DATE: 30/12/2016
SOURCE: REASON
Blockchain
The digital currency Bitcoin is the first way most folks heard of blockchain technology. By one simple definition, a blockchain is a kind of independent, transparent, and permanent database coexisting in multiple locations and shared by a community. (For nice simple explanation of how blockchains work, go here.) The beauty of a public distributed a blockchain is that records are permanent and cannot easily be falsified. It basically solves the problem of trust since everyone can see what was agreed to and what transactions actually have taken place.
CRISPR
Biology is kludgy and complicated and therefore biomedical and biotech progress is maddeningly slow compared to digital technologies. However, precise genome editing made possible by CRISPR greatly simplifies experimentation and will speed up the development of medical therapies, biotech enhanced crops, and even enable humanity to curate wild landscapes. CRISPR genome editing is derived from what is essentially a bacterial immune system in which how bacteria protect themselves against attacking viruses. Cheap and easy to use CRISPR can edit genes much like a word processing program can edit text. And progress has been rapid.
Machine Learning
Various machine-learning algorithms are being deployed as increasingly effective techniques for dealing with the growing flood and complexity of data. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Such learning algorithms are generally trained to organize and extract information from being exposed to relevant data sets. It is often hard to discern exactly how the algorithm is devising the rules from which it makes predictions.
READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE @
https://reason.com/archives/2016/12/30/three-technologies-will-utterly-transfor
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