Bill Gates: These breakthrough technologies are going to profoundly change the world

Personalized cancer vaccines. Lab-grown meat. Toilets that save lives. Wearable electrocardiograms.

Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Bill Gates says these are among the technologies that are going to change the world we live in.

Gates curated the 18th edition of the MIT Technology Review’s annual roundup of “recent technology breakthroughs that are poised to deeply impact our lives” released Wednesday, according to an MIT press release.

For much of human history, innovation has been focused on improving survival rates and longevity, Gates writes in an introduction to the list. But “because we’re living longer, our focus is starting to shift toward well-being,” Gates writes. “We’ve reached a point where we’re tackling both ideas at once, and that’s what makes this moment in history so interesting.”

Here are some of the coolest technologies Gates included on the 2019 MIT breakthrough technologies list.

Companies including BioNTech and Genentech are working to bring to market personalized cancer vaccines that direct the body’s own immune system to destroy cancerous cells by identifying mutations that are specific to each tumor.

“Scientists are on the cusp of commercializing the first personalized cancer vaccine,” says the MIT Technology Review. If all goes well, the technology “could effectively shut down many types of cancers.”

Of course, there are hurdles to developing these vaccines as scale, as each one requires a tumor biopsy and DNA sequencing before the vaccine can be made.

The robot revolution is upon us. For tech leader Elon Musk, “the scariest problem” is “robots will be able to do everything better than us,” he said in 2017.

That may be true, but right now robots are “clumsy and inflexible,” the MIT Technology Review says. However, the development of technology that allows robots to learn dexterity moves through trial and error is changing that. For example, in San Francisco-based OpenAI’s project Dactyl, a robot hand teaches itself to flip a toy block in its fingers with sophisticated neural-network software, according to MIT Technology Review.

“We’ll need further breakthroughs for robots to master the advanced dexterity needed in a real warehouse or factory. But if researchers can reliably employ this kind of learning, robots might eventually assemble our gadgets, load our dishwashers, and even help Grandma out of bed,” the MIT Technology Review says.

“Pulling CO2 out of the air is, from an engineering perspective, one of the most difficult and expensive ways of dealing with climate change. But given how slowly we’re reducing emissions, there are no good options left,” the MIT Technology Review says.

Innovative companies are working to catch the carbon dioxide and repurpose it. For example, Canadian start-up Carbon Engineering (in which Gates is an investor) aims to produce synthetic fuels with the captured carbon, and Climeworks, based in Zurich, will produce methane from carbon emissions and also sell carbon dioxide to the soft-drink industry, among others.

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These versions of meat are better for the environment. “[P]roducing a pound of meat protein with Western industrialized methods requires 4 to 25 times more water, 6 to 17 times more land, and 6 to 20 times more fossil fuels than producing a pound of plant protein,” the MIT Technology Review says, and 3 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from methane emitted from cows.