Tech of the future

May 16, 2017

Every year we read numerous articles telling us about all the different types of tech trends we should be looking out for in the next 12 months. Some we know can be viewed as a bit faddish, but if you look carefully at technological advancement over the past few decades, you will begin to realise that we are witnessing a rapidly changing world and a future that is built on dreams that are fast becoming a reality.

Take AI (Artificial Intelligence) deep learning and cognitive computing for instance. There are computers today that have been programmed, using the human brain as inspiration, with the ability to learn, reason, solve problems, speech recognition and recognise circumstances – all without human intelligence or intervention.

 

Just look at IBM’s Watson, a question and answering computing system that aids doctors to better diagnose and identify therapeutic options for their patients. Watson is also used to predict an elevator or escalator’s condition to enable global engineering company, Kone, to notify technicians with issues, causes and potential solutions and address symptoms long before they become actual problems.

 

 

Personal assistant devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, are already battling for position to be in one’s home and rumour has it that Apple will be joining the fray very shortly with their very own home speaker/personal assistant in June 2017.

 

According to Gartner, next year 6 billion devices will be proactively requesting support and by the end of 2018 customer digital assistants will have voice and facial recognition capability which will enable them to identify customers’ faces and voices across all types of media.

 

Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, is tackling AI a little differently. In the next four years his latest endeavour Neuralink, a brain-computer interface company, is looking to develop an AI device that can be implanted in the human brain to assist with brain injuries and disabilities. The possibility of making these devices available to people with no disability is not too far fetched.

 

 

The Future Today Institute’s 2017 Tech Trends Annual Report says that by 2027 a vehicle’s location on a road will be recognised via advanced technology that will allow cars to drive by themselves.

 

Then there’s Selfie Security. When Apple launched is biometric security in 2013, it was met with no customer complaint. This paved the way for companies such as MasterCard to implement a fingerprint and face scanning authentication process – taking the need for a standard password away. Whilst this raises the question that if you get hacked you can easily change your password, how do you change your face or fingerprints?

 

And, this is only the tip of the future tech iceberg… until next year!

 

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