04.30.24-Startup-Ecosystem-Conference-MIT-Technology-Review-List-of-10-Breakthrough-Technologies

AMY NORDRUM: Hello, everyone. Good to be here with you. Thanks for coming. And I'll just get right into it.

My name is Amy Nordrum. I'm an Executive Editor at MIT Technology Review, based here on campus. I have a really fun job.

And one of the most fun things that I get to do every year is produce our annual list of 10 breakthrough technologies, which I'm going to tell you all about today. This is a list that our newsroom has been putting together for 23 years, and it highlights the technologies that we think matter most right now. There are some interesting lessons in here, I think, for how technologies catch on and what the different models are for commercializing them, which I know you've been talking all about already this morning.

On our list this year, there's a medicine that began in an academic lab and is now being brought to market by a company that has licensed that patent. There's a consumer gadget built and released by a major global tech company. And there's a new twist on geothermal that's gotten tens of millions of dollars in DOE funding for demonstration projects. I also hope that this list will give you a broad sense of what's happening across the tech landscape, maybe outside of your specific industry or area of focus.

Hopefully, you're already familiar with the MIT Technology Review. But if not, we are a newsroom owned by MIT. And this year we're celebrating our 125th anniversary as a publication.

We are editorially independent from the Institute. So we don't write about MIT, we cover the broader world of emerging technology. Our main beats are artificial intelligence, climate technology, biotech, and computing. And every day our journalists are looking across those different beat areas, reading new papers, talking with sources, trying to identify technologies and trends or shifts that people in our audience need to know about.

We publish stories online every day. We have a daily newsletter called The Download that you should all sign up for if you don't get it already.

And this here is our newest issue, coming out on newsstands soon. So you're getting a little bit of a sneak peek of the cover, and there's copies right outside if you would like to pick one up. The theme for this issue is build, and we have stories in there on artificial wombs, commercial space stations in low Earth orbit, and efforts to make useful home robots and whether those might finally be paying off.

And we don't write about technology in a vacuum. We're always putting technology into context with what's happening socially, politically, economically, because we know that those other factors are often really what matters most when it comes to determining whether a new technology will actually work out in the real world and in figuring out the way we implement it and whether that drives progress and improves people's quality of life or causes harm and drives greater inequity.

Before I tell you about this year's list of breakthrough technologies, just a few words about how this list comes together every year. In the summer, everybody in our newsroom starts brainstorming ideas for the next year's list. And we have meetings in which all the editors and reporters on our team are pitching different technologies, things that they've been following on their beats that they think ought to make the list.

So we look at dozens of ideas across every area of technology that we cover. There's a lot of rigorous debate over what should make the list. And we also take a staff vote at some point to see what everybody's just most excited about.

And in the end, we have to make some tough calls. There's always a couple of agonizing decisions. And I'm going to tell you about a few of those later on.

What we're looking for for this list is technologies that we think really have the potential for wide impact and that will change the way that we live and work. And we always look for a good mix of different technologies from different fields and also types, so consumer gadgets as well as big infrastructure projects or new scientific instruments.

As I've said, we have done this for 23 years. And I am proud to say that we have gotten some things right in that time. There are some technologies we've been early to spot through this annual exercise that have become quite commercially successful and important to our lives today. And here's just a few examples.

We put natural language processing on our very first list back in 2001. And today this technology is underpinning the large language models and generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Our picks in 2010 for cloud programming and 2011 for cloud streaming foreshadowed the incredible growth of cloud computing and correctly anticipated one of its most popular applications. The growth of the cloud has really transformed the tech industry over the last decade and changed the way computing gets done.

And then, how many people have a smartwatch on right now? All right, good chunk of this crowd, not too surprising. We had smartwatches on the list in 2013. Two years later the Apple watch was released and smartwatch sales have soared in the years since.

And this last one might seem like an obvious one today, but we put reusable rockets on our list back in 2016. And now there's a few Falcon 9 rockets that have completed 19 missions apiece for SpaceX. So this one is also really happening.

But to be totally honest, we don't always get it right. It's very hard to predict the future and know which emerging technologies will prove commercially viable and stand the test of time. So in the spirit of transparency, which we care about as journalists, here are some of our misses.

In 2013, we honored Baxter the Robot with a spot on the list. You might remember this is a manufacturing robot. It's the big one here on your right.

And it was meant to work on an assembly line alongside humans. It was a very cool design, but it never performed quite as well as promised. And the company that made it shut down five years after we put it on our list.

Google's aerial internet experiment called Project Loon made our list in 2015. That was a project designed to deliver internet service to remote areas by flying huge balloons way up in the air. In this case, the technology worked pretty well, but the service wasn't commercially viable. So that project was grounded in 2021.

And in 2011, we thought gestural interfaces would be the next big thing. So devices loaded with sensors that would detect our hand motions and carry out commands based on that. But that didn't really catch on. Instead, we all started using our voices to give commands to Alexa and Echo and Siri. Although I will say that one of the devices on this year's list does rely on gestures, hand gestures, so this one might have just been a little bit ahead of its time.

So that's a little bit about how the list comes together every year and what our record has looked like. Without any further delay, let's talk about the new 2024 list and the technologies that we picked this year.

As we all know, this past year has been a really wild one for artificial intelligence. And this first item is our attempt to sum all of that up. So we're calling it AI for everything.

This was the year when the public began interacting with artificial intelligence directly and consciously playing around with it, using it to do stuff in their lives. All of this was really set off by the debut of ChatGPT about 18 months ago. Since then, so many other generative AI tools have been released that are now being incorporated into search and chat bots and email services and about a million other places online.

Just a few examples of things that we've covered recently, Adobe now has Firefly to help creators generate images and make effects right there in their photo editing software. Microsoft, of course, has been a huge partner of an investor in OpenAI and is now using its models to power the new Bing search engine and going big on rolling out generative AI tools for software developers as well. And earlier this year, Google revealed its new Gemini model, which it's now baking into many of its products, including Gmail and Google Docs. There's already so much happening here, and in many ways, this is really just still the beginning.

Next we have super-efficient solar cells, which is our term for solar panels that add a layer of perovskites, which are tiny crystals that absorb different wavelengths of light than traditional silicon cells. So cells made with perovskites can be more efficient in converting energy from the sun into electricity. And one of the leading companies in this space, called Oxford PV, plans to start shipping these panels later this year. There's been a lot of other movement, too, from major solar manufacturers who are investing in this technology and acquiring startups that are developing it.

And there's still a lot to prove here. Perovskites are known for being very delicate and breaking down very easily. And these companies are going to have to show that the panels they make are as durable as what's already out there and available on the market today. But there has been some good progress on encapsulating these materials better so that so that they last longer. And there's a lot more commercial interest in this idea, which wasn't even the case just a few years ago.

In February, Apple began selling its first mixed reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro, which overlays digital content onto your real world scene, whether that's your living room or your office. And these headsets use a micro OLED display, which has the highest resolution of any headset to ever hit the market.

Maybe some of you have tried this yourself. I got to test it out about a month ago. And I got to say the 3D videos really did impress me. They made you feel like you were right there in the moment, in the scene of a birthday party or at a concert.

We don't yet know, though, if this is going to be a commercial success. It's quite an expensive device, $3,500, and it's not yet clear whether there's going to be a killer app for this device or not. But the high resolution of the headset was truly a technical achievement in our view, and Apple obviously has a tremendous track record when it comes to introducing new consumer technology, so we decided to include it.

Next I'm sure you've all heard of these. A new class of weight loss medications really came into the public consciousness within the last year. These are drugs originally developed for diabetes that have been shown to cause people to lose around 15% of their body weight, which could obviously make a massive difference for both individual and public health.

Obesity is a major problem in many parts of the world. The World Health Organization has called it an epidemic. And since these drugs came out, there's even been new evidence showing that they might not just help people lose weight, but also protect against heart failure, strokes, and heart attacks.

Geothermal is a really good stable source of renewable energy. But it's only been practical in places where there's certain geological features and a heat source pretty close to the surface. But now with fracking techniques developed by the oil and gas industry, geothermal companies are able to crack open rocks and inject water to create geothermal facilities in more places. One company called Fervo, which was also on our 2023 list of climate tech companies to watch, has demonstrated that this approach is possible at a commercial pilot plant last year, and then began delivering electricity to the grid in Nevada from that plant back in November.

Next we have chiplets. I'm sure this crowd is familiar with Moore's Law. So you know that every two years the number of transistors on a chip has doubled for decades, as engineers figure out ways to make those transistors smaller and smaller. But that is getting much harder to do. So a lot of manufacturers are now turning to chiplets which are smaller and more specialized versions of conventional computer chips that can be linked together in different ways to build a system that performs similarly to a conventional computer chip.

And these have some advantages. They might be cheaper to manufacture and easier to swap out if something goes wrong. And now there's real attention across the chip industry on creating common standards for these to make them interoperable, which should further boost adoption.

In December, the FDA approved the first drug based on CRISPR in the United States to treat sickle cell disease. And the UK had approved it just about a month before. If you're interested in this, we published an op ed by a patient named Jimmy who was in the clinical trial and was one of the first people to ever receive this treatment. And he talks about how it's really changed his life for the better.

And this is just a huge deal, because CRISPR was discovered more than a decade ago and is now really starting to make its way into actual treatments. There are many more CRISPR-based treatments in the pipeline. There's new generations of CRISPR as well. And this one that got approved by Vertex will be the first of many.

This next one is quite exciting. A new generation of very powerful computers is coming online. These machines can perform more than an exaflops' worth of calculations, which is a 1 followed by 18 zeros, so these machines are as powerful as 100,000 laptops combined.

The first one called Frontier was built here in the United States. Europe is getting its first one later this year, called Jupiter. And these machines are really good at performing better simulations of really complicated stuff, so better models of the climate, the universe, and phenomena like turbulence.

Heat pumps are really an older technology. They've been around for decades. But we put them on the list this year because sales have really started to pick up, especially in Europe during the energy crisis.

And if you don't know, these are appliances that can both heat and cool a space using electricity, much more efficiently than a gas furnace. And in 2022, for the first time ever, sales of heat pumps outpaced sales of gas furnaces here in the United States. So they're starting to gain a lot of traction here as well.

Last, but not least, we have Twitter killers, which is our name for all the new social media options that have popped up as Twitter, now called X, has lost users and advertisers. So we're talking here about Mastodon, Blue Sky, Threads. Many of these alternatives are operating on decentralized protocols that aim to give users and moderators more control over their data and their online experience. And Threads very quickly gained nearly 100 million monthly users after its launch, so it's really taken off quickly.

So that's our list. Just to refresh, here's all of the technologies that we picked. You might not agree with all of the items on this list and that's OK. In fact, I would love to hear from you in the Q&A if there's something that you think should have made the list that didn't, or if you have thoughts on the things that we did pick.

And while we really try to think through this list very carefully and ground it in scientific and economic realities, and I'm always very personally proud of the list that we come up with, the future is impossible to predict. And anything could happen. So keep that in mind.

Now that we've talked about this year's list, I thought I'd share with you a few things that did not make the cut but did come up in our discussions. So in these next few slides, I'm going to take you behind the scenes of our process and explain why we ultimately didn't pick some of these technologies for the list. Because I think there's really some interesting stories here as well.

So one thing our climate team has covered pretty closely is a series of controversial solar geoengineering experiments that have taken place for the last year, year and a half. And if you're not familiar with solar geoengineering involves releasing particles into the stratosphere that reflect the sun's energy back out to space. This is sometimes proposed as a way to counteract global warming because you're essentially cooling the planet by doing that. And there's a lot of disagreement within the scientific community about whether that makes sense and is even worth discussing as an option or whether we ought to focus on addressing climate change in other ways.

But we did think about putting it on the list, because some companies and research groups have started testing recently whether this is possible at a small scale. And those early small scale tests really sparked a big conversation around this technology. Mexico even ended up banning solar geoengineering experiments as a result. Ultimately, though, it wasn't really clear to us what the actual impact of any of those early small scale experiments would be or how all of this would shake out. So we decided to hold off on this one for now.

Another one we considered was this new class of drugs for Alzheimer's disease, which is a very devastating illness that causes memory loss, and patients with it have not had many options for how to treat it. There are now some new medications coming out. The FDA approved one from Biogen back in July, and Eli Lilly has one currently awaiting approval. And these drugs have been shown to slow cognitive decline by clearing out harmful plaques that build up in the brain.

But the benefits have been pretty modest. This buys you months, not years. And the drugs have some pretty serious side effects that happened in a fair number of patients and which can be fatal in some cases, including brain swelling and bleeding. So they're far from perfect, and we just weren't sure whether the benefits would outweigh the risks for most people in this case.

There was a really neat proof of concept experiment announced about a year ago from some scientists in Japan, who had taken two male mice and used cells from those two mice to produce healthy offspring. They did that by transforming some of the cells, again, coming from two male mice into eggs and then fertilizing those eggs and implanting the embryos into female mice, so basically showing it's possible to use cells from two mice of the same sex to produce healthy offspring, which is very cool and kind of mind blowing.

And you know, who knows? Maybe someday they'll show this as possible in other organisms, maybe someday even humans. But obviously, stuff that works in mice often does not work in other organisms. So rather than feature it on the list this year, we decided to just kind of watch this space.

OK. So I've taken you through the 10 things that did make the list and some stuff that didn't. But I've got one more thing for you before we get to Q&A.

We also have a poll every year asking our audience to help us pick the 11th breakthrough, as we call it. And this year there were four options that people could vote for on that poll, robotaxis, thermal batteries, lab grown meat, and SpaceX's starship. And we just announced the winner of this poll last week. We had around 11,000 people vote in the poll, and it really wasn't even close.

Thermal batteries got almost twice as many votes as the second place finisher, which was lab grown meat. And I was impressed that the batteries beat out starship. If you don't know, thermal batteries are systems that store renewable energy as heat, sometimes using bricks as the storage medium, and could really help us decarbonize industrial facilities that require a lot of heat to make stuff like cement or glass.

That's what I've got for you. I'm going to leave this up here. Thank you for your time and attention. I would love to hear anybody's thoughts on the technologies that we picked here. It's very much an honor for me to share this work with you. We also have a couple offers here for you as a thank you. You're welcome to scan, if you would like a discounted subscription to MIT Technology Review, 50% off, plus a tote bag, or a discount to our upcoming artificial intelligence event called Emtech Digital, which is happening here on campus in late May.

And now I would be glad to take some questions. I think Catarina is going to join me back here for that. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

CATARINA MADEIRA: I'd like to offer you this--

AMY NORDRUM: Oh my gosh! Fantastic. Thank you.

CATARINA MADEIRA: --to show our appreciation.

AMY NORDRUM: I love it.

CATARINA MADEIRA: Thank you very much for being with us today.

AMY NORDRUM: Thank you.