Amazing Breakthrough Technologies That Can Potentially Change the World

A breakthrough is not actually breaking through something and coming out with something never seen or imagined. A breakthrough is the byproduct of multiple innovations combined into one big evolution. Evolution in any medium of our lives takes place when multiple small innovations, experiments, and discoveries combined together to create a new, never before seen feature or a product that leverages our existing lives.

We're privileged to be living in a time where science and technology can assist us, make our lives easier and rethink the ways we go about our daily lives.

The technology we're already exposed and accustomed to has paved the way for us to innovate further, and this list of current and future technologies certainly have the potential to change our lives even more.

Reinforcement Learning

One of the very first ways that will revolutionize the way we interact with computers and computational power today. Reinforcement learning is a method to feed data to the computers and make them learn with repeated patterns.

Researchers figured out how they can make a computer calculate the value that should be assigned to a particular task. For example, during the research carried out on rats, each right or wrong turn that a rat might make on its way out of its maze will be assigned a value by the computer.

Each value then is stored in a large table, and the computer updates all these values as and when it learns. However, when it comes to large and complicated tasks, this becomes computationally impractical.

This is where reinforcement learning has come into play. In past few years, deep learning has proved as a supremely efficient way to recognize patterns in data, regardless if it refers to the turns in a maze, the positions on a Go board, or the pixels shown on screen during a computer game.

Dueling Neural Networks

This great scientific breakthrough promises to bless the AI systems with “imagination”. And how? By allowing them to essentially “spar” with each other. Researchers at Google Brain, Deep Mind and Nvidia are focused on enabling systems which will create ultra-realistic, computer generated images or sounds, beyond what is currently possible.

Duelling Neural Networks are a classic breakthrough in artificial intelligence allowing AI to create images of things it has never seen before. It gives AI a sense of imagination.

One red-flag here is the possibility of computers becoming alarmingly capable tools for digital fakery and fraud by themselves. And this thought needs to be given much attention as well.

The Quantum Leap

Unlike classical computing, which runs everything from your cell phone to a supercomputer, quantum computing is based on the properties of quantum mechanics. Many vision-led companies, including Google, have been researching in the field of quantum computing. This will take the speed and sophistication of computing to the next level.

Tactical VR

Researchers have developed a prototype device where users can use VR with their touch. This is called Epidermal VR, which uses NFC to interact with the users’ input and provides feedback.

All-time ECG

With chips becoming smaller and smaller, computing power has been increasing. Today there are microchips, which can sit easily on the tip of your finger. We are living in the era of ECG-enabled smart watches which have been made possible by new regulations and innovations in hardware and software. They offer the convenience of a wearable device with something closer to the precision of a medical one.

The data from the host can be directly fed to the app especially made for this device. This idea is one revolutionary step away from a mobile app development company to make it go commercial in the coming years.

Artificial Neurons

Researchers and scientists have been burning the midnight oil in order to develop artificial neurons for a long time. It is believed that they will be immensely useful in treating many diseases and medical conditions. Such artificial neurons can replace damaged neurons, such as those in spinal cord injuries, or dysfunctional neurons, and help in establishing the brain signal again.

Babel Fish Earbuds

This technology has not become mainstream yet. However, major players, including Google are working on this technology where the earbuds you are wearing can translate any language a person is speaking in real-time.

Smart Toothbrushes

There already are commercially available intelligent toothbrushes which keep an eye on your brushing technique to make sure you're doing a good thorough job each time you brush your teeth.

The future of intelligent toothbrush would be such that the brush would send your dental health data to your dentist so they don't even need to ask if you're flossing daily.

3D Metal Printing

We already know about 3D plastic printing. It took over the globe and brought an ease to design and prototyping. With advances in technology, instant metal fabrication is quickly becoming a reality, which clearly opens a new world of possibilities in the world of 3D printing.

Smart Mirrors

Mirrors are something where a quick glance at it each morning will give you a visual cue on how you're feeling and looking to the outside world. How about a time when there will be smart mirrors that could scan you and dictate about the potential health problems, vitamin deficiencies or warnings signs of underlying issues in your body.

Prosthetics with a sense of touch

group of European engineers and scientists, a few years back, created a prosthetic arm unlike any other conventional prosthetics. What this wonderful device does is that the prosthetic hand connects directly to the remaining nerves on the patient’s upper arm. It gives the "hand" a sense of touch and can be easily controlled by the wearer.

A few test results show that patients were indeed able to differentiate between different items such as a bottle, a baseball and a mandarin orange. Wearer was also able to exert different levels of pressure, allowing him to touch, hold or grab something with the prosthetic arm. In future, we could see commercial use of such prosthetic arms and legs by patients across the globe.

Nanotechnology

One of the most promising technologies around us is Nanotech. Paradoxically, the smaller the devices get, the larger the issues they are able to resolve. Right from cleaning the water of pollutants to creating biodegradable plastics to fighting off disease, nanotechnology has the potential to shape the next century in ways we can’t even imagine.

These are infinitesimally small miniscule machines which operate in nanometers which can work at the scale of human DNA and fundamentally change how structures behave, breaking down or building up considering what effect we desired or what output is expected.

They are small and require an incredibly low amount of power to function; they can even be powered by the beating of your heart or the chemical energy inside of cells. Nanotechnology carries the promise to track the progress of diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer, help manufacture and design more efficient batteries, and create damage- and rust-resistant materials which could last forever or break down when exposed to certain waves of light.

Cryogenics

According to physics, the process of Cryogenics is the production and behaviour of materials at incredibly low temperatures. This would also mean, scientists would one day be able to freeze human bodies and put them into a sort of hibernation for a prolonged period of time. Many advocates and enthusiasts of this idea believe that scientists will one day work out how to warm the bodies up and bring them back to life, after they have been frozen. Considering that by that time doctors might be able to cure cancer and other diseases which are untreatable today.

Endnotes

The womb of the future never discloses what it bears inside, nor do we have the technology to take a peek. We can only speculate, evaluate, and calculate. Einstein had put it in the best way when he said, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution’.

Our Imagination fueled with our will to make it a reality has shaped the world around us. And this human imagination is what will take us to the vast corners of not only this earth but across the galaxies.

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