MIT Creates a Prediction Tool for Tech Improvements
August 25, 2021
Leave it to researchers at MIT to find a way to predict the future, at least when it comes to rates of improvement for some 1,757 technologies. Fast Company tells us, “MIT Built a Google Search to Spot the Most Important Tech Innovations of the Future.” The team behind the search tool, dubbed simply technology rates, specializes in studying innovation. Former decades-long Ford engineer and designer Christopher Magee is now a professor of practice at the university, and he put together a team of graduate students to do just that. One, Anuraag Singh, used to work at Honda’s R&D lab determining which technologies that company should invest in long-term. The researchers’ experience led them to this conclusion: The key to rapid but accurate predictions was to create AI that examines relationships within the U.S. patent system. Reporter Mark Wilson explains:
“Like scientific research papers, patents routinely reference other patents. The AI—developed and validated by Giorgio Triulzi, assistant professor at Universidad de los Andes—can build a whole networked web of these patent relationships, seeing not just which are influential within their own fields, but also which are pulling from completely disparate fields. As Magee explains, semiconductor patents alone don’t explain their improvement over time, because the most successful fields dip into other research topics. In the case of semiconductors, improvements in lasers actually improved chips in the past, and the team believes new plasma research will in the future. Similarly, patents in software are now being cited by all sorts of patents in other industries, because so much of the world is operated digitally.”
Magee notes the further one traces these referential patents, the more the relationships “explode” outward. It is a complex task that calls for an AI solution. The article continues:
“The team created the patent search tool because it was the most practical means to look up over 1,000 different technologies—which makes it a superb tool for R&D teams and other future-casting groups in the public or private sector. Any other sort of graphic interface or list would be unwieldy. When you type your technology into the search box, it will pull up its innovation rate, along with the top 10 most-cited recent patents about it.”
Wilson reminds us to think of annual improvement rates like compound interest on money— gains build on gains. What to make of those innovation rates in practical terms, though, can be a bit of a mystery and depends on the field being investigated. Enterprising fellows that they are, Magee and Singh have launched a commercial enterprise, Technext, to make sense of the data. They are off to a strong start—their first client is the U.S. Air Force.
One question: Would this tool have predicted that MIT would accept money from Jeffrey Epstein and then have professional staff who attempted to sidestep scrutiny?
Yes or no, please, My thought is that MIT’s software and its institutional actions may be easier to puff up than deliver on certain core values. Just a hunch.
Cynthia Murrell, August 25, 2021
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