Sign up for the MACH newsletter You have been successfully added to our newsletter. A daily newsletter charting the future: From technology to the scientific breakthroughs changing our lives. Sponsored by 15 top science & tech leaders offer surprising predictions for 2018 Share this — 15 top science & tech leaders offer surprising predictions for 2018 What will the new year bring? by David Freeman, Denise Chow and Prachi Bhardwaj / Dec.31.2017 / 4:21 PM ET What will the new year bring? Just_Super / Getty Images/iStockphoto Get the Mach newsletter. SUBSCRIBE The past year has been a momentous one for science and technology. From the detection of gravitational waves (predicted almost a century ago by Einstein) to the rise of virtual currencies like Bitcoin to the creation of genetically modified human embryo s, 2017 was marked by all sorts of remarkable discoveries and innovations.
What will 2018 bring? No one knows for sure. But as we did for 2017 , we asked top scientists and thought leaders in innovation what they expect to see in the new year. Here, lightly edited, are their predictions. Sean Carroll: Understanding quantum spacetime Sean Carroll Bill Youngblood Dr. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. His most recent book is “The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself.” I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that we’ll see dramatic advances in understanding the quantum nature of spacetime itself.
I won’t make any large bets on this possibility, since theoretical research is notoriously gradual and unpredictable. But the ingredients are in place for moving our understanding substantially forward. Quantum mechanics is the wonderfully successful theory of how the world behaves at the microscopic level, while on large scales space and time are wedded together in Einstein’s famous general theory of relativity . Reconciling how both of these ideas can be true at the same time has been a longstanding puzzle for theoretical physicists.
Recently, we have been bringing new tools to bear: information theory, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and an improved understanding of black-hole entropy. The time is right to finally figure out the quantum ingredients out of which space and time are made. Leroy Chiao: Cryptocurrency takeover Leroy Chiao NASA Dr. Leroy Chiao is CEO and co-founder of OneOrbit LLC, a Houston-based training and education company. He served as a NASA astronaut from 1990 to 2005 and flew four missions aboard three space shuttles and once co-piloted a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station. As an astronaut, I am always following developments in space exploration programs, both government and commercial.
However, while not directly linked to space, my tech prediction for 2018 is about Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies . I believe that 2018 will see mainstream adoption of BTC in a significant part of the worldwide financial industry. In the coming years, the current 1,300 or so cryptocurrencies will battle it out, with just a few left standing. In the future, BTC or its successor would likely be the currency on the moon and Mars! George Church: Big leaps in synthetic biology George Church George Church Dr.
George Church is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston and director of personalgenomes.org. He is the author of “Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves.” The year 2018 will finally see the public embrace million-fold cheaper personal genomes, thanks to better education and awesome software.
Leveraging such revolutionary diagnostic costs, therapeutics costs may follow — via radically engineered nutritional supplements, veterinary products, yogurts, citizen science, and preventing wild animals from carrying malaria or Lyme disease. We’ll see machine learning applied to drug delivery and to preventive medicine, thanks to shareable, rich, individual-patient-level precision medicine data sources like OpenHumans.org .
2018 will bring initiatives on multiple projects to make synthetic cells safe from all viruses — achieved via methods far more precise and more efficient than current gene-editing methods. Microscopes will blossom with images of chromosomes at super-resolution as well as wide fields of millions of cells retaining intricate connections among nerve cells. We’ll see new data on embryos growing outside of a mouse body and human gene collections which enable forming in the lab any of our body organ systems. Among other things, this will enable new synthetic nerve cells for brain-computer-interfaces, gentle alternatives to invasive electrodes. Esther Dyson: Progress in health Esther Dyson Seth Fisher Esther Dyson, a veteran tech and healthcare angel investor, is executive founder of Way to Wellville, a 10-year project to demonstrate the value of investing in health vs.
spending on healthcare. It operates in five small communities around the U.S. and is working with local organizations to enhance their capacity to train and deploy local people in caregiving and health-fostering programs. In 2018, even as the country’s healthcare system is undergoing great turmoil, we may start looking more closely and use big data to understand what’s really going on. We will learn how to reduce costs — not just the costs of healthcare and drugs, but also of unemployment/low productivity and absenteeism, along with the social costs of poor health, addiction, depression, crime and drug overdoses. Related 7 top science and tech stories of 2017 Traditionally, we’ve used clinical trials in healthcare, but they really don’t work well with population health and social changes, with too many variables to control. Now, with big data, and more data available through everything from health records and fitness apps to public data such as high school graduation rates and population demographics, we are increasingly able to compare what happens with what would have happened without a particular intervention.
These interventions include prenatal care, with measurable improvements in birth outcomes and reductions in NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) costs, diabetes-prevention programs now being offered by the YMCA and many other organizations, and mental health/addiction counseling programs (which remain in extremely short supply).
Progress in healthcare is notoriously slow, so actual practice won’t change that rapidly. But with luck, some communities will lead by example, and policy-makers will take note. Oren Etzioni: Artificial intelligence crosses over Oren Etzioni Dr. Oren Etzioni is CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, both in Seattle. In 2018, artificial intelligence will cross over from razor-thin, narrow AI — the kind of bespoke AI that beats people at Go and Poker, and other narrowly delimited tasks but must be reconfigured manually for each new challenge — to broader, multipurpose AI systems that can tackle several challenges using the same software. For example, we will see a single AI that, once trained, can play multiple very different games, answer questions on topics ranging from politics to science to cooking to everyday life, and more. General AI is still decades away, but razor-thin AI is so very 2017.
Jacqueline Faherty: The year of the Milky Way Jackie Faherty Dr. Jacquelin.
