Day: January 7, 2020

In similar vein to yesterday’s post, these five articles are about what to expect in tech in the year 2020. This Sunday’s video will be along similar lines, by the way.

1. Venturebeat chooses 10 technologies that the magazine is excited about for 2020. If you ask me, autonomous driving is (mostly) already here. Commercialization of quantum computing is something I am very, very excited by – although I can’t, even now, understand it as much as I’d like to.
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2. “And 5G will be going to work behind the scenes, in ways that will emerge over time. One important benefit of the technology is its ability to greatly reduce latency, or the time it takes for devices to communicate with one another. That will be important for the compatibility of next-generation devices like robots, self-driving cars and drones.For example, if your car has 5G and another car has 5G, the two cars can talk to each other, signaling to each other when they are braking and changing lanes. The elimination of the communications delay is crucial for cars to become autonomous.”
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   Brian X. Chen with a rather more prosaic list for 2020.
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3. “In life sciences, we’ll have greater understanding of the dynamics of how our microbiome – the tiny organisms, including bacteria, that live in the human body – influences multiple systems in our body, including our immune systems, metabolic processes and other areas. This will result in seminal discoveries related to a variety of conditions, including autoimmune diseases, pre-term birth and how our metabolism is regulated. Regenerative medicine approaches to creating new tissues and organs from progenitor cells will expand significantly. ”
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   The World Economic Forum weighs in on the issue.
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4. “Even if the gene drive works as planned in one population of an organism, the same inherited trait could be harmful if it’s somehow introduced into another population of the same species, according to a paper published in Nature Reviews by University of California Riverside researchers Jackson Champer, Anna Buchman, and Omar Akbari. According to Akbari, the danger is scientists creating gene drives behind closed doors and without peer review. If someone intentionally or unintentionally introduced a harmful gene drive into humans, perhaps one that destroyed our resistance to the flu, it could mean the end of the species.”
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   Fast Company ponders a world in which Black Mirror is non-fiction.
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5. “Ten years from now is “the end of the
   classroom as we know it,” George Kembel of the Stanford d.school
   writes. Professors will be a “team of coaches,” and class projects
   will be like Choose Your Own Adventure — open-ended and actually pretty fun.”
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   Fast Company again, this time in 2010, trying to figure out what the world looks like by the time it is 2020. I can assure you that they got education completely wrong.