Brave New World
Before we really get into this short article, I want to clarify that I’m not a scientist, a techie nor anything like that. I’m a young human being pursuing my path in this earthly life such as you are too.
Now, that I clearly stated out this matter of fact and you’re still with me, I’d like to share current developments in the field of technology and a few thoughts regarding a potential future world.
Society and the economy will change fundamentally in the upcoming years. Megatrends such as demographic change, globalization, and digitalization are and will reshape society and the economy in the long term. To me, one of the most interesting aspects is the evolution of technology. Our lives and perception of the metaphysical world are starting to merge with the digital world, where the mobile phones are functioning as a sort of remote controller. The development and integration of technology in a broad field are accelerating the evolution of all life forms on this planet as it penetrates the ecosystem on a macro level.
Customer oriented
The ever-more digitalized and globalized world led to a time period of total information overflow and overabundance of products and services. With this phenomenon, there’s an increasing sensation of the downside of optionality — mainly in the Western world. Symptoms of such emergencies are stress, orientation loss and strain which can lead to psychological issues. These are affecting the economy and individual lives in scale and causing huge losses in efficiency as just one single example of impact. Furthermore, clients are getting more and more aware of their true power towards companies and their offers and grow increasingly demanding. Companies need to react as people are about to expect products, services as well as customer conversations that are perfectly adapted to their individual needs and demands. Anything perceived as irrelevant or unpersonalized will not be accepted and can strongly harm the customer experience and therefore customer engagement.
In order to implement these “new” customer needs and to solve this issue, companies have to find out about their customer’s will and interests. So how are they going to achieve this gain in reliable customer knowledge? Anyhow, the client or user has to be the central priority of any corporate activities. Unprecedented data streams are providing the necessary information to analyze and create the required understanding. Technologies are merging the off- and online world and offer new opportunities to augment the customer experience so that the process of customer acquisition is not a winning momentum anymore, but rather a development into an obligation. Such experiences can be designed for people who are acting passively or actively. May this be by using eye-tracking, facial recognition and voice to navigate their way through a new customer-centric reality. So natural language processing (NLP) is an important and interesting field of science to elaborate on.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be on everyone’s lips and will progressively augment and enhance literally every existing technology and application. Robots are already doing most of the hard physical work in factories. Autonomous driving has become a reality and is about to get mature for the markets. A WiFi-enabled toy uses speech-recognition to talk and listen to children and some of the world famous entrepreneurs are experimenting with the merge of AI and human brains — for example, Elon Musk’s project called Neuralink. Neuralink’s main aim is to connect our consciousness directly to artificial intelligence. However, Musk sees this as something far bigger than just being able to turn your television on with your mind. For him, this will represent the biggest leap in human communication since we developed speech. Long story short, what Neuralink is striving to achieve is to enable uncompressed communication between individuals. So in other words, this could lead to a type of communication like telepathy.
AI and machine learning (ML), which include technologies such as deep learning, neural networks and NLP, can also embrace more advanced systems which can understand, learn, predict, adapt and potentially operate autonomously. Systems can learn and change future behavior, leading to the creation of more intelligent devices and programs supporting human needs. Anyway, we need to clarify and relativize that ML is just a rebranding of complex mathematical algorithms and exists already since the mid 20th century. The only reason why this specific area in computer science is now getting more traction than ever is that we now have way more extended parallel processing power and massive data sets to feed the algorithms in order to train them. As a consequence, productivity is stimulated through smart programs, machines and systems. Those systems probably won’t be integrated completely into the value chain, but will work as an assistant to humans.
Internet of Things
Generally speaking, Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the networked interconnection of everyday objects, which are often equipped with artificial intelligence. IoT will increase the omnipresence of the Internet by integrating every object for interaction via embedded systems, which leads to a highly distributed network of devices communicating with human beings as well as other electrical devices. Thanks to the rapid advances in underlying technologies, IoT is opening tremendous opportunities for a large number of new applications that promise to improve the quality of our lives. Those applications and use cases are ranging from general information supply over autonomous service to warning and alter functions. In recent years, IoT has gained much attention from researchers and practitioners from all around the world.
Data the new raw oil
Each and every device worldwide, either used and controlled by a human or acting autonomously develops into a data supplier. Every day, a few exabytes of new raw data are produced and the figures are progressively evolving on a regular basis. So in other words, the world is about to create a digital print of itself. Enormous computational power, advanced algorithms and deep neural networks can make this flood of information utilizable as long as the data sets are structured. These aspects allow us to collect the data, help us classifying and analyzing the data, gain insights and enable us to make smarter conclusions so that we can make more accurate future predictions.
It’s fundamental for businesses to understand the importance of gained knowledge and the power data. It’s where magic can happen at scale. In the future, companies have to consider this success factor and be able to collect, save and interpret vast amounts of data in real time. So to be clear, investments in infrastructure and required competencies will not be a matter of differentiation and gaining a competitive edge anymore, but rather of mere survival.
Potential future world
The above-mentioned developments in technology will indispensable lead to great change in the way of life. However, most, if not all of today’s statements regarding a potential future are just assumptions based on the current and past events.
Personally, I believe that technology is exposing our true selves, rather than changing our behavior. Thus, I do believe as Nikolai Dmitrijewitsch Kondratjew said already in his lifetime that the 21st century will mainly be about humans — it will be the central priority of economy and research. Immortality as another keyword… Today, most people are afraid of death and so while we are experiencing an evolution of machines and highly complex systems, we will include them in potential problem-solving investigations for this issue (for example Google launched a company called Calico). As a result, ethics and morals are going to be even more important in the future than they are already today. Moreover, we should be aware of the shifting of authority from humans to algorithms which can cause a huge vulnerability for humankind. Decisions have to be made very carefully as they might lead to great variation in potential future outcomes.
We might also have to face a huge challenge with an emerging new class of people all over the world, who potentially are going to lose their jobs as AI is evolving. Therefore, we really need to think about what and how we are educating people and especially the youth so that they will be able to stay integrated into the labor market.
Again, these are just very few of a vast amount of possibilities for a potential future and it is now the time to take responsibility and follow up with action if we want to change something we don’t like. Finally, I truly think that our key goal has to be to create useful technology which is serving us and not we serving the technology!
Data source: Munich RE IT Trend Radar 2017
