2010 Trends – A Roadmap for the Future

2010 Trends – A Roadmap for the Future: The trends map has 16 lines representing everything from society & culture to news & media. There are also 5 time zones representing 2010-2050, so everything that falls outside the central zone (zone 1) is obviously a prediction.  The key mega trends on the map are: Ageing; Power shift Eastwards; Globalisation; Localisation; Digitalisation; Personalisation; Volatility; Individualism; Environmental change; Sustainability; Debt; and Urbanisation. Some of the predictions include:  All televised sport becomes short-format; Epidemic of new disorders caused by uncensored use of digital devices; Turkey, Iran and Mexico become key powers; Online communities gather offline to start physical communities; The robot population surpasses the human population; Brain holidays; Communications free resorts; People attending online funerals; and The appearance of laboratory grown meat in supermarkets. https://goo.gl/tZsUsT

See the roadmap at 2010 Trends - Roadmap

http://toptrends.nowandnext.com/2009/12/30/2010-trends-a-roadmap-for-the-future/

10 innovative patents that could give us a look into the future of augmented reality

1. Augmented reality display integrated with self-contained breathing apparatus, 2006
2. Augmented reality data center visualization, 2012
3. Augmented reality language translation system and method, 2011
4. Novel Augmented reality kiosks, 2014
5. Augmented reality worksite, 2014
6. Touch screen augmented reality system and method, 2009
7. Augmented reality building operations tool, 2011
8. Augmented reality maps, 2011
9. Augmented reality panorama supporting visually impaired individuals, 2013
10. Augmented reality enhanced triage systems and methods for emergency medical services, 2013

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Meet the soft, cuddly robots of the future

Rigid robots step aside — a new generation of squishy, stretchy machines is wiggling our way.

 n 2007, Cecilia Laschi asked her father to catch a live octopus for her seaside lab in Livorno, Italy. He thought she was crazy: as a recreational fisherman, he considered the octopus so easy to catch that it must be a very stupid animal. And what did a robotics researcher who worked with metal and microprocessors want with a squishy cephalopod anyway?

Nevertheless, the elder Laschi caught an octopus off the Tuscan coast and gave it to his daughter, who works for the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. She and her students placed the creature in a saltwater tank where they could study how it grasped titbits of anchovy and crab. The team then set about building robots that could mimic those motions.

Prototype by prototype, they created an artificial tentacle with internal springs and wires that mirrored an octopus's muscles, until the device could undulate, elongate, shrink, stiffen and curl in a lifelike manner¹. “It's a completely different way of building robots,” says Laschi.

This approach has become a major research front for robotics in the past ten years. Scientists and engineers in the field have long worked on hard-bodied robots, often inspired by humans and other animals with hard skeletons. These machines have the virtue of moving in mathematically predictable ways, with rigid limbs that can bend and straighten only around fixed joints. But they also require meticulous programming and extensive feedback to avoid smacking into things; even then, their motions often become erratic or even dangerous when dealing with humans, new objects, bumpy terrain or other unpredictable situations.

Robots inspired by flexible creatures such as octopuses, caterpillars or fish offer a solution. Instead of requiring intensive (and often imperfect) computations, soft robots built of mostly pliable or elastic materials can just mould themselves to their surroundings. Although some of these machines use wires or springs to mimic muscles and tendons, as a group, soft robots have ditched the skeletons that defined previous robot generations. With nothing resembling bones or joints, these machines can stretch, twist, scrunch and squish in completely new ways. They can transform in shape or size, wrap around objects and even touch people more safely than ever before.

Building these machines involves developing new technologies to animate floppy materials with purposeful movement, and methods for monitoring and predicting their actions. But if this succeeds, such robots might be used as rescue workers that can squeeze into tight spaces or slink across shifting debris; as home health aides that can interact closely with humans; and as industrial machines that can grasp new objects without previous programming.

Researchers have already produced a wide variety of such machines, including crawling robotic caterpillars², swimming fish-bots³ and undulating artificial jellyfish⁴. On 29–30 April, ten teams will compete in Livorno in an international soft-robotics challenge — the first of its kind. Laschi, who serves as scientific coordinator for the European Commission-backed sponsoring research consortium, RoboSoft, hopes that the event will drive innovation in the field.

“If you look in biology, and you ask what Darwinian evolution has coughed up, there are all kinds of incredible solutions to movement, sensing, gripping, feeding, hunting, swimming, walking and gliding that have not been open to hard robots,” says chemist George Whitesides, a soft-robotics researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The idea of building fundamentally new classes of machines is just very interesting.”

Read the Nature News Feature

The crazy world of connectivity expected in 2016

Wi-Fi has been the buzz word for 2015, an expected ask from every public space in our country; a hotel without Wi-Fi is unthinkable; our travel/everyday destinations are decided basis two questions - mobile connectivity and Wi-Fi. Trust me, the need for Wi-Fi is on its way to becoming synonymous with air and water - available and is taking!

Wi-Fi technology has taken the telecom landscape by storm, reshaping and impacting strategies for many Telco's including Tata Teleservices. Moreover, Government of India's Digital India initiative, launched earlier this year, to ensure that Government services are made available to citizens electronically by improving online infrastructure and by increasing Internet connectivity is expected to take flight in next few years. So how will these developments and the accelerated roll out of Wi-Fi in all forms, both on the device and network side, impact our lives in 2016 and beyond?

There are some very interesting trends and innovations lined up next year. Here is a look:-

Fortifying the Transit
Smart up your homes
Time shifted Video content - (TV on Demand) here we come
Next-generation Wi-Fi Calling
Rise of LBS
Innovative and socially impacting uses of Wi-Fi technology
Wi-Fi offloading becomes an imperative

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10 terrifying uses of artificial intelligence

Many advances in artificial intelligence are innovative and extraordinary, but some are downright creepy. Here are 10 of the eeriest ways people are using, or could use, AI.

1. Robots predicting the future
2. Robot soldiers
3. Schizophrenic robot
4. Economic meltdown
5. Robots that deceive
6. Robot lovers
7. Survival robots
8. Police using AI algorithms to predict crimes
9. AI-based medical treatment
10. Autonomous drones and weapons

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Sustainable materials

Materials influence every aspect of the energy system; therefore, as well as developing new materials for energy generation, materials scientists should engage in public debate about the limitations of future innovations and the conservation of existing materials.

The term ‘sustainable development’ is used to reflect the concern that we should meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. However, the word ‘sustainable’ is difficult to define precisely and can indicate many different aspirations about economic well-being, social equity and environmental harm. This rightly reflects a broad human agenda, but the actions required to address these three targets are in some cases unrelated, and in others incompatible. A particular problem created by the conflation of economic and environmental intentions of sustainable development occurs when actions to reduce environmental harm are reported per unit of economic or physical output. If output grows faster than the reduction in harm per unit of output, the total environmental harm grows, and it is the absolute physical effects that will challenge future generations. In this context, this Comment article discusses the environmental concerns of sustainable materials and addresses two questions. First, can new materials be developed that support a more sustainable future? Second, what is the role of existing materials within a more sustainable future?

Read the comment from Nature Reviews - Materials

The World Wide Mind

In 15 years time, technology could enable a mind to search for, or “Google” for, the answer to any question, information about which, or the solution, is available in connected minds across the world.

Mind reading and thought control could be creepy topics. On the one hand, they conjure up images of black magic where adepts can look into a victim’s mind and then hurt him or otherwise control his behaviour without his knowledge, and on the other hand, we remember Pink Floyd and their defiant call to evade thought control in the classroom. Even Uri Geller’s celebrated demonstrations of bending spoons by thought, in the 1970s, was viewed very suspiciously by the scientific community. In fact this whole business of reading and controlling the mind is seen as being based on superstitions and beyond the reach of the science and technology that is taught in our schools.

But strangely enough, today, there is a bioinformatics company, Emotiv, that sells commercial mind reading equipment starting at $350 and the OpenBCI initiative (where BCI stands for Brain Computer Interface) manufactures equipment that allow students to build thought-controlled robots!

What kind of volte face in the technology community can turn a superstition into consumer product?

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Here are some bizarre futuristic technologies that we can expect by 2030

Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that in our lifetime, we will experience 20,000 years of progress, based on how fast technology advances and affects human life. Experts say that in the next 20 years alone, we will experience more changes than in all of human history.

Anti-Aging Treatments (Extension of Human Life)
Digital Contact Lens
Implanted Mobile Device
Exoskeletons
Pillows to Share Dreams
Artificial Intelligent Personal Assistants
Augmented Reality
3D-Printed Liver Transplants

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9 predictions for the future of programming

Some scientists say time moves forward at a constant rate. The clever ones argue that everything changes near the speed of light. But none of this explains the increasing rate of change in the world of tech. It keeps accelerating a bit more every time you look.

If you’re wondering where to place your next development bet, looking five years out can seem like mere guesswork. Anticipating tech’s future is nearly impossible, much less the skills and tools that will be relevant given the impact of innovations to come. But there are inklings that can be gleaned from the tea leaves of today’s tech landscape -- glimmers of the future of programming through the fog.Here we gather a list of projections for programming’s future based on today’s most intriguing evolutions in tech. Not all are guaranteed to come true; not all are even guaranteed to be new. Many are trends that started unfolding several years ago. And if you compare this list to our previous foray into prognostication, you might find a bit of backsliding. Despite this, these predictions offer a solid road map that will help us plan for the future as it unfolds before us, faster and faster.

Prediction No. 1: REST rules IoT -- at first
Prediction No. 2: Binary protocols rise again
Prediction No. 3: Video kills the HTML star
Prediction No. 4: Smartphones will do everything but phone calls
Prediction No. 5: Bigger, better databases will dominate
Prediction No. 6: JavaScript will dominate, but no one will write it
Prediction No. 7: PHP will battle back against Node.js
Prediction No. 8: Everyone will know how to program -- but few will write “real code”
Prediction No. 9: The pointy-haired bosses will be even more insufferable


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Digital Oilfields: Redefining Pipeline Operations

While oil and gas pipeline operators are investing heavily in new technologies for better control, inspection and maintenance of assets, an increasing number of devices are linked to the industrial internet, the global network connecting people, data and machines. These trends foreshadow the future for the pipeline industry.

Read the full findings and analysys

The race to 5G: Inside the fight for the future of mobile as we know it

The next generation of mobile technology, 5G, is beginning to take shape. Here's what it's trying to accomplish and how. And, why 5G could be the last standard we ever need.

Every ten years or so, something big happens in mobile. Once a decade, a new generation of mobile network technology comes along: the first mobile networks appeared in the 1980s, GSM followed in the 1990s, 3G arrived at the turn of the century, and LTE began rolling out in 2010.

Each generation has set out to fix the flaws of its predecessor: GSM fixed the security weaknesses of analogue telephony, 3G was meant to sort out GSM's lack of mobile data and, given it didn't much succeed, 4G was needed to finally make consuming data less of an unpleasant experience.

Now, 5G is emerging ahead of the turn of a new decade and the next big change to hit mobile. But what's the problem that 5G's meant to fix?

Here's the thing: no one's too sure about 5G, not really, not yet. The main gripes that people have with their mobile service today are coverage and price - neither of which are problems that need a new generation of mobile tech to solve. Throw a bit of cash into building out LTE and LTE-A and much of these headaches would go away, yet the industry is ploughing full steam ahead into 5G. Instead, the industry is hoping 5G will solve problems we don't have today, but those that could hold us back years in the future.

The process of building each new mobile standard begins years before it's put into use, and once up and running, those standards will remain in place in various forms for a decade or more. With 5G, we're having to build a standard that will still be in use in 2030 and beyond - and the mobile industry has a terrible track record when it comes to future-gazing.

Back at the start of 2000, with 3G just about to launch, who could have predicted how the mobile world would look in 2010? At the turn of this century, we all packed candy bar feature phones, now most of us have feature-packed smartphones.

Figuring out what uses 5G will be put to is the equivalent of trying to predict the rise of the iPhone five years before it launched. No one foresaw its arrival, or how the market would change in response to it, and how we'd end up where we are now. We're facing the same situation again: trying and imagine how the mobile world will look 10 years from now and design a standard to fit it.

If history is any guide, we're going to fail spectacularly again. That doesn't mean that the industry isn't going to try.

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8 things women should know about the future of work

The World Economic Forum’s Industry Gender Gap study seeks to understand the current gender gap across industries and the future impact of key disruptions on women’s employment. It does so by asking the talent and strategy executives of today’s largest employers to imagine how jobs in their industry will change up to the year 2020. If you are a woman who is planning to join, stay in or return to the workforce in the next 5 years, here’s what you need to know.

1. Most businesses want to recruit, retain and promote more women than they did before.
2. Industries that are traditionally male-dominated are even more likely than others to do so. 
3. The reasons why range from moral calling to profit motives. 
4. But gender gaps still persist in all industries.
5. The reasons are both cultural and structural. 
6. Women could be in the firing line of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
7. If you are a woman in college today, consider STEM or business courses. J
8. It’s time for companies and governments – not just working women - to lean in.

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The Future of Jobs

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, which includes developments in previously disjointed fields such as artificial intelligence and machine-learning, robotics, nanotechnology, 3-D printing, and genetics and biotechnology, will cause widespread disruption not only to business models but also to labour markets over the next five years, with enormous change predicted in the skill sets needed to thrive in the new landscape.

This is the finding of a new report, The Future of Jobs, published today by the World Economic Forum.

Executive Summaries

From AI To Robotics, 2016 Will Be The Year When The Machines Start Taking Over

For the past century, the price and performance of computing has been on an exponential curve. And, as futurist Ray Kurzweil observed, once any technology becomes an information technology, its development follows the same curve, so we are seeing exponential advances in technologies such as sensors, networks, artificial intelligence, and robotics. The convergence of these technologies is making amazing things possible.

2015 was the tipping point in the global adoption of the Internet, digital medical devices, blockchain, gene editing, drones, and solar energy. 2016 will be the beginning of an even bigger revolution, one that will change the way we live, let us visit new worlds, and lead us into a jobless future. Yes, with every good there is a bad; wonderful things will become possible, but with them we will also create new problems for mankind.

Here are six of the technologies that will make this happen, and the good they will do.

1. Artificial Intelligence
2. Robots
3. Self Driving Cars
4. Virtual reality and holodecks
5. Internet of Things
6. Space

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Six Transformations From 2015 That Will Reshape The World

Looking at the list of finalists for the Crunchies, you could get the impression that the greatest advances of 2015 were sharing and delivery apps, software platforms, and pencils. Yes, these are cool. But much bigger things happened last year.

A broad range of technologies reached a tipping point, from science projects or objects of convenience for the rich, to inventions that will transform humanity. We haven’t seen anything of this magnitude since the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. And this is just the beginning.

Starting in 2016, a wider range of technologies will begin to reach their tipping points.

Here are the six amazing transformations we just saw.

1. The Internet And Knowledge
2. Doctors In Our Pockets
3. Bitcoin And Disintermediation
4. Engineering Of Life
5. The Drone Age
6. Saving the planet with unlimited clean energy

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Are Big Book Publishers Going The Way Of Newspapers?

I think we all possess some kind of familiarity with the history of the newspaper industry over the past century or so. Newspapers and magazines used to rule the kingdom of delivering news, editorials, comics, and even short stories. It was a huge industry that offered the main employment for freelance writers and journalists. Then the internet came along. The internet is easier, faster and cheaper than paying someone to print and deliver a bunch of actual papers each day telling yesterday's news.

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The Robots Are Coming

How Technological Breakthroughs Will Transform Everyday Life

Robots have the potential to greatly improve the quality of our lives at home, at work, and at play. Customized robots working alongside people will create new jobs, improve the quality of existing jobs, and give people more time to focus on what they find interesting, important, and exciting. Commuting to work in driverless cars will allow people to read, reply to e-mails, watch videos, and even nap. After dropping off one passenger, a driverless car will pick up its next rider, coordinating with the other self-driving cars in a system designed to minimize traffic and wait times—and all the while driving more safely and efficiently than humans.

Yet the objective of robotics is not to replace humans by mechanizing and automating tasks; it is to find ways for machines to assist and collaborate with humans more effectively. Robots are better than humans at crunching numbers, lifting heavy objects, and, in certain contexts, moving with precision. Humans are better than robots at abstraction, generalization, and creative thinking, thanks to their ability to reason, draw from prior experience, and imagine. By working together, robots and humans can augment and complement each other’s skills.

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The next 25 years

If there’s one thing that can be said with certainty of the last 25 years of telecoms, it’s that few people in 1990 could have predicted what the telecoms landscape would look like 25 years later.

This became strikingly clear as we dug through back issues of Telecom Asia in preparation for this 25th Anniversary issue. The Asia telecoms landscape in 1990 was an era of analog circuits and (mostly) government monopolies. In most Asian markets there were at most two operators - one monopoly for domestic telephony and one for international. In many countries the waiting list for a telephone line was measured in years. POTS networks (as they were known - award yourself ten (10) points if you remember what that stands for) were only just starting to go digital with ISDN. For international connectivity, carriers were debating whether Sonet or SDH would (or should) replace PDH as a way to synchronize long-haul digital traffic. There was no Google. There was no internet (not commercially). There was no broadband. Mobile was rare, and mostly analog (commercial GSM wouldn’t be commercially live until 1991).

So imagine going back in time to 1990 and explaining a 4G smartphone to a telecoms executive in Asia (or anywhere else, really) - its computing power, its storage capability, data speeds, apps, the 20MP webcam, etc.

You get the idea.

So if Asia telecoms in 2015 is fantastically futuristic by 1990 standards, the Asia telecoms landscape of 2040 will appear almost as fantastically advanced to residents of 2015 - so much so that making any predictions of the how telecoms trends will play out beyond 2025 or so is probably pointless.

But it sure is fun.

While we may not know exactly what the 2040 telecoms market in Asia will be like, we can point to the key ingredients that will help shape it over the next quarter-century, from technologies, consumer trends and research projects already in play, to external trends and variables that have nothing to do with telecoms and/or technology. Here are the ones that are worth keeping in mind as the telecoms sector kicks off the next 25 years of innovation. 

 
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How cloud computing - and other new technology - could lead to the destruction of humanity

Back in 2000, technologist Bill Joy, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, penned a feature for Wired magazine that caused a storm. Although Joy could boast a CV packed with technology breakthroughs, "Why the future doesn't need us" saw him cast as a neo-Luddite.

In it, he postulated that far from ushering in an age of comfort and leisure, new and advanced technology posed a potential threat to humanity. He cited nanotechnology with "uncontrolled replicators", genetic engineering, and robotics, to name just three, that separately or collectively posed a mortal threat to humanity if mis-used or mis-applied.

If Joy were writing the same article today, he would no doubt add cloud computing to the list of threats: networks of servers controlled by a small group of companies - which will only get smaller with consolidation - that will increasingly communicate with each other so that organisations can run applications across disparate clouds.

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The future of search

Google gets down to doing what it knows best - developing new tech - to change your life

At a well-built six feet, Nikesh Arora commands a presence when he walks into a room. Much of it is also because he is the man tasked with bringing in revenues of more than $50 billion - that is more than Punjab's annual income - at Google, the Internet giant.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt thinks it is business as usual. "Google's aspiration," he says, "is to be your assistant, to know what you don't know and to get that information to you in whatever way it is quickest."

Read the Business Today Cover Story

Interview with Eric Schmidt -- Google, Executive Chairman

Interview with Nikesh Arora, Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer at Google