Emerging and future technologies---Journal for Session 9

In this session, we were mainly talking about emerging and future technologies, such as nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, computer\human interface systems and so on.

However, just as the author of one of our readings said, technology is not the full answer to life. We need a lot more other things to develop better life. We need philosophy, arts, ethics, wisdom and other things to make a better life. We also need these things to wield the power that technologies offer to us.

One most interesting thing that attracts me is the placebo effect, which relies on the spiritual effect from a patient’s mind to help cure diseases or injuries. Although placebo effect is proved by a lot of experiments, it is still not widely accepted as a way of cure in the western medicine. Maybe more researches can be done in the future to provide more undeniable proof for such a low-cost and high effective cure.

There are so many fascinating technologies emerging today, giving us hope to solve a lot of problems, but there is also potential that these technologies will be abused by people with malicious wills or people without enough wisdom. I really wonder what our future will be like.

Energy-Journal of Session 8

In this session, we concentrate on energy and technology. Some drivers for energy technology are the high price, the running out of easily accessible storage and the harmful environmental impact of traditional energy resources, such as oil and coal.

There are a lot that can be done to achieve energy sustainability. For the supply, we can explore more new sources to provide energy, such as fusion, algae, osmosis and so on. And for energy conversion, there are a lot of chemical, biochemical or thermal technologies that can be used. For consumption, we can design better machines to increasing efficiency. To make the optimum model for both energy production and consumption, there is a need and synergy for multi-field collaboration. Such fields include biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, and so on.

And such collaboration and development need the encouragement and guidance from government policies. Three main considerations for energy policies are energy security, energy equity and environmental impact mitigation. To achieve energy sustainability, governments need to promote renewable energy supply, manage demand by increasing the efficiency of energy consumption, encourage private investment for new energy technologies and make cross-cutting policies to involve all stakeholders in order to ensure the effect and sustainability of energy policies.

To encourage private investment for emerging energy technologies, governments need to reduce the risk of investment by reducing uncertainty through leveraging long-term and strong policies to provide a more stable and predictable investment environment.

Another thing that is also important is education related to energy sustainability. Here, education is not limited to raising awareness, but also developing human capital for energy sustainability, such as all-round experts.

To achieve the optimum of energy sustainability, there are also a need for the collaboration of different countries and regions. Different countries and regions have different advantages in resources endowment. Such resources include natural resources, human capital resources (i.e. knowledge and technologies) and capital resources. International collaboration makes sure that all the resources are used more efficiently and in the meantime, every participant benefits.

Session 6 Journal

In this session, we talked about what improvements technologies can bring to the field of healthcare, including diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, treatments and so on.

Although there are countless good news that bio-technologies can bring to us, there are also potential threatens to human beings. For example, with the wide usage of antibiotics, many kinds of microorganism have developed their resistibility to the antibiotics. If we cannot stop this, will there one day when some super-bacteria appear and we cannot find ways to protect ourselves from their attack?

From the SARS outbreak a few years ago, we know that there should be quick action and collaboration around the world to prevent such abrupt and terrible infectious diseases from totally out of our control and making huge harm. How to develop effective cure and medicine as soon as possible, and how to help control the spreading by using technologies? These need to be studied further.

I rate this session 7.5 since we mainly concentrate in bio-business and this is not enough for our topic----healthcare----a field which has such wide influence because it touches every single person of the world and a field with such close relationship to everyone.