 Welcome to this press conference on a cool and fresh and rainy tangent morning, the second day of the annual meeting of the new champions 2018. You don't see me as much. My name is Oliver Cannes. I don't do as many press conferences as I used to do, but I do my favourites. I do ask for special dispensation once in a while to come out of retirement to help announce the news that I find personally most exciting. I work for the World Economic Forum. I'm the head of media content here for the past five years. It's been one of my greatest pleasures launching what we call the emerging technologies of the year list. It's been a wonderful collaboration over these years with first the World Economic Forum's global agenda councils and now the global future councils and the World Economic Forum's expert network. I have two members of that network here to talk a little bit more about these technologies. First of all, I'm just going to go over a couple of my favourites just to get the party started. Well, who isn't going to be excited about plasmonic materials? You may not have heard of plasmonics, but they're already being used for battery development and monitoring health. They could well lead to invisibility cloaks in the not so distant future. Who knows? Lab-grown meat. Well, we all know the environmental damage and unsustainability of human appetites for meat and protein. What about if we get our protein from meat, which tastes just as good, looks like meat, has all the characteristics but is grown in a lab? Could that be a major answer to the sustainability drive our planet needs to make? Who likes the idea of arguing with your Alexa or your Siri when you wake up in the morning? It's not a matter of just being told what time it is or what weather it is, but AI is moving so fast that the machine learning technologies behind these personal digital assistants is now going to mean that in the future they'll be able to offer you advice and possibly even answer back. So, as I said before, delighted to have members of the expert network that put this list together. I'm going to invite each of them to talk a little bit about their special subjects and then we'll have some time to take questions from you and also from myself, hopefully. On my immediate left, joined again by Mariette Di Crescino, an old friend, great to see you again Mariette. It's great to see you. Thank you. Mariette is editor-in-chief of Scientific American, been with us working on this list for five years as has Andrew Maynard, Andrew your professor of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. Welcome back again, very nice to have you. And we're about to be joined and the camera will soon see our third panelist, Sania Blee, who's a distinguished professor and dean of the Korea Institute of Advanced Science and Technology in the Republic of Korea. Mariette, let's start with you. What has been different or most exciting or noteworthy about this year's list after the over the five that we've been doing it together? One of the things I love about our list every year is how they follow how human innovation is emerging itself. And so this year we're seeing AI constantly throughout the list. You mentioned a couple of favorites of mine as well. The idea of arguing with an Alexa or Siri actually has some benefit. If you think about a physician who's trying to keep up with the latest advances in technology, imagine an assistant powered by AI and machine learning who could review all of the literature, find where the patterns are that are too hard for humans to see, suggest possible diagnoses or treatment paths to the physician and maybe even have a debate or discussion with the physician to help that person make the diagnosis. So, I mean, I think AI running through the thread everywhere this year is a really big one for me. AI seems to be a huge topic and it's working its way through most of the technology sessions at this meeting as well. Is it everywhere? Are we going to be seeing AI for the years ahead? Another place we see—yes, we are. Actually, we've been seeing it for a while now, but what's happening is it's becoming a lot more sophisticated as it continues to progress. Another entry in this year's top ten list that I like a lot is advanced diagnostics for precision medicine, which are also powered by AI. Instead of finding one biomarker or a biological signal that there's a diseased happening, they find several at once and there are many panels and arrays that do this. In fact, Sange Alff would probably speak quite a bit more about it. Wonderful. And we'll go to our panelists first. I just want to go through a couple of previous emerging technologies just to give you a taste of how we like to feel with fairly on trends and ahead of the curve. In 2016, for example, we talked about blockchain and we talked about autonomous vehicles. Now, alongside AI, there are a few sessions that aren't talking about the blockchain, not just at this meeting but at our other meetings and in conferences around the world. Whenever we put out a press release, I know this for a fact, blockchain is one of the most exciting and most interested areas. A huge area of topics and nobody was really talking about it in 2016. It was in the emerging technologies list. So hopefully that's a good sign that these technologies here are going to be fairly mainstream fairly soon within a three to five year timeframe, I believe we guide. Andrew, tell me a little bit about your contribution for the list this year. So I always have a very tough spot here because my day job is trying to ask tough questions about what could go wrong with these technologies. But at the same time, I have my inner geek that gets really excited about them. So there are a couple that if I three that really stood out to me here. Marietta has just mentioned one of them, the cultured meat, the lab-grown meat, which I think is tremendously exciting. A couple of others, though, one that really excites and intrigues me and one that does worry me. The first one is augmented reality. So we've had this promise of augmented reality, the idea that we can overlay another set of digital information on what we see for a number of years now. But we're just on the cusp of this becoming reality, especially with breakthroughs such as 5G networks with phones with very powerful computing. For anybody that's experienced augmented reality with high-resolution headsets, it's utterly transformative. Where you can be immersed in an environment where you can see 3G projections that look as if they're real. So I think this is going to be incredibly transformative. The other one, which has been bubbling along for some years now but really is gaining a lot of attention, is gene drives. So this is the ability to actually modify whole species genetically. So imagine you can take mosquitos and you can genetically engineer mosquitos, not so you get rid of them, but so that they no longer carry malaria. Or you can modify locusts so they don't swarm. It's incredibly powerful, this technology, being able to engineer things so that their traits are heritable. But as you can imagine, there are an awful lot of things that might possibly go wrong with this if we don't get it right. That's why we love you being on the panel, Andrew. I know, I'm the downer. We all need a safety valve and we'll come to that as well. One of the comments that I stood out for me yesterday at this meeting was a session on dual-use technology. The fact that technology designed for civilian use can be re-engineered for military purposes. And one of the comments that really stood out and worried me a little bit was the comment from one of the panellists that the ship has sailed in terms of governance. So maybe we'll have a few questions around that. But thank you very much for joining us, Sanya. I know there's been traffic issues in Tanzania and I've been part of the forum. I do apologise for the traffic and the organisation here, but we're very, very glad you could join us. Could you please tell us a little bit about your contribution? Yeah, well actually this year's top 10 list attracts me a lot, but let me talk about maybe two or three items now. One is implantable drug-making cells. So as you know, if you have diabetes, you have to prick your fingers, monitor the glucose concentration, and then you have to inject your insulin. What if you have this eyelid cell implanted in your body which responds to the level of glucose and then automatically treat your diabetes symptom? Well, that was not easy even though a lot of scientists and doctors have tried because when you capture these cells in a protective material so that they can release drugs at the right time, that causes fibrosis. So it's not going to work in your body. Recent years and very recently there have been attempts to make new material based on old known material which is known to be biocomparable and then it allows cells to release drugs without causing fibrosis problem. So this will make a significant contribution if and also if it's linked with the synthetic biology where you can engineer cells further so that very nice drugs can be actually delivered at the right spot at the right time when patients need. Another technology that drew my attention was electroceuticals. So as you know, electroceuticals by the name, it says it must be doing something with your neurological disorders because our neurons are all electric responsive. However, recent studies shown that actually neurological transmitters or neurotransmitters can be released at a desired location such as spleen which will in turn trigger release of certain chemicals that prevents inflammation for example. So that was first good demonstration that actually electrical stimuli can deliver chemicals that can suppress some bad symptoms. So I like that idea of electroceutical. Maybe if I had one more thing, AI for materials, I love that because I use that already. So artificial intelligence can be used to scan through all the known chemical reactions to design very complicated reaction steps much much faster and efficiently than humans can do. I use it for scanning drug-drug interactions. There has been about 2,159 known drugs. So if you take two drugs which you will most likely when you get older and there might be some unknown drug-drug interactions which can be damaging your body. Now using AI you can actually scan through. It's 2,159 times 2,158 divided by 2. So it's more than 230 million, sorry, 2.3 million interactions. And then now we were able to identify potentially harmful reactions that correspond to about more than 430,000. And these need to be paid attention for pharmacists and also medical doctors when they are giving drugs. And I think AI for materials will even further advance to link all these things together. Essentially what we're looking at is through the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence a huge acceleration at the speed of discovery. Absolutely. One question for me before I open it up to my friends on the floor. A lot of these technologies have been around. Electroceuticals have been around, the diagnostics for personalized medicine has been around. What's happened in 2018 to make this, get these onto your list? I think, yes, you are right in that these technologies have been around for their potentials. But I think this year it's actually been demonstrated in a small clinical setting as well. So I think that's why now these technologies are one step closer to a real life and that's why it's selected in this year's list. For me also they've taken a leap forward. So Shakespeare said there is nothing that is new under the sun. Everything is part of a long continuum of change in human history. But in the case of, for instance, the diagnostics, we've gone from detecting single features to detecting multiple with assays that can do it all at once. And that reduces the cost, that makes things faster. In the case of electroceuticals, we're seeing a transition from invasive stimulators of the vagus nerve to non-invasive. So, again, making it less expensive, easier to use, faster to use. What's not to like about non-invasive sense of positive development? Absolutely. It does sound positive. Even Andrew likes it. Absolutely, so you'd be as intense. Let's have a quick show of hands. He's got questions. Gentleman in the front, can we get a microphone here please? Can you remind us of your name and where you're from please, sir? OK, my name is Neil from the media. And actually, my question is, you talk about a lot of advanced technologies. But I think in China, the health is a major issue. And the cancer, we say, is the top of the diseases that cost the benefits. And so what I want to know is what the advance in curing the cancer, and is there any mass, I think, treatment to the public, anything you can say about this? Thank you. A question on cancer. Let's just see if there's any other questions first. Anybody else? OK. Professor, maybe I can start. So advanced diagnostics for precision medicine can help from this year's list because cancer patients, even though they have been diagnosed with, for example, lung cancer or gastric cancer, actually they are different from person to person. So we're not going to be able to treat cancer individually specific because it's going to be too much costly. However, we can at least group subpopulations who are most likely to be responsive in a similar manner and most likely to receive the treatment and work better. That's called precision medicine. Now this year's list includes these advanced diagnostics which can classify not only biomarkers, but also pan-omic scale data that can classify patients into certain subpopulations that can immensely help treat cancer patients better than before. So that's one contribution I can say. It's a sobering thought when sometimes I believe in the US now the average age is actually declining for the first time. So we are working very, very hard to improve science. At the same time, new challenges are coming in and facing this, hitting us in the face. OK, whilst we wait for other questions, a curiosity from myself. I've been doing this list as we all have for a few years now and I look forward to it every year. There's a lot of AI this year. We've established that. There's a lot of health related technologies with established this. But one area where I've become accustomed to seeing technologies emerge is the kind of sustainability in the energy space. And my question is, why is that less of a focus this year and giving you all the ability to have a long range into the future? Do you think that we're going to see a kind of plateau off of certain technologies in certain areas of advance? Maybe research funding is going in unequal divisions across various areas. What's your take on the situation? So I don't think it's an issue of funding pulling back. I think it's just that we plateau in some areas temporarily. So if you look at the discussions around this year's list, it wasn't that there was a lack of advances in areas related to sustainability. It's just that other things really caught our attention and sparkled. But I would also say that if you think about big questions around sustainability, how do we use energy better? How do we use renewables? How do we stop looting the earth as much as we do? Many of the technologies here are directly applicable to that. So you've got to draw a line between the capability and what we can actually do with it. So for instance, AI design materials, looking at physical materials, this is where we have the ability to build much better batteries because we can discover materials that have never previously existed. So I think there is that strong connection there. It's just a little bit under the surface. And also, I mean, this is Seventh Edition of Top 10 Emerging Technology already, which means that we have already disclosed 60 different emerging technologies which cover a lot of those technologies. And one of the rules when we are selecting the list is that we're not going to list the same thing again. So even though some of those emerging technologies appeared, say, three years ago, are still important and rapidly advancing, well, that has been already covered. So it's not going to be listed again. I'm not going to test you on the 60 past and present emerging technologies. But, Maria, you're the editor-in-chief of the world's best-known science publication. It was a benefit of your vision as to other exciting areas that maybe we could be looking forward to reading about in a year's time. One of the things I always look forward to seeing is new materials advances especially. So it was very resonant with me this idea of using AI for creating new materials that Sangyapus talked about, but also the Plasmonax. So just like you were saying at the beginning of our chat that, you know, a few years ago, last year, we were talking about blockchain. It wasn't really out there. Now it's everywhere. Plasmonax, I suspect, would be one of those technologies that we start to see very routinely under a lot of different areas. For instance, they were already used as sensors. You've mentioned the fun Harry Potter idea of, you know, because these manipulating the plasmonax on the surface can deflect light, you can actually reduce the visibility of something and create a quote-unquote invisibility cloak. But there are many other advances that you can use that technology for from sensing to manipulating material in many ways. And there's a lot of money flowing in to do that. Just to see if there's any more questions. If not, I've got one to close on. It's one for Andrew. So let's go back to that governance issue. And do you agree with that comment that the ship has sailed when it comes to convening the right leadership and the right energy and ingenuity to create an environment where we can govern any negative uses and side effects of these technologies? No, I don't. And I don't because I think that that's partially just too depressing a thought. But also I think there is optimism here. If you look at these technologies, there is tremendous potential to improve people's lives. And we can't afford to turn our back on that and say that the ship sailed. I think we've got an uphill struggle. So definitely the gap between what we can achieve with technologies and how we understand how to do that safely and beneficially is widening. And we've got to get smart at how we narrow this gap. And that's exactly actually what we're doing through the forum with ideas such as agile governance. How do we develop approaches to ensuring that the safety and the responsibility of technologies by closing that gap using innovative methods? So I don't think that the ship has sailed. I think we have a huge uphill struggle in front of us. But I actually think that we have the innovative capabilities to close that gap. Thank you so much. And that is indeed what we'll be trying to do here at the annual meeting of the new champions 2018. Thank you very much for joining us this morning and it's been difficult getting in. I appreciate that and it's wonderful to have this annual engagements. And thank you so much for joining us here in the room and watching us live online. This session is now over.