7 Botnet eradication
Our lives may not be that sci-fi yet, however botnets, or malware that phishes a victim’s computer such that all its resources are at the mercy of the attacker are rampant in this day and age. The most popular of this malware’s variants would be the Mirai worm which has been responsible for causing DDOS (distributed denial of services) attacks on entire networks that caused a snowball effect and temporarily affected Netflix and Twitter’s service. The logical step, to incorporate encryption in the most minor of activities, has begun. We are far from an age where hackers are not breaking down our systems for entertainment or digital anarchy.
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8 Gene Therapy Stage 2
Hereditary diseases have been a bane of human evolution. The study of genetics strived long and hard over the century to weed out the negative traits in a lineage so that the progenies could live healthier and more diverse lives. Fortunately, of recent scientists have mastered gene therapy to the extent that a single session can cure an individual of rare genetic diseases or dormant diseases that affect them later in life. There have been recent documentations in experimental genetics where individuals with immuno-deficiency disorders have been cured from a single session. Hopes of making the same available for patients of Alzheimer’s, heart diseases and cancer prone lineages saved at nominal costs, are alive.
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9 Artificial Intelligence
No top 10 scientific breakthroughs list can be complete without a hint of artificial intelligence thrown in for good measure. Not breaking the mold, it should be made known that scientists at AlphaGo, a computer developed by DeepMind, pitted itself against an expert human player, in a complex board game called ‘Go’, and won. Reinforcement learning or the process where an individual can make educated decisions based on what they have learned, is the key to sentience in computer machinery. The ability to associate desire with action and thus lead the same to an outcome has been achieved by the code running on the computational device. Conventional coding cannot judge the validity of a move as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in game as complex as ‘Go’.
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10 Quantum Computers
Humming in solitary in a lab at Dutch research institute Delft University of Technology, is a quantum computer whose components connect to each other, a few degrees shy of absolute zero! The quasi-particles produced at this temperature are the building blocks of the quantum computer. To call it a quantum computer would be a misnomer as it is far from completion. However, should the computer become the first of its kind, it shall make immediate breakthroughs in the fields of materials science, pharmaceutical research, and artificial intelligence.
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CONCLUSION:
We are in the Golden Age of technology and are about to unearth more paradigm shifts that make this age look like the Silver or even the Bronze age in a few decades.