Trends: The Top 7 Technology Trends for 2018

   One thing that we can state is that we are on our way to enter the 4th Industrial           Revolution. Many of the technologies that have been promised for decades are           constantly improving and are now reaching a point of maturity. Once that happens,     it will radically change our societies, how we work and how we live. However, we     are not there yet.

1. Artificial Intelligence Will Take a Leap Forward, without Human Data

2017 was the year that AlphaGo Zero taught itself the game of Go and within 40 days became better than any human or artificial player ever existed. It did so without any human data as input and purely played against itself. As a result, it taught itself strategies and moves no human has ever thought of and arguably progressed the evolution of the game of Go exponentially in a very short timeframe. This achievement marks a significant milestone in the development of artificial intelligence.

In 2018, this will only continue and we will see more examples of artificial intelligence that will behave in unexpected ways, as it already did so this year. In 2017, for example, AI developers from Google built algorithms that had to compete for scarce resources, resulting in increasingly advanced strategies to beat the component. Google Brain developed algorithms that created new encryption methods, unlike any seen before, to protect information from other neural networks. Finally, Facebook had to shut down two algorithms that created its own secret language, unsolicited and used advanced strategies to get what it wanted. If one thing becomes clear from these developments, it is that artificial intelligence will be fundamentally different to human intelligence

2. Blockchain Will Mature and the ICO Hype Will Slow Down due to Regulation

Last year, I predicted that 2017 would see smart contracts taking off. And so they did, although not in the area that I originally expected. Last year, smart contracts were predominantly used for Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). The hype around ICOs has amazed many and as of the end of November, 228 ICOs raised a total of $3.6 billion. Apart from many successes, there were also many scams and people who tried to game the system and rob people of their money.

2018 will see more applications being developed and launched, of which many of these by the companies that did do an ICO in 2017. It will move Blockchain towards maturity. Earlier, I discussed seven cryptocurrencies that are worth following and forecasted the end of Bitcoin, as it is technically flawed (despite the ridiculous price increase in the past weeks, which reminds me of tulip mania in the 17th century). All in all, 2018 will be a very interesting year in terms of Blockchain.

3. Our Privacy Continues to Be Threatened, but a Solution is Coming

All those new technologies, platforms and services gobble up massive amounts of data and more often than not, this data is not very well protected. For the past years, we have seen thousands of data breaches, with, in 2017, the data breach of Equifax as a new low point. Unfortunately, 2018 will not be any different. The more devices we will connect to the internet, the more data we create, the more security breaches we will see. IoT devices are remarkably insecure, thereby continuing to threaten our privacy. Consumers are aware of this as 90% of consumers lack the confidence that their IoT devices are secure.

As long as organisations that develop internet connected devices do not take security seriously, and develop products such as cardiac devices that can be hacked or CCTV cameras with serious bugs, this trend will only get worse. However, not only IoT devices are prone to hacks, but also large organisations such as Uber or Verizon were hacked in 2017.

4. A New Approach to Data Ownership is on the Horizon

Fortunately, there is more good news with another new technology slowly making its entry. Thanks to distributed ledger technology, we will see a new approach to data ownership, giving control back to the original creator of content or data, instead of the platform where it was created. Not only will this empower consumers to take back control and monetise their data, but it will also enable organisations to share proprietary data with competitors and industry partners without being afraid of theft or loss of a competitive advantage.

5. Edge Computing Enables Intelligent Networks

Therefore, in 2018, we will see increased attention to edge computing to enable intelligent networks, where connected devices will perform the required analytics at location and use the results to perform a certain action. It will happen in a few milliseconds, instead of the few hundred milliseconds it takes today when using cloud computing. With self-driving cars that difference can be the difference between a crash or a safe ride home. The world’s cloud computing giants are not ignorant about the opportunities of edge computing. Microsoft has developed Azure IoT Edge and Amazon recently developed AWS Greengrass. In addition, startups such as Packet and Vapor IO are also bringing cloud computing to the edges. In 2018, edge computing will find its way to connected devices, before truly taking off in 2019.

6. A Quantum Computing Arms Race Will Lead to First Results

In this year’s hype cycle for emerging technologies, Gartner estimated that quantum computing is still more than ten years away. However, the developments in quantum computing are going a lot faster than expected. The race for the holy grail of computing is on and companies such as Google, D-Wave or IBM, universities such as Yale or UNSW or startups such as Rigetti Computingare all working on developing quantum computers. Each of these organisations has reported breakthroughs in 2017, with the latest being IBM who announced the first 50-qubit quantum processor in November 2017. 

Their objective is to have a quantum computer by 2020 that has the computational power of a million times all computers in the world combined.

7. Prescriptive Analytics Will Start to Deliver on its Promises

Finally, the rise of prescriptive analytics. The past few years, we saw the adoption of predictive analytics by many organisations and big data has become a prerequisite for organisations to remain competitive. The biggest corporates and also medium-sized enterprises started implementing predictive analytics solutions to improve their processes, customer experience and bottom-line. Although predictive analytics is a great technology, it is not sufficient in the data-driven world we live in. For that, we need prescriptive analytics. 

2018: The Year of Transition

The coming year will be a very exciting year. We truly live in exponential times and slowly we are climbing out of the curve of the hockey stick, meaning that technologies will start to improve exponentially. Artificial Intelligence will become smarter, this time thanks to the lack of human data. We will see the Blockchain market mature and ICOs will become increasingly regulated. Also in 2018, our privacy will be breached, but help is underway in the form of Zero Knowledge Proof. In addition, slowly consumers will get back ownership of the data they create and new marketplaces will enable sharing of proprietary data with competitors. Slowly, cloud computing will make way for edge computing and the arms race of quantum computing will result in quantum supremacy, years before initially anticipated. Finally, organisations will discover the possibilities of prescriptive analytics and thereby significantly improve their bottom line. All in all, it will be a very exciting year as we slowly move into the 4th Industrial Revolution.