My tech predictions for 2018
I made a set of predictions for 2017 here
and a look back at how miserably wrong i was in December’17
That said, i’ll take another shot at making some tech predictions for 2018 at the risk of embarassing myself once again.
Technologies
Blockchain
Top contender for fastest moving tech this year is surely blockchains.
We can expect to see Casper implemented in Ethereum, and lightning networks on Bitcoin. This will be a big push to the scalability problem that we have been complaining about all of 2017 with respect to crypto currencies.
We will also see a fall in prices of the tail currencies.Expect to see much fewer crypto currencies seeing the end of 2018, but expect them to finish much stronger.
I think we will see some solid usecases being implemented on blockchain outside of just currency, that will connect to the end customers, albeit a select few.
AI
AI already saw hype with Sophia and more real applications. It sure has matured. But AI now covers a more wider horizon than it used to, i’ll try to break down my views into these smaller sub sections.
Autonomous Vehicles : Mainly self driving cars. Pardon my ignorance, but i am sure there is a lot of developments on Drones, but not something i have been following very closely. We can expect self driving cars to hit atleast one major city this year, especially on highways. Once that happens, it will be interesting how the cars industry re-orients itself. Yes, 100% (level 5) autonomous cars are still a couple (?) of years away, but i expect some forward looking companies to start re-imagining the car itself. Do we need a dash board? Do we need the passengers to be all facing one way? What more can we do in a car that drives itself?
Voice assistants : I am a skeptic on this, i expect the enthusiasm to fall in this space. Even though we saw record sales of Alexas and Google Homes in the festive season of 2017, it feels like it is a matter of time before the market realizes how little the device can do. That said, Google Now, Siri and maybe Cortana will continue to advance the technology in useful ways. I feel voice can be a good form of input but not a great output. Atleast not better than visual.
Social Media
Social media (especially Facebook) seemed to take a beating in late 2017, and i feel that trend will continue this year. We can expect more commercialization of social media. Afterall, all the money has been flowing into this section under the assumption that one day it can be commercialized out side of just showing ads.
We may see commercial bots and proactive ads this year. This will primarily be driven by Messenger/Whatsapp playing around with commercial accounts. The social feed is likely to be replaced by something else. Afterall, most people see posts from their subscribed pages more than they see friends statuses on Facebook, for example.
AR VR
AR-VR saw some big news in 2017 with MagicLeap making announcements of its first product, Apple and Google launching ARKits for iPhone and Android respectively and Snap making announcements for virtual landmarks.
We saw Occulus/Facebook coming up with social aspect to it, so did BigScreen VR. Unfortunately both seemed lack lusture to me. However i am convinced there will be a push to the development efforts with the release of standalone devices like the Occulus Go.
Though AR-VR both have seen considerable improvements in 2017, however it feels like the tech isn’t ready yet. The devices feel bulky and isn’t something we can use for long periods of time. My best bet is we will continue to see improvements in this field and wouldn’t be surprised to see no real useable product coming out using this technology.
Fields
Consistent with 2017, i’ll also try to imagine what are the areas that are most likely to see innovation this year.
Healthcare
I had this on my last year too, but we didn’t see much coming out in 2017. I thing we will see some more wearables and AI coming together to make this more feasible this year. We have AI models beginning to do better than human doctors in many areas.
FinTech
It will be interesting to see how fintech companies tackle crypto currencies. I would like to see payment gateways comeup (into mainstream) where payments may be made in crypto. This is definitely far fetched, but we should start seeing some leading indicators.
Social media
It is hard to discreetly put social media into Tech or Field. But, i believe we will start seeing a drift away from the news feed as we know it today. Stories was one of the most popular format in 2017, but it will be interesting to see innovations we have on the newsfeed, and the way people consume content. I will be looking forward to proactive feeds, where content is pushed to me when it is most relevant (more intelligently).
I will review these predictions in late December’18. However, i’d love to hear from you if you think there are trends i turned a blind spot to.
Cheers!
