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Churchill Club Leading ten Tech Trends Debate

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I just got back from the Churchill Club’s 13th Annual Leading ten Tech Trends Debate (web site).

Curt Carlson, CEO of SRI, presented their trends from the podium, which are meant to be “provocative, plausible, debatable, and that it will be clear inside the next 1-three years whether or not they will in fact turn out to be trends.”

Then the panelists debated them. Speaking is Aneesh Chopra, CTO of the U.S., and smirking to his left is Paul Saffo, and then Ajay Senkut from Clarium, then me.

Here are SRI’s 2011 Prime 10 Tech Trends [and my votes]:

Trend 1. Age Prior to Beauty. Technology is made for—and disproportionately used by—the young. But the young are receiving fewer. The big market place will be older individuals. The aging generation has grown up with, and is comfortable with, most technology—but not with today’s latest technology products. Technology product designers will uncover the Baby Boomer’s technology comfort zone and will leverage it in the design of new devices. 1 instance these days is the Jitterbug cell phone with a big keypad for easy dialing and strong speakers for clear sound. The trend is for Infant Boomers to dictate the technologies merchandise of the future.

[I voted YES, it’s an essential and underserved industry, but for tech products, they are not the early adopters. The key situation is age-inspired entrepreneurship. How can we get the entrepreneurial thoughts focused on this critical industry?]

Trend 2. The Medical doctor Is In. Some of our political leaders say that we have &quotthe best medical care system in the planet&quot. Think what it have to be like in the rest of the globe! There are a lot of troubles, but one is the high cost of delivering professional guidance. With the development of practical virtual individual assistants, powered by artificial intelligence and pervasive low-expense sensors, “the medical doctor will be in”—online—for people about the planet. Rather of the current Internet paradigm: “fill out this form, and we’ll show you information about what may possibly be ailing you”, this will be true diagnosis—supporting, and in some circumstances replacing—human medical practitioners. We had been sending X-rays to India to be study now India is connecting to doctors here for diagnosis in India. We see the concept in websites that now supply on the internet videoconference interaction with a doctor. The next step is automation. The trend is toward complete automation: a combination of artificial intelligence, the Internet, and very low-cost medical instrumentation to supply higher-good quality diagnostics and advice—including answering patient questions—online to a worldwide audience.

[NO. Most physician check-ups and diagnoses will nonetheless require to be conducted in-person (blood tests, physical exams, and so on). Sensor technology can’t entirely replace human healthcare practitioners in the near future. As soon as we have the physical interface (individuals for now), then the networking and AI capabilities can engage, bringing specialist reactions to locally collected information. The actual close to-term trend in point-of-care is the adoption of iPads/phones connected to cloud services like ePocrates and Athenahealth and quickly EMRs.]

Trend 3. Made for Me. Manufacturing is undergoing a revolution. It is becoming technically and economically achievable to develop goods that are exclusive to the particular demands of individuals. For example, a cell telephone that has only the hardware you want to assistance the functions you want—making it lighter, thinner, more efficient, significantly more affordable, and easier to use. This level of customization is becoming created attainable by converging technical advances: new 3D printing technology is effectively documented, and networked micro-robotics is following. 3D printing now consists of applications in jewelry, industrial design, and dentistry. While all of us may possibly not be good solution designers, we have various demands, and we know what we want. The trend is toward sensible, one particular-off production of physical goods in widely distributed micro-factories: the ultimate customization of products. The trend is toward practical, one-off production of physical goods in widely distributed micro-factories: the ultimate customization of products.

[NO. Personalization is happening just fine at the application level. The UI skins and app code is changeable at zero incremental expense. Code permeates outward into the different vessels we create for it. The iPhone. Soon, the auto (e.g. Tesla Sedan). Even the electrical circuits (when utilizing an FPGA). This will extend naturally to biological code, with DNA synthesis costs plummeting (but that will probably stay centralized in BioFabs for the next 3 years. When it comes to building custom physical items, the cost and design and style challenges relegate it to prototyping, tinkering and hacks. Too numerous people have a hard time in 3D content creation. The difficulty is the 2D interfaces of mouse and screen. Possibly a multitouch interface to digital clay could support, exactly where the polygons snap to match soon after the form is molded by hand.]

Trend 4. Pay Me Now. Data about our personal behavior and characteristics is exploited often for commercial purposes, typically returning little or no worth to us, and sometimes with no our knowledge. This expertise is becoming a essential asset and a significant competitive benefit for the organizations that gather it. Believe of your supermarket club card. These knowledge-gatherers will want to get smarter and much more aggressive in convincing us to share our information with them and not with their competitors. If Tv advertisers could know who the viewers are, the worth of the commercials would go up enormously. The trend is technologies and company models primarily based on attracting customers to share big amounts of information exclusively with service providers.

[YES, but it’s nothing new. Amazon makes much more on merchandising than item sales margin. And, specific companies are getting far better and much better at acquiring client information and personalizing offerings especially to these buyers. RichRelevance gives this for ecommerce (driving 25% of all e-commerce on Black Friday). Across all those vendors, the typical lift from personalizing the purchasing encounter: 15% enhance in all round sales and 8% enhance in long-term profitability. But, simply becoming explicit and transparent to the consumer about the supply of the data can improve the effectiveness of targeted applications by up to 100% (e.g., saying “Because you purchased this item and other customers who bought it also purchased this other product&quot yielded a 100% boost in item recommendation effectiveness in many A/B tests). Social graph is incredibly useful as a marketing and advertising tool.]

Trend five. Rosie, At Final. We’ve been waiting a long time for robots to live in and run our residences, like Rosie in the Jetsons’ household. It is happening a little now: robots are lastly beginning to leave the manufacturing floor and enter people’s properties, offices, and highways. Robots can climb walls, fly, and run. We all know the Roomba for cleaning floors—and now there’s the Verro for your pool. True-time vision and other sensors, and affordable precise manipulation, are enabling robots to help in our care, drive our automobiles, and defend our homes and house. We want to broaden our view of robots and the forms they will take—think of a self-loading robot-compliant dishwasher or a self-defending house. The trend is robots becoming embedded in our environments, and taking advantage of the cloud, to comprehend and fulfill our requirements.

[NO. Not in 3 years. Wanting it badly does not make it so. But I just really like that Google RoboCar. Robots are not leaving the factory floor – that’s where the opportunity for newer robots and even humanoid robots will start. There is lots of factory operate nevertheless to be automated. Rodney Brooks of MIT thinks they can be less expensive than the cheapest outsourced labor. So the robots are coming, to the factory and the roads to start, and then the property.]

Trend six. Social, Actually. The rise of social networks is nicely documented, but they’re not truly social networks. They’re a mix of friends, strangers, organizations, hucksters—it’s a lot more like walking through a rowdy crowd in Occasions Square at evening with a group of close friends. There is a growing want for social networks that reflect the basic nature of human relationships: identified identities, mutual trust, controlled levels of intimacy, and boundaries of shared information. The trend is the rise of accurate social networks, made to keep actual, respectful relationships online.

[YES. The ambient intimacy of Facebook is leading to some startling statistics on fB evidence reuse by divorce lawyers (80%) and employment rejections (70%). There are differing approaches to resolve this issue: Altly’s option networks with partioning and handle, Jildy’s better filtering and auto-segmentation, and Path’s 50 pal limit.]

Trend 7. In-Your-Face Augmented Reality. With ever-less expensive computation and advances in pc vision technology, augmented reality is becoming sensible, even in mobile devices. We will move beyond expensive telepresence environments and virtual reality games to totally immersive environments—in the workplace, on the factory floor, in healthcare care facilities, and in new entertainment venues. I after did an experiment where a individual came into a space and sat down at a desk against a huge, 3D, higher-definition Tv show. The projected image showed a area with a comparable desk up against the screen. The particular person would place on 3D glasses, and then a projected individual would enter and sit down at the other table. Following talking for five to 10 minutes, the projected person would stand up and place their hand out. Most of the time, the 1st individual would also stand up and place their hand into the screen—they had swiftly adapted and forgotten that the other person was not in the room. Augmented reality will turn out to be indistinguishable from reality. The trend is an enchanted world— The trend is hyper-resolution augmented reality and hyper-accurate artificial individuals and objects that fundamentally improve people’s expertise of the planet.

[NO, lenticular screens are also expensive and 3D glasses are a pain in the cortex. Augmented reality with iPhones is excellent, and pragmatic, but not a best 10 trend IMHO]

Trend eight. Engineering by Biologists.
Biologists and engineers are diverse types of people—unless they are operating on synthetic biology. We know about genetically engineered foods and creatures, such as gold fish in numerous other colors. Subsequent we’ll have biologically engineered circuits and devices. Evolution has created adaptive processing and system resiliency that is much more sophisticated than anything we’ve been capable to design and style. We are learning how to tap into that all-natural expertise, designing devices utilizing the mechanisms of biology. We have already observed basic biological circuits in the laboratory. The trend is practical, engineered artifacts, devices, and computer systems primarily based on biology rather than just on silicon.

[YES, and NO because it was so badly mangled as a trend. For the next couple of years, these approaches will be used for fuels and chemical substances and components processing since they lend themselves to a 3D fluid medium. Then 2D self-assembling monolayers. And eventually chips , starting with memory and sensor arrays lengthy before heterogeneous logic. And processes of biology will be an inspiration throughout (evolution, self-assembly, etc.). Obtaining created predictions along these themes for about a decade now, the wording of this one frustrated me]

Trend 9. ‘Tis a Present to be Basic. Cyber attacks are ever far more frequent and successful. Most attacks exploit holes that are inevitable provided the complexity of the software program items we use every single day. Cyber researchers actually comprehend this. To stay away from these vulnerabilities, some cyber researchers are beginning to use only basic infrastructure and applications that are throwbacks to the computing globe of two decades ago. As simplicity is shown to be an efficient approach for avoiding attack, it will turn out to be the guiding principle of computer software design. The trend is cyber defense by means of widespread adoption of simple, low-feature software program for shoppers and businesses.

[No. I recognize the advantages of getting open, and of heterogencity of code (to keep away from monoculture collapse), but we have long ago left the domain of straightforward. Yes, Net transport protocols won through simplicity. The presentation layer, not so considerably. If you want dumb pipes, you require sensible edges, and sensible edges can be hacked. Graham Spencer gave a fantastic talk at SFI: the trend towards transport simplicity (e.g. dumb pipes) and &quotintelligence in the edges&quot led to mixing code and information, which in turn led to all kinds of XSS-like attacks. Drive-by downloading (enabled by XSS) is the most well-liked vehicle for delivering malware these days.]

Trend ten. Reverse Innovation. Mobile communication is proliferating at an astonishing price in developing countries as value-points drop and wireless infrastructure improves. As developing countries leapfrog the need to have for physical infrastructure and brokers, employing mobile apps to conduct micro-scale company and to boost high quality of life, they are innovating new applications. The creating globe is speedily becoming the biggest market we’ve ever seen—for mobile computing and a lot a lot more. The trend is for building countries to turn about the flow of innovation: Silicon Valley will commence to discover a lot more from them about revolutionary applications than they want to understand from us about the underlying technology.

[YES, globalization is a megatrend still in the creating. The mobile markets are clearly China, India and Korea, with app layer innovation increasingly originating there. Not totally of course, but we have a lot to find out from the early-adopter economies.]