3 Tech Trends to watch in 2019
By Amy Webb
It’s been a tumultuous year. Once-venerated companies found their stock trading below a dollar. Tweets rattled investor confidence. If 2018 has taught us anything, it’s that chaos is the new normal, and that it’s time to get smarter about anticipating change. But it also revealed an unsettling truth: We simply aren’t paying enough attention to meaningful signals in the present, and that’s why we’ve been caught in this constant cycle of surprise.
To understand the future of one thing, you must consider the future of many things. Otherwise, you’re essentially looking at the world through a pinhole.
This is especially true when it comes to technology’s influence on the economy. In the coming year, we will see tantalizing advancements in a host of emerging technologies—artificial intelligence, smart devices, space travel, genomic editing, electric vehicles, and automated hacking tools—that will move further from the fringe into the mainstream. As these technologies begin to converge, we’ll start to see acceleration. This is why pharmaceuticals must closely track developments in deep learning, and big agriculture should keep a close eye on CRISPR experiments in China. AI will help researchers develop precision medicine techniques, while gene editing could yield new crops that don’t require pesticides.
My approach is to intentionally look for weak signals and emerging trends across different areas, to find meaningful connections. Here are three tech trends on my radar for 2019.
This is the beginning of the end of smartphones
Globally, smartphone shipments are in decline. Apple will no longer report sales numbers for any of its hardware products, including iPhones—it’s a clear signal about what’s on the mid-horizon. And even as new form factors enter the consumer marketplace next year—you’ll see dual-sided phones and models with foldable screens—the functionality isn’t improving fast enough to merit tossing out existing phones for new ones. In the next ten years, we will transition from just one phone that we carry to a suite of next-gen communication devices, which we will wear and command using voice, gesture, and touch.
5G will be deployed at scale
The fifth generation of wireless technology will, at last, power up—but not where you’re expecting. While local governments continue to fight over incentives, private companies will ditch WiFi for 5G, which will shorten transmission latency from 30 milliseconds to just a single millisecond, allowing essentially instantaneous connectivity between devices on a network. Unlike WiFi, a private 5G network can be built to prioritize certain data transmissions over others. In practice, this means that heavy manufacturing companies and utilities can finally take advantage of the Internet of Things and begin to automate more of their core processes using robots. It also signals a massive emerging market for all of the components, devices, and consulting services that will soon be required.
Data regulation is coming, and it won’t be pretty
From ongoing privacy and security debacles at Facebook to how much influence Google and Amazon wield in our everyday lives, big tech will face a reckoning, one that will likely affect every single company mining, refining and storing our digital data. In the U.S., a newly Democratic House, joined by key senate members, will consider some important questions: Who should be the ultimate gate-keepers of our digital data? What role should automated decision-making play in our everyday lives? How can a publicly traded company serve both its shareholders and the broader interests of democratic society?
Policy-makers are not prepared to deal with new challenges that arise from emerging science and technology, and the relationship between our big tech titans and governments continues to be transactional at best. As a result, we are likely to see proposed regulations, rules, and legislation that are either too restrictive or don’t acknowledge that science and tech are in constant motion. It’s unlikely that sweeping new rules, like the E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation, would pass in the U.S. Even so, going through the process will prove a serious distraction for big tech companies.
The best strategic positioning for 2019 is simple: think exponentially but act incrementally. You’re going to need to get comfortable with uncertainty. Broaden your thinking, look for intersecting vectors of change and figure out ways to make incremental decisions as often as possible.
Amy Webb is a professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business and author of The Big Nine: How Today’s Tech Titans and their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity.
(Fonte: https://www.barrons.com/articles/technology-trends-2019-
51546007213. Acesso em 28/02/2019)
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