Anyone who knows me is aware of my enthusiasm for technology. I’m a strong believer that an appropriate technology is the solution for almost all of our limitations as a civilization. Even more importantly than expanded possibilities, technology is enabling win-win situations far easier than ever, in human history. To my mind, this ability to create solutions that have no downsides is the true gamechanger. A mindset of scarcity and competition has been responsible for a lot of our historical ills. Building on several generations of technology, humanity has arrived at a point where we can finally begin to apply solutions that benefit everyone universally, while also helping create a sustainable and more efficient world.
This is a truly exciting time to be alive. The kind of changes we are witnessing in our world today, in both scale and sheer speed, are completely unprecedented. The famous science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke once famously said that a sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. While every one of the innovations I’m discussing here today has elements of what a previous generation would find hard to believe, making elements in our environment able to interact with us on command is truly the stuff of wizardry!
Of course, what technology can accomplish today consists of an even more impressive and wider set of breakthroughs than that very short and inadequate list. Here’s a list of some technology trends that I find intriguing:
- Blockchain: Even though we have all heard of Blockchain technology by now, especially because of crypto-currencies, the possibilities it empowers are still evolving far more rapidly than any one imagination can speculate about. I find this technology particularly intriguing because traditionally we have had to rely on authority structures to make contracts and other group interactions credible. Being able to achieve the ultimate in secure and dependable records within a group of peers, without the need for a mediating authority is an incredible leap in secure transactions.
- Driverless Cars: Not a single major city in the world today is free of traffic congestion. This is only natural, given the fact that we can build tall and provide living and working spaces for many people on a small footprint, but we don’t have enough room on our roads to accommodate the number of vehicles that many people need. Driverless cars can not only operate at much higher speeds because of being networked, they can be a shared rather than an owned resource. Driverless cars will make it possible to have a large fleet of one or two seaters that reduces the physical space each vehicle needs, while also centralizing parking facilities.
- Augmented and Virtual Reality: As an entrepreneur in the business of creating built spaces, this is one technology that is extremely exciting to me. From the design to the sales stage, the advantages are obvious! Full sensory virtual experiences of an environment and objects and even people across distances is revolutionary!
- Internet of Things: IoT is basically far more than merely an array of smart devices around us. It will make our surroundings so alive with technology that we will virtually have re-invented our world. The commercial advantages are obvious, manufacturing will never be the same again. Having complete control of the amenities in homes and working spaces will completely redefine our lives as well. What really intrigues me is how living in spaces so responsive to us will change us as a species, spawning more innovations and creative pursuits
- Telesurgery and Remote Education: Almost nothing affects our quality of life as dramatically as the education and medical care we have access to. It’s often the case that physical infrastructure limits the availability of the highest quality of these services to everyone. Imagine a world in which no child is limited in their education and no patient limited in the care they receive. Technology is making borderless education and borderless healthcare a reality.
- Solar energy and waste to energy: It’s often said that the radiant solar energy that the world receives in just a few minutes is enough to power humanity for an entire year. However, the weak link has been the ability to store this energy at a grid scale. Flywheels, Compressed Air, Molten Salt, Pumped Hydro, Supercapacitors, Metal-Air Batteries and many dozens more technologies are rapidly approaching commercial maturity stages. I honestly believe this will be one of the most important breakthroughs in human history. At the same time, several waste to energy technologies are emerging that promise the closing of the loop on our ever growing patterns of consumption. Being able to use products for convenience but not pollute through their disposal is an important breakthrough. Being able to do this while reclaiming a part of the energy that was used to manufacture the product is an even more empowering advance!
- AI, Machine learning: I believe that cognitive technologies like AI and Machine Learning will completely transform our world in the next decade. While AI can help businesses increase sales, detect fraud, improve customer experience, automate work processes, as well as disrupt industries like health care, automotive, financial services and logistics with its potential, I am looking forward to AI’s potential to enable social good, solve global problems and meaningfully improve people’s lives
Conclusion
With almost every limitation that humans have struggled against for millennia in the process of being overcome by today’s tech innovations, I feel that our greatest challenge might well be how to retain our humanity and not act selfishly when such power becomes available to us.
