- Stone age (before 5000 BCE)
- Copper and Bronze Age (5000-3000 BCE, respectively)
- Iron Age (1000 BCE-1500 AD)
- Medieval to Early Modern Age (14th-17th century, aka Renaissance)
- Age of Exploration (1500-1700s)
- Industrial Revolution (1800s+)
- Second Industrial Revolution (1850-1960’s, pre-PC)
- Information Age (1970s-2000s)
- Modern Age (2000s+)
- Patterns
- What is the next real step function in productivity or advancement?
- Predictions
- Personal
- Bonus: Computer history
“Culture’s primary objective is to harness energy” -Kardashev
Goal of the study:
To predict what technologies will be the most important of the 21st century. I am in the process of defining what matters to me, what is important for human development, and what business to work on next. All of these technologies are ultimately just ways for us to do things easier with less energy input. So I am looking for the highest leverage opportunities to help customers around the world. If you would like to skip the history, feel free to jump to the Predictions section under the Modern Age (2000s+).
Personal anecdotes from study:
Our genomes and their evolution literally bootstrapped control and made order of our observable universe
Life takes energy from its environment to preserve its own computational state
A lot of technology is built around resource usage and protection of it- so automation of agriculture and defense of that agriculture from other competitive life forms
Three main stages of human evolution:
- Savagery
- Barbarism
- Civilization
Energy densities of fuel sources
- Wood: about 4-7 kWh/kg
- Charcoal: about 27-29 kWh/kg
- Coal: about 24-29 kWh/kg
- Oil: about 44-47 kWh/kg
- Natural gas: about 55-58 kWh/m^3 (equivalent to about 55-58 kWh/kg)
- Nuclear: about 900,000,000 kWh/kg
- Solar: about 0.2-0.3 kWh/m^2/day
5 main stages of human development- Kardashev scale
- own muscles are used as energy source (hunter gatherer)
- domesticated animals are used as energy source (simple agriculture)
- energy derived from plants via domesticated animal energy (advanced agriculture)
- natural resources are used for energy (coal, oil, gas- all energy dense, industrial)
- nuclear energy is used (where we are almost at)
- side note: fixed costs of nuclear get spread out among more people, meaning cheaper energy, maybe even $0 if the utility company can monetize energy usage data
4 stages of human development through information
- genes serve as medium to pass information
- humans pass information through their experience
- humans develop signs for representation and develop logic (Godel, Escher, Bach: what equals what)
- verbal language is developed and written language
Stone age (before 5000 BCE)
Problems needing technology:
- defense
- hunting
- skinning
- cutting (wood pieces for fire, reeds for strings)
- food preparation
- fire
Major contributions:
- fire
- clothing
- stone tools
- sharp stones: killing, skinning, chopping wood
- harder stones: flaking obsidian for sharp weapons, for hammering
- long, oblong stones: digging, grinding- agriculture
- stone weapons
- flint
- bows and arrows
- spears
- skis
Interesting that the first technologies were special use stones (ore) that we used to make our jobs easier
Oldowon industrial complex: a way of making tools that was taught to other hominids. They did not have language, so they did not advance as fast (2.5M years ago). The first known industry!
Copper and Bronze Age (5000-3000 BCE, respectively)
Problems needed for technology:
- Fertile Crescent: crossroads of trade, fertile soil for growing populations, lots of metal ore, and abundant water
- needed better defenses
- Bronze smelting
- used charcoal and wood
- 1100-1300 C
- Copper smelting
- 1000-1150 C
- both needed kilns and tools to manage the smelting
Major contributions:
- smelting (copper first, bronze second)
- ceramics (kiln for keeping the temperature hot for smelting)
- furnaces
- charcoal (higher energy density than wood)
- Babylonian cubit (pre Roman foot, pre meter)
All of these technologies needed industries to support the efficient processing of them
- copper ore
- tin ore
- wood harvesting
- conversion from wood to charcoal
- furnace building
- transport (ore, wood, charcoal)
- road making
- massive homes- with dozens of people, like the Native American huts
- ramps
- city planning
- sanitation- water and waste
- wheels
- astronomy
- math (Babylon, Greece, China)
- boats
Iron Age (1000 BCE-1500 AD)
Problems needed for technology:
- bronze became too soft after use
- harder metals for infrastructure, defense, and weapons
- stronger and easier to work with
- greater quantity of iron ore than bronze (copper and tin ore are harder to find)
New empires:
- whoever could make iron the cheapest, won
- Romans (the best)
- Persians
- Hitites
- Egyptians
- Greeks
- Celts
- Tang Dynasty
Major contributions:
- Iron smelting
- Bloomery furnace: clay or stone with chimney (Europe, Bronze Age to Middle Ages: 3300 BCE-1500 AD)
- Blast furnace: longest lasting iron smelting furnace (China, 200 BC-19th century)
- Reverbatory furnace: 400-1500 AD
- Iron alloys
- Steel: iron + carbon, iron dunked in cold water
- Iron casting
- Replaced forging which was extremely laborious and required lots of muscle energy. This outsourced energy use to more charcoal
- gunpowder (China, 9th century AD)
- pulleys (Greeks)
- foot (Roman)
New industries:
- agriculture: plows, sickles, and hoes
- transport: wheels, axles, components for wagons
- shipbuilding: hulls and braces, ironclads would come later (probably too expensive until 1800s)
- weapons
- architecture: could build longer lasting structures
- supply chain for ore → material
- weaving (Roman)
- gallic reaper (Roman)
- glass blowing (Roman)
- concrete (Roman)
- gunpowder (Chinese, Tang Dynasty)
- large-scale construction
Medieval to Early Modern Age (14th-17th century, aka Renaissance)
Problems needed for technology:
- defenses: castles, metal armor, cannons from gunpowder, ships for longer journeys
- expanded trade
- growing population
- lots of wealthier individuals
- literacy (need more cheap books)
- medicine- understanding of viruses, cells
- debt- first families that became bankers
Renaissance:
- Italian art
- Catholic Church
- architecture and manufacturing methods for it
Scientific Revolution:
- Heliocentric model (1543)
- laws of motion and gravity (Newton, 1647)
- cells and microorganisms (Robert Hooke 1665, Leeuwenhoek 17th century)
- scientific method
- electricity and magnetism (William Gilbert later 16th century, Volta and Faraday in late 18th early 19th century, Franklin and Maxwell even later)
Major contributions:
- mechanical clocks (1250-1300)
- printing press (1455)
- windmills
- spectacles
- watermarks
- compass
- horseshoe
- trebuchet
- crossbow
- paper manufacturing (2nd century original invention)
- domes
- mosaics, other artistic contributions
- oils
- cranes
- telescope
- microscope
- cells
- institutionalized debt
New industries:
- printing
- media (newspapers)
- shipping transit (international trade)
- medicine
Age of Exploration (1500-1700s)
Problems needed for technology:
- sailing longer distances from Europe to the Americas
- water routes became more popular
- transport and repurposing of raw materials, also storage of foods on ships for long journeys
- charting trade routes ahead of time
Major contributions:
- international maps
- trade routes
- chronometer (1735, but was not accurate until this era)
- spice manufacturing
- import/export standardization
Industrial Revolution (1800s+)
Problems needed for technology:
- urbanization
- mass printing
- aerial attack- did not want to go through defenses, but above
- coal mining
- trains
- steam engine (probably most important invention- convert potential energy into kinetic)
- communication to keep up with pace of innovation in manufacturing
- like if someone sets up a railway between a mine in Colorado and New York, having a quick communicating device that doesn’t require a mailman is very useful
- production increase for manufacturing
- pulley block
- light bulb
Economics:
- cheap coal allowed for mass work on cast iron- leading to bridges, metal transportation devices (trains, cars, ships)
- steam engine allowed potential energy to be transformed into kinetic energy
- measuring productivity with hand written data
- light bulb increased production by 3x since now they could do night shifts
Major contributions:
- textile manufacturing
- sewing machine
- shoe manufacturing automation
- bicycles
- train
- railway
- mining
- dynamite
- metallurgy
- coke (denser form of coal)
- cast iron
- steam engine
- telegraph (Samuel Morse, 1844)
- built after railway network had been started, copper wiring
- materials transport first (real world), communication technologies second (digital world)
- does digital lag behind material world?
- copper wiring
- light bulb
- battery (invention, not mass manufacturing)
- pulley block
- manufacturing
- interchangeable parts
- specialization of skills
- all to be features of Ford
- ironclads
- East <> West trade routes without going through brokers
- modern business organization (corporations, presidents, assigned roles, etc)
- cotton mill
- photography (Nicephore Niepce, 1826)
Second Industrial Revolution (1850-1960’s, pre-PC)
Problems needed for technology:
- lots of businesses, need management structures and corporations to apply law
- lack of formal systems for managing industries
- communication networks for growing discoveries of ore out West- railways, gold, iron, oil
- shipping to bring in coal and other fuels for manufacturing steel, to manufacture machines
- growing demand for cheaper foods- growing population
- byproducts for oil- a lot of use cases for plastics were invented as byproducts from the petrochemical refinement process
- defensive technologies for planes- lighter materials, weapons, high rate machine guns
Major industries:
- chemical
- electrical
- petroleum
- steel
- airplane development
- tabulating machines (IBM in 1911…)
- radio
- home appliances
Major contributions:
- automobile
- one-cylinder engine (Karl Benz, 1885)
- 4-cylinder (Henry Ford, 1896)
- oil
- gasoline
- paraffin
- asphalt
- planes
- jets
- electricity
- tabulating machines
- cheap steel
- chemical manufacturing from synthetic dyes and oil
- nitrogen-based fertilizers: mid-19th century (Haber-Bosch 1909 discovery, 1913 manufacturing)
- synthetic dyes: mid-19th century
- celluloid (first plastic): late 19th century
- chlorine and sodium hydroxide (caustic soda): mid-19th century
- sodium carbonate (soda ash): mid-19th century
- calcium carbide (for acetylene gas production): late 19th century
- engines
- diesel- ships, locomotive (15% more energy dense than gas)
- gas- cars
- radios
- microwaves
- televisions
- cathode ray tubes
- air conditioning
- fast food
- pesticides
- wholesale groceries
- medicine
- vaccines
- energy networks
- copper wiring
- utility companies (privatization)
Information Age (1970s-2000s)
- Manufacturing developments
- Information developments
- Manufacturing of information machines developments (fab manufacturing)
Major contributions:
- communication networks
- fiber optics
- lasers
- space
- rockets
- moon landers
- satellites
- ground to air communication
- electron microscopes
- computers
- transistor
- internet
- world wide web standard
- artificial intelligence
- information
- storage
- processing
- genetics
- zinc-fingers, crispr (not cas9)
- cloning
- IVF
- surrogate
- gene diagnosis for new babies
- confocal microscopes
- nuclear
- fission
- fusion
- large electron-positron collider
- medicine
- vaccines
- birth control
- imaging technology
Modern Age (2000s+)
Problems needed for technology:
- massive amounts of information created from the internet, need something to interpret results, compute and storage resources to make the interpretation of this compute cheaper (AI, cloud)
- accuracy of biology getting smaller and smaller (imaging)
- isolated communities not on the internet, need to reach harder areas for more internet users (rockets, satellites)
- internet-first consumers need internet-first data structures (blockchain), doing business across the waters is too difficult with the current banking infrastructure (built in 80’s)
- in-vivo genetic changes need testing
- authentication on the internet (who is who)
- computers get smaller, need one that is portable with us (mobile smartphones)
- growing waste, need to recycle big atoms (especially metals)
- unsustainable energy usage- take non-entropic asset from the ground, put it in the air which increases the energy in our environment (causing more severe climate response)
- medicine
- rapid vaccine manufacturing
- drug accuracy
- brain-machine interfaces
- genes
- gene therapy
- cas9 cutting
- custom drugs based on genome (first successful patient in 2023)
- genome mapping
- base editing
- imaging (speed of imaging movement across genome x interpretation/translation algorithm to display on screen x low cost of storage)
- deconvolution takes a long time
- computers
- artificial intelligence- enough data to train smart models that react like life forms, in a digital environment for now
- quantum computers
- superconductivity
- memristor
- GPU compute expands dramatically
- cloud computing
- smart phones
- electronics
- wearable devices
- virtual reality headsets
- wireless devices
- brain machine interfaces
- manufacturing
- production-grade 3d printing: metals, polymers (entire rockets)
- still have time x structural integrity strength
- composites
- graphene
- carbon fiber
- transport
- electric vehicles
- battery density
- self-driving ground-based vehicles
- energy
- commercial fusion
- solar networks
- LED lights
- Large Hadron Collider
- space
- reusable rockets
- cheaper payloads
- recycling
- e-waste recycling
- single-stream
- automated sorting
- plastic recycling
- biodegradable plastics
- waste-to-energy
- Medicine/Health
- what happens with a larger, healthier, older population?
- disproportionately large amount of savings relative to the previous generations, and its prob going to happen faster?
- Longevity/aging as a disease
- Yamanaka factors
- 10-15 years ago, 4 compounds injected in cell and it reverts to a stem cell
- David Sinclair
- if they use 3 in a specific way, you can take the cell back to a few years earlier
- revert the age of organs 10 years
- methylation clocks
- measure of entropy? blood draw, determine age of cells in different parts of the body
- consistent way of measuring age
- cant say you’re helping something unless you have a baseline measurement- now you see the innovation cycle has started, meaning the money starts to flow
- HORVATH clock (4-5 years ago)
- GWAS for target discovery
- Genome-wide association studies
- Alector accesses databases and correlates data from the databases with other known biomarkers and other related to these patients
- Not even ML, just correlations
- Alzheimers is an immunological disease
- Microphages- ID things that don’t belong, and encapsulate, then that gets pushed out. Mocriglea is the same but in the brain
- real difficult to find good sources of structured data for this- identifier, get the sequence for the human, and need an accurate baseline. Biotech is becoming software first
- psychiatric indications, aging directly,
- genome is not a death sentence, the epigenome is the more important one- it won’t introduce a change
- Medical devices / wearables / CGM
- continuous monitoring
- CGM that goes in the back of the arm
- precision medicine came before this, and enabled this
- purely data driven
- really big companies have been the most successful at doing this
- just like deep brain simulation technology
- non-medicine diabetic solutions
- what effect do all of these preventative advances have on the medical system? what about on insurance?
- have only been successful in places where the net benefit is for the insurer. they “keep this person out of the hospital so you don’t have to pay”
- being used by Apple- promotions are for get this Apple Watch for free, let us get information on your data. How are they monetizing the data?
- do insurers give discounts to people who are healthy?
- B2B2C
- 23&me is introducing long lost relatives, building a network/social component
- 23&me doesn’t even do full genome sequencing, they do snips
- energy (needed for economy and blockchain and internet)
- we can measure life by energy used, it’ll be geometric, not arithmetic. it’s gonna increasing
- generating energy in one place, then moving it somewhere else
- real innovation is needed in energy transfer- materials, networks, room temperature superconductor wire
- what about the materials we need for electrification? like battery mining in Africa
- need to look at battery innovation and demand- MegaPacks for Tesla have a 2 year waitlist. Chemistry for these cells are different
- CATL designed battery
- Mexico has a lot of Lithium, Africa has rare earths
- how can we synthesize these chemicals? can we use bacteria to make these in large quantities? are bacteria able to produce these chemicals?
- technology from biofuels- can it be used for creating these clean chemicals?
- cheapest energy wins
- will the gov fund solar on every house?
- panel on roofs and batteries in garage
- energy transfer efficiency
- EV transformation
- what is the bandwidth of energy delivery to supercharger networks?
- bandwidth is doubling every year- what technology is required to make this happen?
- Tesla increasing number of chargers by 30% YoY, will be 100% YoY
- Tesla battery packs are networked- they built the P2P network that my college roommate and I made, they are already larger than any other utility grid
- VPP- virtual peaker plant
- commercial fusion
- solar networks
- helium was a byproduct of nuclear fission, scientists/hospitals are paying new
- does fusion? can you use bacteria?
- Space based systems, asteroid mining
- moving manufacturing out in space
- LED lights
- Large Hadron Collider (energy?)
- found the element that actually gives stuff mass
- Deglobalization?
- isolated manufacturing
- where is energy going to be required? transportation costs will change
- physical stuff is coming back, digital stuff is becoming globalized
- if we stop manufacturing commodity goods, what happens if we don’t need to travel?
- travel innovations
- combination with health monitoring devices
- rocket based terrestrial travel
- faster travel time between countries- can get from US to Japan in an hour
- what does the world look like if everyone is an hour away?
- hypersonic planes
- SpaceX will most likely beat them on time and cost
- gets to ride on existing infrastructure though
- Airships for freight?
- none of them handle large items
- submarines or bigger planes
- US Navy will pull away from waterways- now going across the water makes it risky, pirate activity is going to increase
- how much has the activity increased?
- US Navy is not building replacement large ships at the same rate, which means we are losing our technological edge (politically less motivated)
- Oil flows through the world because the US protects these transport waterways. Otherwise, these places would not be able to move.
- our motivation is decreasing, if we don’t have a cold war with China, are we willing to give up that oil production since we have enough?
Patterns
- the cost of a resource always dictates it’s S curve
- metals were the defining feature of humans- we accelerated exponentially from mastering metallurgy (which is, ironically, just a subset/spectrum of the periodic table of elements. what category is next? heavier elements that are more unstable, and we make them more stable?)
- after coal manufacturing became efficient, we see a period of humankind where we go from innovating based off of needs to innovating based off of dreams
- cars for consumers (railways were more efficient for industry)
- planes (desire for flight)
- personal computers
- entertainment
- most advancements are made from using different forms of energy to automate production
- every era had a different resource that was competed over
- Stone-Industrial: land
- Industrial: human capital & equipment
- Information: data (China is able to get more information from its citizens than companies in the US)
- technologies are just solutions to problems, but most technologies are just solving symptoms
- the steam engine transformed our productivity- outsourcing energy use from our muscles to coal
- the gaps between “too expensive to be mainstream” to “mainstream” are getting shorter and shorter
- for example, it took 4000+ years to get to iron, then 1000 to get to steel, ~75 years to create the integrated circuit after the first computer, then ~70 for fusion, ~25 from IC to PC
- all technologies follow the energy source- charcoal followed wood; steam engines, trains, dynamite, and telegraphs followed charcoal; gas engine followed oil
What is the next real step function in productivity or advancement?
- AI is already here, tons of people working on that
- robotics is already here, tons of people working on that
- nuclear is almost here, tons of people working on that
- genetics is coming, not a lot of people working on that
- globalization is already here, internet made everything equal
- internet-native money, tokenization of securitized assets on-chain, lots of people working on that
- international IPO (via tokens), lots of people working on that
- electrification of transport
Predictions
- current revolutions: computer and software revolution, genetic revolution, synthetic materials revolution atomic revolution
- Ages we are in: Information Age, synthetics age, automation age (automating fulfillment of manufacturing)
- Next one: fusion, biological. Information mastery is needed before genetic (advancements in processing x storage- 1 genome is 300GB). 1000XB total, 24PB for entire population sequencing. 1 XB = 1k PB = 1M TB
- aluminum alloys and titanium alloys are here, composites are next
- Industrial automation- like just in time delivery but server-less. I order something online based on my genetic preferences, the factory spins up, prints/builds/assembles my product, then sends my product to my door
- climate change is both a cultural movement (emotional) and utilitarian movement (economic, non-entropic). climate policies for businesses are being reviewed in almost all first-world countries. this is a very high form of leverage
- computer <> machine interfaces (using the internet)- me interacting with my computer is strict, rigid, and deterministic. but we do not act like that when communicating with each other. my communication with my bash shell will change to be more like communicating with another human. “Make a folder for me named X, create a doc in it called Y, write a program that does Z.” Even better, you won’t need folders- the machine will store/organize whatever is more effective for it, vs you. Like Google when you search
- AI making financial decisions on our behalf- a personal accountant x smart contracts. AI has only had access to financial decision making from Wall Street HFT firms and for some people that trade on automated scripts. now that we have trustworthy interpretations of information from AI (LLM’s show that they can do that purely based on text now), they just need access to execute transactions and interact with merchants
- cost of medicine going to $0- costplusdrugs is the first. fixed costs have been removed from the system since we now have such an abundance of drugs (just supply & demand)
- cost of energy going to $0- because nuclear energy is so high leverage, it has very little input for such a high output. its just the construction costs are incredibly high (but coming down). the fixed costs will eventually be spread across all customers, and just like sending a message over the internet, people wont care where their energy will come from, just so long as it’s the cheapest. these two variables will make energy trend towards $0/kWh
- cost of compute going to $0- cloud computing has commoditized compute. It takes milliseconds to get information from Kazakhstan, same as from Virginia (us-east-1). People are fine waiting a few extra ms to get their cloud computing bill to be 5x cheaper. Then, as data centers pop up around the world in low energy areas, their software will become commoditized (AWS, GCP, and Azure have similar services) and they will compete on costs
- purchasing power around the world equalizes- already seeing this with India and IT, they are able to command the same exact salary as someone in the US
- ConvertKit pay its remote employees the exact same no matter what country they are in
Personal
Dad feedback on most influential technology:
computer
iPhone
internet- transfer massive sums of data quickly
what took 5 people previously now takes 1 person, what happens to the other 4?
- where can humans compete better than computers?
Reflections
what are the downstream implications of:
- global, immediate financial system
- faster commerce, new social paradigms that have never been unlocked
- faster business
- AI can now execute money, meaning we can use AI for economic decision making
- gene editing
- change fundamental information laws of the universe
- computer software that can make financial decisions on behalf of people
- already happening on Wall Street
- how do you license an AI to be an accountant?
- free energy
- free compute
constraints create technology- if you don’t understand the constraint, you’re not going to understand the technology. context is important
Bonus: Computer history
1950s:
- In 1951, the first commercially available computer, the UNIVAC I, was introduced by Remington Rand.
- In 1952, Grace Hopper developed the first compiler for COBOL, which allowed programs to be written in high-level programming languages.
- In 1958, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments invented the first integrated circuit.
1960s:
- In 1960, the first operating system, the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), was developed by MIT. Interesting that a compiler was invented before an operating system- was a file system for different computer programs the reason why this was needed? Yes, also because they needed to store the different compilers for each program on a machine and allocate resources for each
- compilers were not included on consumer computers (see Apple II)
- In 1963, Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse.
- In 1964, IBM introduced the System/360, which was the first mainframe computer to use interchangeable software and hardware components.
- In 1969, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was developed, which later became the foundation for the modern internet.
1970s:
- In 1971, Intel introduced the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, which revolutionized the field of computer engineering.
- In 1972, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson developed the C programming language, which became widely used in operating systems and application software.
- In 1973, Xerox PARC developed the Alto, the first computer with a graphical user interface and a mouse.
- In 1977, Apple introduced the Apple II, one of the first successful personal computers.
- its OS included a file system, no compilers for dev work, a simpler text interface (like terminal), and easier loading/using of floppy disk programs
1980s:
- In 1981, IBM introduced the IBM PC, which became the standard for business and personal computing.
- In 1983, ARPANET adopted the TCP/IP protocol, which became the standard for the modern internet.
- In 1985, Microsoft released Windows 1.0, which was the first version of the operating system to feature a graphical user interface.
- ah here we go, the first OS that includes a GUI. i wonder if this is the OS that Bill stole from Apple
- In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, which made the internet accessible to the general public.
1990s:
- In 1991, Linus Torvalds created the Linux operating system, which would become one of the most widely used open-source software projects in history.
- In 1993, Mosaic, the first web browser with a graphical user interface, was released, making the World Wide Web more accessible to the general public.
- In 1995, Sun Microsystems released Java, a programming language that could run on any computer, regardless of the underlying hardware or operating system.
- like the EVM
- In 1998, Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, which would become the world's most widely used search engine.
2000s:
- In 2001, Apple released the iPod, which revolutionized the way people listen to music and marked Apple's entry into the consumer electronics market.
- In 2003, the first version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser was released, which would become one of the most widely used browsers in the world.
- In 2004, Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, which would become the world's largest social networking site.
- In 2007, Apple released the iPhone, which revolutionized the smartphone industry and paved the way for the app economy.
- In 2009, Bitcoin was released, bringing attention to the potential of blockchain technology.
2010s:
- In 2010, Apple released the iPad, which helped popularize the tablet form factor and became one of the company's most successful products.
- In 2015, Tesla released the Model S, the first electric car to achieve a range of over 200 miles per charge, which helped popularize electric vehicles.
- In 2016, AlphaGo, a computer program developed by DeepMind, defeated the world champion at the game of Go, marking a major milestone in artificial intelligence research.
- In 2018, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect, imposing strict data privacy regulations on companies doing business in the EU.
- In 2019, Google's DeepMind AI program solved one of the biggest problems in biology by predicting the folding of a protein with atomic-level accuracy, marking a major breakthrough in scientific research.