Top 10 Emerging Technologies 2024

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Bernard S. Meyerson, Chief Innovation Officer Emeritus, IBM: I'm a real believer in scale in terms of improving the human condition. And the ability to save literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lives every year is just an extraordinary game changer.

Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. This week: the top 10 technologies set to change our lives for the better.

Every year the World Economic Forum publishes its top-10 tech and on this episode the lead authors of that report talk through each of them - from clever ways to speed up the way we gather and transmit data...

Mariette DiChristina, Dean and Professor of the Practice in Journalism, Boston University College of Communication: Integrated sensing and comms is just that. It allows wireless networks to become aware.

Robin Pomeroy: To using artificial intelligence to speed up all areas of scientific discovery.

Bernard S. Meyerson: It can assemble a jigsaw puzzle in an instant that would take us a lifetime, It's a very, very fundamental expansion of our abilities to basically do scientific and technical discovery that previously was unavailable to us, and will have a profound impact.

Robin Pomeroy: You can find Radio Davos on any podcast app, at YouTube or at wef.ch/podcasts where you will also find our sister programmes, Meet the Leader - interviews with leaders from business, science, academia and beyond with unique insights on leadership - and also Agenda Dialogues - the full audio from the best discussions at World Economic Forum meetings at Davos and around the world.

I’m Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum, and with this look at the top 10 emerging technologies set to change all our lives…

Mariette DiChristina: Which is an amazing thing to think of and within our reach in the next decade or so.

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos.

Robin Pomeroy: Every year, the World Economic Forum's Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution publishes a top ten of the latest technologies that a panel of experts believe will have a big impact on the world in the next few years.

On this podcast, I'm delighted to welcome back to Radio Davos, the two people who lead the work creating this list. They are Mariette DiChristina, who's Dean and professor of the practice of journalism at Boston University College of Communication. Hi, Mariette. How are you?

Mariette DiChristina: Hi, Robin, such a pleasure to see you.

Robin Pomeroy: Great to see you again. It's not the first time we've done this with you and the other expert joining us, who is Bernie Meyerson, chief innovation officer emeritus at IBM. Hi, Bernie. How are you?

Bernie Meyerson: Yeah. Good morning. I'm well, thank you. Good to be back here and do this again.

Robin Pomeroy: It is. I believe this is our fourth year. You've been doing it many more years than I have this top ten tech. But on Radio Davos, this is our fourth time, I believe.

For anyone who hasn't followed it before, could one of you just remind us, what is this annual report that you put together?

Bernie Meyerson: We look at what are emerging technologies that will be of significant scientific, technical, financial, commercial value going out about 3 to 5 years. And we have an extensive team far beyond Mariette and myself, that actually are world class experts in their fields, and they bring forward ideas as to what will emerge as being significant. And then, of course, we over the course of several weeks and several meetings, whittle it down to a top ten list.

And it's been remarkably successful in terms of, for instance, identifying mRNA quite a few years before it turns out to be something that had tremendous positive impact in terms of saving lives during the pandemic, or similarly, CRISPR-Cas9 in terms of enabling gene editing. So it it really is a work in progress constantly, with additional help from sources at the World Economic Forum and around the globe. And not to mention Mariette, whose expert in journalism has really tuned it up to the point that, quite frankly, she is my favorite heckler.

Robin Pomeroy: Are you a heckler Mariette?

Mariette DiChristina: Yeah, I suppose I am. Let's see. Let's see how we are today. Maybe I won't heckle you. I feel I should be nice to you.

Robin Pomeroy: And remind us - what are the criteria? Because there must be the countless innovations.

Mariette DiChristina: Right. I'd like to add a couple of facts about that. Thank you. And thanks to Bernie for, as always, the great overview introduction.

This year we added a few attributes to our selection. So as Bernie was explaining, first of all, these emerging technologies need to be something that we feel will have a strong impact in the next 3 to 5 years, let's say.

We're looking for novelty. You know, something that's truly emerging and new. Looking for applicability, is it significant applications that are possible there? Will they really benefit society and the economies? Depth. What we mean by that is more than one company involved, one company alone is not enough maybe to have the kind of impact we're looking for. And power. Are these technologies truly game changing?

And this year we added a few additional screens because, as you rightly point out, Robin, there are many hundreds or thousands of new things that pop up every year.

For one thing, we, put out a call to the Global Future Councils network for ideas that they may have. We put out a call to universities and the university research network. We, then got more than 300 nominations of technologies. And applied this time for the first time a new tool by Frontiers, an AI trends analyzer, which looked at those 300 technology stations from 29 countries and gave us a curated list of around 70 of those technologies from which, as Bernie mentioned, our steering group finally selected the the last ten nominations that you see before you this year.

Robin Pomeroy: Okay. Well we're going to go through this top ten list. People can find it online to find out more. The links will be in the show notes to this podcast episode.

It's not like a hit parade top ten where we go down to, you know, number one is the most popular. You've not identified the number one, but there are ten of them.

And let's go through them in the order they're listed in, in the report. And each of you can give your kind of explanation to what they are.

I'm really interested. I'm glad you said that one of the criteria is the application the real world use. Because for those of us who aren't scientists or engineers, often we're baffled by, oh, here's some great new science how will impact my life? And I think what's always so engaging about this report is, oh, I can imagine of that happening either in my life or in someone's job, or in healthcare or farming or all these things that touch us every day. So I'll be pushing you to tell me how these things are being implemented or might be implemented in the future.

Let's get started. One out of ten, and number one is, oh, here we are. I mean, this could have been an entire top ten in itself. artificial intelligence. For the last two years is all that everyone's talking about. I think we're getting to the point kind of peak AI hype has maybe passed now, and people are asking, okay, so what is it all about? Why is it so important? And here you've called it AI for scientific discovery. Bernie, can you tell me what you're identifying here?

Bernie Meyerson: One of the remarkable things about AI is it is able to scale. What gets lost when we're talking about, discovery is discovery is basically predicated upon your ability to look back at what is known by the way of facts, add something new that you may have discovered and say, wow, you know, this discovery basically enables me to do something that is going to be profound.

That sounds great, but the reality of science is that science is done globally, and it is done by not just hundreds or thousands, but hundreds of thousands or millions of people. The odds of you as an individual, seeing every relevant entity that's going on out there and being able to then synthesize out of that something new and guaranteeing that you're going to find the right pieces is incredibly, there are incredibly low odds.

So what AI has the ability to do, which humans just because you are a person, not a supercomputer looking through the world's literature, is it can pull together all of the disparate elements relevant to what you're working on and say, did you realize that?

And I'll give you a classic example of a field I worked in for many, many years, growing silicon, and alloys of it, silicon germanium. It turns out that about 30, 40 years ago, somebody measured, believe it or not, junk on the surface of a piece of silicon and published the fact that this junk is there, no matter if you clean it all off, the instant you put it in the air, it regrows. And so you have to heat this stuff to 1000°C to get rid of it. Okay. And they had published this, and it's been cited tens of thousands of times. AI had it been able and existed at that time, would have looked through all the literature. Of course, if I asked it about the efficacy, about how valid this was and would have noticed something really important, it would have noticed that the measurement this person did proving this junk was there, you had to actually tell it in advance what it was looking for. It didn't know what the stuff was. And it turns out this person just made up what he thought it was, seemed reasonable, it was completely wrong, and it set the field back about 30 years.

What AI's capability would be is, it knows the measurement technique. I mean, it's published. It tells you what it can and can't do. And something like AI would have said, wait a minute. By the way, did you know that that technique doesn't actually measure what's there, just measures how much of something is there. And you might have caught this mistake three decades earlier.

It is much more powerful than a human individual will be. And therefore, in terms of scientific discovery, it can pull together knowledge that has been created globally at a rate and pace that is unimaginable before. So if you are looking, for instance, as someone who's treating a disease in the United States, of someone who came back, let's say, from Kenya or elsewhere in Africa, with some sort of issue, some sort of physical issue, there are countless papers written about various parasites you might pick up, but this would enable a physician to do the research and literally look through all of the papers written about this. Even if there were only 1 or 2 out of tens of thousands in a year, locate something that was relevant to the symptoms they were seeing in an individual and say, wait a minute, this could help you.

It's a very, very fundamental expansion of our abilities to basically do scientific and technical discovery that previously was unavailable to us, and will have a profound impact in improving the quality of life and the quality of the information we get.

It obviously has issues, as we well know, because people can misuse it. I mean, we're well aware that there are lights and shadows, you know, positive and negative issues around AI, but in its truest form, it is an incredibly valuable tool in letting us assess and discover things that may be out there in little bits and pieces, but it can assemble a jigsaw puzzle in an instant that would take us a lifetime, and that is a tremendous move forward.

Robin Pomeroy: Is that something that's actually being used now? Because I suppose academics have worked in a certain way for decades. It must be slightly a different kind of workflow, to say the least.

Bernie Meyerson: It is in widespread use for the simple reason that, as I said, the ability to scale the accessibility to knowledge has enabled people to discover new materials, where, again, there were disparate hints that a material may have a given property or seeking. But if these papers were written by 300 different authors, good luck finding them as a human. But the ability for it to bring it to you and for you to make that simple assessment is something that already is in existence.

Robin Pomeroy: And you've mentioned healthcare. Are there other areas where you see, you know, in the next months and years, this could bring impact.

Bernie Meyerson: Oh, absolutely. Just the discovery of new materials. for instance, there is a whole set of new materials that are needed to address certain climate crises. In fact, one of them we'll discuss a bit later, elastocalorics, basically is something where you can actually utilize the material discovery capabilities of AI to actually sort through literally whatever 100 years of literature in seeking the properties you really need to make that work.

Robin Pomeroy: Wonderful. Let's park AI then. I think it's the only time we're going to mention it. Let's see if we can get through the rest of this show without mentioning AI again. I bet we won't. Number two on the list is privacy enhancing technologies. Mariette, do you want to tell us about that?

Mariette DiChristina: So, Robin, hate to disappoint you, but we will be mentioning AI again in this item but in a slightly different use.

So large data sets have obviously transformed the way we can look at a lot of things. Research, like we were talking about, new discoveries, innovations. But there are concerns around our privacy. Especially with health research or security and with data sovereignty, one country to another, then these limitations that have been imposed by those concerns are very real. They limit the degree to which we can share information across borders or among people.

And now, the next, you know, solution that we can use to share sensitive data is these privacy enhancing technologies. And one of them is called synthetic data. And I know that sounds kind of funny, but what it means is synthetic data replicates the patterns underneath and trends in the sensitive data that you don't want to just share completely openly. And those patterns, replicated and trends are replicated enough, though, so that they can be used for further analysis, without exposing the privacy of individuals or compromising governments or organizations sensitive data.

And these are powered by, you might guess, advances in AI. And they open up new global data sharing capabilities that we didn't have before that will help us, whether it's researching biological phenomena, you know, health related studies or even training AI models to do other things.

And there may, you know, still be some concerns around revealing health trends in a country, let's say, a country that might be sensitive to those trends being exposed for some reason. So, these technologies are not 100% protective, but they are protective enough of the sensitive individual data that they can be used to enhance sharing in ways that we just never could do before.

Bernie, I saw you nodding. That looked like you wanted to add something.

Bernie Meyerson: No, I think you're exactly correct. It is such an incredibly sensitive thing, because the power that we have as a global entity, or at the World Economic Forum by definition, is to see things happening in small quantities at first and address them proactively. You know, Lord forbid we face another, issue like we did with COVID, the ability if we had this kind of freedom and movement of data, perhaps we could have dealt with it sooner.

It is, Mariette said it very well, it's a very powerful technique that tries to break down the borders that currently exist and prevent us from utilizing data on a global scale by addressing the concerns about privacy.

Robin Pomeroy: Because we're often asked if you're in a hospital setting, health care, to allow sharing of data. And I think very often people are sceptical of that. They would like to improve the population's health as a whole. But also, I don't want everyone to be able to access my personal data. This idea of making synthetic data, which anonymizes and collects all this data together, goes some way to assuaging those fears. Is that correct?

Mariette DiChristina: Yeah. It does. I mean, I was just thinking that right before we got on together, I was asked to blur my background a bit. And it's kind of a nice analogy because you can still see the shape of things, but not the specifics. I hope that helps a little bit to get across the, at least by way of analogy, to get across the idea of how the specific data are masked a bit.

Now, that does mean that, there might be a poor representation of, maybe an especially significant edge case, or, you know, the use of more energy and time to analyze that data because you're taking a kind of a step back from it, just as my laptop right now is using a little bit more energy to mask my background. But you got the general gist and idea then, and even that in the age of AI is a huge advance compared with not being able to share data across lines at all.

Robin Pomeroy: Let's move on to number three in the list, which is called reconfigurable intelligent surfaces. So, Mariette was talking about her room. When we're talking about surfaces here, Bernie, this could literally be your walls. Tell me what a reconfigurable intelligent surface might be.

Bernie Meyerson: It has become incredibly important to share data electronically.

People walk around, you know, you have a wristwatch that's taking your pulse, maybe your blood oxygen level. Maybe, in fact, the glucose level in your body. If you're diabetic, can you track that?

The challenges all of this information has to be communicated. And the amount of communications requirements we have nowadays are vast. So we have to come up with a better way of basically steering information, literally, so that you use a lot less energy and you get a lot more accurate transmission of data.

One of the things you can do is you can literally now with very, very sophisticated, technologies and very powerful microprocessors, take what looks like a flat surface, which really consists of an incredible number of unbelievably tiny mirrors that can be individually tilted, and you can focus that transmission of energy.

And this is why it's important. If you simply take an antenna literally, you know, like this, and you broadcast from it, the actual power is going out into 360 degrees of the environment, so that a receiver that's at one little point far away sees a tiny little fraction of the energy that was sent, because of course, the energy went in all directions.

Imagine for a minute you had a surface that's configurable and literally can focus, like a parabolic mirror focuses light, can focus the energy from that antenna at one spot, going out, maybe at literally one degree angle, as opposed to 360 degrees around you. Well guess what? You just picked up a factor of 360 in the efficiency of sending data.

And that is an enormous benefit. So that the whole point of these surfaces is that you actually are starting to get the ability to, on a global scale, literally, whether in a factory or whether using cellular, you can actually steer the signal to where you want it to go, which means you can use vastly less power because a larger fraction of what you transmit, it actually arrives where you want it to be.

And you've done this for years. People basically make these, let's say, three meter across parabolic mirrors they point at the sun and focus the sun down to a little tiny region where you can boil water just using solar energy. It's the same exact idea, except it's dynamic. It isn't a fixed surface. It's a surface that you literally can use to steer the energy in any direction you want and thereby saving an enormity of power, and interference goes away.

And this can be done on any surface. So this is coming. They used to do this electronically, but it's very complex. They actually have flat surfaces where they have individual electric elements. And what they do is they delay the time those elements report back what they're seeing. So it makes the surface look like it has a shape and can receive more information from a direction. Nowadays, you literally can build little mirrors that steer the energy exactly where you want it. So it's really a very powerful mechanism. And this is something that will become much more available over a short period of time.

Robin Pomeroy: And what would it look like in the real world? Is it just like a TV screen somewhere? Is it a whole wall in a home or a factory? What is this surface?

Bernie Meyerson: It actually can be any surface. That's the key point. In other words, you might have just a flat antenna and buried inside your cell phone that can nonetheless look in a particular direction once it knows where a signal is coming from to make a much stronger connection.

It could be the roof of your car that actually, believe it or not, a section of the roof of the car actually can track a satellite overhead that's broadcasting information or track a passing vehicle.

Literally any surface can be adapted to the technology.

In a factory. You may just have a series of what look like small mirrors, but those mirrors actually are essentially beam steering, and they actually are steering the information in a very direct way to where it's most use, and requires the least power to do so.

It will be unobtrusive. That is the key. This isn't going to be some huge parabolic antenna. This is going to be a literally unobtrusive surface that you will probably not be aware of, which is a good thing.

Robin Pomeroy: And the main benefit is power saving or are there other other benefits from this?

Bernie Meyerson: Many benefits. Remember that you have to transmit a certain amount of data. If you have much more efficient connections, you really need less power or for the same power, you can transmit a vastly larger amount of data.

So it's not just about saving power. You may want to run at the same exact power because the battery is at adequate. But then you could transmit many times, maybe 100 times more data over the same link.

So it's really a very powerful technology because it enables trade offs that let you choose what it is you want to optimize, where prior times you didn't have that option.

Robin Pomeroy: That's called reconfigurable intelligent surfaces. Down here it has the acronym RIS so people can look out. Sounds like something we're going to be hearing a lot more about in the coming months and years.

Let's move to number four, which is also related to the transmission of data, I suppose. High altitude platform stations. What are they?

Bernie Meyerson: If you think about it today, you have a cell tower, right? And you drive past and you connect to it. That works great if you happen to be in an area. Oh, yeah. Like, where you didn't have hurricane Sandy that took out all the power, knocked out the cell towers, and you couldn't communicate. The challenge is you're not going to orbit a satellite specific to addressing that need, and you're not going to go out and buy a sat phone for the three weeks it takes to resurrect the local electric grid.

What these options now are, which did not pre exist, is people have done some astonishingly effective work as an example in figuring out how to build a solar powered plane, where you literally can have an aircraft with enormous wings that have all essentially photovoltaic devices across the top, electric powered carry batteries, and they can orbit in a fixed location over a region. You can literally launch one of these things and climb at the altitude, perhaps 60,000ft, and have it orbit over a spot and act as a temporary area where you can communicate via that to some remote one site that connects you back into the internet and provides emergency communications.

So that's one of the powers of this technology. But the other one that's interesting because it's incredibly low cost compared to throwing, you know, a geosynchronous satellite into orbit, where you only have to accelerate it to 17,500 miles an hour. That's just to get it to circle the Earth. Then you have to climb up to 24, 25,000 miles to park it in an orbit. Here you have to basically just launch an aircraft. Or even, believe it or not, a dirigible or balloon floated up to 60,000ft and have it sit in a spot, and you have communications that has enormous potential to basically remedy what we call the digital divide.

There are still large areas of the continents where people do not have access, even basic access, to the communications, the internet that we all take for granted in what we call the first world. The fact is that people need to have that. That is a leveling of the playing field, and to be able to do that at extremely low cost, at extraordinarily short notice is very powerful.

So this is much more than just saying, wow, you know, in an emergency, I can get, you know, phone communications and say, help or I'm all right. This is about essentially potentially opening up a huge, huge amount of the world to high speed communications, where it does not currently exist at a price point that will not break the bank of the government or the entities involved in doing so.

Robin Pomeroy: It seems almost like low tech in a way. You're talking about aircraft. They've been around 100 years. Blimps, you know, hot air balloons or whatever, dirigibles. Has something changed in the technology? It makes me wonder why this wasn't happening 40 years ago. What has changed?

Bernie Meyerson: Intelligence. In prior times, as you might imagine, some poor, pilot would be sitting up there flying the aircraft, flying the dirigible and maintaining it. You certainly in the past didn't have photovoltaics, which meant, well, you ran out of fuel and guess what? You landed. These things can orbit the solar powered ones. Literally. Potentially, hypothetically, months at a time. And that's the difference.

In other words, A, you don't mean people. These are run by, here we go, artificial intelligence. It can assess the rate of flow of air around the vessel and make sure it stays in the right spot. It can even anticipate global weather changes and reposition itself in anticipation of not being able to quite keep up with the local winds, but allow itself to get a little bit ahead of it so that it drifts back to the right spot.

These were all capabilities that only existed within the last several years. Particularly photovoltaic and battery technologies enabled you to put this up there and maintain it in a fixed orbit for months at a time.

So there has been a lot of technological progress that has enabled this to evolve to something that's both, essentially readily executable using you are you are correct, underlying technologies like balloons that have been around since forever.

Robin Pomeroy: There are 2.6 billion people in the world that have no access to the internet. I'm taking that statistic from the report. This is a technology that could help address that. Let's go to number five on the list. It is called integrated sensing and communication. Mariette, do you want to tell us what that is?

Mariette DiChristina: One of the things that report shows a lot this year is efficiencies through thinking about things more carefully. The technology that Bernie was just talking about is a great example of integrating a bunch of things that many of them had been existing but hadn't been put together in quite that way, and now have the right investments.

Integrated sensing and communication. Well, for decades these things have been separate technologies, where you have sensors and you have communication devices. And as a result, now we have lots and lots of devices and overlapping functions, that have led to a lot of spectrum inefficiency. So financial loss and device congestion.

If you put them together, it turns out, if you think about it, they can be put together, integrated sensing and and comms is just that, it allows wireless networks to become 'aware', I'm putting quotes around it, of their environments, enabling capabilities like mapping an environment. Continuous monitoring of infrastructure like a bridge to make sure that stays safe and doesn't collapse. You could analyze air and water quality or soil moisture for agriculture. You could check for weather conditions. You can help with integrating into power grids, enhancing efficiency of them, and enabling monitoring of electricity consumption and generation.

There are tons of things you can do and more efficiently. So this is very much about being efficient. And imagine a world where it's just more aware of itself in every dimension. You're saving water, you're saving energy, and you're saving material costs of making all of these separate devices. Once you combine them together.

Robin Pomeroy: Again, how new is that, really? We're getting used to things like smart meters. In the good old days, you had a meter that then had to be read by someone and reported back. And now these things are connected to the internet. Obviously that's the one we see. There must be countless other applications that this could be used for, but presumably that's been developing now for some time.

Mariette DiChristina: Sometimes the innovation is how you put it together. You know, yes, there have been sensing technologies such as what you described. And yes, there have been many communication technologies, but these things have existed as separate nodes, and not all clustered around an area that you're trying to keep track of, whether you're trying to monitor the water, in the soil, because you need to worry about how drought, drought, you know, tolerant your plants are or whether you're trying to monitor electricity consumption in a world where we're using, at least in urbanized areas, more air conditioning than ever before, more energy draw than ever before to run these devices. So you put these together and it's more efficient.

But yeah, I mean, we stand what was it Newton who said we stand on the shoulders of giants? That is true. There are steps along the way. And then somebody has, or some bodies in the case of top ten emerging technologies, have the insight that if you combine them, if you combine sensing and communication, now you're in a whole new area of both saving and awareness of the environmental conditions.

Bernie Meyerson: To build on what Mariette just said. She's exactly right. And if we go back to the reconfigurable surfaces. If you think about it in the past, I'll give you an example. If you had two things that were, let's say, ten miles apart, and then you needed to collect data across this ten mile gap, you know, you'd have a fairly high powered radio. People, if you think about it, people use CB radios might be interested, you know, in making that connection, the idea of using Wi-Fi would be inconceivable. Well, it turns out if you have these reconfigurable antennas behind the actual transmitters so that you can focus the beam narrowly, and if the other end of the receiver, again, you have the same reconfigurable surface that can actually look at a very specific location, you can use Wi-Fi to transmit over distances that are 10 to 100 times beyond what we typically think of a being capable of.

And all of this enables you to have a level of interconnectivity that was unimaginable before, but only if you combine all the elements. It doesn't work if you just have a little piece.

And as you correctly said, it is the fact that we finally have gotten to a stage where we have all the elements, that this becomes something you could almost take for granted over the next several years, as opposed to something where we're seeing one one offs like, you know, I'll read your meter remotely.

And by the way, reading the meter remotely, many places, they have a little transmitter and a guy drives a truck down the street and literally just captures the signal by driving down the local street. Why? Because they don't have a way to transmit over distance without getting very involved in cellular and other technologies.

So this is something that will make a significant change over the coming 3 to 5 years, and how well this works and how densely it can operate.

Robin Pomeroy: That was integrated sensing and communication. We're into the second half of the top ten now, this is number six, which is called immersive technology for the built world. Mariette.

Mariette DiChristina: It's amazing to me how much carbon is produced by our world. You know, in creating it and building it. The report mentions 40% of global carbon dioxide emissions are involved in construction of various kinds. And despite that the footprint of the construction industry, because it is a large industry has been difficult for it to adapt to digital innovations.

So what we're talking about here is AI driven. Again, that word AI, immersive reality tools that can bring the same kind of design power to construction that has begun to be, used elsewhere to help leap ahead in the built world. Look, what could you do?

Well, for example, you could at scale than has ever been possible before, ensure the accuracy and safety of designs. Advances sustainability by doing sort of hypothetical modeling digitally before building at a greater detail that has ever been possible so far with things like that you would have heard of, like CAD/CAM [computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing] designs.

This is this is at a whole other level of detail. And this immersive design, would help anticipate construction challenges and, test them out, test out different hypotheses, looking for potential errors in designs and solutions before you even begin to build.

Another thing that is a positive aspect is digital twins. These are models which are widely used elsewhere in industry, can finally be brought to construction technologies and, help simulate proposals for urban development. Let's say as more and more of us, will continue to move ahead.

And industry also suffers from labor shortages in the construction industry. In the US alone, the report mentions that by next year, by 2025, the industry is going to have to bring on another half a million workers just to keep pace. And that's just in the US. If you can be more efficient in the first place with the designs, then you save some of that human power to deploy elsewhere. Again, a theme of the World Economic Forum's report this year is one of efficiency.

Robin Pomeroy: Is this in some way related to the metaverse, virtual reality and augmented reality? You can build theoretical but very immersive, very, almost tangible version of a building before you actually put down the bricks and mortar?

Mariette DiChristina: Yeah, it is. And the next step for this, which is coming just a tad bit farther down, would be text to design. So where you could verbally describe or write in the describe how the building should look and it could spec it out for you, which is an amazing thing to think of and within our reach in the next decade or so.

Robin Pomeroy: Wonderful. That was immersive technology for the built world. Number seven on the list is elastocalorics. How do you pronounce that?

Bernie Meyerson: Elastocalorics - you did a fine job.

Think about is as yoga for metals.

The reality. Okay. One of the challenges, today, particularly given the sea change in our environment where you're talking about, you know, heat warnings now that exist across the US, certainly, on such a regular basis as to tell you that things are getting a little tough. The use of air conditioning and the cooling done by it is very stressful in terms of energetics and in terms of environmental impact, because you need to use, various fluids that are not necessarily environmentally friendly and there's not an efficiency yet the people are very comfortable with.

There has been a lot of work recently in how do you make the most efficient way to pump heat from one place to another. Remember that air conditioning? All it does, really, is transfer heat from in your house to outside. And if you have a heat pump, it's designed to be reversible. So takes heat from outside, brings it inside. It does that now through a series of very complex elements which are basically fluid based. And the struggle is what's next?

Well, people discovered something really interesting and it sounds too good to be true. There are certain metal compounds, typically, for instance, nickel titanium, if you squash it, and I'm not talking about, you know, step on it, we're talking about hydraulics crushing it, the thing actually gives off a bucket of heat. Then when you let it relax, it absorbs a lot of heat.

Well guess what? That sounds an awful lot like a heat pump. And that's exactly what people are looking at it for. Because if you think about the physical simplicity, all you're doing is using hydraulics to scrunch metal to give heat off. And then when you relax, well, it cools down.

The trick would be, of course, if you're looking to air conditioning something, you literally crush this block of metal and you're blowing air where the heat that comes out of it, you're blowing the air out into the outside environment. And then when you relax it, by eliminating the forces crushing it, it cools dramatically. And then you blow air over it into the environment you want to cool.

This is literally a way of simply moving heat from one place to another by only stressing a piece of metal, And there's a ton of work going on here if you look around, because people are finding it's extremely efficient.

Now, it's not without its challenges, right? Notice what I said. You're crushing it at enormous forces. Here's the good news. Hydraulics have been around a really long time, and so people do know how to put, you know, if you ever go into a garage and you watch somebody lift your car off the ground with a single finger. Well, welcome to the world of hydraulics. All you're doing is pumping a literally an oil under a piston and it picks up your car.

This is a well known technology. And applying it when you find that you can actually make a cooling system out of using the same technology to simply squash a piece of metal is damn impressive.

Now, I made it very simple. I said this, you know, nickel titanium alloy. The truth is, people mix all kinds of other metals into the nickel and into the titanium to make it more efficient.

But this is a completely novel way of of transferring heat from one place to another. It has not existed before. And yet, as Mariette said, very well, at the beginning, one of the new things we did as part of the World Economic Forum's interface is we actually looked at the rate of growth of work in a particular area, and this is one that's growing almost exponentially because, of course, all the automobile companies are looking at how do we do this. If you think about electric vehicles, one of the challenges had been how do you heat and cool them efficiently? And what they found is, just what they call resistive heating was a mess. They literally would have a wire you run a lot of current through, burn a ton of energy to heat a car during the winter. Not efficient. What they went to is a new system, which is a heat pump, where at least it's more efficient than the old way. This is yet another attempt to improve on that and find better solutions, because the more battery power you use, the shorter the range and the more pollution you might create in generating the electricity needed to operate the vehicle.

So it's really a seminal shift in a field that we've known about again, for 50, 100 years. Air conditioning is not new. But it is a way better way of handling this transfer of energy if people can sort out the mechanics.

Robin Pomeroy: Compressing a gas is one thing. Crushing a metal. Is another. Doesn't it take a massive amount of energy to actually get this to work?

Bernie Meyerson: Oddly enough, no. The reason is, yes, it takes a lot of, oomph, shall we say, to squash a piece of metal? Here's the good news. When you, squash the metal and you let it relax, you can recover a lot of that energy.

It's kind of like a car. If you think about an electric vehicle, what makes it so, efficient is you're going down the street, you stop at a light, you step on the gas, on the light changes, and off you go. You accelerate to 30 miles an hour. Then, of course, the next light turns red and you stop. If it's an electric vehicle, the electric motor that accelerated you to 30 now becomes a generator. And they actually use it to stop the car and recover most of that energy back in the battery. If you think about this, you can do something very similar.

So you are right, the forces are enormous, but the energies can be recoverable in exactly that fashion. So it is a very interesting play on something that we've seen before. We know how to do it in EVs, and it will be interesting to see if people can work it out correctly here.

So it's not a done deal. Remember these are emerging techs. They may not be around in large quantity for the next 3 to 5 years, but there is no question the amount of work on this field is currently accelerating rapidly because of its potential.

Robin Pomeroy: Love the word elastocalorics. We'll be looking out for that. Really interesting for heating, for cooling, for cars.

Let's move on to number eight in the list. It's called carbon capturing microbes. Mariette, do you want to tell us about that?

Mariette DiChristina: So, one thing that's clear as we look ahead at our and are managing climate change or adapting to climate change is part of the solution has to be capturing some of the carbon dioxide that we've emitted.

And one way people are currently exploring it is it's actually quite a lot of money moving into this is, carbon capturing microbes. Can you put more of the environment to use? And you can find, you know, these microbes which which either are cyanobacteria, they photosynthesize like plants to create energy, or they are microbes that use chemical energy to digest.

And what they can do is capture greenhouse gases and waste emissions and either using sunlight if they're photosynthesizing or using chemical energy, such as from hydrogen, they can make, that carbon dioxide into fuels, into fertilizers, into animal feed. And they are either found in the environment or they are engineered to enhance their performance, either using photosynthesis. So taking light and using that or chemical energy from waste products or hydrogen, for instance.

Robin Pomeroy: Well, we're used to photosynthesis capturing carbon. That's what trees and all plants do. This is micro-organisms. What would that look like? What kind of real world application would that be?

Mariette DiChristina: Yeah. So we'd look a couple of ways. For example, you could have, a giant solution and bubble carbon dioxide through it and have these engineered microorganisms put to work to create one of those compounds I mentioned, let's say animal feed, a high protein animal feed or fertilizer.

Another way, which is a more speculative way, and one that needs a lot more testing, is you could release these microorganisms into the environment because after all, they're already doing that. They're already naturally occurring microorganisms that photosynthesize.

You mentioned plants, but the ocean is full of algae and other microorganisms that that use sunlight to create energy. What we're asking them to do is create a little bit more, of a product that we humans can then use. You know, whether it's chemical energy or whether sunlight energy.

Robin Pomeroy: That was carbon capturing microbes. We've got two left on the list and the penultimate one is alternative, we've just mentioned, livestock feeds. Tell us about number nine.

Mariette DiChristina: Obviously humans need to eat. And, one way we need to eat is to feed our, you know, animal protein such as we're going to use and we're going to be eating less of it probably over time, but we're still going to want to eat animal protein. And one way to do that more efficiently, I mentioned, is to harness these microorganisms. But there are other ways you can create animal feed that are, alternatives. You could use different kinds of insects. You could use different kinds of single cell proteins, algae, which I mentioned, even food waste. And they are very viable alternatives and increasingly so to using soy or maize, which aren't like, like. You know, which we could then use instead to feed humans.

So this is again about efficiency. It's about taking products, byproducts from one thing, converting it to another to feed our animals so that we can save, things like soy and maize and wheat for us.

Robin Pomeroy: Let's go to the last one. Bernie. Genomics for transplants.

Bernie Meyerson: This actually builds on one of the more seminal things that we had our team bring forward many years ago. It's called CRISPR-Cas9. CRISPR-Cas9 is really a revolutionary way of modifying a genome for a very specific purpose.

Basically, if you have the DNA strand and it's got all the genes in it. Each one of them dictates a certain property that a human will have or any other species. In the past, you didn't have a really good way of editing out a specific gene that did something, and substituting in a gene that corrected a problem.

As an example, haemophiliacs lack the ability to generate clotting factor. You literally have the hope of extracting a gene that's defective and inserting a gene early in the life cycle of a gestational human to actually produce clotting factor and literally eliminate haemophilia.

Well, the same technology, the same technology actually solves a crisis that we're currently facing. There are cases right now where, roughly speaking, if you have 100,000 people, you know, waiting on a transplant list, a life saving transplant list, maybe only 30,000 transplants are available. What happens to the rest of those people? I don't have to explain the consequences.

If you think about somebody who is perfectly healthy and then contracts a virus that attacks their heart and essentially damages it to the extent that within certainly six months to a year, it will fail, that person is facing a death sentence without a transplant.

There has been a large amount of, shall we say, ethical wrestling as how you address this, because people simply do not provide enough organs currently to deal with this and, and that those numbers are in the US. Multiply those easily tenfold if you go globally. So now you're talking about saving hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lives if you could solve the shortfall in available organs.

There are ethical challenges and what was done. But if you look at the lives saved, people said we could take, for instance, a species that has a very similar genome to the human genome. And one of the shocking things people find is that when you look at the genomes of animals around the world, apes and such and humans, they're all similar. But within 98-99%. The differences are remarkably small.

And what they did was they said, you know, if we look at, for instance, pigs, to be blunt and, you know, you have to acknowledge, what I'll un scientifically referred to as the ick factor. The fact of the matter is, people began to undertake what would be required to eliminate the rejection issue if you were to use a organ from another species to save a human life. And that is a very tough issue.

What they've done and they've done pretty good success so far is they basically bred over and over again using genetic engineering species of pigs that literally they have removed the markers in their genome that would trigger a human's immune system to attack that organ if it was transplanted.

Now, that is an enormous task, an unimaginably sophisticated piece of biological engineering. But what's happening is they are now getting to the point where they have FDA approval to do, in a crisis mode, test transplants of these animal organs into humans who had no other option. But if the transplant was not performed, they would die.

And it is turned out to be a challenge still, for other reasons, which they're working on addressing as an example, a foreign species like a pig will be subject to certain viruses that in a human would have no effect. So even if you transplant the pig's organ into a human, but the human has that virus in them, that human doesn't care or can't work on a human. It will attack the transplanted organ.

I mean, there are all kinds of issues in terms of not just avoiding human rejection, but ensuring that the biologic activity of that new organ that you put into the human isn't subject to attack by other methods.

But the fact of the matter is, there has been great progress and it is accelerating.

Now, we're not saying it's ready today, and we acknowledge there are tremendous ethical and other concerns. We've got that. But are you prepared to ignore the fact that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people globally die every year for want of a transplant? That would be life saving? And we're not talking about extending lives months. We're talking about essentially living a normal life as people who get a kidney transplant many times go on to do as one example.

This was radical years ago when they did heart transplants, and now it's an everyday occurrence, except for the fact the supply is short and the fact that it's short, frankly, does not disturb me many times because people are healthier and they're living longer, and I don't like the way in which they become available, which unfortunately can be by terrible accidents and loss.

It is a tremendous, tremendous technical challenge to do what these folks are undertaking. But it is no longer a one off or two off effort. There are several companies around the world now who are going through the engineering to enable unbelievable levels of lifesaving transplants if this comes to full fruition.

So this is something we felt the need to highlight, but we clearly acknowledge there will be issues around it as we go forward. There is no question this will become a sensitive issue as it accelerates, but it will accelerate and there's no point in ignoring it.

Robin Pomeroy: That's genomics for transplants. Number ten on the list of the emerging top ten technologies identified in your report for 2024. That's the end of the list.

Am I allowed to ask you, because I said this isn't a hit parade? You know what's number one this year? You know, you know, I enjoyed elastocalorics, I think I'd pick that one. Last year I do remember plant sensors, I thought that was amazing. People should go back and read last year's report and last year's Radio Davos.

I haven't even primed you for this question, but if you had to pick one, either that you think is a particular favourite for whatever reason or one that you think we're all going to be talking about this in a year or two years time, are either of you willing to put yourselves on the line to to pick a favourite?

Mariette DiChristina: It's so hard to pick a favourite. You know, I love elastocalorics as well, just because it's awfully fun. I love the the the reconfigurable surface. But but one of my favourites this year, maybe I'll say it's my favourite, is the high altitude platforms. You know, more than a billion people can't get the internet regularly. Think what an enormous benefit that would be as it comes online. So put my name there.

Robin Pomeroy: Bernie, do you have one?

Bernie Meyerson: We have an incredible team that does such a fine job of selecting things. It is not easy. But if you were really pushing it, I would actually start with genomics related to transplant, because think about the human impact. I mean, I'm, I'm a real believer in scale in terms of improving the human, condition and the ability to save literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lives every year is just an extraordinary game changer.

But if you ask me, you know how long it will take to grow and acceptance and time, then you know, it's a little more challenging because if you look at the issue of, for instance, the elastocalorics, that's something that you literally can roll out. When people solve the mechanics of that, they're not going to people, arguing in the street over whether we should do it. It's a just a better fix. And that would certainly be one of the more immediate outcomes.

But truthfully, again, right at the top of my list is something that will have a human impact on the scale of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lives. Because I have friends who've been through this. I mean, I won't go into any other detail, but having had friends who suffered through the absence of the ability to get a kidney transplant for years, and I mean, I use the word suffer in the most direct terms. It really sensitizes you to what the scale of the problem they're facing is, and what the tremendous sea change in human existence would occur. Where this to be made feasible.

Robin Pomeroy: Our listeners can find their own favourite among the top ten. The report is called the Top Ten Emerging Technologies 2024. You can find it on the website of the World Economic Forum.

I'd just like to say before we finish, thank you very much for joining us to our guests, Mariette DiCristina and Bernie Meyerson. Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully, see you next year.

Bernie Meyerson: You can count on it.

Mariette DiChristina: Thanks for having us.

Robin Pomeroy: That report, the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2024 can be found on our website - the link in is in the show notes to this episode.

If you enjoyed this episode, please click on the button on your app to give us a rating. To discuss anything you heard here, join us at the World Economic Forum Podcast club on Facebook.

This episode of Radio Davos was produced and presented by me, Robin Pomeroy. Studio production was by Taz Kelleher.

We will be back next week, but for now thanks to you for listening and goodbye.