Emerging IT technology # 2: Computer-generated meta studies and peer reviews

Research teams in IBM, DARPA and other organisations are currently working on enabling computers to think much more like human do. This involves mainly emulation of the human neocortex, which forms most of our brain and explains almost everything that makes us think differently from animals – and from computers. When neocortex simulation eventually starts to work, we may for instance be able ask a computer a scientific question, and it will then be able to read all relevant scientific research on the Web and then write its own summary of the informed, global consensus - what is commonly known as a ”meta study”. It may perhaps read thousands of studies and assign weights to each of them based on where and when they were published as well as on how often other scientists have quoted them. And instead of spending years on such a task, as scientists typically would, a computer might be able to complete the task within hours, if not minutes. And it would have no inherent bias.

If or when computers can do this, it is conceivable that they may also be able to do qualified peer reviews of scientific articles, including pointing out possible errors and omissions. Or they may even be able to write their own research pieces based simply on available raw data. The productivity in science will speed up dramatically, as it has done in so many other industries already.

Emerging IT technology # 3: Creative computing

When computers in the future be able to emulate the human neocortex, they will become intuitive and creative. And this will mean that some of the computers of the future will be able to write great music, create their own animated movies, draw houses, write books and news summaries as well as a host of other tasks which we today consider exclusive human territory. In other words, just as machines and computers have already invaded a lot of job areas involving hard or repetitive physical work, computer will soon begin to do the more fun parts as well.

They will also do something else: write software. In the future you may tell a computer what new software is supposed to do and then the computer will write it automatically.

Emerging IT technology # 4: Autonomous robots

We are at the dawn of the robotic age. Some of the robots of the future will have capabilities that are now only the stuff of movies. They will be able to learn from experiences and adapt to changes in the environment. This will be so, because we will enable computers to emulate how the human neocortex in our brain works. The computing power behind this doesn’t actually need to be physically located on the robot itself. Each robot may instead be wirelessly connected to cloud computing somewhere else, where the most demanding parts of its computing power is located.

The robots of the future will be able to do things that people can’t. One example: whatever one robot has learned can be downloaded to many others within a few minutes. This is something humans cannot do. Another comparative advantage of robots will be their ability to communicate wirelessly with each other in real time. We cannot do that either. And robots will be tireless, of course. Humans aren’t.

It is a general rule that the productivity of industrial product trend to rise approx. 7% each time the annual production doubles. However in information technology, the productivity often doubles every one or two years – a much, much faster improvement. What this means is that the performance of the brains of robots will evolve much faster than their bodies, and this again means that the beginning of the robotic age will be mainly about connecting new computing “brains” to existing hardware “bodies” such as cars and airplanes.

Emerging IT technology # 5: Data mining

One of the fastest growing concepts of data research of recent times has been the various forms of so-called data mining. Some of this focuses on so-called data exhaust – data created by human action for other purposes than being studied. For instance, insurance companies have for years analyzed usage patterns of credit cards to find clues to whether the card is stolen. Financial institutions generate statistics about the client’s market positions to generate indication for sentiment and when trade orders may be triggered. And Google and other search engines use the search habits of their members as clues to which web links are the most relevant to which queries.

One particularly promising form of data mining for the future is so-called crowd-sensing, where the sensors in digital devices are used en masse to gather large-scale data. For instance, smart phone companies may (legally or not) use feedback from their clients’ devices to map the presence of WiFi networks.

However, all of this is only a start. Mobile phone operators may create traffic jam warnings by analysing the number of phones connecting to different transmission masts, and politicians may pick up clues to the public opinion through statistical analysis of Twitter messages. The GDP of a country may be mapped in real time by measuring power consumption.

People will in the future use an increasing number of real time sensors and – transmitters such as surveillance cameras, smartphones and pads which will all create vast amounts of data exhaust, which will be analysed in countless new ways.

Emerging IT technology # 6: Crowd sourcing

Crowd sourcing is the act of sourcing information or knowledge from large groups of volunteers. These people may remain unidentified through the process, or they may be able and willing to submit their IDs as they contribute data. Wikipedia is the most prominent example, but countless blogs are also based on crowd sourcing. One of the intriguing aspects of this is that many bloggers actually do their work out of passionate interest and may at times perform much deeper research than many professionals. For instance, in his book The Big Short Michael Lewis describes, how an amateur blogger, the medical doctor Michael Burry was one of the few people in the world that made thorough analysis of the subprime bond markets and spotted the risk of the 2009 market crash before almost anyone else. And it was a crowd of bloggers led by Steven McIntyre that uncovered a series of grave errors in the widely published “hockey stick” long term climate graph used by the Internal Panel of Climate Change.

Crowd sourcing is in a sense a part of ultimate democracy since it gives anyone the possibility to provide insight and knowledge and it may in the future be used in a much wider range of activities, from commenting on existing and desired future products to jointly developing the perfect ways to run a society.

Emerging IT technology # 7: Products that tell stories

What would it take to enable virtually any product in the world to tell you a story about, say where it comes from, how it was made, or how it should best be consumed? How about this:

• A few trillion RFID-tags
• Several billion smartphones
• Countless TV and PC screens
• A lot of cloud computing.

An RFID-tag is a small chip, which can now be printed onto any product wrapping for less than one cent. It doesn’t have a power supply, but if you send a radio wave towards it, it uses some of its energy to return an “echo” which contains a signal that is essentially similar to a wireless bar code message.

So let’s imagine that you have a smartphone which is able to transmit such radio waves. One day you have bought an Italian ham, and you now point your phone at it and press bottom to transmit the silent radio signal. The equally silent return signal from the RFID-tag on the ham is picked on by your smartphone and transmitted from this to a cloud server on the Internet, which identifies the message as “I am a Parma ham from San Daniele del Friuli.” Your smartphone will now display a multimedia story about this product, including videos about how it was made and the history of this producer and Parma hams in general. You can display this story on your smartphone screen, or you can point to any other screen neat to you, such as a TV screen on the wall, and it will instead be shown there.

Emerging IT technology # 8: Magic vision

In the future a smartphone might be able to identify and explain virtually anything you happen to come across. Because of GPS it will know where it is, and it will also know which way the phone is pointed (compass), and which angle it is held (gravity sensor). It will also be able to hear what you hear (microphone) and see what you see (camera). So the only thing left is wireless access to massive cloud computing and it will be able to give you context to whatever you are looking at. Let’s say it is a mountain or a building, and it will give you the basics about that. If it is a bottle of wine it may read the label and give you the relevant Parkers Wineguide ratings and information. If it is someone speaking a language you don’t understand, it may show you subtitles in your own language as they speak

Emerging IT technology # 9: The universal device

Have you heard of paying with a smartphone? The Japanese do it already all the time. Technically the smartphone can evidently transmit an ID like a credit card can, so the concept is not too complicated. But the smartphone has a number of advantages over the credit card. First, it is a single device that can contain any number of virtual cards. Second, it can easily be equipped with biometric controls like finger print recognition, which improves security. In case the security system of the payment operator tags the device as potentially stolen, it will be easy to make a video call to verify that it is indeed the owner of the card that is trying to make the payment. And should there be any doubt that the owner has money on the account, this may be possible to display prior to a potential attempt to make a payment.

However, paying with a smartphone is just one out of countless new features for it. Over time it is likely to evolve as the universal device that can do vertuially everything electronic you can piossibly dream of. For instance, why do we have a remote control for each TV and HiFi device. Why not let the smartphone recognize the device and then bring up the relevant remote control menu? – regulate the light in your house?

Emerging IT technology # 10: Self-driven cars

Since 2004 the military research institute DARPA has arranged 3 competitions for driverless cars, conducted in 2004, 2005 and 2007, respectively. The cars made amazing progress from the first to the third competition. In the first they all failed to drive through a desert, whereas in the third many succeeding in navigating through a non-populated suburban setting while respecting traffic regulations. Google is now lobbying the state of Nevada to give permission for use of self-driven cars there. The potential advantages of having driverless cars are many:

• They would reduce the need for chauffeurs, whether it be truck drivers or taxi drivers.
• They would free up consumer time for productive work, entertainment or for a rest in the car.
• They would eventually get far safer than manually driven cars; especially on highways.
• They would automatically reroute or adapt in order to minimize traffic jams and their effects.
• They would drive far more economically

Emerging IT technology # 11: Distributed computing and clouds

It is probably not an unreasonable estimate if we guess that 98% of all computing capacity on Earth is idle at any given time. Furthermore, once a computer is in use, it may at times have too little capacity or lack software that would be useful. The answer to that is distributed computing and in particular cloud computing. The advantages of these solutions are not only a far higher average utilization of overall computing capacity (hardware and software), but also to reduce the challenge of maintaining an IT infrastructure and every company or home, to get access to data irrespective of where you are and finally to get access to massive capacity when needed.

Emerging IT technology # 12: Voice recognition and real time translation

Both of these technologies have been available for some time, but both have also been fairly inefficient and thus not very popular. This is now finally changing, and the implications can be vast. Not only may you be able to speak to a computer in one language and have everything you say come out in another you don’t understand yourself (and vice versa), but computers may automatically record everything that is said in radio, TV and Internet clips and enable you to search through it via text input. And then there are automated help desks. Oh yes, the spokes might also like it for phone tapping.