MIT, The 6 Technologies to Make 2021 Better
Research and medicine, artificial intelligence applied to the analysis of natural language, the world of social networks, that of energy, data management and their tracking, remote healthcare solutions are some of the areas within which MIT identifies the most promising solutions to improve everyone’s life in 2021. With some we distinguish: in some cases, in fact, these are innovations and technologies with which it seems to be already “in contact”, as if they were “already here”.
In others, on the other hand, we talk about existing technologies that are in the process of maturing, and in some cases we still look at them with hope, but it is easy to recognize how time is still needed for the proposals to actually produce the best effects on everyone’s life. For 20 years, the MIT Technology Review of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has identified and suggests a selection of the technologies that will prove to be the most important during the year or that in any case are already changing people’s lives, and also for 2021 it has made this available contribution. We propose them again with our considerations.
Messenger Rna (mRna)
The recovery, the possibility of rethinking a better normality, will largely depend on vaccines based on messenger RNA. This is not a new technology, because we have been working on it for about twenty years, but it is true that only with the announcement of the first vaccines for Covid-19 at the end of December, the mRna has become an acronym “within everyone’s reach” and this technology is still only revealing part of its potential. In very simple words mRna is a type of Rna that encodes and carries information during transcription from DNA, where protein synthesis takes place, in this case to stimulate the immune response and to produce specific antibodies.
Gpt-3, Machine Learning and Language
The machine learning applied to models of natural language, is a particularly challenging area, for many years now, for scientists from around the world. Gpt-3 is a natural language model trained with the analysis of thousands of books and currently can be considered as the most educated system, to the point of being able to imitate the text written by people to the point of almost suggesting that the works of composition are actually daughters of the human intellect, so much so that in the course of last year a well-known foreign newspaper published a piece written by Gpt-3. This technology has also been tested by allowing, for example, to simulate the presence of a fake user on the Reddit platform with whom real people interacted without particular doubts.
Tiktok, Its Algorithm Is “Different”
It is among the youngest social networks, Tiktok was in fact launched only in 2016, but it immediately registered a rapid growth, actually meeting the “tastes” of its members. According to MIT, this would be due to the maturity of the algorithm used to suggest specific feeds for individual user profiles. It seems that the algorithms of Tiktok are able to provide relevant content to specific niche communities also perhaps born out through sharing only the very special interests. The differentiating element would be precisely to be found in the ability to identify a trait that characterizes a user, where other social networks use modulated algorithms to highlight content with a more mass appeal.
Metallic Lithium Batteries
The race towards the electric car has only just begun. It would be fair to point out right away that while there is great interest at the moment in pushing for the development of new “battery-powered” models, perhaps the issue of how exhausted car batteries would be disposed of over time is perhaps too dormant. In fact, there is talk of a future with billions of electric vehicles in circulation, but there are very few answers to the problem of disposing of batteries that contain highly polluting elements, such as lithium.
Part of this is the development by a Silicon Valley startup, QuantumScape, of a lithium metal battery capable of increasing the range of an electric vehicle by 80% compared to the use of ion batteries lithium. The proposal should see its debut on Volkswagen vehicles by 2025. At the moment the battery is only a prototype, far from having the necessary dimensions to move a car, but it would be economical, non-flammable and therefore able to bring the consumers to electric models.
The Value of The Data
The black gold of this century, we often hear, is data. Above all, people’s data, those concerning habits, consumption, preferences. If on the one hand, for years the main concern, in Europe, has concerned the protection, protection of information and the guarantee of confidentiality – the protection of individual privacy understood simply as “closure” to the use of data – today something is changing. On the basis of the doubt that probably the problem is not so much the use of information, but rather its modality, precisely considering how information is such when and if it can actually become useful.
Data Trust Horizon 2020
Trusted Secure Data Sharing Space project aims to develop a data sharing platform for secure, reliable and GDPR compliant data exchanges.
The new strategy, presented by the European Commission just in February 2020, sees the EU become an active player in facilitating the use and monetization of its citizens’ personal data, but on the basis of a data trust model, intended as a sort of steward who manages personal data on their behalf, with fiduciary duties towards their customers. These would be legal entities that would supervise how companies operating on the Web use users’ personal information so as to allow users to avoid accepting the conditions expressed differently on each platform.
The first project in this sense, under Horizon 2020, called Trusted Secure Data Sharing Space, should be implemented by 2022; benefits from a budget of 7 million euros, and provides that global technology companies cannot be authorized to store or move European customer data, and access it exclusively through “trusts”, with customers (citizens) benefiting in some form of the value derived from information processing.