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.
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
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.
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 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.