Every year new technologies emerge that make people's lives easier and more exciting, and each year the editors and writers of the popular MIT Technology Review website select the best of the best from these technologies.
So in 2020, they published their annual list of 10 breakthrough technologies that will change the world. And we present it to you.
10. Study of climate change
As recently as the beginning of this decade, scientists were reluctant to draw parallels between extreme weather events such as hurricanes and storms and climate change.
But the amount of data that has accumulated over the past few years makes it clear that climate change has almost certainly played a role in causing severe weather events. Understanding this connection will help build simulations and prepare for risks (floods, tropical storms, etc.) as global warming intensifies.
One of the most breakthrough technologies of 2020 will also help us understand how to rebuild our cities and infrastructure for a climate-changed world.
9. Anti-aging drugs
To be forever young and healthy is still an unrealizable dream of mankind. However, the first senolytic drugs are already being tested, which help prevent various ailments by slowing down the natural aging process. They remove senescent cells that accumulate with age. Such cells do not multiply or die, but can degenerate into malignant cells or provoke inflammation, which suppresses normal cell regeneration mechanisms and poisons the microenvironment of tissues and the entire body.
In June 2019, the first positive results of using senolytics for patients with knee osteoarthritis were reported. Similar drugs are already being developed for the treatment of age-related eye and lung diseases.
8. Differential Privacy
How do you collect statistics on millions of Americans while keeping their identities private? By law, the U.S. Census Bureau must ensure that citizens' identities are not compromised. To do this, they add "noise" to the statistics. For example, they can make some people look younger, others older, or turn black people into white people or vice versa.
And differential privacy is a mathematical method that makes this process manageable by measuring how much privacy is increased when “noise” is added to the data. This method is already used by Apple and Facebook to collect aggregate data without identifying individual users.
7. Miniature artificial intelligence
In their quest to create powerful artificial intelligence, researchers are using ever-increasing amounts of data, relying on centralized cloud services.
But how do you cram a huge amount of data into a miniature AI? With the help of new algorithms that will allow you to compress existing deep learning algorithms without losing all their capabilities. These are the algorithms that are implemented in the new generation of specialized AI chips that will be used in our smartphones and other gadgets.
The simplest example is Google's "smart assistant." Last May, the company announced that its mobile Google Assistant could now work without sending requests to a remote server. In iOS 13 for Apple smartphones, Siri speech recognition and the QuickType keyboard work locally. IBM and Amazon have also adopted the capabilities of miniature AI.
So in the future, the AI used in a mobile phone may be smarter than some users.
6. Quantum Supremacy
Quantum computers could, in theory, quickly solve problems that would take today's supercomputers centuries, if not millennia, to solve, such as simulating the precise behavior of molecules to create new drugs and materials.
Last October, Google demonstrated “quantum supremacy.” A computer with 53 qubits—the building blocks of quantum computing—did the calculation in three minutes, which Google says would take the world’s largest supercomputer 10,000 years (1.5 billion times longer than a quantum computer).
However, this is still a demo version, and the company still has to create a computer that can solve useful problems. And this is an extremely difficult task: the more qubits, the harder it is to maintain their fragile quantum state.
5. Satellite mega-complexes
The ability to build, launch and operate tens of thousands of satellites in orbit is no longer science fiction, but reality. The SpaceX project alone plans to send 4.5 times more satellites into orbit in one decade than during the entire "satellite" period.
This will help spread the internet and improve communications on Earth. However, such a technological breakthrough has a downside. Some researchers fear that these objects will interfere with astronomical research. The only thing worse than that is the prospect of satellite collisions, which will create a large amount of space debris.
4. Molecules discovered by AI
You can hardly count the molecules that could potentially be used to create valuable medicines by hand. Their number, according to researchers' estimates, reaches 10 to the power 60. That's more than the number of atoms in the solar system.
And thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), scientists can obtain huge databases of existing molecules and their properties, which will allow them to create new drugs faster and cheaper.
3. Electronic money
Electronic money like WebMoney is nothing new in Russia. But what about introducing a single digital currency across the country? This technology can truly be called interesting and groundbreaking.
Last June, Facebook unveiled a “global digital currency” called Libra. The idea was not well received and the project may be shelved.
However, days after Facebook's announcement, an official from the People's Bank of China suggested that a Chinese digital currency was in the works.
Now China is preparing to become the first global economy to issue a digital version of its money, which will be used as a replacement for cash.
2. Individualized medical services
Some of the most terrifying diseases known to man are so rare that they occur once in ten thousand times or even less. And sometimes there is no cure for a rare disease.
But this sad situation may change, thanks to new classes of drugs that can be tailored to human genes. If this extremely rare disease is caused by a specific DNA error, modern science gives the patient at least a chance to correct it.
New drugs can become a kind of molecular eraser that erases or corrects erroneous genetic information. An example of such a personalized drug already exists; doctors created it for a little girl, Mila Makovets, who suffers from Betten's disease caused by a unique mutation of the MFSD8 gene. Treatment with Milasen did not cure Mila completely, but stabilized her condition.
The only problem is who will pay for such drugs when they help one person, when it is much more profitable for pharmaceutical companies to produce widely used drugs.
1. Internet protected from hackers
Quantum technology could help create a network that is impossible to hack. That is exactly what a team from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands is doing. They are building a network that connects four cities in the Netherlands and uses only quantum methods to transmit information.
The technology is based on the quantum behaviour of atomic particles – so-called “quantum entanglement”. The main difficulty in creating a network is that entangled particles are difficult to create, and even more difficult to transmit over long distances. So far, researchers at Delft University have managed to send data over more than 1.5 km, and they are confident that they will be able to create a quantum link between Delft and The Hague around the end of this year.
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