Future & Frontier Tech

Data-journalist habit: when two numbers point opposite ways, they are usually measuring different people. AI skills now appear in 75% of US tech postings, up 178% year over year, and 35% of ENTRY-level roles…

Nurse habit: I judge a therapy by what has to go right at 3am. So the 2026 story isn't CRISPR getting sharper. It's the FDA's February guidance on a "plausible mechanism" pathway: approve a…

Built enough weekend robot arms to be allergic to the 'robots are coming' hype reel. But something shifted in 2026, and it isn't a viral clip. Agility's Digit has moved 100k+ totes in a…

Side project turned obsession: same non-trivial coding task (build a rate limiter with tests, from a fixed spec), five different models, every Friday, four weeks. Results: the top two swapped places twice, the "best"…

Nanotech has a branding problem — people imagine grey-goo nanobots. The reality is less cinematic and more useful: nanostructured electrodes for batteries, targeted drug delivery, water filtration, better solar. I work on the battery…

Everyone wants a date, so here's mine with the caveat that timelines are mostly vibes: ~30% chance of something most experts would call AGI by 2032, ~60% by 2040. The bottleneck isn't raw capability…

We now have approved CRISPR therapies for sickle cell. That's astonishing and barely made the news. Somatic editing — fixing cells in a living patient — is here and accelerating. Germline editing (heritable changes…

Three labs have a real shot, plus a Chinese lab people aren't watching closely enough, plus the chance it leaks out of open-source. But "first" may matter less than "safest and most deployed". Getting…

I don't think there'll be a single moment — no alarm goes off. My test: a model makes a genuinely novel scientific discovery a human team would've taken years to find, and we can't…

AI is the current wave. What's next? My ranking: (1) biotech + longevity — AI is about to supercharge drug discovery; (2) robotics — AI finally gives robots a brain; (3) fusion/clean energy —…

Short answer: useful quantum advantage exists in a handful of narrow, mostly contrived problems. Practical, error-corrected machines that break RSA or design drugs are still years out — error correction is the real mountain,…

I work on automation, so this is my soapbox. The home is the hardest environment that exists: unstructured, unpredictable, full of edge cases and liability. A humanoid reliably folding your laundry is a decade-plus…

Everyone fixates on quantum breaking encryption. As a materials person, I think the first real wins are in simulation: modelling molecules and materials classical computers can't. Better batteries, catalysts, fertilisers. That's a quieter revolution…

No, not "forever". But "longevity escape velocity" — adding more than a year of life expectancy per year of research — is a serious hypothesis, not just Valley fantasy. The credible near-term story is…