5 Life-Changing Technological Innovations That Most People Aren't Aware Of
Most people don't yet understand these 5 tech innovations that will change their lives.
Technology can be amazing and can change the world for the better. For example, there have been breakthroughs in medicine that save lives, and there have been new developments in industrial automation that keep us from having to do dangerous jobs or waste our lives on boring, routine tasks.
But it can also be scary, like when people worry about how computers and the internet affect their privacy or when they worry that robots will take over the world and hurt it by making emissions and pollution.
But sometimes that fear and uncertainty are just because people don't understand. This isn't always our fault. When we first hear about new technology, it's usually from marketers or salespeople who are more interested in selling it as a solution to our problems than in telling us exactly what it is and what it can do.
So, here's a look at five new technologies that have changed the way people live in the last ten years or so. From what I've seen, most of them are still not fully understood, which can lead to a lot of wrong ideas. So I'll try to explain each of them in a way that's easy to understand and clear up some of the most common misunderstandings I hear!
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Today, when people talk about "artificial intelligence" in business and technology, they usually mean "machine learning" (ML). This just means computer programmes (or algorithms) that don't need to be told exactly what to do by a human operator. Instead, they can get better at a certain task as they do it more and more and see more data. One day, they might be able to do these things better than people. AlphaGo, a machine intelligence that was the first computer to beat a human champion at the game of Go, is a great example of this. There are more possible moves in the game Go than there are atoms in the universe. This means that it would be hard to make a computer respond to every move a human player could make. This is how regular, programmatic computers that play games, like chess computers, work. But by teaching it how to play Go and letting it try different strategies until it won, giving more weight to moves and strategies that it found had a higher chance of working, it "learned" to beat a human.
Before about a decade ago, most people got their ideas about AI from science fiction, especially robots in shows and movies like 2001, The Matrix, and Star Trek. In these shows, the robots and smart machines were usually shown to have what we call "general AI." This means that they could do pretty much everything that natural (human or animal) intelligence can do, like reason, learn, make decisions, and be creative. They could also do any task they needed to do. Today's AI (or ML) in the real world is almost always what's called "specialised" (or "weak" or "narrow") AI, which can only do the jobs it was made for. Some examples of this are matching customers with items they might want to buy (recommendation engines), understanding human speech (natural language processing), and recognising objects and items when they are seen by cameras (computer vision).
Quantum Computing
Most people can get away with this. For most people, even a basic understanding of quantum computing requires knowledge of quantum physics, which they don't have if they haven't studied it in school.
But there are also a lot of common misconceptions at a higher level. Quantum computers aren’t simply computers that are much quicker than regular "classical" computers. In other words, classical computers won't be replaced by quantum computers because quantum computers are only better at a small number of very specific tasks. Most of the time, this means solving very complicated math problems that don't usually come up in everyday business computing. Among these problems are simulating quantum (sub-atomic) systems and optimization problems (finding the best route from A to B, for example, when there are a lot of variables that can change). Encryption is one area of everyday computing where quantum computing might be better than classical computing. For example, it could be used to make sure that communications can't be hacked. Researchers are already working on quantum-safe cryptography because some people worry that, in the future, quantum computers will be able to easily break some of the most advanced cryptographic security used by the government. But it won't make Windows run faster or improve the graphics in Fortnite.
Metaverse
Many people first heard the word "metaverse" in Neal Stephenson's dystopian science fiction book Snow Crash, which came out in 1992. When the idea became popular in 2021 after Facebook changed its name to Meta, many articles linked it to ideas from the book-turned-movie Ready Player One, which was about virtual reality (VR). But in reality, the idea as it applies to technology today isn't always just about VR. And I hope it doesn't have to be dystopian!
No one knows for sure what the metaverse will look like because it hasn't reached its final state yet. Maybe the best way to think about it is that it is a collection of vague ideas about how the internet will change in the future. Whatever it is, it's likely to be more immersive, so VR and related technologies like augmented reality (AR) could play a role. But many proto-metaverses and applications related to metaverses, like the online game platform Roblox or the virtual worlds Sandbox and Decentraland, don't use VR yet. It's also likely to be built around the idea of persistence in a number of ways. For example, users are likely to use a persistent representation of themselves, like an avatar, as they move between different virtual worlds and activities. Users will also expect that if they leave a virtual world and come back later, they will still be in the same "instance." This is not the case, for example, in the virtual worlds that many people are used to exploring in video games, where the whole world might be reset when a new game starts.
Once it's a part of our lives, we might not even call it the metaverse anymore, just like the term "worldwide web" isn't used much anymore. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said that he doesn't think the idea will catch on because "the average person" doesn't really know what it is. He does think, though, that some technologies that are part of the metaverse, like AR and VR, will be part of how the internet changes over time.
Web3
The most common way to use the term "Web 3" today is to talk about another idea for the "next level" of the Internet. This idea has to do with decentralisation, blockchain technology, and cryptocurrencies. This is confusing because there is another set of ideas called "Web 3.0." Tim Berners-Lee, who is often called the father of the World Wide Web, came up with these ideas. Both "web3" and "web 3.0" refer to what the internet might become in the future. Even though the ideas are related and don't always contradict each other, they still describe different things. Confused? Don't worry, so is everyone else!
Web3 is especially looking forward to an internet where power and ownership aren't centralised in large companies that own the servers where data is stored and software programmes are run. For example, many people think that big social network companies like Facebook and Twitter have too much power over public debate because, in the end, they decide who has a voice and who doesn't. Theoretically, a decentralised Web-based social network would be run by its users and work like a true democracy. There would be no Mark Zuckerbergs or Elon Musks who could cut off anyone they didn't think should have a platform.
Decentralized web3 principles could be used to run an internet focused on the metaverse, but they wouldn't have to be. In the same way, a web-based internet could be set up like a metaverse (where immersion and avatars are important), but it wouldn't have to be. So, the ideas are both about what the internet could be, but they are not necessarily connected.
5G
There have been a lot of misunderstandings about the new generation of mobile internet technology. This includes worries about what it might do to your health. Many people were worried that high-powered radio waves from phones or transmitter masts could cause health problems, like cancer. But hundreds of studies done by governments and independent research groups around the world haven't found any proof that this is true.
It's also a common misconception that 5G is a single piece of technology or standard that was put in place, and now we're just waiting to see the results, which will mostly be faster internet on our phones. In fact, 5G is a standard that keeps changing. Most of the infrastructure we have today is based on a slower type of 5G that "piggybacks" on the 4G LTE infrastructure we already have. True, "stand-alone" 5G is being rolled out slowly, which will help it reach its full potential over the next few years. This will include letting a lot more people connect in a small area, like a shopping mall or sports stadium. This should get rid of the connection problems that often happen in places with a lot of people. The true potential of 5G internet is not just faster data transfer, but also a mobile internet that allows us to transfer new and exciting types of data in new and exciting ways to create apps that do entirely new things.