Top 10 hot technologies in 2019: 5G ranks first, and "brain-computer interaction" achieves breakthrough
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The top ten technologies are 5G, blockchain, foldable screen mobile phones, the evolution of artificial intelligence assistants, smarter and more flexible robots, flying cars, quantum computers, customized cancer vaccines, artificial meat, and brain-computer interfaces.
In order to improve the quality of human life or solve certain global problems, countless scientific researchers from all over the world have been working hard day and night, year after year.
Every year, we hear about their research progress and achievements, some of which are close at hand, while others are still far from practical application.
So what new technologies have these researchers presented to us in 2019, which is coming to an end? And whose lives can benefit from them or even be completely changed? Let's take a look.
In the field of mobile communications, the most anticipated technology this year is undoubtedly 5G. Countries around the world have begun to invest heavily in the construction of 5G networks, and in some countries, including China, 5G has already been put into commercial use this year.
The charm of 5G naturally comes from its high speed and low latency. The maximum download speed of 5G network can reach 1Gbps. It only takes a few seconds to download a high-definition movie. When playing online videos, you can drag the progress bar at will without waiting for loading. This significant speed increase that can be seen with the naked eye can immediately arouse the interest of ordinary users.
The low latency of 5G will also bring revolutionary changes in the industrial field. The 1ms latency makes it possible to remotely control precision equipment and machinery, including cars, airplanes and surgical instruments, all of which can be remotely controlled under the 5G network.
Although 5G still has shortcomings such as high fees and limited coverage, these problems will eventually be solved as the technology matures and the scope of promotion expands. By then, we will not forget 2019, the first year of 5G.
Blockchain is also a hot topic in the technology circle in 2019, but it may not be an easy technology to understand for ordinary people.
The reason why blockchain can give rise to a variety of digital currencies is due to its decentralized, open and transparent nature. You can think of it as a ledger where everyone can write and view transaction records, but no one can tamper with or delete this information.
In other words, what banks used to do, blockchain can now do, and do it better. You can distrust banks, but you can’t distrust blockchain.
However, the application areas of blockchain technology are not limited to electronic currency. Due to its openness, transparency and trustworthiness, all industries dealing with data can benefit from it, including data sharing, data collaboration, asset confirmation and medical health, etc.
For example, charitable organizations can put fundraising and the use of donations on the blockchain, allowing donors to clearly see the use of funds; your medical records can be securely stored on the blockchain and can be correctly synchronized no matter which hospital you go to.
In 2019, blockchain became well known to the general public due to the attention of some giant companies and even the government. Local governments have also begun to apply blockchain technology to many scenarios such as digital identity, electronic evidence storage, electronic bills, property registration, industrial and commercial registration, data sharing, public supervision, and administrative approval.
In the future, blockchain technology is expected to penetrate deeper and deeper into the daily lives of ordinary people.
Folding screen mobile phone
Since Apple released the first iPhone in 2007, the basic form factor of smartphones has not changed in more than ten years.
A full screen on the front and a camera on the back are our definition of a modern smartphone — no matter how powerful it is, how fast it charges, or how many cameras it has.
However, this year, manufacturers' pursuit of differentiation has finally given rise to changes in the basic form of smartphones: foldable screen phones are here.
First there was the little-known Royole Technology, and then there were the two giants Samsung and Huawei. Faced with the stunning debut of foldable screen phones this year, some people exclaimed "awesome" while others watched coldly.
Indeed, foldable phones are too much of a gimmick. They cost several times more than regular phones, their screen lifespan is unknown, and their production capacity is quite limited. But the benefits of foldable phones are also obvious: they can maintain a size close to that of regular phones, but when the screen is unfolded, you can get a screen size close to that of a tablet.
In any case, the foldable screen phones unveiled this year have shown us new possibilities in the form of smartphones. If the maturity of technology can solve the various defects it has, then it will indeed have broad development prospects.
The evolution of AI assistants
Everyone must be very familiar with artificial intelligence assistants, whether it is letting Xiao Ai control home appliances or using Siri to set alarms.
Although these smart assistants can help us complete some simple tasks, I'm afraid they are not very smart. The current smart assistants can hardly even accurately understand our words, let alone communicate with us normally.
But don’t worry, researchers have made some progress in expanding the capabilities of voice assistants. In June 2018, researchers at OpenAI developed a method for training AI to recognize unlabeled text, eliminating the need to manually classify and label all the data first, thus eliminating the time and cost involved.
A few months later, a team of researchers at Google released a system called BERT that could predict missing words by analyzing millions of sentences and perform as well as humans on a multiple-choice test.
These advances, combined with improvements in speech synthesis, will allow us to truly have conversations with AI assistants, rather than just giving simple one-way instructions.
One example is Google's Duplex, a feature unveiled this year that upgrades Google Assistant to help users answer scam and telemarketing calls or call restaurants to make reservations.
Smarter and more flexible robots
Robots have strength that humans cannot match, but they are far inferior to humans in intelligence and flexibility. However, with the development of artificial intelligence technology, the shortcomings of robots in these two aspects can be made up.
This year, the Dactyl robot developed by OpenAI successfully solved a Rubik's Cube in 4 minutes. There is nothing special about this robot itself, but the real magic lies in the software.
Unlike previous robots that solved the Rubik's Cube in just a few tenths of a second, the researchers did not explicitly program Dactyl to help it solve the Rubik's Cube, but only set the ultimate goal of solving the Rubik's Cube in the underlying software. Dactyl then learned how to solve the Rubik's Cube by itself in the virtual environment.
The magic of Dactyl is that it is not a robot designed to solve the Rubik's Cube. In other words, even when performing other tasks, it can master the methods of handling tasks and solving problems through self-learning, and the speed is much faster than humans.
At present, Dactyl has accumulated about 100 years of training experience, but in reality, it only took 50 hours to complete this training.
For a long time, flying cars have only existed in science fiction movies and our imaginations. Having a car that can run on the road and fly into the sky at any time is definitely the dream of many people, but the technical difficulty of building a flying car is also quite high.
Although we can see the concept drawings and research and development information of flying cars from time to time, they are basically thunder and rain. However, this year, we finally saw a glimmer of hope that flying cars will move from science fiction to reality.
In early December, PAL-V of the Netherlands showed off what it claims is the world's first mass-produced flying car, called the "Pioneer Personal Air Landing Vehicle." It can accommodate two people and is equipped with a four-cylinder engine. It only takes 160 meters of runway to take off and 30 meters to land. The car can transform from a car to a gyroplane in 10 minutes, accelerate from 0 to 100 kilometers in 8 seconds, and has a maximum flight speed of 320 kilometers per hour.
But it is not easy to drive this car. You first need to have a car driving license and a flight license, and you have to have $599,000 (about RMB 4.18 million) to buy it. But anyway, it is at least much cheaper than a private jet.
In addition to the PAL-V car, Lilium, a flying taxi startup that was once invested by Tencent, also completed the first phase of flight testing in October this year. Their Lilium Jet is equipped with 36 electric engines, with a maximum speed of 300 kilometers per hour, a range of 300 kilometers, and can carry 5 passengers.
Geely's Taili flying car also completed its first flight in December this year. It is a hybrid car that relies on fuel for flying in the air and electricity for driving on land. It can fly up to 3,048 meters and has a range of up to 640 kilometers. This flying car is said to have started pre-sale abroad at a price of US$280,000 (approximately RMB 1.956 million).
Maybe in a few years, flying cars may really appear in our lives.
It seems like yesterday that countries were competing with each other in the supercomputer rankings, but the emergence of quantum computers has quickly made us forget about these behemoths.
According to Wikipedia, a quantum computer is a device that uses quantum logic to perform general computing. Unlike electronic computers (or traditional computers), quantum computing uses quantum bits to store data and uses quantum algorithms to perform data operations.
Didn't you understand? It doesn't matter. All you need to know is that a quantum computer is a computing device with super-powerful computing power, which even supercomputers cannot match. For example, an ordinary computer may be helpless in the face of the encryption algorithm that encrypts your credit card information, but a quantum computer can easily crack it in just a few seconds.
Quantum computers received widespread attention in 2019 mainly because Google announced that it had achieved the so-called "quantum supremacy." How powerful is Google's quantum computer? According to their paper published in Nature, their quantum computer can solve a problem that would take the most powerful supercomputer on Earth 10,000 years to solve in just 200 seconds.
With such incredible computing power, quantum computers are expected to provide tremendous help in fields such as cryptography, chemistry, biology and pharmaceuticals.
Customized cancer vaccines
Cancer is probably one of the most feared diseases, partly because of its high mortality rate and partly because of the great pain that patients endure during treatment.
Radiotherapy/chemotherapy and surgery are the main methods of cancer treatment, but they cause great harm to the human body, are expensive, and have a low cure rate.
But in 2019, the progress made by scientists in cancer vaccine technology gave patients a glimmer of hope.
Cancer vaccines work in a similar way to traditional vaccines, except that they target cancer cells. They can stimulate the human immune system to kill cancer cells in a targeted manner.
Compared to traditional chemotherapy, which treats cancer cells and normal cells equally, this vaccine can selectively kill only cancer cells by identifying the unique mutations of each cancer, which is less destructive to the body. After the first treatment, the activated immune cells will also become extremely vigilant and can detect any free cancer cells.
At the end of 2017, German startup BioNTech and biotech giant Genentech launched a large-scale test of cancer vaccines. This year, the first customized cancer vaccine is about to enter the commercial stage. If the effect is as expected, this technology will be effective against many types of cancer.
The world's population is expected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, and more people will be lifted out of poverty, both of which are bad for climate change because they mean people are eating more meat. Scientists predict that people will consume 70% more meat in 2050 than in 2005.
So how is meat-eating related to climate change? According to statistics, producing a pound of protein from animals is less environmentally friendly than producing it from plants, consuming 4-25 times more water, 6-17 times more land, and 6-20 times more fossil fuels.
Since we can’t stop people from eating meat, we have to find other ways to reduce damage to the climate. For now, artificial meat may be the most obvious alternative to traditional meat.
Artificial meat is currently produced in two main ways: growing it in a laboratory using animal muscle cells, and making it using plant protein. However, both methods can only achieve a similar appearance, and the taste is significantly different from animal meat, and the price is also more expensive than ordinary meat.
Since lab-grown artificial meat is not very environmentally friendly (greenhouse gas emissions are only about 7% less than beef production), plant-based meat has become a more promising development direction. Beyond Meat, which specializes in producing plant-based meat, set up a 2,400-square-meter plant in California this year and has sold 2.5 million plant-based meat burgers through about 30,000 stores and restaurants. Compared with traditional beef burgers, Beyond Meat's plant-based meat burgers can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90%.
What is the most efficient way for humans to interact with computers? Now it may be keyboard and mouse. But imagine if in the future we can give commands to computers directly with our brains, then keyboard and mouse will become no different from stones and sticks in the hands of primitive people.
To achieve direct interaction between the human brain and the computer, the "brain-computer interface" is the key. This technology can create a direct path between the human or animal brain and the computer to achieve information exchange.
Research on brain-computer interfaces has been going on for more than 30 years, and in July of this year, Elon Musk suddenly announced that his company Neuralink had found an efficient way to achieve brain-computer interfaces.
A medical device developed by Neuralink can read information from 1,500 flexible electrodes connected to a laboratory mouse, 15 times faster than the current system implanted in the human body. In addition, compared with the materials used in other brain-computer interfaces, the flexible conductive wires used by Neuralink are only 4-6 microns in diameter, much thinner than a human hair (about 75 microns), which not only causes less damage to the brain, but also can transmit more data.
Neuralink plans to start human trials as early as next year. Their ultimate goal is to implant their brain-computer interface into patients with paralysis or other diseases, allowing them to control computers with their thoughts.
According to statistics, there are currently about 50 million people in the world suffering from some degree of paralysis, and at least 250,000 people suffer spinal cord injuries each year. For these people, Neuralink's brain-computer interface technology undoubtedly gives them hope.
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