7 Technology Trends Poised for 1,000-fold Growth

Two weeks ago, at a user group conference for one of our technology partners, I had the opportunity to see a presentation titled, “The Big AHA, How to Embrace Today’s Trends to Create Tomorrow’s Opportunities.”  The presenter was Jack Uldrich who describes himself as, “a leading futurist, author, and speaker who helps organizations gain the critical foresight they need to create a successful future.” There was a ton of valuable information in the presentation, but for me the takeaway was if your new idea seems doable you probably aren’t thinking hard enough. Here is a link to Jack Uldrich’s website http://jackuldrich.com/.

“Today is the slowest rate of change you will ever experience.” His point is that tomorrow change will happen a little bit faster, the next day a little bit faster, and so on. The Big AHA stands for Awareness, Humility and Action. Mr. Uldrich referenced the first automobile was made in 1900 and 13 years later the move to automation was nearly complete. He says we are about to live through a similar transition where standard processes and tasks will be executed by systems that are data driven, cognitive, and automated. He also touched on the move to the cloud. The floppy disk could store 1M bytes, a jump drive could store a billion, a hard drive a trillion, and cloud computing quadrillions. Companies like Facebook, YouTube, AirBNB, Twitter, and Uber couldn’t exist without the cloud. It would be impossible for me to write about everything that was covered during the presentation, so I am going to focus on a few trends that are poised to see 1,000-fold growth.

Trend 1 – Wireless/Bandwidth/Mobility.  When 4G came out it was 1,400 times faster than its predecessor. 5G will be 100X times faster than 4G. Movies will take seconds to download instead of minutes. In terms of mobility Mr. Uldrich cited Lemonade a mobile app allowing you to get insurance any time anywhere receiving $120M in funding in December of 2017. (Learn more about 5G in our blog here)

Trend 2 – Virtual Reality. Combined with 5G, virtual reality will let you perform tasks never thought possible in the past like surgery with a robotic arm.

Trend 3 – 3D Printing.  In 2017 Adidas produced 5,000 shoes using 3D printers, in 2018 it was 100,000, and in 2019 500,000. It allows them to reduce inventory risk. Another example is the ability to produce personalized health supplements for individuals. At Wake Forest they used 3D printing to produce fully functional kidneys.

Trend 4 – Self-Driving Vehicles. Uber now has self-driving semis in Arizona. In 2018, a self-driving truck drove from California to Florida. Right now, there is a shortage of truck drivers, but self-driving trucks will change that.

Trend 5 – IoT (Internet of Things). IoT is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals, or people provided with unique identifiers to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. A company in Wisconsin recently had employees voluntarily implant chips into their hands. IoT will allow companies to engage people in new and unique ways.

Trend 6 – Artificial Intelligence (AI). I’ve written a fair amount about AI in the past. It has been described as, “the most disruptive technology since the industrial revolution” or, “the new electricity.” IBM Watson performs 80,000 calculations per second. Google has a new AI that can predict if a person has heart disease simply by looking in their eyes. Critical to AI is big data and that will also be a growth area as devices like Alexa capture information about us.

Trend 7 – The Genomics Revolution. 23andMe was originally designed to tell you about your ancestry, but it can also tell you about your health.  What health risks you have a predisposition to, what drugs will work for you, how fast you will metabolize those drugs.

As you can see the world around is changing fast. Mr. Uldrich concluded his presentation by encouraging the audience to keep an open mind and active imagination and stating, “the best way to predict the future is to create it.”