Joining us on washington journal. Guest thank you. A pleasure. Host how long has your review looked at Breakthrough Technologies . Guest since 2002 we have been selecting the 10 breakthroughs that we think are a clear advance. Which we believe had the potential to have the largest impact on commerce and society and in politics. Host just to give our viewers a look at what those technologies are, we will run down the list and take time and talk about each. The top 10 Breakthrough Technology for 2017 reversing paralysis, self driving trucks, paying with your face, practical quantum computers, the 360 degree selfie, hot solar cells, gene therapy 2. 0, the cell at las, the botanist of things and reinforcement learning. What are the parameters of qualifications that the m. I. T. Magazine choose or select to come up with this list . Guest in the last 12 months, there has to be an identifiable breakthrough. They cannot be a science project , and then we look for something that we think will affect one billion people or do something truly new in the world. Finally, there needs to be a clear path to commercialization in our view. If it is just a science project, it is a little practical it is of little practical use. Host lets start with the most significant in terms of an advancement, but the 360 degrees selfie. You write about the inexpensive cameras that are opening a new era in photography, and availability, one of the factors, are available now. What brought it to the list . Were looking at video shot by the New York Times of refugees using the technology. About myat is nice point of view as editorinchief is that they range widely from their ability a commercial product right now, like a day hundred 60 degree cheap camera, all the way to some fairly like a 360 degree cheap camera, all the way to some fairly new ones allowing them to work. Weve become used to seeing images as framed, but we see in 360 degrees. Until recently, you could put together a 10,000 camera rig that could see in 360 or Virtual Reality camera that also would see in the route. That capacity for ordinary people to capture everything around you and then look at it Virtual Reality said of goggles or audio tablet, that wasnt widely available. Now a bunch of companies from brought outico have products less than 500, usually around a hundred dollars. Around 300e same dollars. They have the same chips as cell phones and they use simple cameras. Using them with your laptop or your tablet, you can capture everything in the route. When people start to do this, it shifts quickly what they think of as photography. It is cool to put on your facebook page, and it has all sorts of practical applications. You are showing this shot there, so we can use it to really bring home what it is like to be in bedded in a strange place, a refugee camp. Scientists can track changes in the environment. I think the cameras are quickly going to become almost universally used. Host our guest is jason pontin, the editorinchief and publisher of Mit Technology the 10 and they look at Breakthrough Technologies in 2017. Join the conversation and read it at technologyreview. Com and join us at 202 7488000 for those of you in the eastern and central time zones. 202 7488001 for mountain and pacific. We welcome comments on twitter cspanwj. The other top 10 technologies in what is called reinforcement learning, but experimenting, computers are figuring out how to do something that no programmer can teach them. Give us examples of where this happens because you say it is available. In this piece, it says it is available in one year to two years. Guest reinforcement learning isnt a new idea in Computer Science. It is making a computer behave like a dog. So you keep making and Intelligence System did the same again, andand over then you reward Good Behavior and you punish bad behavior, bad dog. This isnt an idea that is new. One of the founders of Computer Science, marvin minsky, who was at m. I. T. , proposed in the 1960s. In the 1980s, ibm had a program mon that learned by reinforcement learning. Around 2010, there was a breakthrough in Computer Science called deep learning. It was not particularly new, but deep learning allows a computers to learn the way our brains do, based upon new run networks. On networks. Nuer when you combine deep learning with reinforcement learning, suddenly, computers become powerful. They can almost do a kind of unstructured selfdirected learning. There was an unprecedented and unexpected breakthrough. One of the worlds best players computer built a by deep mind, the google owned company the combined reinforcement and deep learning. This is an extraordinary thing because no one thought of human go player would be defeated by a computer for another 10 years. That is because go, while seemingly simple, is fiendishly complex in detail and human beings cannot explain how it is that they recognize one good move from another. Host on the computer that learns reinforcement learning, is there a case when a programmer says there are things i dont want to computer to learn . I dont want it to be able to do this or change this . Is that a concern . Guest you are getting into one of the most contested areas at the moment in artificial intelligence, which are what are the limits of ethical ai . You can create computers that more or less reflect human biases and assumptions, and that might lead to predicted all the rhythms that say redlined various minorities for certain privileges or insurance or tax breaks. Debating the ai community in the do we wantt degree to constrain our computers from learning certain things that we dont want them to learn or to make certain predictions that we prefer them not to make . In the longterm, the question is, do we want in the words of elon musk to unleash the demon . That wouldcreate ai maybe not have human interests at its core that would have its own . Host lets touch on some driving trucks in the moment, but we have callers. A lot of interesting things. 202 7488000 for those of you eastern and central. Island pacific, 202 7488001. 10the top breakthrough, top for 2017 technologies. Good morning in michigan. Caller good morning. I would like to find out where are we at as far as electric vehicles to be able to go from coasttocoast on one charge, a guide on the road itself, and then with the , i think it has both of the systems. Host thanks, raymond. Thanks, raymond. One question was the Battery Capacity of electric vehicles, and the other was about the capacity to be self driving cars. It will surprise you that i think we are actually slightly closer to being able to have driverless vehicles, at least in many circumstances, then we are to have an electric vehicles that can drive for long periods of time. Question first, as the moment, the most efficient battery is within ion lithiumion, the same on your laptop or cell phone. It is not particularly Good Technology and is in store along charge, and the batteries exhaust themselves. Tesla, which has the best lithiumion battery, you can drive for a fairly long period of time but you have to recharge frequently and to cannot drive from coasttocoast. On the other hand, there are projects all over the United States at the moment. Coloradoand with uber, with google Driverless Cars, and with one of our 10 technologies, auto, self driving trucks, we are close to being able to have self driving cars under the following circumstances when the roads are well known, when it is sunny, daylight, not , Driverless Cars are becoming efficient. Google has achieved more than one million miles inefficient driverless vehicles in the seven years and has only had less than a dozen accidents. One of those was the fault of the card itself. Itself. Say the car we are maybe five years to 10 years going from driverless bagels taking the roads in significant numbers. Host from m. I. T. Technology review, the economic rationale for self driving tracks, you write, is stronger for the one for Driverless Cars. Tom and his trucks can ordinate movements, it put too into closer together over long stretches of pipe two and two together over long stretches of highway. Part of the time, truckers complete the route sooner. Guest i dont think they will kick drivers out of trucks altogether, but at the moment, federal regulations in the United States limit the amount of time a truck driver can drive to around 11 hours a day and 60 hours a week. You can imagine with self driving vehicles, trucks, they could drive 24 7, which would thatown on the loss factor Truck Driving no has. That is how we move most of our goods in the United States. I think it could be an economic benefit. Host your reporters talk to couple of tucker interested in the project or the projects underway. Craig murphy pictured here, a long time greg murphy, pictured here, keeps a close eye on some driving trucks. And another wonders how what they would handle dangerous situations. We have calls. Lets go to richard in lexington, massachusetts. Go ahead. Caller thank you for cspan. Otin toto ask mr. P describe 2. 0 and all the health care companies, private companies and some of the advancements improving the lives of our people for the future. Of 10 gene therapy is one technologies. It has been around for a while, but historically, gene therapy has had an unlucky history. ,n 1999, justin gill center justin was killed but a gene therapeutic intervention. The virus that delivered the immunotherapy meant to save him from his advanced immunosuppression went rampant and killed him. Arlier than that, there was series of Clinical Trials were people developed leukemia from gene therapy. That is because the factory with which we introduced these new genes into the body the vector in which we introduced the new genes in the body did not work well, but we have refined the weight of viruses work. In europe, there are two approved drugs, one for immunosuppressed patients, the other for patients that produce too much fat in their blood. Which is in use now. 50re are around 40 to awaiting Clinical Trials, or we can begin to move gene therapy into humans. This is really important because around 70 of diseases have some kind of genetic component. We could fix the. Host lets talk about the other top 10 Breakthrough Technologies, the self atlas cell atlas. It will be available in the next five years. What is that . Most probably the scientific of technologies. Hundreds oftified cells in the human body and there are undoubtedly more. If we could apply a technology called microfluidics, we could las fora complete at every single cell in the body. In a way, it is that we are body stress their genes that determine physical health. That a detailed level to take the work of the human genome project right down to the individual cell, so we can understand how diseases express themselves. Host and your rider steve connor on the piece says there is cataloging writers even connor on the piece says there is some cap blogging each cell. Sally, go ahead. Caller thank you for talking to us today. Diane 35 and i have always been fascinated by these emerging i have always been fascinated by these emerging technologies. One of the things now is, lets cut half of the work force and use technologies to automate workforce. Meanwhile, on the national budget, there is no discussion on how to reeducate people like me, who had 30 more years of work. Programming, how can i become a creator of these technologies rather than a consumer . Guest great question, sally, and it is dear to my heart. For the last 40 years, there has been wage stagnation in the United States in most of the advanced industrial powers. At least a part of that has to do with tax policy and perhaps trade. The majority of that because being of productivity the cuffing of productivity growth from wages is as a result of technological unemployment. We are not so much eliminating the number of jobs that we are beginning to eliminate high paying jobs. The jobs being eliminated right now are the kinds of jobs that folks like you, people who work in finance, lawyers, i think they are going to be huge number of jobs eliminated inside the health care industry, as well. I dontnews, sally, is know what the future of employment is going to be, but i do know that historically, every great technological revolution has created better jobs. Or have stood best way to take advantage is not become a job or script programmer or t but to teach yourself how to learn. The is what more or less industrial system of education didnt really provide people with skills or when they went to elementary and high school and university. The to acquire new skills. I suggest you look at some online courses like m. I. T. X from iphone university. They are the great set of courses on the west coast from you density, but i think that is the key. Since i am on cspan, i should say this is also a policy problem. We need to entirely overturn the way we think about education and we need to begin to think about retraining more as the german state does, as a thing that investing inummate workers and companies are, as well. Host a question on twitter from bobby are there any technologies that are geared toward providing clean, abundant water and clean air . Guest the short answer is yes to both, but they are fairly radical. If you talk to the people working on energy, they would say listen, if we really wanted to end it made the right policy decisions and investments could probably create sustainable, abundant energy. We want, but that is what they say. Water is the hardwon. Thermodynamic limits in how we self father to Potable Water for use. Water to Potable Water for use print the most advanced is in israel with reverse osmosis to push water through vast membranes to create clean water. It is fairly inefficient. As for creating clean air, that may be where we are driving toward with our Global Warming crisis. At the moment, there are around 400 parts per minute of carbon all their, and given policy constraints and political difficulties of really standing down or use of fossil fuels, i would bet all the money in my pocket against all the money in the audiences that we are eventually going to end up removing carbon from the air. Keith atled David Harvard is working about scrubbing carbon from the air but it is an earlystage project and it would be as expensive to as building our entire fossil fool economy at the moment. Host on energy, one of your top technologies is hot solar cells by converting heat to focus beams of light, a new solar device could create cheap and continuous power. James temple riding that because heat is easier to store the electricity, it should be possible to advert excess amounts from the device at the thermal stage, which could be used to produce electricity, even when the sun is not shining. If researchers can incorporate a storage device and ramp up the system could one day deliver clean, cheap and continuous solar power. Guest i wanted to guess which sources provide this . Host 7 . Guest good guess. If you include simple forms like burning biomass, or if you include hydroelectric power, it for advanced renewables like solar and wind. The reason is mostly cost. At the moment, solar has around a 32 efficiency of converting light into electrons. The new technology called solar chs allows us to capture more of the wavelength of light by capturing heat, as well. Two times more efficient than Current Technologies and has a further advantage. Heat is easier to store the light, obviously, and it can take some of the heat produced by the new solar cells and store them so they can work after the sun goes down. I think the most likely form of clean energy will be solar cells and it is advances like this, which capture more of the visible spectrum that make solar into a possible scalable technology. Host lets it from randy in ohio. Thanks for joining. Caller thank you for taking my call. All this concern about these driverless tax. I was a truck trucks. I was a truck driver for 20 years, and faced with the overcrowded roads out there and the fact that people dont know how to drive anymore, they seem to have all kinds of things on their mind, how is a truck going thee able to keep down traffic that im seeing . You have the heat from offroad to build tire pressures up, and when the friend tires popped, the truck goes in the direction of the popping tire and quickly. I have seen too many. How do you plan on dealing with that . Host randy, on top of that, dailvy asks, there still needs to be someone in the truck to monitor, especially if the script is not running. I suspect go driverless trex will be safer than trex driven by human beings driverless trex will be safer then trucks driven by human beings. Im sure you are a safe driver, but i read they are twice as safe and good at driving theomically as the rest of Truck Driving population. Human beings are easily distracted. The drink, text, get distracted. Truck drivers driving 11 hours a day get tired. Truck driving000 fatalities the year end United States but a lot hundreds of accidents and injuries. I think driverless trucks could reduce the numbers of deaths and injuries. At the same time, no one is proposing the short term to remove the driver altogether. The, self driving trucks at moment, we assumed it was to be a Driver Monitoring the system and occasionally taking the wheel. Good driver needs to get the truck onto the highway. These systems are not good enough that they can drive the truck on a rural road for instance, so the way otto thinks about it is the truck driver drives the truck onto the highway and then relaxes in the back. Host [laughter] gregory, silver spring, maryland. Go ahead. Caller good morning, everybody and mr. Potin. I have a question mr. Pontin. The question with regard to smartphones. My question is are we not on the verge, perhaps, of the Representative Democr