Trends Identified
Realistic Robots
If you’ve seen any of the Boston Dynamics robot videos, like the dog that opens doors, you know there’s a whole frontier of robotics that is starting to get into exciting (or scary) territory. As these robots integrate the type of intelligence that machine learning and modern AI techniques offer, we’re going to start seeing more and more robots that look and feel like living beings.
2018
2019 Tech Forecast: 11 Experts Predict The Next Wave Of Breakout Technologies
Forbes
Analytics
If you’re maxing out on data and analytics in 2017, just wait. The mass amount of information being created by the IoT has the power to revolutionize everything from manufacturing and healthcare to the layout and functioning of entire cities — allowing them to work more efficiently and profitably than ever before. One company, for instance, found that it was able to reduce the cost of managing its fleet of 180,000 trucks from 15 cents per mile to just 3 cents. That same kind of efficiency can be exercised in almost every industry, from retail to city planning. Tech giants such as Microsoft, IBM, SAS and SAP are all heavily investing in Analytics, more specifically IoT Analytics as they are seeing the power of this combination in driving new business insights across a vast array of industries and applications.
2016
Top 10 trends for digital transformation in 2018
Forbes
Edge Computing
If you think you’ve already been pushed to the edge when it comes to digital transformation, look out: you haven’t seen anything yet. Just when many companies are finally beginning to move toward cloud computing, edge computing — driven by the sheer volume and speed of information produced by the IoT—is jumping to the forefront of the business scene. Industry leaders such as Cisco and HPE have made huge hardware, software and service bets on this movement, which I look at as strong validation of this trend. As smart drones, autonomous vehicles, and other AI-powered smart devices seek to connect and communicate instantly via the IoT, the matter of sending data “all the way” to the cloud will become highly impractical. Many of these devices will need real-time response and processing, making edge computing the only viable option. For those of you who have just jumped into the cloud generation: don’t fret. Though edge will continue to be the go-to choice for processing real-time data, it’s likely that the most important and relevant data will still head cloud-ward.
2016
Top 10 trends for digital transformation in 2018
Forbes
New Bio-Utilities
If new technologies made fruits or vegetables last up to three times longer, Pande says, farmers could pick tomatoes at peak ripeness and they’d still taste great when they landed in a supermarket. “You could ship fruits and vegetables to new markets, or to the third world. It’s only possible due to this engineering approach,” he adds.
2018
The Most Important Tech Trends Of 2018, According To Top VCs
Fast Company
Advertising: 'All sorts of things will just be sold in plain packages'
If I'd been writing this five years ago, it would have been all about technology: the internet, the fragmentation of media, mobile phones, social tools allowing consumers to regain power at the expense of corporations, all that sort of stuff. And all these things are important and will change how advertising works. But it's becoming clear that what'll really change advertising will be how we relate to it and what we're prepared to let it do. After all, when you look at advertising from the past the basic techniques haven't changed; what seems startlingly alien are the attitudes it was acceptable to portray and the products you were allowed to advertise. In 25 years, I bet there'll be many products we'll be allowed to buy but not see advertised – the things the government will decide we shouldn't be consuming because of their impact on healthcare costs or the environment but that they can't muster the political will to ban outright. So, we'll end up with all sorts of products in plain packaging with the product name in a generic typeface – as the government is currently discussing for cigarettes. But it won't stop there. We'll also be nudged into renegotiating the relationship between society and advertising, because over the next few years we're going to be interrupted by advertising like never before. Video screens are getting so cheap and disposable that they'll be plastered everywhere we go. And they'll have enough intelligence and connectivity that they'll see our faces, do a quick search on Facebook to find out who we are and direct a message at us based on our purchasing history.At least, that'll be the idea. It probably won't work very well and when it does work it'll probably drive us mad. Marketing geniuses are working on this stuff right now, but not all of them recognise that being allowed to do this kind of thing depends on societal consent – push the intrusion too far and people will push back. Society once did a deal accepting advertising because it seemed occasionally useful and interesting and because it paid for lots of journalism and entertainment. It's not necessarily going to pay for those things for much longer so we might start questioning whether we want to live in a Blade Runner world brought to us by Cillit Bang.
2011
20 predictions for the next 25 years
The Guardian
Space exploration will open up in 2018 - Eye-catching space missions could boost dreams of setting up bases on celestial bodies
If all goes well, on November 26th 2018 NASA’s InSight unmanned spacecraft will slice into Mars’s thin atmosphere at a blistering 3.2km (2 miles) a second, open a parachute, fire retrorockets, jettison its heat shield and softly land. It will be the culmination of an exciting year of space travel.
2018
The world in 2018
The Economist
Growth, but not as we know it
If 2014 taught us anything it’s that in our increasingly technology-led world, no industry, no company and no government, even, is immune from the effects of change. Take the global energy market, where breakthrough innovations continued to shake up the status quo. Or the corporate world, where a cyber security attack had international security and diplomacy ramifications. And what about that digital transport start up – barely four years old – challenging the entire global taxi industry’s business model and receiving an $18 billion valuation for its chutzpah..
2015
18th Annual global CEO survey
PWC
Altered Identities
Identity is an umbrella term used to describe how people perceive themselves and others. An individual belongs to multiple identity groups, through birth, assimilation, or achievement and each particular group influences their values and beliefs. Historically key influences for identity have been often along ethnic, racial, national and religious lines, however out to 2040 new influences are likely to emerge. For example, online social interaction is likely to increase in sophistication and scale. Social networking sites fused with ‘virtual reality’ networking sites, such as Second Life, may lead to new ways of interacting, new variations of language and the formation of complex relationships between individuals on a global scale.
2010
Global strategic trends - out to 2040
UK, Ministry of Defence
Text and Data mining
ICT technologies are getting better at processing large volumes of unstructured or non-uniform data and text. New techniques, learned on data sets in life sciences and drug discovery, are being applied in particular in social sciences, humanities, security, business, marketing and legal areas. Text and data mining (TDM) refers to the different tools, techniques and technologies for the automated processing of the large volumes of information available in order to obtain new knowledge and insights and discover patterns and trends. While its importance is growing with the increasing large amounts of data stored in corporate data warehouses and databases, realising the full economic and societal potential afforded by this vast sea of information will require new technologies, processes and business models.
2015
Preparing the Commission for future opportunities - Foresight network fiches 2030
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS)
Materials' Quantum Leap
IBM has simulated the electronic structure of a small molecule, using a seven-qubit quantum computer.
2018
10 Breakthrough Technologies 2018
MIT Technology Review