Top Tech Innovations to Watch in 2004

Jan. 23, 2004 -- In this week's Cybershake, we pick the minds of the big-thinkers at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology for the hot technology of 2004. Plus, we note the music industry continues its war on suspected online copyright violators.

The Top Tech to Watch in 2004

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say 2004 will be a banner year for new technological innovations. And in the latest edition of the university's Technology Review magazine, editors and researchers highlight the "Top Ten Technologies" that will change our world.

Editor in Chief Robert Buderi, says the innovations run the gamut, covering "everything from information technology to fundamental biology to materials."

One field that is predicted to take off with innovations is so-called synthetic biology. That, says Buderi, is "creating life from scratch with the new genomic tools that we have, or altering existing simple forms of life like bacteria and in essence programming them to do certain tasks."

"We know some bacteria are good at eating oil, for cleaning up environmental waste," says Buderi. "What if you can tailor their genomes to do that even more efficiently? Release them at oil spills and [you] have a clean site very rapidly."

The rapid pace of development in information technology will also yield a novel tool that has been long in the works: a universal language translator.

Buderi notes that by the end of this year, rudimentary translating machines will be able to seamlessly understand and convert between only two languages — say, between English and Arabic. But even such limited systems would be a boon to soldiers and health care providers working overseas who need to instantly converse in foreign languages in order to save lives in danger.

And then there's T-Ray, or "terahertz radiation," technology. Like X-rays or infrared waves, T-rays are just another part of the electromagnetic spectrum but with unique properties.

"If you shine them or beam them on to some target, as they pass through different gaps or thickness of material, they'll take longer time or shorter time to pass through to a detector and from that [difference in] times you can get a spectral fingerprint of the material they're passed through," says Buderi.

The result? "You can [produce] images [of] things like razor blades that might be carried in an airline passenger's pocket or an image of a breast cancer," says Buderi. "You'll be able to tell exactly what's there in a 3D picture that's not invasive and doesn't have the harmful radiation of X-rays."

Developing these innovations will still take significant investments. But Buderi says economic malaise isn't an inhibiting factor. Instead, it's a big booster of tech innovations.

"We think of a recession as a slow down, but it actually increases the urgency to create new things, to try to break out of that and create a new cycle of economic growth," says Buderi. "A lot of what we see coming in 2004 is the fruits of people working even harder than ever on these problems."

— Larry Jacobs, ABCNEWS

The Ongoing Hunt for Online Pirates

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has started to file lawsuits against so-called "John Doe" defendants.

Earlier this week, lawsuits filed in both Washington D.C., and New York targeted more than 500 "major offenders" — people that have allegedly distributed more than 800 songs on the Internet.

These lawsuits are different than the others filed last year, says Cindy Cohn, legal director for the online civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"Before they can get your identity from your Internet Service Provider (ISP), they're going to have to ask a court for permission to do so," says Cohn.

In December, a U.S. District Court had thrown out previous RIAA lawsuits because it found the association's attempts to obtain information from ISPs about suspected pirates violated legal procedure.

But the recording industry seemingly is not slowing down. RIAA president Cary Sherman says the campaign to find illegal file sharers isn't missing a beat.

— Steffan Tubbs, ABCNEWS

Cybershake is produced for ABCNEWS Radio by Andrea J. Smith.