3 Tech Trends to watch in 2019
By Amy Webb
It’s been a tumultuous year. Once-venerated
companies found their stock trading below a dollar.
Tweets rattled investor confidence. If 2018 has taught
us anything, it’s that chaos is the new normal, and that
it’s time to get smarter about anticipating change. But
it also revealed an unsettling truth: We simply aren’t
paying enough attention to meaningful signals in the
present, and that’s why we’ve been caught in this
constant cycle of surprise.
To understand the future of one thing, you must
consider the future of many things. Otherwise, you’re
essentially looking at the world through a pinhole.
This is especially true when it comes to
technology’s influence on the economy. In the coming
year, we will see tantalizing advancements in a host of
emerging technologies—artificial intelligence, smart
devices, space travel, genomic editing, electric
vehicles, and automated hacking tools—that will move
further from the fringe into the mainstream. As these
technologies begin to converge, we’ll start to see
acceleration. This is why pharmaceuticals must
closely track developments in deep learning, and big
agriculture should keep a close eye on CRISPR
experiments in China. AI will help researchers develop
precision medicine techniques, while gene editing
could yield new crops that don’t require pesticides.
My approach is to intentionally look for weak
signals and emerging trends across different areas, to
find meaningful connections. Here are three tech
trends on my radar for 2019.
This is the beginning of the end of smartphones
Globally, smartphone shipments are in
decline. Apple will no longer report sales numbers for
any of its hardware products, including iPhones—it’s
a clear signal about what’s on the mid-horizon. And
even as new form factors enter the consumer
marketplace next year—you’ll see dual-sided phones
and models with foldable screens—the functionality
isn’t improving fast enough to merit tossing out
existing phones for new ones. In the next ten years, we will transition from just one phone that we carry to
a suite of next-gen communication devices, which we
will wear and command using voice, gesture, and
touch.
5G will be deployed at scale
The fifth generation of wireless technology
will, at last, power up—but not where you’re
expecting. While local governments continue to fight
over incentives, private companies will ditch WiFi for
5G, which will shorten transmission latency from 30
milliseconds to just a single millisecond, allowing
essentially instantaneous connectivity between
devices on a network. Unlike WiFi, a private 5G
network can be built to prioritize certain data
transmissions over others. In practice, this means that
heavy manufacturing companies and utilities can
finally take advantage of the Internet of Things and
begin to automate more of their core processes using
robots. It also signals a massive emerging market for
all of the components, devices, and consulting
services that will soon be required.
Data regulation is coming, and it won’t be pretty
From ongoing privacy and security debacles
at Facebook to how much influence Google and
Amazon wield in our everyday lives, big tech will face
a reckoning, one that will likely affect every single
company mining, refining and storing our digital data.
In the U.S., a newly Democratic House, joined by key
senate members, will consider some important
questions: Who should be the ultimate gate-keepers
of our digital data? What role should automated
decision-making play in our everyday lives? How can
a publicly traded company serve both its shareholders
and the broader interests of democratic society?
Policy-makers are not prepared to deal with
new challenges that arise from emerging science and
technology, and the relationship between our big tech
titans and governments continues to be transactional
at best. As a result, we are likely to see proposed
regulations, rules, and legislation that are either too
restrictive or don’t acknowledge that science and tech
are in constant motion. It’s unlikely that sweeping new
rules, like the E.U.’s General Data Protection
Regulation, would pass in the U.S. Even so, going
through the process will prove a serious distraction for
big tech companies.
The best strategic positioning for 2019 is
simple: think exponentially but act incrementally.
You’re going to need to get comfortable with uncertainty. Broaden your thinking, look for
intersecting vectors of change and figure out ways to
make incremental decisions as often as possible.
Amy Webb is a professor of strategic foresight
at the NYU Stern School of Business and author of
The Big Nine: How Today’s Tech Titans and their
Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity.
(Fonte: https://www.barrons.com/articles/technology-trends-2019-
51546007213. Acesso em 28/02/2019)
