From Neurotic Cars To Brain Hacking, Top 10 Lists Reveal the Future and Our Challenges

The beginning, or end, of every year is marked by an eruption of Top 10 lists. Permit me to start with my top pick, the annual Notre Dame Reilly Center Top 10 List of Ethical Dilemmas and Policy Issues in Science and Technology. Topping that list this year is Honda’s announcement to develop an artificial-intelligence-driven “emotion engine” to “read” a driver’s emotions.

Would you really want your car to do that? Forget about the prospect of your kids one day taking your keys away when you fail an eye or reflex test. How about when your emotions are running high and your smart car keeps you in the driveway until you ‘just calm down’ after a fight with your wife/husband/child/neighbor/boss/dog or cable installer? And what happens if your car itself becomes a bit neurotic, consumed with your safety. Seriously. As the Reilly Center asks: “Does no one at Honda remember what happened when [Star Trek’s] Lt Commander Data used his emotion chip those first few times?”

The truth is there are very real prospects and ethical issues here. The idea of using sensors and data analytics to read human emotions is no longer science fiction but on the horizon of possibilities with applications and implications far beyond cars. Autonomous systems are emerging for both work and home that will soon migrate beyond just answering questions like Siri or Amazon’s Echo, but actually have the capability to ‘read’ the environment and address situations involving human actions. Hence the rapidly emerging discipline of figuring out how to imbue ethics into software, a domain where we really don’t want to count on just coders and engineers but also input from philosophers and theologians, not to mention lawyers and hapless citizens. No surprise then that Notre Dame philosophy professor Don Howard is a pioneer in the new domain of “robot ethics.” (And by way of full disclosure, as I’ve noted in earlier Top 10 columns, I am a member of the Reilly Center’s Advisory Board.)

Notre Dame’s list is of particular interest because of its important, if obviously qualitative, consideration of ethical implications associated with emerging tech trends. Consider a few other examples from the N.D. 2017 list.

• Brain hacking: The potential to use your EEG as a unique biometric identifier for a hyper-secure ‘password’ is intriguing, but opens the potential for bad actors to hack that sensor to gain very personal information, literally, about your state of mind.
• Reanimating cryonics: Now that scientists have successfully cryopreserved a rabbit’s brain with no neuron damage, and reanimated cryofrozen worms, could human brain death become a choice?
• Swarm warfare: The ethical issues here are clear in the description. DARPA has launched an OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program that would allowed hundreds (!) of ground and airborne drones to automatically coordinate and work in human-swarm collaboration.

Top 10 list mania goes on year–round of course. But there is value in the tradition of pausing for annual reflection. It can be more than just amusing, scandalous, practical or provocative, it may even be useful.

It turns out lists have “an irresistible magic,” the late philosopher and author Umberto Eco noted. Eco said that lists literally define our culture and not only satisfy human desire to “create order” but how we “grasp the incomprehensible” is “through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.” Eco’s 2009 book The Infinity of Lists, perhaps the only book dedicated to lists, explains that wherever “you look in cultural history, you will find lists. In fact, there is a dizzying array: lists of saints, armies and medicinal plants, or of treasures and book titles.”

By one account there are over 1,000 lists that enumerate each year’s best books alone. Myriad lists categorize pretty much anything: movies, stocks, beauties, literate or illiterate cities, dangerous places, fun places, expensive lawyers, IPOs, market caps, popular words, empires, deaths, black lists and bucket lists. Then there’s Forbes which is at the top of the heap on business-related lists measured by utter dominance in audience reach; lists practically define their brand.

And every two years plenty of election-driven lists appear like the Pew Research Top Issues for voters in 2016. (The #1 issue? The economy.) There are even some lists that claim to be lists of all the other lists: One is called, naturally, The Top Tens, another called Listverse (claiming to be “the original Top 10 site with over 30 million pages a month added), and culture-centric Vulture catalogs a bevy of annual rankings.

So, in keeping with the themes illuminated by Notre Dame’s list, in the spirit of scholarship and the season, permit me to offer a selection of 9 more Top 10 lists thus creating my first annual Top 10 list of Top 10 lists in science & technology.

1. Science magazine’s annual Top 10 list offers the closest second to N.D. for illuminating some truly foundational changes in science and, derivately some ethical, social or philosophical questions (though they don’t typically articulate all that). Top on their list was the measurement and thus discovery of gravity waves which gives mankind a new instrument (albeit huge and enormously expensive) for studying the universe. Second on the list is the discovery of an earth-sized planet orbiting our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri. In astronomical terms this would be like Columbus discovering his ship’s lifeboat before leaving the dock. Others on the Science list include advances in computation biology leading to the first “designer proteins” that promise medical and biological revolution, and the first metalense that has implications equivalent to the revolutionary development of the first ‘natural’ glass lenses centuries ago.
2. MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies is, naturally, far more hardware focused. Top of their list is “immune engineering” to conquer cancer, followed by their #2, the revolutionary low-cost gene-editing machine called Crispr. Also on the MIT list without ethical qualification are “robots that teach each other,” and, less imaginatively, they include Tesla’s self-driving car feature.
3. Pew Research’s Top 10 Scientific Studies offers a window on what science issues ignite the most audience interest. Using quantitative data on “the reach of scientific journal articles in online news outlets, social media and other online platforms,” they found that six of the 10 most followed scientific journal articles in 2016 were about health-related issues, and three were astronomy-related. The very personal and cosmic captured the most interest. The same methodology for the top 100 most-discussed scientific journal articles found 65 percent were about health issues. (The next two: biology at 17 percent, and astronomy at three percent of the total.)
4. Cleveland Clinic’s Top 10 Medical Innovations includes smart cars because of the potential for reduced accidents and injuries. Also on that list: immunotherapy that helps kids beat cancer without chemo; stents that harmlessly dissolve when their work is done; 3D virtual reality as a new tool for intricate surgical practices; and the potential (and need) for conquering the complexity of interoperability amongst the proliferation of digital healthcare systems and tools.
5. The Scientist’s Top 10 Innovations in life science tech centers on valuable “new platforms that look primed to rev up discovery in basic biology, drug development, and clinical labs” including tools that generate long gene sequences with single-molecule resolution, and efficient and precise genome editing.
6. Deloitte’s Top 10 health care innovations unsurprisingly also includes next-generation gene sequencing, but properly includes the direct effect of non-health tech revolutions on the health sector, including virtual reality (much as the Cleveland Clinic did) as well as: 3D printers (making not just custom metal implants, but also biological simulacrums of organ tissue for drug development), artificial intelligence (healthcare is a major focus of IBM’s Watson supercomputer), biosensors, and “leveraging social media to improve patient experience.”
7. InfoWorld’s 10 strangest tech stories of 2016 includes only one health-related item: dust-sized microbots that can be inserted into humans (Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage anyone?) to be steered and powered remotely with magnetic fields. Also on this list (as with many others), Google’s artificial intelligence engine that beat the world’s #2 ranked Go player (a computer feat orders of magnitude more difficult than Big Blue beating Kasparov at chess in 1997), Goodyear literally reinventing the wheel itself (a spherical wheel suspended magnetically), and a Google patent for “human flypaper for cars” (so people, who are hit by a self-driving car end up sticking to the hood instead of bouncing off to be run over).
8. Forbes World’s Most Innovative Companies—because all technology ends up as a business—shows that 9 out of the top 10 are in the U.S. and 5 are pharma companies. The Forbes’ list considers only firms with seven years of public financial data and at least a $10 billion in market cap. For a list focused on tech start-ups and venture capital there is no better source than CB Insights.
9. World Economic Forum’s Top 10 emerging technologies gives one a window on what the potentates of the planet think is a big deal. This year the WEF, which claims they look for technologies at “a tipping point in the deployment” included: nanosensors and the Internet of nanothings, next generation batteries, autonomous vehicles, organs-on-chips, and perovskite solar cells.

That’s all I got, until next year’s Top 10 list of Top 10 S&T lists.

This piece originally appeared on Forbes

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Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of Expanding America's Petroleum Power: Geopolitics in the Third Oil Era. Follow him on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in Forbes