Trends Identified
Smooth-talking AI assistants
New techniques that capture semantic relationships between words are making machines better at understanding natural language. We’re used to AI assistants—Alexa playing music in the living room, Siri setting alarms on your phone—but they haven’t really lived up to their alleged smarts. They were supposed to have simplified our lives, but they’ve barely made a dent. They recognize only a narrow range of directives and are easily tripped up by deviations. But some recent advances are about to expand your digital assistant’s repertoire. In June 2018, researchers at OpenAI developed a technique that trains an AI on unlabeled text to avoid the expense and time of categorizing and tagging all the data manually. A few months later, a team at Google unveiled a system called BERT that learned how to predict missing words by studying millions of sentences. In a multiple-choice test, it did as well as humans at filling in gaps. These improvements, coupled with better speech synthesis, are letting us move from giving AI assistants simple commands to having conversations with them. They’ll be able to deal with daily minutiae like taking meeting notes, finding information, or shopping online. Some are already here. Google Duplex, the eerily human-like upgrade of Google Assistant, can pick up your calls to screen for spammers and telemarketers. It can also make calls for you to schedule restaurant reservations or salon appointments. In China, consumers are getting used to Alibaba’s AliMe, which coordinates package deliveries over the phone and haggles about the price of goods over chat. But while AI programs have gotten better at figuring out what you want, they still can’t understand a sentence. Lines are scripted or generated statistically, reflecting how hard it is to imbue machines with true language understanding. Once we cross that hurdle, we’ll see yet another evolution, perhaps from logistics coordinator to babysitter, teacher—or even friend? —Karen Hao
2019
10 Breakthrough Technologies 2019 - How we’ll invent the future, by Bill Gates
MIT Technology Review
Artificial Intelligence
New technologies are focused on augmenting the processing capabilities of machines for human-like intelligence (e.g., robotics, natural-language processing, speech recognition).
2017
Beyond the Noise- The Megatrends of Tomorrow’s World
Deloitte
Technology
New technologies can be expected to affect future family structures and interrelations in several ways. Firstly, progress in medical technologies has in the past made important contributions to extending people’s lives, and further advances can be expected in the years ahead, pushing life expectancies to new heights and significantly increasing the numbers of elderly. Secondly, information and communication technologies (ICT) have vast potential to enhance the lives of the sick, the infirm and the elderly by increasing or restoring their autonomy, particularly in the home, and enabling them to participate more actively in family life, not least in the role of carer and/or educator. Thirdly, distance working and distance learning are set to increase considerably in the coming years, as broadband availability and usage intensify and more companies, organisations and institutions avail themselves of the benefits offered by these technologies. As take-up increases so too will the opportunities for families to organise their working and learning lives more flexibly in ways that are better aligned to their needs. And finally, over the next 20 years the much anticipated expansion of social networking will almost certainly have consequences – often unexpected – for family interrelationships and interaction, in some cases enhancing them, in others perhaps hampering them.
2011
The Future of Families to 2030
OECD
New patterns of inequality
New technologies may disrupt the consensus on what constitutes equal and fair treatment for citizens. The technologies may level the playing field for some, while creating new barriers for others. The public policy questions include timing, efficacy and affordability.
2013
Metascan 3 emerging technologies
Canada, Policy Horizons Canada
Interaction will change
New technologies will allow traditional in-home activities to also happen virtually. The seamless management of data and systems, enabled by AI and new materials, will change how homes look. It is likely that new interactive surfaces will appear throughout the home that will allow occupants to monitor and manage household systems and communicate with others. Over time, as technology evolves, traditional building materials and fittings will be displaced by new ones that will integrate with a home’s AI and sensors. These sensors will share information remotely with smart phones and smart vehicles, allowing people to administer their house remotely.
2013
Metascan 3 emerging technologies
Canada, Policy Horizons Canada
New types of light and high-strength materials
New types of light and high-strength materials primarily relate to products based on carbon fibres. Their most important characteristics (high elastic and strength qualities, lightness, low friction coefficient, resistance to atmospheric effects and chemical reagents) and special features of their structure make it possible to combine carbon fibre materials with other types of fibres: boric, glass, and aramid. As a result, light and strong products can be created, combining the competitive advantages of two source materials. Such hybrid com- posites have already found application in the aerospace sector and sporting equipment industry. Other materials which meet the criteria of lightness and high strength can be created on the basis of nanostructured alloys or aluminium, titanium and several other metals. The most in demand will be the following products: high-strength mixtures based on nanostructured structural polymers;_x000B_polymer composite materials with the addition of small quantities of carbon nanoparticles; stronger composite materials based on nanomaterials using wood; nanostructured composite materials based on light metals – Al, Ti, Mg – containing nanofibres made from super-high-molecular polyethylene, etc._x000B_
2016
Russia 2030: science and technology foresight
Russia, Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation
The march of the bots
News of machines taking human jobs has caused widespread nail-biting for some time, but the tension reached fever pitch in 2017. More than 70% of people in the US are now anxious about a future where computers perform human tasks, according to a study by think tank Pew. Sinovation Ventures founder Kai-Fu Lee, for example, believes that half of all jobs globally will be replaced by AI over the next decade.
2018
Most contagious
Contagious
Next-generation carrier rockets
Next-generation carrier rockets making wide use of new polymer composite materials (composite proportions 20% higher than in the Proton-M rocket) will have better characteristics compared with existing counterparts by almost twofold. A distinguishing feature of these carrier rockets will be modularity. Such a construction concept firstly helps to simplify delivery of a ready-made product to the launch site by rail transport; secondly, it makes it possible to create a whole family of carrier rockets – from light (based on a single first stage module) launching a ground payload of 1.5 tons into low-earth orbit, to very heavy (up to 50 tons). With the introduction of such systems it will be possible to place payloads of over 50 tons into an orbit of 200 km, which increases the opportunities for space tourism allows to use modular carrier rockets to launch spacecraft to the Moon or nearby planets in the Solar System, and they could even be adapted for the development of deep space. One expected production benefit is linked to economies of scale: modular systems make it possible to move from modern small-scale or even individual production of rocket modules to medium-scale output.
2016
Russia 2030: science and technology foresight
Russia, Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation
Beyond the Cloud
No vision would be complete without commenting on the cloud. However, cloud computing is no longer an emerging trend. The on-demand, elastic technology needs to be considered in all decisions made today; the key question is not “should we use cloud?” but “how can we use cloud?” More than that: cloud isn’t a single concept. Its individual elements—from IaaS to SaaS to PaaS, from public to private—are as distinct and different from one another as the opportunities for enterprises to use them. So the real “trend” is a shift in focus to the next phase: putting cloud to work and crafting an overarching approach that weaves cloud capabilities into the fabric of the enterprise—with business value uppermost in mind.
2013
Accenture Technology Vision 2013
Accenture
Non-radioactive Non-destructive Testing Technology
Non-destructive testing technology using non-radioactive substances or devices which can replace the radioisotopes in current industrial use
2017
10 emerging technologies in 2017
South Korea, Korea Institute of S&T Evaluation and Planning (KISTEP)