As we stand on the brink of a technological revolution, the future of computing unfolds with exciting possibilities. Let's delve into the emerging trends, innovations, and potential challenges that could redefine the landscape of computing in the years to come.
The computing industry progresses in two mostly independent cycles:
Financial and Product cycles
- Tech product cycles are mutually reinforcing interactions between platforms and applications
- New platforms enable new applications, which in turn make the new platforms more valuable, creating a positive feedback loop
- Smaller, offshoot tech cycles happen all the time, but every once in a while a major new cycles begin that completely reshape the computing landscape
2016 is an exciting year for VR
The launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC/Valve Vive means that comfortable and immersive VR systems will finally be publicly available
- Proper VR requires special screens, powerful graphics cards, and the ability to track the precise position of the user
- Major areas of research will include new tools for creating rendered and/or filmed VR content, machine vision for tracking and scanning directly from phones and headsets, and distributed back-end systems for hosting large virtual environments
Each product era can be divided into two phases:
The Gestation: when the new platform is first introduced but is expensive, incomplete, or difficult to use
- Growth: when a new product comes along that solves those problems, kicking off a period of exponential growth
- We are now entering an era in which processors and sensors are getting so small and cheap that there will be many more computers than there are people
Echo is a great demo of how effective always-on voice can be as a user interface
It will be a while before we have bots with generalized intelligence that can carry on full conversations
Recent breakthroughs in software include distributed systems, deep learning, and quantum computing.
Distributed Systems
- As the number of devices has grown exponentially, it has become increasingly important to parallelize tasks across multiple machines
- Communicate and coordinate among devices
- Software tools like Theano and TensorFlow allow small teams of engineers to build state-of-the-art AI systems
- The “WhatsApp effect” is now happening in AI
Wearables
Wearables are constrained along multiple dimensions including battery, communications, and processing
We are on the cusp of not one but multiple new eras
The “peace dividend of the smartphone war” created a Cambrian explosion of new devices, and developments in software, especially AI, will make those devices smart and useful
- Many of the futuristic technologies discussed above exist today and will be broadly accessible in the near future
- Observers have noted that many of these new devices are in their “awkward adolescence” because they are still in their gestation phase
There are a variety of new computing platforms currently in the gestation phase that will soon get much better
as they incorporate recent advances in hardware and software.
- Although they are designed and packaged very differently, they share a common theme: they give us new and augmented abilities by embedding a smart virtualization layer on top of the real world.
Autonomous Cars
Big tech companies like Google, Apple, Uber, and Tesla are investing significant resources in autonomous cars
- Drones
- In the near future, we’ll see drones that incorporate advanced computer vision and other AI to make them safer, easier, and more useful
- Internet of Things
- The obvious use cases for IoT devices are energy savings, security, and convenience
