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 Democracy that is app . Basically a smartphone ,hen i say Smartphone App imagine an app where you can control 90 of all offices that are held and people would be super engaged i know, and there are a lot of shortcoming in the fact that maybe not everybody would he engaged or have the right technology, but the point is what about the cell phone Representative Democracy apps . Host ok, gregory. Guest that is a really interesting question. Yes, you could easily develop a federal or state app that would allow people to have direct democratic interventions, but let me suggest two possible problems with that great one is our cell phones are really not very secure. They are hacked all the time by thats called botnets hijack cell phones in order to do things like click fraud, or denial of service attacks. I would be nervous about handing over our democracy, particularly in the context of the arguments over the last national election, to systems that could be hacked by foreign powers or by malefactors inside United States. My other concern would be the idea of an unrestricted representative direct democracy. We have elected leaders for a reason, and we have Great National debates about who should our president be, referenda about how he went to think about our taxes. I fear direct democracy over cell phones might become a little too much like twitter and too quickly. Host the reference to our caller, one of the top Breakthrough Technologies, the botnet of things, the relentless push to add connectivity to home gadgets is creating dangerous side effects that figure to get worse. Guest we created something ,alled the internet of things tens of millions, hundreds of millions of simple internet connected devices that monitor want buthings that we no one thought to go and put very much security in them to read there are hundreds and millions out there, and they are being hijacked all the time in them. There are hundreds of millions out there and they are being hijacked by. Nets all the time. By botnets all the time. This happens even right now and they could be used for things make peopleraud, to think more ads are being watched and really being watched, but they could attack national infrastructure, dams, electrical systems, really dangerous. Ghost devices arent going to go away. People continue to use them in the insecure state until they break areas we created break. We created a problem and there isnt a way to fix it. Treats about 1600 a converted my a year electric bill into a 40 a year bill. Ingleside, illinois. Go ahead. Caller i had a question about electric cars earlier. I thought about investing myself, but with about five years down the road when the battery has to be replaced . Car there be value in the or is it considered junk at that point . Guest great question, bob. Tesla, will replace battery packs, but tesla vehicles with the current model are 70,000 to 100,000 cars. The question is will the car manufacturer continue to replace batteries on lower level vehicles . I dont know when General Motors had its first ev1, one of the reasons they only released the vehicle, because they did not went to replace the battery packs. Keepgine since most people cars from two years to seven years, or we will want to do is have an electric vehicle, where the battery lasts for that length of time. Host when of the other challenges, the New York Times a quote writing about New York Times writing about how do you create a map showing all the every stop,s, base around accidents, construction, writing about that in the New York Times. Far, it is true that so driving vehicles have worked best in Silicon Valley in places like singapore. That is light Numbers Project in pittsburgh ubers project in pittsburgh is interesting. It isnt as chaotic as boston but based on an old 19 century maze of streets. Thinkinght of uber self driving vehicles work well in pittsburgh, perhaps they can do it anywhere. Host here is ron, welcome. Caller thank you. Fromestion is your list 2007, how many of those technologies are common today . Guest i knew someone was going to ask that. [laughter] our track record is fairly good. Where we get it wrong is not so technologyntifying but being too early. A clear path to commercialization, but sometimes goradical technology that from innovation to commercial use, can stumble over the right Business Model. The best example i can think of them around 2007 was microfluidics, which does what liquidssts, manipulates that small levels and it is now incredibly important for a whole variety of technologies, including gene sequencing. Ist we couldnt see in 2007 the path to commercialization would go through making really simple cheap microfluidic raise for use in africa on blossom paper. You could put it on a piece of paper, squeeze a little bit of the techo it and cellular catastrophe like aids and malaria, and that turned out to be really important for Health Care Workers and poor parts of the world. We had no idea that what happened. We thought it would drive genegh big pharma or the companies. That totally took us by surprise. Often we do not know what the Business Model is going to be that really drives the technology. Host one more call from timothy in vermont. Caller yes, good morning, gentlemen. Like to digress a little bit, but two words come into my mind three. Fukushima and the Pacific Ocean, and there is so much hot water barely going into the Pacific Ocean in that ocean is literally dying. Is there anys applied technologies or anything to possibly this is a disaster, and no one ever talks about it. Briefly abouttalk Nuclear Power and then i will talk about the acidification and warming of oceans. I think nook power is potentially nuke power is a potentially important source of carbon and neutral scalable technology, but you are right that the technologies we have for reactors at the moment are incredibly expensive and not very safe and rely upon the fuel cycle of enriched uranium, what. E use for weapons what we want our reactors, like or molten salt, reactors, that are smaller, safer, and can use different. Uel sources like Nuclear Waste in terms of the warming of the oceans, this is important. You are right it is not sufficiently talked about. People said there had been a slowing of Global Warming, and that is true with atmospheric tests. Where the heat had been going was into the oceans. Because the pacific is warming fast,t and acidifying so it is having an enormous impact, and those environments, coral reefs, but eventually come at the ocean will begin admitting heat again, and there are some models for Global Warming where we begin to see a Tipping Point run away Global Warming effects. E do not know yet a lot more Research Needs to be done. This is what climate scientists call the question of climate sensitivity. We do not know how bad until past Global Warming is going to happen. We know what is happening and we will probably blow past two degrees of warming over the next century, but the climate sensitivity is high, it could be six degrees and could happen very fast. That would be hard for the human race to adapt to. Host we have touched on a few of the top 10 break to technologies in 2017 lead jason pontin, the editorinchief and publisher of the Mit Technology review. Take a look at it at technologyrewview. Com and you can follow him on twitter at jasonpontin. Nd thank you. If you want to talk about technologies or tweets, we have about 20 minutes left. 202 7488000 for democrats. 202 7488001, republicans. Independents and others, 202 7488002. We will try to get to your tweets that cspanwj. First, we take both tv and American History to be on the road. All of our san jose offerings will feature the citys history and that of the surrounding Silicon Valley area. Onestop is the historic 1867 look observatory, where we hear the story of a place that owns one of the largest and historically significant factor telescopes in the world. Refractor telescopes in the world. James glick was a wealthy businessman in the San Francisco bay area in the 1800s with a fortune over 300 million in the 1860s. He wanted to be remembered or george davidson, the president of the California Academy of sciences and george madeira, an astronomer, who showed them what sad in the like do a small telescope, or some of the factors that convinced him scientific monument that would make great discoveries was the way to go, so he decided he wanted the greatest telescope, existence, any in constructed at his memorial. To give about 700,000 of his fortunes to form the Lick Observatory in this telescope is his monument. Was astronomer Eleanor Gaetz from the Lick Observatory and you can see other programs that cspan cities tours website at cspan. Org cities tour. We will be right back with your calls on washington journal. Afterwards, Sophia Nelson on her latest book. She is interviewed by michael steele, former chair of the rnc. Where it is unity come into play and how does this book provide prescriptions for turning that important corner to recognize how important unity is . This book is a refresher civics but i wrote it in a way of my sophia weight of we need a little help, were messed up. America is a great country but we are confused right now about who we are and what we want. That is what we are wrestling with. This unity peace, we have to break it down because the problem is on the last election is that half the country feels one way and another half of the country feels another. Tonight at 9 00 eastern on afterwards. Washington journal continues. Host for the remainder of the