10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2024 | SXSW 2024
hi hello everyone it is absolutely wonderful to be here with all of you at South by Southwest uh it's great to be in this crowd it's always great to be in this crowd the room's full it looks looks to looks amazing um I've got a lot to go through today uh I want to take you through 10 technologies that our team of reporters thinks are going to change the way we live in work over the next several years uh and I also want to talk to you a little bit about what all of these Technologies might mean for the way we live and work so I expect many of you if not most of you are familiar with uh MIT technology review so we are a media company owned by MIT we publish journalism for current and future Tech leaders like yourselves if you don't know us all already the name may make you think academic Journal we are not an academic Journal rather we're journalists that we tell we tell the stories about how Technologies are being created and used and how those technologies will impact all of our Lives we are inspired by our relationship to MIT the world's leading University for engineering physical sciences computer science mathematics and a bunch of other subject areas besides MIT alumni and faculty include 101 Noble laurates at last count but every every year that number increases 26 touring Award winners and more astronauts than any University other than the Naval Academy mit's influence I'm I don't have my my slides are not up but mit's uh influence in the business Community um may be even more noteworthy as of 2015 so in 2015 people at MIT did a study and they uh took a look at the the companies that had been founded by alumni what they found is that of the people who had graduated from MIT that more than 30,000 companies had been started by alumni those 30,000 companies generated Collective Revenue if you add all 30,000 together Collective revenue of two trillion dollar at that point in time when they did this in 2015 so about 9 years ago that $2 trillion meant more higher was higher than the GDP of the 10th largest economy in the world at that point it was uh right in between um India and Russia so we're talking about a lot of economic might that comes through uh The Institute so MIT is known for all of this of course so you probably knew much of that already um and it's also known for a hacker culture a kind of playfulness a creativity um which really comes through in unique ways in uh approaching problems and solving problems and putting to putting this together with that um interdisciplinarily and trying to figure out could we hack something together here that will will will be a cool solution to a problem so out of this incredible institution Comes This journalistic Enterprise MIT technology review you can think of us like Harvard Business Review Harvard Business Review comes out of uh Harvard Business School very similar to the way we're organized or like the Smithsonian Magazine which is you know a part of the Smithsonian U or sort of comes out of the Smithsonian it also happens that this year uh 2024 is the 125th year of MIT tech review and so you can see sort of the very first copy it's kind of an old copy from our archives we have the archives um and in its very first days the purpose you know when it was set up the purpose was always to explain to the broader public what they call the always new and ever more complex problems that we face as a society to share the stories of what H humans can accomplish with the right amount of knoow creativity and commitment that very first issue again as I said we we have you know all the issues uh in our archives there's an art the very first article is about the function of a laboratory you can imagine the kinds of Innovations and the kinds of advancements we've seen um over the 125 years we've been doing what we do uh but we've moved on uh as you would hope and expect and today we are a multiplatform media company company we publish in digital every day we have an a very nice app that we've just relaunched quite recently we have a whole bunch of newsletters that are specific on particular topics that we send out um you know all the time to hundreds of thousands of people to get into their emails uh we have a print magazine we have podcasts and we have a a really nice event events series um we are aimed at anyone who wants to is interested in the future of our world and how technology is shaping it but who probably aren't experts themselves probably you know you don't have to be an MIT Alum I'm not an MIT Alum you don't have to be an engineer or a scientist and awful lot of people who read us are not engineers and scientists and never have ever thought about MIT as a place that they would even set foot rather what kind of brings everyone together is the primary focus is across all the platforms is I'm kind of answering the question what is technology doing for people and this Zeitgeist moment that we're in here when all we've been talking about really in the business press um for the last year so has been artificial intelligence we've also got technological development in robotics in biogenetics and Engineering the human body Quantum Computing etc etc etc we are providing rigor and insight to a very large number of people uh who are using these technolog Oles who are making them creating them or who you know would like to take the right decisions about how to implement or regulate those uh Technologies in their own lives and world so all of us here I expect believe and and uh and you know think that the work we do matters um I hope we're all doing work that we believe matters I hope you'll tolerate a slight Indulgence I want to talk for a moment and then I'm going to get into the the meat of the matter I do want to talk for just a moment about this time in media and journalism 2024 now I am aware that most of you are not paying much attention to uh the headlines uh around the collapse of the the the uh journalism and the media industry and we're talking about really kind of daily stories about are we heading for an distinction level event for journalism um I don't know if you know that National Geographic National Geographic which I read as a you know seven or eight-year-old or I didn't read it but I looked at the photos as a seven or eight seven or eighty old um you know when it came first time I saw photographs of the Moon first time I saw you know so many different parts of the planet uh photographs that that magazine is undergoing a slow shutdown it more or less doesn't exist uh they laid off all of their staff six months ago Popular Science announced in February or excuse me November that it's also not going to publish anymore they've been around for 151 years no longer going to be publishing if you add to this wired they laid off 20% of their editorial team a couple of months ago and that included every one of their science reporters there's nobody uh any longer who's publishing uh at wired about science CNN did the same thing about a year ago and their tech tech reporters so why is this happening I'm not going to bore you with it but it goes back to the emergeny of the internet everything went online everything was free because remember we were paying with our eyeballs that worked okay for a little while but then digital advertising got swallowed up by large platform companies like Facebook and like Instagram and Google ads and so forth so there's simply not enough digital advertising dollars to fund all the journalism that you we have all become accustomed to too so people in my job have to ask people you like you to pay for Content so that's why you're running into pay walls all over the internet but because without people willing to pay for Content um we as the expression goes if you don't have people willing to pay for Content well we can't have nice things uh this is leading to closures of Independent Media companies we are in a very unique position because of our relationship to MIT but we don't get everything from them we do need to continue to engage with our audience and convince our readers to pay for Content it's incredibly difficult to make a solid business out of reporting and telling stories about what's happening in Tech the tech world in the Science World and it's really hurt uh the amount of information that most of us that's really hurt these our our industry because the amount of information that we have out there is diminishing so it's perhaps no surprise that Pew Research Center uh this came out sort of in the the fall about four or five months ago this study says that today fewer Americans than ever believe that science has had a mostly positive impact on society I mean it's really I'm going to let it say it again because it's shocking few were today as we stand here with covid shots in our bodies and assembled together and again we flew here on airplanes we've got devices in our po Etc um fewer Americans than ever believe that science has had a mostly positive impact on society to me this is you know the the a giant flashing redl sort of the reddest of red flags um it is critically important obviously that we have an informed educated Society if we're going to Grapple with the major challenges that are facing us and of course I'm talking about things like climate change I'm talking about artificial intelligence I'm talking about the right making the right decisions about how these systems are going to work and control the the world that we live in um because we do have big problems we do have to face these problems as a as a collective as a society and think about uh what the truth is so I know you didn't come here for this I still even so feel I need to ask you invite you to support smart objective and trusted journalism this is a QR code you might want to be you might want us to be the F the the the the the publisher that you support I would love that but if it's not us I don't care support someone support journalism in your local newspaper whoever um I I would love it if you subscribe to MIT technology review we have a nice offer you'll get a little tote bag that's all great but again if it's not us let it be someone thank you I I forget who it was who said Don't Clap vote I'm going to say Don't Clap subscribe um so it's time for our list now and that's what you came for and um I have 10 items to go through so because it's the the 10 breakthrough Technologies I'm not going to spend the same amount of time on each of them but if you want to dig in and get more definitely go to our site dig in there's quite a lot here it's listed under the 10 breakthrough Technologies um so you can go really deep dive down down those down into these stories so what is this list well since 2001 we have been creating a list of the 10 new technologies or innovation or innovations that we believe will be game changers and that have staying power all of these Technologies are at today a critical breakthrough moment and either that moment has just occurred or it's coming very very soon this process of selecting the 10 which we do every every year comes out in the in the you know very beginning or sort of the first couple of months of of the new year uh but we started in the summer so about six to eight months ahead of time the tech reporters and the editors uh get together and they start throwing ideas around and they start brainstorming these ideas come from the conversations that they've had during their reporting when reading through and and reviewing research and otherwise exploring their particular coverage areas because all of our reporters have S sort of really subfocus areas that team considers dozens of different ideas across every area of technology that we cover they debate they take a straw vote they come up with a preliminary list and then they let it sit kind of ferment for a couple of weeks until our editor-in-chief goes back with s of the the sort of the the luxury of a little bit more time to make a final decision now not every one of these breakthroughs is a positive development we're not making a judgment about the the positivity or the negativity of a development what we're doing is we are talking about the fact that they are at an important moment in development and are about to get very very big and very significant um so last year for example I was here I shared the list and one of the items on the list was the fact it was about drones used in Warfare and the reason we put that on the list was that prices for small but powerful drones had Fallen to such a point that it was clear we were going to start seeing them used in Warfare um because you know there you could get a you could get a decent drone that could have weapons on it for you know under $500 um so it was clear that that was going to start to become a big technology for war and in fact we had already started to see it in uh UK Ukraine Russia so again we're not endorsing necessarily these Technologies we're simply wanting to point out that it's powerful and at an important moment in development and really important to pay attention to so here are some covers of the magazine as I say we've been doing this for since 2001 um you know obviously most of what we do is in digital form but we do we do put together a print magazine that has the list as sort of a key component of it uh once a year and I thought I'd just flag up I I I kind of went back sort of five years ago and earlier and pulled a few covers um and I thought I'd just share some of the technologies that got highlighted over these years it's notv I don't have time to go through all all of them but in 2001 um we had brain machine interfaces on the list U which is something that you know is coming up more with neuralink for example um but quite interestingly that was the first time 2001 when we put um natural language processing uh on on the list of breakthrough Technologies and of course natural language processing is what drives large language models that underpin or that that are used in chat GPT so that was you know 20 something years before we we came to chat GPT 2007 was mobile um AR or um augmented reality 2009 Smart assistant at that point Siri was everybody's phones just woke up but at that point Siri um Siri was you know was sort of rolling out um so again was getting bigger 2012 was crowdfunding so crowdfunding had been out for a while but it was at 2012 when some platforms were launched that would enable crowdfunding at scale so at that point we said it's a breakthrough 2013 smart watches um it's hard to believe that 2013 was you know we weren't really we weren't all wearing smart watches um before then but it really wasn't until after that that we all started to get um everyone started to have a smartwatch deep learning in 2013 add additive manufacturing at scale um 2014 was a particularly exciting year because that was the first year that we put crisper on on the list and we called that the biggest biotech discovery of the century and we had a lot of really wonderful exclusives that we published on crisper both in that time period And in the decade since 2016 was reusable Rockets we started talking about Rockets being able to take off and then you know bring them back without sort of having to you know being able to reuse rockets and not you know lowering the cost of um of rocket launches 2018 generative adversarial networks Gans again you know we were we've been looking at these um these these uh elements of AI for a long time and of course AI was born was was developed at MIT so it's probably unsurprising that we've been on top of it for as long as we have and then 2019 Bill Gates came to us and said he wanted to pick the list so we said okay uh you know that's a nice invitation uh so he came to us and said he wanted to pick the list we decided that seemed like a fine idea um and he chose two of the things that that I'll mention was carbon dioxide capture Technologies and also meatless Burgers so it brings us to today uh you know this is sort of the the this is the aesthetic that we've got on our site around the list in 2024 and you know I want to just be clear that I am here as the the voice of many many people who are far more expert in these Technologies than I am and that's my colleagues at MIT technology review who spend their days uncovering brilliant sometimes weird sometimes disturbing or challenging stories about technology so I'm I'm very much here as a person representing all the very very deep detailed knowledge um so I'm going to take you through sort of a more we'll call it maybe a little more accessible approach to some of these Technologies there's a lot more as you dig into the reporting and the and the and the content that we publish I'm just about to get into the first item and I want to say that to the the the crew here my timer is not counting down so someone should tell me how much time I've I've got I I suspect saying that someone will maybe come out with a counter or something okay item one is AI for everything so it's no surprise to see AI on the list and I and I note that our very first list as I said released in 2001 included natural language processing the technology that underpins large language models that drive uh generative AI tools like chat GPT and last year when I was here we talked about this generative AI of course was on also on the list but but 2023 was a wild year for AI A lot happened this first item is our attempt to sum it all up we're now in a time when the public is interacting with AI directly and consciously playing around with it I'm sure almost all of you have used chat GPT you maybe you've made you've written some code or I I drafted um uh I used it to draft a condolence note cuz I I wasn't quite sure how to phrase it so I got really specific about the situation um I'm you know people are using generative generative AI to to make images there's obviously loads of advances coming out all the time many generative AI tools are now out that are you know Incorporated in Search and chatbots uh email services and so on and so on and so on so there is a lot to say about Ai and of course there are sessions all week I'm sure uh there are I've gotten invited to several myself um entirely focused on generative AI so trying to kind of figure out what to say here that would be perhaps different um I decided to ask some questions raise some questions and and share some predictions and some of our thoughts so the first thing is about bias so we know that there is a bias problem in these tools and that's because the models are trained on data that comes from the web that's images and text that uh include gender stereotypes for example or racial discrimination and because they're trained on on sort of the real world they can encode those biases and reinforce them when used so how will the bias problem be resolved and whom will it hurt before it gets resolved that's the question uh we predict that there will continue to be workarounds developed as awareness continues to rise around the problem bias and I think awareness is I people are pretty pretty aware that that is a problem um but it's not going to be solved quickly or easily so the bias problem again we expect there will be workarounds and there will be some improvements but it's it's going to take a lot more than the progress that we've made there's going to be a lot more work before we're talking about solving that so topic number two copyright law um so as these models are being trained on data and content and create creative work um expect to see a lot more lawsuits um we've got celebrities like Sarah Silverman or um the the writer George R Martin uh we've got in in the journalism industry uh the New York Times has sued open AI for um its use of the the content published by uh the New York Times to train the model you can also expect to see some technology kind of solutions like there's a technology solution called Nightshade that alters images in a way that mucks up the algorithm so there's a way to to alter the image is before they they're they're published so that when that image is sort of absorbed into the into the model it messes up the algorithm so a little little bit of um prevention of of that content of that copyrighted content getting used but it's going to continue to be a game of wack-a-mole and and I'm personally watching very closely what happens with the New York Times lawsuit uh against open AI in our sector there's you know various um uh there's various um uh industry groups that are are working through you know policy policy protections and and legal um legal um legal cases but again it's going to continue to be a game of whack-a-mole uh big question as well number three is about jobs uh will they be lost how many jobs are going to be lost um or will they be different generally speaking what we hear today is that re researchers largely think that jobs will change in their scope but not necessarily in their numers so people will need to be go through some retraining um and rather than rather than expecting to be out of out of work um so the way that you know some of the research that has been done is it makes for example it makes uh researchers in a particular topics much more efficient but it doesn't take um away the need for the human researchers and there's obviously going to be a lot more work done to kind of figure that out since the uh there's so much concern and uh and would there would need to be some um some action to retrain people uh you know if necessary so topic number four is about misinformation um so misinformation is going to remain a very very big problem it's probably going to get a lot worse before it gets better and think about um the elections that are coming up obviously the election in the United States for president but there's elections taking place awful lot of Elections taking place all around the world in 20124 if you take a look at these images I don't know how many of you remember the dope Pope that's my favorite uh then there was Donald Trump under arrest then there was the explosion at the Pentagon now all of those are fake uh those are all fake images they were shared and viewed by millions of people policing these sorts of images is like if you think about the explicit um sexually explicit Taylor Swift fake video that went around went viral a few weeks ago policing those sorts of of uh fakes is incredibly difficult um so there was an executive order signed uh on artificial intelligence in October that focus on the importance of labeling AI created content but it did not legally require it the EU has a an AI act it goes a little further for requiring that but ultimately it's extreme difficult to ban deep fakes because so many of them come from open source systems or systems that are built by state actors and so are out of the reach of the of control and can can be impossible to trace so it's going to be a very um messy uh 2024 in terms of misinformation around the elections I think especially and it's really important as as you know as as consumers of media that we're taking into consideration what we're getting and the fact that an awful lot of what we see may not be real um another another topic sort of another subject subject number five when it comes to generative AI is it is extremely costly and a lot there isn't a f a broad understanding of how costly generative AI is by which I mean environmental costs it it it requires an awful lot of energy um the data centers require an awful lot of energy um and it's also costly on humans um and the reason for that is specifically the low paid workers often in um in poor economies um who are doing data labeling and this is a really kind of an unseen part of the AI economy um they may be labeling thousands and upon thousands of images of sexually explicit content violence content um uh abuse of of children I mean I'm talking people who are spending every day going through thousands of hundreds and thousands of photographs in order to label them we want them to be labeled but without a lot of understanding of the kind of the wear and tear it can have on on human beings um psyche to to confront that that kind of imagery on a hour in and hour out basis tech companies have come already come under pressure there's been some ex some some uh journalism that has exposed the use of of lowp paid workers um by open AI for example um but there's a there's there's an awful lot going on that is not well understood uh there is going to continue to be pressure on tech companies to address these costs both the human costs and the environmental costs as awareness rise but awareness Rises but we don't ultimately expect there to be major improvements and then the final thing is um you know when it comes to this topic people are fond of asking you know well what about the existential you know societal human risk of AI what's it going to mean for the continuation of human beings um and our team's view is that those and there's there's a battle sort of there'll be arguments between high-profile AI leader over here and high-profile leader over AI leader over there and they'll yell at each other across the stage maybe at a place like this or they'll shout at each other over Twitter and um and you know it's it becomes a little bit of a kind of um a muscle flexing of these sort of uh Tech Bros um which our view is is ultimately distracting because we're not we're not the these these sorts of existential questions are not imminent not even close but the other things that I just talked about the human cost the environmental costs the bias uh the misinformation those actually are happening today and there's a whole lot of like look over here distraction um that that you know our position is is is keeping some of these Tech leaders from really addressing much more solvable problems so finally it's really important to ask like what is even all this AI for like what's the use of generative AI like ultimately is there a killer app well we don't really think there is a killer app yet it's fun to play with it it's fun to to you know see what it can do when I put in do a cartoon of you know of a of a monkey writing a writing a train and you know with a top hat on um but there it's it's unclear exactly what the needs are for some of these um these tools people do like playing with it but we have also done some research and surveyed Tech Executives thousand Tech Executives we we surveyed a couple of months ago and asked about how they were using generative AI in their businesses we wanted to know we we know we knew that they all said look we get it it's transformative um but we're not so confident when it comes to actually deploying it um only 9% of those 1,000 people surveyed which you have to also realize if they're known to us um they're probably more Tech interested than your average um uh Tech leader or excuse me um business executive um so 9% of those thousand uh Executives we surveyed had a working use case for with generative AI involving generative AI only 9% and you know if you look at by sector government sector was the lowest which is unsurprising 2% had a working use case um 17% for for finance and 28% for it and they all said that got a lot of concern conerns around the risks 59% said we're really worried about some of these risks um largely around bias and um uh and and the concerns about what the bias could introduce into their into their uh their businesses um and they all felt that they needed to better understand these risks before they went you know wholeheartedly into into rolling it out into their uh companies so there's an awful lot that's going to need to be worked out but with AI for everything you know ultimately uh these problems are going to be everyone's problems so AI for everything number one number two changing subjects entirely these are super efficient solar cells so this is our term for solar panels that add a layer of perab skites I don't know if that's how you say it but that's how it's spelled these are tiny crystals that absorb different wavelengths of light than traditional more wavelengths of light than traditional silicon cells uh so solar cells that are made with prop skites can be quite a bit more efficient at converting energy from the Sun into electricity so there's an image of a of of of that um the tiny Crystal cell um one of the leading companies in this space is called Oxford PV and they are shipping panels later this year we're talking about about a 50% increase in efficiency there's been a lot of other movement too a lot of major solar manufacturers are adopting or investing in this technology and making Acquisitions we think this is going to be very important in the development of of uh solar energy you've obviously all heard of this one this is Apple's new mixed reality headset Apple Vision Pro Apple Vision Pro overlays digital content into real into a real world scene that might be your living room it might be your office um you know we've talked about face computers a long time um you know Google Glass and Microsoft Hollow lens or meta's Quest those are all face computers that fail for a number of different reasons um so what is different now well there's one big difference and this is Apple Apple knows a thing or two about consumer Tech i' imagine there's nearly as many iPhones in this room as there are people um but more Salient is the tech behind it so the the headsets use a twin microed display which has the highest resolution of any headset ever on the market um I I had to put the photograph of Tim Cook because it's really goofy looking um and you know he was like yeah Vanity Fair cover uh and he's got he's got that on his face um anyway but our but but mockery aside our editor-in-chief who has been around a long time in and looking at Tech he's called this the most fully exper immersive experience he's ever seen I don't know if if you all have tried it um you know it's too expensive today $3,500 it's not accessible to most people but the price will drop and when it does we expect this to be transformational next I am sure o the buzz in the room nice uh so you've all heard of this one I saw a story on The Today Show as I was you know getting ready to leave my hotel room uh about this um and this the story is this in the leadup to the Oscars uh uh Nova Nordisk who is the manufacturer behind two of these drugs is running an ad urging people not to use them to fit into their Oscar addesses uh or tuxedos that it's for you know for health for health reasons and it's about you know treating obesity it's a very odd premise for the ad um so they came into public Consciousness recently these drugs the two from novan nordis kind of the leading drugs are OIC and wovi and they have an active ingredient called semaglutide that works by suppressing appetite through mimicking a hormone that the intestine releases when um when after we eat and so it causes the patient to feel full they were originally de developed for diabetes treatment and have been shown to help anyone taking them lose an awful lot of weight so 15 20% and higher um today oops I'm going back today nearly 2% of the US population has been prescribed one of these drugs so I did the math if that's like 6 million people 6 million people um has been prescri has been prescribed one of these and that's only 2% of the population you can imagine you think about the the percentage of our population that suffers from obesity we could be talking about a 10 maybe 15 times increase in the number of people who are are taking these drugs um there are today 70 new treatments in development and six are waiting another six are waiting for regulatory approval there's also action being taken to move from the injection to pills I mean it's that we're talking about a major sea change that is going to have a huge difference make a huge difference for both individual health and public health and that is especially true when you think about the evidence coming out to show that not only do they um enable people to reduce their weight but they protect they may even protect against heart failure strokes and heart attacks so big big change in the public health a very exciting development for um for a population like ours that suffer from weight and weight related um sickness so next is enhanced geothermal systems um so geothermal is the heat energy that's in the earth it is a really good stable source of renewable energy um but it's only been practical to extract it from places with certain kinds of geological features and that where the heat is relatively close to the surface so it's not you know it hasn't been accessible as a real solution for many many parts of the of the world um but now using fracking Technologies or techniques that have been developed by oil and gas industry and we all know about fracking it's been around for at least 10 years or so uh geothermal companies can now crack open rocks inject water at much deeper depths the steam that comes out because the because we're talking about um the heat that's down there the steam drives turbine and produces electricity that can be used in you know and this can be used in lots and lots of places there is a company called fervo uh fervo was we listed it on our 2023 L 2023 climate tech companies to watch um which we which we launched in uh in in the fall we publish we will be publishing every year uh this company fervo launched a commercial pilot plant last year in Nevada and have been raising quite a lot of funding as recently as um a week or so ago I saw that they had they had another 250 million in in um funding that they're using all this additional money to build another facility in Utah so there's never you know it it feels like there's never a a a problem Free Solution um in this particular technology in the case of this particular technology these fracking techniques may result in seismic AC ity you may have heard this um there has been a geothermal um fra um facility in Korea and uh there's concern or there appears to be research to suggest that this approach um was behind a pretty big earthquake that occurred in South Korea in um pedong which is a a city near soul okay chiplets so you're probably familiar with Moore's Law Moore's law says basically every two years the number of transistors on a chip doubles and that's been going on for decades and Engineers have been figuring out ways of making transistors smaller and smaller and smaller and that explains why we can have a computer in our pockets um today when you know a Deca decades ago that would have been absolutely laughable um but it's getting much harder to do that um you know the end of Mo's law people talk about so chiplets are smaller more specialized uh versions of conventional computer chips they can be linked together in a number of different ways uh to build a system that performs similarly and they're so they're kind of modular but they need so that's great sounds good but they need a packaging standard this is very wonky stuff that I'm telling you but bear with me they need a packaging standard to put all these modules together and connect them and it just so happens that the chip industry has recently made advances towards just that sort of standard and it is called the universal chiplet interconnect Express which is just rolls off the tongue uh and that makes it possible to combine chiplets from bunch of different manufacturers which gives these chip makers more freedom to specialize and drive efficiencies and reduce costs and so on and so forth all of this is expected to greatly boost adoption and support overall faster development and Innovation especially in fields like AI auto manufacturing and Aerospace so this is a you know net positive for Tech development okay next I get to talk about crisper again I'm very excited this is the first ever Gene editing treatment it's built on uh it's based on this crisper technology this is a drug that is actually a available today and it was approved in December by the FDA and also like a month earlier in the UK they approved it it treats CLE cell disease so CLE cell disease you probably know is caused by inheriting two bad copies of the genes that make hemoglobin in our blood symptoms of CLE cell disease include bouts of extreme intense pain uh life expectancy for a person with CLE cell is 53 years old it affects one in 4,000 people in the United States nearly all of them are African-American there is a new drug that was developed by a company called vertex that works by editing the DNA of the patient and it turns on the production of healthy hemoglobin it turns on the production it's it's complicated it's very cool but it turn after we're born there is a uh there's a gene that stops producing hemoglobin it kind of just lays dormant this drug will turn that those genes back on if you if you take it so it enables these folks to begin producing healthy hemoglobin again patients who went through trials were pain-free after treatment and we published an oped which is I think there's a image image of the page we published an oped by a patient named Jimmy who was in the clinical trial he wrote us a story talking about his experience in the trial and the treatment he was one of the first people to get it he calls it life-changing so it's really exciting uh I mean CLE cell is a is a is a is a nasty disease um it is incredibly costly to to to provide this treatment it's about $2 to3 million per treatment um we are obviously hoping that you know those costs come down um we are obviously hoping that vertex can perhaps deploy some of these treatments and these drugs uh in population in Africa where it is extremely widespread and there are a lot of of of uh young kids who suffer from this um but despite all those you know sort of less positives around the cost and kind of the the ability for that to scale out it is an incredibly exciting development incredibly exciting because it's only been 11 years since crisper was developed and I showed you that we talked about crisper in 2013 it's only been 11 years and now here we are it's no longer just in the labs it's actually in treatments this will be the first of many treatments that are using um uh for lots of different health conditions that are using crisper exoscale computers uh these are very very you can tell from the name these are very very powerful computers that are coming online they perform more than an xof flops worth of calculations a what an xof flop that's one followed by 18 zeros that is as powerful as 100,000 laptops combined so I thought about that and that's like it's larger than you know the stadium full imagine a stadium you know a football stadium full of fans about 70,000 it's it's more than that right uh all of these laptops doing the same thing um there first one was called Frontier it was built here in the United States Europe is getting its first one later this year they're calling it Jupiter there are two more coming in the US one's called El Capitan and the other's called Aurora and I love the names that they're they're so um confident these names um we believe there may be a few in China but it's kind of hard to get reliable information about that uh the team at the Oakridge National Lab in Tennessee that is behind the um uh is behind the frontier computer they're saying that they've got a they they've got one coming that's three to five times more powerful than Frontier so you know it's just going up and up from there um these machines can perform excellent uh simulations of the climate of the Universe I mean really really complex um calculations things like turbulence there is a big challenge does anyone know what the challenges can you guess yes it's energy uh they are energy Hogs Frontiers power when idling it's just idling it's the same it it's the same amount of power that that we would use to to power thousands of homes we're talking about that's when it's idling it's not even doing calculations so we're talking about you know a need not just to build out the speed of these computers but to think about their environmental sustainability heat pumps I'm waiting for the excitement no no it's exciting uh yeah heat pumps are not that exciting but this is an older technology it's been around for decades I wasn't even quite sure I live in you know Greater Boston I wasn't really sure even what a heat pump was so it's a replacement for a furnace and it is a an appliance that both Heats and cools it uses electricity they're much more efficient than gas furnaces they're not going to work for me in in Suburban Boston they will work in M milder climates um uh last year though for the first time sales of heat pumps in this country in the US outpaced gas furnaces and in Europe last year heat pump sales grew by 40% year-over-year and that was driven by the energy crisis coming because of the war in Russia Russian war of war in Russia Ukraine war um so a lot of people were worried about energy costs and went to purchase heat pumps um so there will be steps forward to increase production um and very importantly to make sure that the electrical grids are ready to as more and more people switch to heat pumps or you know new new U purchases you know people sort of sunset their existing uh furnaces um that the electrical grid can handle that kind of energy um demand and that transition so last item on my list are Twitter Killers so this is I know right we're all hoping for them uh so so Twitter Killers this is our name for all the new social media options that have popped up as Twitter or X has lost its users its advertisers so in case you have been living in a cave Elon Musk purchased Twitter they he Reen renamed it X fired most of its employees more or less uh did away with verification and moderation systems uh and that led to quite a lot of people to become disenchanted with it um there has been a interest in new platforms um especially ones not owned by a single person um options like that use decentralized protocols like Mastodon and blue sky this have gained popularity because of the um advantage of them not being owned or sort of the counter sort of the Revolutionary element to those um they allow for communication across independently hosted servers or platforms and they enable more individual control over your connections and moderation and things like that um it is interesting though that thus far I mean none of those decentralized options has really exploded that rather thus far it's been threads which is of course a meta company of course owned by Mark Zuckerberg uh uh that has been the most popular threads has um very quickly got its monthly users to about 100 million per month um is and our editor-in chief uh said that ultimately the real Twitter Twitter killer is Elon Musk so uh that's it that is the list of 10 I'm not done there's more I there's more we are soliciting input from you and from our audience of readers um for our the selection of our 11th technology so what you do if you're so inclined is you scan this QR code and you vote and here are the options the first one is Robo taxis uh so those are autonomous cars that come when you call them uh thermal batteries is number two these are systems that store clean energy as heat uh number three is lab grown meat now I talked about lab uh meatless Burgers back with uh Bill Gates um these are this would be chicken made from cultivated cells um which is available in restaurants is this going to be the next great breakthrough and then lastly SpaceX Starship again reusable rockets that lower the cost of launches and and and are increasingly uh widely used so scan this QR code vote we'd love to know what what you think um we're going to stop taking votes on April 14th and then we are going to write up um a nice article about whichever one wins and you know tell the story of why it's so important in uh in our daily newsletter which goes out to your email box um it's called the download and that will be on April 15th um so I often I'm not done I'm going to stay for a couple more minutes um we often get asked what didn't make the list and why what did do not put on the list what was borderline and I think this is actually pretty interesting because it reveals a lot not only about what's coming around the corner but also kind of what what explains what is on the list um and so I thought I would share so there's a couple of I'm going to go through I think four or five so there is new drugs for Alzheimer's disease I don't know how many of you all have seen this this has been in the the popular press but these drugs slow are meant to slow cognitive decline from the buildup of plaque um FDA approval has happened for one has come through for one drug and there's another one coming um the reason we didn't put it on the list is that there are severe side effects we're talking brain bleeding um and swelling and it also appears to be very difficult to administer these drugs so we are excited about the progress that's being made but we don't think we're ready to put it on our list another one is sustainable Aviation fluid this is excuse me sustainable aviation fuel this is using cooking oil animal fats and other um agricultural waste and using that to power um airplanes there have been successful test flights it's really very cool but they're not quite there yet in the production but keep an eye on that because there's every reason to think that they will continue to make um make uh to continue to make advancements so another one is solar GE geoengineering and this is like wild so solar GE geoengineering is releasing particles into the stratosphere that reflect the sun's energy and that cool therefore cool the planet it's like a think of it like a big mirror like with the sun's beams being you know reflected back instead of coming onto the planet it's very controversial um but there are a few uh researchers and companies that have been exploring this and doing pilot tests there was some large there was some small scale tests in Mexico we did a great big um expose on these tests and then Mexico banned the tests we weren't necessarily advocating the Banning of the test we were reporting about what was taking place it's really not clear where all this is going but um so it's for that reason we didn't put it on the list but it is another thing to keep a keep a watch on uh another one is is male male reproduction so there has been success in creating healthy Mouse pups who knew that a baby mouse is called a pup uh healthy Mouse pups were created about a year ago taking cells from two male mice uh some of those cells were transformed into eggs and the eggs um became pups um this Advance may allow same-sex reproduction to other animals too including perhaps humans there's a long way to go before that's something that we would call a breakthrough again something to keep a watch on and then uh the last thing that I wanted to you know that was one of the sort of near misses was over the- counter Narcan so Narcan as you will probably all aware is a is a drug that redu that reverses opioid overdose um it's now being sold Nationwide by retailers like Walgreens CVS and Walmart it's only like $40 for two doses um and so it is making this drug very very widely available without a prescription not expensive will undoubtedly save lives and we're talking about 880,000 Americans every year that die from opioid overdose um but we didn't put this on the list either and that was because really the the advance was in the distribution method not the scientific or technological breakthrough um so that explains why we put on the list what we did I hope you found it interesting um our team loves loves working on this it is like the favorite thing I could probably give a version of this talk probably every week for the whole year um uh I hope it inspires you I hope it challenges you and ultimately you know this is why we do what we do we are you know are just painfully Earnest optimists um uh we want to bring Innovations to you the people who are creating the the future we want to nurture a new idea that could be a breakthrough um that will impact all of us um I can't wait to see what ideas you know you all come up with I hope to read about them in MIT tech review and I thank you for your [Applause] [Music] attention [Music]
2024-03-31 16:52
