Tech trends that will transform the world in 2018

Augmented lifestyle with AI, intelligent apps and analytics

As AI, intelligent apps and analytics are getting more embedded into our lifestyle we are beginning to create technology that has started augmenting human lifestyle. We will see designers integrating and augmenting our everyday activities such as seeing (facial recognition), reading (semantic and sentiment analysis), listening/speaking (conversational interfaces e.g. Alexa, Siri) and emotions (affective computing)

Rise of intelligent things with smart IoT

It has been predicted that we will have 75 billion connected devices by 2020! These devices will not only be connected, but will be cooperating as part of an intelligent eco-system. These smart devices will be constantly gathering data, connecting and sharing in intelligent ways to solve the desired goals of underlying systems. As AI and intelligent things proliferate, expect to see a swarm of intelligent agents collaborating and replicating interactions in the real world.

Cloud shifts to the edge

With the proliferation of IoT/IoE and intelligent apps/agents, we will see the need for distributed computing with respect to analytics and decision-making. Therefore edge computing IoT will spawn a new infrastructure market. The dependency of IoT infrastructure for near real-time solutions will require us to overcome connectivity, latency and bandwidth constraints. Greater functionality at the end points will require the adoption of scalable and failsafe distributed network and storage architecture.

Quantum computing and surge in computing power

The emergence of quantum computing will enable significant transformation of computing power. The massive scale of compute power will enable problem solving such as unsupervised machine learning at a scale, which is unthinkable with our current computers. IBM recently announced a 50 qubit prototype quantum computer chip; we should see a 100-200+ qubit system in 2018.

Event driven and context aware platforms

With data being integrated across multiple data streams, devices and network, the next challenge and opportunity is for insights from the data that can be available in a timely and contextual manner. Businesses will become more and more dependent on the ability to sense and exploit events so that they can make contextual business decisions. Therefore niche platforms that enable businesses to configure, detect, analyze and execute on events will be essential. Event sources, real-time situational and context aware system will be the requirement of enterprise IT strategy.

The dawn of consciousness hacking and bio-field sciences

Consciousness hacking is a global community exploring technology as a catalyst for psychological, emotional and spiritual flourishing. It’s an inside-out perspective on how technology can serve us by changing our relationship to the world, rather than the world itself. Technologies such as HRV, EEG, ECG, GSR will be leveraged to better understand the Body-Mind and connectedness of communities.

– Compiled by Ankita Das