Imagine how emerging technologies may reshape our world

Among the hottest new emerging technologies for 2018, picked by MIT Technology Review, here are some that caught my attention. While 3D printing has been around for a while, it’s only been for plastics, while printing anything in metal is challenging and costly. But recent strides in 3D metal printing that are combining sophisticated software with cheap metal printers (e.g. Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Markforged, Desktop Metal etc.) are enabling precise control of microstructure of metals and will likely enable mass production of parts. Just imagine, you scrape your new Lexus Mini against a pole in the narrow parking space and you get home in the evening and 3D print a new bumper.

Or imagine a city that makes sense.  A recent project in Toronto, called Quayside is designing urban neighborhoods built around digital technologies. Through an extensive network of sensors, data will be gathered on every aspect of urban life from air quality to noise levels to people’s daily activity patterns and decisions about design and policies will be made to make life more affordable, pleasant, fun and environmentally friendly.

Or imagine your baby arriving into the world with a report card that offers probabilities of heart attack, cancer, getting addicted to alcohol or tobacco, or being smarter than average, or being too competitive. LOL.  Through huge genetic studies, some involving more than a million people, this may become possible. It can bring so many new challenges that we better start thinking about all the implications.

Or imagine the possibilities of AI. Currently Artificial Intelligence is used mostly in the tech industry. But how AI will transform industries from medicine to manufacturing and energy, are endless. Recently at Ichan School of Medicine in Mount Sinai, a project called “Deep Patient” is based on use of AI to go through mounds of health data, in order to obtain insights about disease risk. With the use of deep learning, a machine learning tool, the computer is learning new things without prior programming. Similarly, at University of Montreal, in an approach known as GAN or a generative adversarial network, two networks are trained on the same data but pitted against each other. This dueling neural networks become proficient and over time gain an independent ability to make sense of the world. And when Artificial Intelligence acquires capability for imagination, the possibilities are endless on how it will impact all aspects of our lives.

You can read about top 10 breakthrough technologies of 2018 at https://www.technologyreview.com/lists/technologies/2018/

Virtual reality, Augmented Reality, Autonomous vehicles and Artificial Intelligence will all intersect with Data, Cloud and will reshape our world in unimaginable ways. Attend TiEInflect 2018 www.TiEInflect.org this Friday and Saturday and get insights into which new technology innovations will have an immediate profound impact on our lives and which ones hold the future potential to turn our world upside down.