6 cutting-edge technologies that are changing our lives today

Since 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has chosen every year the leading technological achievements that, according to its calculations, will have a tangible impact on each of us in the near future. Not all of the scientific discoveries that you will learn about below were made this year — some of them are already several decades old.

This is due to the fact that when compiling the list, experts paid attention not so much to a specific scientific breakthrough in a particular field, but to a whole set of factors that allow us to accurately state which technologies will really enter our lives. This is the maturity of the technology, and the existence of ready-made inventions based on it, as well as what tasks it solves — how significant it is and what areas of life it can affect. For example, 3D printing technology was first patented in 1989 by Immanuel Sachs, and only in 2017, his startup Desktop Metals released the first batch of 3D printers for metal.

3D printing

3D printing has long remained the domain of individual designers and enthusiasts. However, the gradual improvement of the technology has reduced the cost and price of printing, so that today it is becoming increasingly popular and may soon radically change modern mass production.

Giant factories that produce a narrow range of products in large quantities will be replaced by smaller, wide — range production facilities-because with the help of 3D printing, you can instantly and in the right amount respond to changing customer demand. The usual auto repair shops will no longer store a ton of spare parts in their warehouse — they will simply print the part you need on the spot.

3D printing technology allows you to create lighter, stronger and more complex structures at a lower cost than traditional methods of working with the material. For example, scientists from the Livermore National Laboratory have learned how to use 3D printing to make spare parts from steel twice as strong as those produced by the traditional method. And last year, the startup Markforged released the first 3D printer worth less than a hundred thousand dollars. With the exception of the high cost, the technology may well be used by the average consumer — it is not necessary to be an engineer and understand the intricacies of 3D printing. The company Desktop Metal already offers a program that will make a model ready for printing for the user. All that is required is to specify the characteristics of the item you need.

Artificial life

For the first time, embryologists at the University of Cambridge have managed to grow a mouse embryo from stem cells alone — no sperm or eggs. This breakthrough revolutionizes our understanding of the creation of life, because everything that is required for the birth of a living being can literally be taken with a pipette from another embryo.

The technology of using stem cells provides scientists with countless opportunities to study the problems associated with diseases that occur at the stage of fetal development, and the possibility of studying the process of the birth of new organs — during the development of the embryo, you can observe how individual cells develop certain functions during growth — thus opening up the potential for the possible cultivation of artificial organs.

However, many are concerned about the ethical issues associated with such experiments. How to distinguish an artificially grown fruit from a real one and how to treat it? Is it possible to conduct experiments on an artificially grown fruit, if already at the research stage it can feel pain? Does he have the right to life, as an ordinary fetus is endowed with? All of these issues represent long-standing ethical obstacles to the spread of this technology.

Smart cities

The integration of digital technologies and space planning can lead to a fundamentally new way of life in the cities of the future. The sensors and sensors that will flood cities will track pollution levels, noise, and traffic density in real time, and shift some of the troubleshooting tasks to automated programs and robots that can take the necessary regulatory measures at such a speed that residents will never again have to stand in traffic or write a noise complaint near a residential neighborhood.

One of the most successful projects in this area is "Pier", which is being developed by Google's subsidiary "Sidewalk Labs". The project provides for the introduction of an underground system of robot workers who will deliver parcels and goods and perform other work that loads the urban infrastructure, exclusively underground, which will free up roads and reduce pollution.

To help this automated system will be a widely implemented network of sensors that track a variety of data about the urban environment, including the activity of residents and businesses. Such a network will be able to identify patterns in activity, opening up opportunities for optimizing urban space. Residents will no longer have to worry about congested roads on their way to work, and a unified information network will allow you to check the congestion of popular places for recreation, such as parks or museums, before going there with your family. Despite this, the massive collection of data on the activity of residents is very worrying for those who are not ready to share personal information — because in the case of, say, a hacker attack, this data can be used by attackers who can track at any time where you are and what route you most often return home.

The interest of private companies in this area remains unclear. Many experts complain that there needs to be a separation between the public interests of citizens and the private interests of technology giants like Google, which may primarily seek to profit from the sale of data to third parties — for example, advertisers or real estate agents, who will be able to more effectively promote their services depending on the location and habits of a particular resident.

Battles of neural networks

Artificial intelligence is getting better and better at tasks that may seem routine and do not cause us to associate with high technology — such as processing a lot of photos and determining which one shows a person and which one shows a giraffe. However, it is the ability to accurately distinguish and identify a particular object among an array of information that separates narrow — profile neural networks from truly working artificial intelligence.

Until now, progress in this area has been limited by the ability of the neural network to distinguish a conditional person from a giraffe and has been characterized by a complete lack of creativity. Just creating an image of a person remained an impossible task for neural networks-even after studying the array of data about what a person looks like. The neural network, trying to independently create an image of a person, would now and then draw an extra eyebrow on his forehead or a third hand.

The new method, first described by Ian Goodfellow in 2014, solves this problem by competing two neural networks — one of which acts as an idea generator, and the other as a discriminator. This division of labor into two neural networks provides quality control over the imagination of the "generator", which gradually learns from its mistakes, accepting comments from the discriminator, and eventually begins to produce images that are indistinguishable from real objects — only completely fictional.

Advances in this technology mean that computers will soon be able to create images that even humans cannot distinguish from real ones. Here, for example, are computer-generated photos of fictional celebrities.

Researchers from Nvidia trained neural networks on photos of celebrities to create realistic images of people who do not exist. Many experts believe that the ability of neural networks to accurately distinguish objects reflects their growing ability to truly understand the world around them, and therefore their rapid independence from human instructions.

Translator headphones

The technology, which is closely related to neural networks, made it possible to realize the long-standing fantasy of science fiction authors. Google recently released Pixel Buds-headphones that many commentators called Babel-Fish Earbuds, referring to the popular science fiction book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", in which the so-called Babel fish penetrated the ear and allowed you to understand foreign speech.

Headphones worth $ 159 in real time translate the speech of the interlocutor from a foreign language. This is the first more or less working invention that opens up the possibility of instantly overcoming the language barrier for people around the world. With the gradual improvement of technology, it is not difficult to imagine a future in which such headphones will become available to the mass consumer and people will no longer have to learn foreign languages so hard. The technology will significantly ease the language barriers that arise in a variety of everyday and business circumstances between residents and people from different countries.

DNA Divination

Technology that predicts the risk of cancer or the likelihood of getting hooked on tobacco, and reveals an above-average IQ or a predisposition to music, has recently been made possible by processing a huge array of DNA data from millions of people. By conducting research and identifying patterns in the behavior of certain types of genes, scientists can now create high-precision "passports" of disease risk, as well as passports of benign characteristics.

This could help researchers in the medical and pharmaceutical fields by significantly reducing the cost of false alarms and unnecessary examinations of patients whose genes-as it will now be possible to test-are not even conducive to the disease. Scientists conducting clinical trials in an attempt to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease will be able to more accurately select control groups of patients — thus increasing the effectiveness of research.

However, the fact that DNA reading technology can predict not only a disease, but any trait in general, puts ethical concerns at the forefront. How will parents and teachers use information about a child's predisposition to a particular subject? Will a person be able to raise a child knowing for sure that he will have cancer, and will he want to know for himself what is the probability that he will develop Alzheimer's? Risk and performance profiles may also raise the issue of discrimination at work or in employment. It is not profitable for an employer to invest in the professional development of an employee with a high risk of heart disease — therefore, with the spread of this technology, we have to think about the privacy of this data.