Image: Photograph by Mark Hooper
In Brief
- Our annual compilation picks 10 innovations that could change the way you live.
- They are: gamelike reality; human number crunchers; smart pricing of toll roads; DNA transistors; biomimicking computer algorithms; inexpensive, mobile water filters; a biomass-gobbling machine that produces electricity; affordable diagnostic tests for genetic diseases; gas from trash; and the new appreciation for "junk" DNA.
More In This Article
Technology is all around us, expanding the limits of what is possible. but every once in a while, some invention or insight has an outsize effect; it creates a large discontinuity, dividing history into “before” and “after.” The steam engine, the transistor, the World Wide Web—each of these ideas seemed to emerge from nowhere to change our world in fundamental ways. Which key technology will arise fromtoday’s vast cauldron of innovation to become tomorrow’s world changing idea? It’s impossible to know, of course, but we know it will come.
Here are 10 candidates—10 new ideas and technologies that could rewrite the rules. What if we could build robots that turn waste into fuel? Or harness the power of video games (yes, video games) to make ourselves do the right thing? What if the “junk” in our DNA is actually as important as our genes? What if insects hold the secret to fending off cyberattacks? Welcome to the World Changing Ideas 2010 edition. —The Editors
Already a Digital subscriber? Sign-in Now
If your institution has site license access, enter here.
Rights & Permissions
See what we're tweeting about
12 Comments
Add CommentI think world has changed by techniques that helped people to harness the forces of nature, first by domesticating animals and harnessing natural energy,second by inventing mills and harnessing water energy, third by inventing sale and harnessing wind, fourth by inventing steam engine and harnessing fire, fifth by inventing turbines and harnessing electricity, sixth by inventing reactors and harnessing radioactivity. Therefore we are waiting for the seventh invention harnessing god knows what!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe next important invention, wiil be inventing fusion technology and harnessing fusion power.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut progress is not all about inventions sometimes its down tothe ideas that allowed those inventions.
If you truly want to harness technology it is important to understand physics at a very fundamental level, partucularly quantum phyiscs with quantum computing instanneious communication at a distance, quantum telepotation, and of course quantum gravity.
Harnessing gravity wiil be particularly important.
See: String quintessence and the formulation of quantum gravity. Physics Essays 22: 264-377.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this. change is a constant ... hmmmmm perhaps this is an oxymoron? .
. Technoloy is constantly changing, in order to best suit our needs in daily living .
. However for each time a positive change or breakthrough occurs in technoloy, there is also
a negative occurrence . For example; mobile banking & online shopping are types of positive change in technology . Identity theft & credit card fraud are
types of negitive technology .
. I am proud to work toward a goal with a positive cause . My goal has been to identify problems, then solve them through a viable means .
This Could End Identity Theft & Credit Card Fraud
http://champressed.wordpress.com
One of the world changing innovations was not mentioned. That innovation was the tractor which created a new world in agriculture. In the book "Mankind in Transition", the future will be an automated society. That means the robot that can replace man on the assembly line and in the office, will create the really big next change in human society like the tractor and the steam engine and the transitor.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI read each one of these in depth in the magazine. A few seemed reasonable, like inclusion of junk DNA in medical exploration. However I concluded that too many were tech fixes--those using nanotechnology, any which require disposal of toxics, the ones that further restrict our privacy, etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBe very, very careful, since the results of tech fixes--without prior consultation with ethicists and sociologists--have historically created more problems than they've solved. For example, "smart pricing" for parking could soon become as irritating, if not quite so embarrassing, as airport scanning. "Mobile water filters" might end up disposed of in careless ways that contaminate whatever is left of sparse ground water. Worst of all was the idea of cheap DNA testing, which many of us suspect would be used by companies and health insurance groups--without permission and without the education needed for decisions--to exclude persons "at risk". Give us a break!
I further noticed that none of these was truly visionary. Do we REALLY need more oil? Creative scientists, where were you? Where was a proposal for mining asteroids? The need for safe disposal of nuclear waste?
World changing ideas of the past have indeed changed the world beyond what would have seemed unimaginable or even ludicrous at their respective times. In the field of science, such radical ideas have generally found themselves trying to make headway against the mainstream of thought. It takes people of the stature of Galileo, a seeming crank to the ‘establishment’ of his day, to push ahead with determination and resolve, and with little care for consequences.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn that respect, there was this line in Discover (http://discovermagazine.com/2002/apr/featnotes), apparently from a UCB professor, about a ‘crank’ of current times: "I found myself getting really angry," one cosmologist said after reading [Sittampalam’s] paper. "It must have hit some real insecurity."
However, the complacent mainstream, as in the time of Galileo, preferred not to take the potential world changing scientific idea any further, at the risk of research grants, to the ever-prolific and piecemeal physical theories of today, being stopped or diverted.
Shall now leave you with: www.sittampalam.net/LateralThoughts.pdf and www.sittampalam.net/NobelResponse.pdf
Thank you all for your time. Cheers!
Develop a pill that would cure greed and the addiction to power.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThank you grunt,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm sure you will agree that fighting technology with technology is the way to go here. Lets leave the pills for handling the headaches of designing the technology, and the long hours it takes to solve such issues.
Regards
I have been monitoring developments in drinking water filters for many years as support for a friend who conducts health-related projects in the impoverished enclave of Oecusses, East Timor. I was therefore very interested in the article "A Killer Water Filter". It all seemed extremely promising until I got to the throw-away line "Additional killing power comes from a light electric current (powered by two nine volt batteries)...". These would are the equivalent of more than a week's wages to many people in Oecusse.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy friend, Judy Charnaud, with the help of locals, has developed a bio-sand filtration unit that uses local materials such as river pebbles and sand. She has conducted scientific water-quality testing of the units and found they are highly effective. More info is at:
http://web.me.com/mfoo/mfoo/Photos_of_water_filtration.html
I do think women can help these
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Junk DNA", a term coined by theoretical evolution biologist Susumo Ohno, is without question the absolute missnomer of the 20th century.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDismissing 98% of the genome as "junk DNA" will enter the history books as the greatest of all science stoppers ever invented to keep up the Darwinian paradigm.
"Junk DNA" kept genome researchers from understanding how genomes actually work.
Pluri.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you haven't seen "First Contact" with Matt McConaughey and Jodie Foster you have to watch it. The movie asks some profound questions about "progress." And are we happier, kinder, fulfilled, safe with the progress we've made in science?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe must progress, however, the human race is about mechanical progress without matching it with philosophical progress.