Disruptive Technologies beyond 2030 in the Data Ecosystems II

What is the city mood? By looking at the tweets posted by citizens of MInneapolis and associating colours to several moods this sculpture provides a way to feel the mood of the city. Credit: MIMMI – City of Minneapolis

Public Mood Monitoring

We can be in the pink or feeling blue, what about our fellow citizens? How are they feeling now? And considering them all together, what is the mood of the  city? This kind of questions would have been an impossible to answer just few years ago but now we are starting to have ways to feel the pulse of the city, as a collection of its citizens.

A variety of technologies are available, from mining the tweets exchanged in a urban area to looking at the faces of people as they are captured by security cameras.

Processing the data available on the Internet from a myriad of sources it is possible to extract the mood and sentiment of a city. Credit: Knowlesys

Companies like Knowlesys offer services to mine a myriad of web sites to extract the mood of people in a certain area, their feelings about a given product and much more.
This “mood monitoring” has already been extensively used during election campaigns in several Countries and they have started to influence the result through a feedback loop whereby the candidates have almost real time access to the mood of people, to the change in the mood following their electoral talks (promises) and this let them customise their talks to specific audiences and even change their talk …as they are talking.

It is a sure bet to imagine the in the next decades public mood monitoring will become more and more sophisticated and precise with implications that we are just starting to consider. For sure it is leading to a dramatic social disruption.

Internet of DNA

MINIon, a DNA sequencers based on micropore technology. Allows a quick sequencing of (part of) DNA and the data captured can be used to investigate specific characteristics of a living being. Credit: Oxford Nanopore Technologies

The sequencing of DNA has made unbelievable progress in the last 20 years becoming both dramatically cheaper and faster, an evolution rate that left Moore’s law in the dust. The outcome of this evolution is an ever growing amount of living being sequenced, from viruses to human beings (scientists are now calling for sequencing all life on Earth) and even more important it is creating a huge data base containing millions of human genomes sequenced.

The “tree of life” is being redrawn as more and more genomes are being sequenced. The similarities among species and their evolution can be traced by looking at the genome in a much more accurate way than by looking at the formed living being. Image credit: NASA

By examining the differences among these genomes researchers hope to gain a better understanding on the meaning hidden in the code of life and artificial intelligence tools are being developed to connect the genotype (the genome) to the phenotype (the living being).

In the coming decade we might expect millions and millions of genome being sequenced (most likely all human beings born in the fourth decade of this century will be sequenced at birth) and they will become part of the Internet, meaning they will become accessible for study and for proactive health care and bio-engineering. This is what is now starting to be addressed as the Internet of DNA.

Predictive Gene-based Healthcare

The gene sequencing kit you can order by mail. In a few days you will receive an “abstract” of your DNA telling you about your ancestors and pointing to some potential risk tied to your genetic footprint. Credit 23andMe

The sequencing of the genome has already hit the mass market with companies like 23andMe providing easy to use kits for picking up genetic material and sending it for sequencing via courier mail.

Several companies, like Kite Pharma, Phenogen Sciences, Regeneron …, are working to proactively fight diseases by looking at the genome, assessing potential risks and finding cures.
In the coming decades we can expect a disruptive change in healthcare thanks to a much better understanding of the genetic influence on several diseases and on the possibility to “patch up” the genome.
This is another area that is fraught with ethical issues (would insurance decline support once they know that you have a high risk of cancer…?) but it is also rich of potential benefit both to the individual and to the collectivity. By using predictive gene-based healthcare it will be possibile to decrease health care cost and be much more effective at the same time. Because of these benefit it is obvious that research will continue and that will, unfortunately, also create unexpected (or expected but undesired) side effects.

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.