

    Modeling surprise -- Douche-baggery.

    Look, my main point is that we can't predict revolutions in science and technology. All we can do is say advance x will help with problem y, but that's evolutionary thinking. Revolutions, by their very nature, cause huge changes in what people do and what they think can be done. You can't predict it ahead of time. We've gotten very good at grinding away at the next evolutionary step in technology, and that's really neat. Many of the ideas above have exciting applications. But I really hate the "revolutionary" and "disruptive" technology ideas.

    • Re:Nothing revolutionary (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wizardforce ( 1005805 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2008 @08:25PM (#22734508) Journal

      Look, my main point is that we can't predict revolutions in science and technology. All we can do is say advance x will help with problem y, but that's evolutionary thinking. Revolutions, by their very nature, cause huge changes in what people do and what they think can be done. You can't predict it ahead of time.
      exactly. a great deal of the science and technology we now enjoy couldn't possibly have been forseen as it was developed by accident! who would have thought penicillin from a mold could keep millions from dying of bacterial infections? or that gel electrophoresis was developed after a chance observation that clay particles in a liquid environment migrate under an applied electrical field- this is now used for analysis of DNA- it has even lead to the freeing of wrongfully convicted people. sulfanilamide drugs were originally dyes found to have an antibiotic effect. the drug now known as viagra was originally developed to help with heart disease [vasodilator] it didn't help with that but it did help with something completely different... point being that to attempt to predict the next 20 years is idiotic, 50 years is utter lunacy and any list of revolutionary tech fails to account for the fact that a lot of what we have and will have won't be developed on purpose.
    • Yeah agree...the offline web application made me laugh. Most of the applications I develop already leverage the web with HTTP parsing and MySql...It pisses me off when people start treating vitrual machines and web browsers as an operating system.

      Pretty soon everyone will be programming for a browser built inside of another browser thats built on a virtual machine...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Belial6 ( 794905 )
        Offline Web based applications are useful in limited cases. Basically, first you get a list of applications that make sense to have in a browser in the first place, then trim that down to the ones that do not need immediate feedback from other people or systems. Email is a good example of this. While I prefer a native client, I have to admit that a web based email client is just fine for many people. The big problem with most web based email clients is that when you are not connected to the server/inter

    • Graphene transistors -- Damn cool. But we have transistors. These are just smaller transistors. Evolutionary.

      Okay, so this technology is lame because it's just a smaller version of something we have....

      Atomic magnetometers -- Really small sensors are neat. Lose the "war on terror" retoric in the summary. These might actually allow some neat things, but it's a bit early to say.
      [...]
      Nanoradio -- Nifty. Especially if used for communication between multiple tiny machines ... too early to tell how it'll sort itself out.

      But these are "neat" and "nifty?" I'm not following the logic here.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by F34nor ( 321515 ) *
        These are neat and nifty becasue we may have moved the detectors from the equivilent of tubes to transistors. That is a revolutionary change to this technology. This is especaily interesting when combined with the recent visual mapping techniques for fMRI. With smaller, lower power, cheaper detectors, that also require a far lower magnetic fields that mythical ability to read minds is one serious step closer. I for one welcome our new brainscan overloards.
    • > Connectomics -- Brain wiring diagrams. Neat, but it's too soon to tell if it'll reveal anything exciting.

      It won't. No neuron is more than 6 connections from any other, the average being around 3. The connections do not dictate the function, the simultaneous activity (synchrony) of a collection of 1000 to 10000 neurons do. These are called Hebbian Cellular Assemblies.

      Without knowing which neurons are operating with certain others, we'd have to consider all the possibilities, which is 10 billion neurons
    • Look, my main point is that we can't predict revolutions in science and technology.

      James Burke reads slashdot? Cool.

  • Most of these are totally ridiculous (Score:4, Interesting)

    by WillAffleckUW ( 858324 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2008 @08:03PM (#22734352) Homepage Journal
    And I work in medical genetics and follow new technologies in energy and other fields, so I think somebody just did a braindump without thinking about what the implications are, quite frankly.

  • News? (Score:2, Informative)

    by TurinPT ( 1226568 )
    I might be missing something but what exactly does this story say that wasn't said 1 month ago? it even links to the same article...

  • In 2001 #4 was Digital Rights Management (Score:3, Interesting)

    by KarmaRundi ( 880281 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2008 @10:23PM (#22735272)
    Just one paragraph given to the skeptics. http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/12264/?a=f [technologyreview.com]
  • I have never seen their magazine before but this is basically just an advertisement to get people to subscribe. I get the marketing value of it but usually Slashdot folks see through this sort of thing.
  • I really dont understand this. Out of pure speculation ,it seems to me that taping the sap from a live tree and turning that into biofuel would be more practical ????? Please comment ...
  • TR is (has become?) a promotion rag, and Jason Pontin is a douche.
    • I don't complain, it's OK to call me a douche--but what is "promotional" about Technology Review? It's the least commercial magazine in America. Indeed, if you designing a technology magazine for commercial success and advertising revenue, you would never give it so broad a range of subjects (essentially all technology) and make it focussed on emerging technologies (essentially technologies that aren't products yet and can't be sold).

      • Darn, I cuss out somebody, and they actually reply.

        I've received TR a few years ago, when I believe you took over as the editor. One memorable article is about this guy that was working on aging and (im)mortality, and your editorial attacking him in a highly personal manner as a loon on some moral ground that is incomprehensible to me (and apparently many of the readers according to the letters published). My calling you "douche" is crude, but equivalent to your personal attack on that guy - no, I'm no

        • Well, kind of... I was hired by the previous publisher because I had been the editor of Red Herring, a business and technology magazine during the boom that was popular with entrepreneurs and VCs. The old publisher wanted me to make TR like the magazine you describe: focused on risk, progress, time-to-market, payoff. But when MIT made me the publisher as well as the editor the chief three years ago, I returned the magazine to its historical focus on emerging technologies. It's not a business magazine at al
  • Nikola Tesla [wikipedia.org] would be proud. People havent given up on what made him broke. You can get some of the story on what he did over at the Mind Course [mind-course.com] page. Amazing to think what was "radical" back then is now "the next big thing" today. Sad.
  • To start with, I'm not sure how the magnetometer guy is going to revolutionize MRI. The signal recorded in MRI isn't magnetic, it's a radio signal. I suppose you could detect that with a good enough magnetometer, but would it be worth it? A coil of wire is awfully sensitive. The magnet is used to produce the signal, and a magnetometer doesn't help you do that. The big magnets are needed to produce a stronger signal, which gives you a better signal to noise ratio.

    The probabilistic processors extending b

  • Palem has developed a way for chips to use significantly less power in exchange for a small loss of precision. ... chips could be designed to produce the correct answer sometimes, but only come close the rest of the time. Because the errors would be small, so would their effects: in essence, Palem believes that in computing, close enough is often good enough.

    I liye thet ideb. Msre pow4r t8 Dr' Salem!
           
  • Where's my friggin flying car??!!!
  • Well, I can't see surprise (or surprisal as it is also known) as a major breakthrough, at least not in cognitive psychology. All it does it tell you how far something (e.g. a word) deviates from some (corpus based) expectation. It does provide another way of looking at things like reading times and difficulty of sentences, but it is just another measure of something like relevance, probability (actually, surprisal is defined as the -log of the conditional probability of an event, just like in information th
  • Reality mining? Offline web apps? Surprise modeling? OMG!! Microsoft researchers!? How did microsoft get in there!!! Maybe their work was lacking surprise. What next, XML2?

  • People are seriously working on about six of those thirty topics. 20% hit rate.
  • Hmmm. Pretty soon all we'll need are these computers, let's call them "workstations", that have local storage for running applications faster and ...

    Where have I seen this before? ;-)
  • > The TR10 technologies this time around are: cellulolytic enzymes, reality mining,
    > connectomics, offline web apps, graphene transistors, atomic magnetometers, wireless
    > power, nanoradio, probabilistic chips, modeling surprise.

    No flesh clones of Sandra Bullock, with an AI brain programmed to love me, deeply and physically love me?
  • This will become the new "Vaporware" list.
  • Probabilistic chips are essentially analog. In the analog world; the hiss is the inaccuracy in the least-significant digits.

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