Ah, yes, January – that time of year when hopeful joggers bloom like algae, post-Christmas bank accounts are incredulously checked, and companies draw up their cunning plans and make predictions for the coming year.
by Richard Edwards
Although, given all the upsets and surprises of 2016, it would take a brave person to get too specific! What seems less doubtful is that several of the technological trends of 2016 will continue into 2017, and perhaps beyond. Here are some of the most significant ones to watch…
1. Artificial Intelligence is a term that almost everyone has heard of and intuitively ‘gets’, but up until recently, relatively few companies have understood it well enough to apply it to real-life commercial applications (well, ones that have truly taken off and been adopted by millions of us, that is). This is showing signs of changing in 2017, as companies begin to make breakthroughs in things like deep reinforcement learning, generative adversarial networks and natural language processing. Fancy terms aside, what this is likely to mean for us as consumers is easier, more natural communication with our phones, computers and domestic appliances, better image quality of streamed games and content, cleverer cars and driving aids, and falling prices for cloud-based hosting due to more efficient management of computing storage and infrastructure.
2. Corporate security ‘oopsies’. TescoBank’s recent 40,000-account security breach and Russia’s alleged interventions in the US election were two more chilling reminders that big corporates and even whole political systems can be breached or influenced by sophisticated cyber attacks. Several factors suggest that things will get worse before they get better – the world is growing ever more connected, countries like China are investing heavily in their cyber capabilities, and physical devices are being connected to ‘the Internet of Things’ at an ever-increasing rate. All this suggests that it’s inevitable that more digital jiggery pokerey is on the way in 2017. Those in the know are already making stark predictions that another big bank will be targeted by hackers in 2017, triggering a run and perhaps bringing it down completely. Well, that’s something to look forward to, isn’t it..?
3. Medical science gets even more awesome. We predict that 2017 is going to be full of firsts for medical science too, and near the top of our Gosh Darn That’s Cool List must be the way scientists are fighting back against the Zika virus that has caused thousands of serious birth defects in South America and which is starting to spread around the world. Building on a decade of field trials by an Australian University, scientists plan to breed and release large numbers of mosquitoes that have been pre-infected with Wolbachia bacteria. This has been shown to prevent the transmission of Zika by mosquitoes, and if these doctored mosquitoes breed with native ones as hoped, this could be an effective way of protecting millions of people and the most significant advancement in insect control since the invention of DDT. If it works, we’ll be first in line to ask the WHO to target the vicious Scottish midge next…
