Panel
The Next Big Things in Technology: A Preview
- Industry value is projected to reach $11 trillion through scaled vertical purpose-built technology, driven by connecting things to generate immense data and democratizing future technologies.
- The Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, and the convergence of AI, machine learning, and quantum computing are expected to be discussed at length, with VR becoming faster and cheaper while applications for training and treatment continue to grow.
- High-speed satellite communications are predicted to reach 27 gigabit per second upstream, with eight additional satellites launching this year and $100 million in contracts secured over the next five years to enable global connectivity at low cost.
- Satellite-controlled drones are anticipated to fly nonstop from San Francisco to New York pending battery improvements, while autonomous driving is expected to reduce accident rates dramatically, potentially disrupting insurance models and forcing body shops into different business models.
- The utilization rate of autonomous cars is forecast to rise from 10% to 30%, potentially reducing the total number of vehicles manufactured to under 100 million while allowing idle capacity (22 hours/day) to support new service economies.
- Moore's Law is described as tipping over, with quantum computing evolving as a smaller, alternative technology capable of solving optimization and sampling problems; benchmarks suggest speeds up to 100 million times faster than traditional machines, with qubit counts doubling every one to two years.
- Real-world production deployment of quantum technology is estimated to take another decade, though specific applications like teaching concepts to autistic children or predicting capital markets with near 100% accuracy are claimed to be available or imminent.
- Healthcare data collection via instrumenting people is expected to increase from 10–12 daily samples to millions, enabling personalized care, while the combination of AI, quantum computing, and CRISPR is predicted to bring cancer to an end within the next 10 years.
- Enterprise IT applications will likely be completely rewritten and moved to the cloud for all but the largest corporations, and banking is predicted to change dramatically in the next five years as devices gain innate payment capabilities.
- Blockchain is expected to address security concerns by aggregating resources to compute the present state, particularly as backward-looking encryption faces threats from universal quantum computers within approximately 10 years.
- A significant gap between the technology elite and the rest of the world may become "huge" without conscious efforts to bridge it, posing risks of unemployment and resource inaccessibility that could create "bigger problems."
- Traditional encryption that could be broken instantaneously by a universal quantum computer does not exist yet, and it is expected to take "quite a while" before this vulnerability is realized.