Trends Identified

Deep learning for visual tasks

Computers are beginning to recognize images better than humans. Thanks to deep learning, an emerging field of artificial intelligence, computer-vision technologies are increasingly being used in applications as diverse as driving autonomous vehicles, medical diagnostics, damage assessment for insurance claims and monitoring of water levels and crop yield.

2017

These are the top 10 emerging technologies of 2017

World Economic Forum (WEF)

Deep learning accelerators

Deep learning accelerators such as GPUs, FPGAs, and more recently TPUs. More companies have been announcing plans to design their own accelerators, which are widely used in data centers. There is also an opportunity to deploy them at the edge, initially for inference and for limited training over time. This also includes accelerators for very low power devices. The development of these technologies will allow machine learning (or smart devices) to be used in many IoT devices and appliances.

2018

IEEE Computer Society Predicts the Future of Tech: Top 10 Technology Trends for 2019

IEEE Computer Society

Decrypting Crypto-Consumers

On October 31th, 2008, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published the paper Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, which would lay the groundwork for the world’s most talked about and prominent novel currency project since the creation of the euro some twenty years ago. Growing from a little-known cryptography mailing list, a discreetly registered domain, and a dedicated forum set up by its founder, Bitcoin soon inspired a huge growth in traders, platform and brokers, trade media, fans churning out memes, as well as commercial endeavors from cash brokers to exchanges, pubs to candy stores. This rapid expansion also meant that the user and consumer base has been difficult to track and segment. The crypto landscape is awash with data, but consumer data has been more difficult to come by for a variety of reasons. At first the audience was very small, and few cryptocurrency holders would be caught in the dragnet of national surveys – some of which were still based on calling landlines when Bitcoin was launched – and others relied on data volunteered by community members based on straw polls and student surveys. Self-selection also favored outspoken crypto activists, rather than silent investors. It’s the latter group our research has been able to capture. By including cryptocurrency into our global internet user survey, we’ve been able to expand the dragnet to almost 90,000 respondents – and picked up cryptocurrency holders in the course of general fieldwork, without targeting them. This means we have a sample of cryptocurrency holders with more than 25,000 data points against them, which has also served as a benchmark for our subsequent targeted poll.

2019

Trends 19

GlobalWebIndex

Decreasing Defence Expenditures

Governments faced with slow or non-existent growth, rising unemployment and increasing debt burdens will continue to have many competing priorities. Continuing volatility in financial markets might further slow global as well as national economic activity. Defence spending has continued to decline across the Alliance due to reduced economic growth, and the increasing emphasis on social programmes. There is a risk that, even if economic cycles turn more positive, public opinion may prevent some nations from reinvesting in defence. This will have a marked negative impact on defence capabilities in the future. The consequences of current and anticipated near-term reductions in Science and Technology (S&T) investment will have implications on longer-term force capabilities. These deficits could be offset by new, less expensive, and yet-to-be-developed technologies.

2013

Strategic Foresight Analysis 2013 Report

NATO

Declining Civic Values

The spread of transnational networks are likely to impact on an individual’s identity. Many people in affluent societies are increasingly likely to regard their relationship with the state in consumerist rather than civic terms, while governance standards in many developing societies are unlikely to keep pace with economic and social change. Civic support systems may decline producing an increased reliance on local communities, extended family networks and personal patronage.

2010

Global strategic trends - out to 2040

UK, Ministry of Defence

Decentralized energy systems

The combination of cost-effective solar, wind and battery technologies are the key building blocks for decentralized energy systems. Buildings could plug into the grid or operate independently. Electric cars could be plugged into buildings where they could act as a supplementary power source.

2013

Metascan 3 emerging technologies

Canada, Policy Horizons Canada

Decent work deficits are widespread

A majority of the 3.3 billion people employed globally in 2018 experienced a lack of material well-being, economic security, equal opportunities or scope for human development. Being in employment does not always guarantee a decent living. Many workers find themselves having to take up unattractive jobs that tend to be informal and are characterized by low pay and little or no access to social protection and rights at work. Significantly, 360 million people in 2018 were contributing family workers and 1.1 billion worked on their own account, often in subsistence activities that are pursued because of an absence of job opportunities in the formal sector and/or the lack of a social protection system. Overall, 2 billion workers were in informal employment in 2016, accounting for 61 per cent of the world’s workforce. The poor quality of many jobs also manifests itself in the fact that, in 2018, more than one quarter of workers in low- and middle-income countries were living in extreme or moderate poverty. On a positive note, the incidence of working poverty has decreased greatly over the past three decades, especially in middle-income countries. In low-income countries, however, the pace of poverty reduction is not expected to keep up with employment growth, so that the actual number of working poor in these countries is projected to rise.

2019

World Employment and Social Outlook

International Labour Organization (ILO)

Debunking the Fabricated

It’s not as if fake news is a novel idea. But, it hogged the headlines in 2017 as fact and fiction got completely tangled (or, do we mean mangled?). Governments, industry participants and citizen-focused initiatives are already coming together to identify, reduce and prevent misinformation strategies and fake news in 2018. In light of recent incidents, the focus will be on quelling interference in political processes and social polarization efforts. Developments may lead to the segmentation of social media based on verified identities, pseudonyms, and anonymous environments.

2018

Top 10 Tech Trends For 2018

Forbes

Data-driven healthcare

Today, we are already at a turning point in our ability to 3D “bioprint” organ tissues, a process that involves depositing a “bio-ink” made of cells precisely in layers, resulting in a functional living human tissue for use in the lab. These tissues should be better predictors of drug function than animal models in many cases. In the long-term, this has the potential to pave the way to “printing” human organs, such as kidneys, livers and hearts. By 2020, our goal is to have the technology be broadly used by pharmaceutical companies, resulting in the identification of safer and better drug candidates and fewer failures in clinical trials.

2014

14 tech predictions for our world in 2020

World Economic Forum (WEF)

Data Veracity- The Importance of Trust

By transforming themselves to run on data, businesses have created a new kind of vulnerability: inaccurate, manipulated, and biased data that leads to corrupted business insights, and skewed decisions with a major impact on society.

2018

Accenture Technology vision 2018

Accenture