Memristor Moments & Hurricane Hunting - A Peek At What 2014 Will Bring

It's always good to take a punt on what might happen in the future.  Forty years ago the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote that you might find the following in a 2014 World Trade Fair, and he is not too far off the mark as some of his predictions show:

“By 2014, only unmanned ships will have landed on Mars, though a manned expedition will be in the works and in the 2014 Futurama will show a model of an elaborate Martian colony"

"Men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better”

"Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare automeals"

"It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the "brains" of robots"

"Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with "Robot-brains"*vehicles that can be set for particular destinations and that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver"

"Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books".

If anything the pace of change has increased significantly since 1964 so what trends and developments might we expect in the year ahead?  The following are the results of my crystal ball gazing.

The Way We Work

The debate about the merits of remote working will continue to ebb and flow, with no clear cut decision either way. The BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) approach will bring with it  a huge surge in the growth of the mobile workforce.  This will be coupled by a corresponding growth in the need for data and device security as imported malware on personal devices will pose any even greater threat to company security.

As businesses evolve into 'any-time/anywhere' enterprises the change will bring with it a huge societal shift, as new technologies increasingly blurs the line between 'work' and 'play'.  The need to reinforce a work/life balance in the workforce will be greater than ever as the realisation sinks in that the new work practice is not simply about handing out smart devices to employees.  Companies will also need to become less risk averse if they are to succeed.

Mobile But Not As We Know It

Mobile will continue to be one of the dominant trends in 2014 and we will have even greater dependence on our mobile devices. Marketing will increasingly focus on mobile and mobile content marketing strategies will separate out those who succeed in the marketplace and those who do not.

Mobile Apps will be more carefully targeted and smaller.  Their development will surge ahead at the expense of applications.  There is a prediction that app developers will be looking for ways to snap together apps to create larger applications.

It is probable, but not definite, that augmented reality glasses such as Google Glass will finally go mainstream in 2014, as the march towards wearables continues. Smart watches will become 'de rigueur' in all the smartest circles and will live up to their name by becoming even smarter than the existing prototypes we have today.

Transformative Technologies

There are several of these either in use, or in the offing.  Here are my top picks for the year ahead:

• Bitcoins
  Although I have written previously (with guarded skepticism) about the merits or otherwise of Bitcoins, it is clear that there is continuing adoption of the alternative 'currency'. But it's a case of 'buyer beware' as, while is has apparently been a boon for online drug peddlers, its value fluctuates widely. Between November and December 2013 Bitcoin's value rose from $US 200 to $US 1,200 only to lose half its value by December 7th.
  Little wonder then most holders of Bitcoins are keen to change them into more tangible assets such as bullion. According to Business Insider nearly $US 7 million of bitcoins were spent on Black Friday and a large proportion of them were traded for silver and gold coins and bars.
• Drones
  Although both loved and loathed in equal measure depending which side of the political fence you are on, robotics and drones in particular are more and more invading our lives.  Miniaturisation and new nano material technologies make this feasible and affordable.
  While military uses of drones are well known, the recent announcement by Amazon.com that it would use drones to convey book orders to customers broadened the debate about their use.
  Other uses include Tijuana authorities using them to monitor traffic, locate landslides and control wildfires. The US uses them to hunt hurricanes, undertake 3D-mapping, monitor the condition of farmer's fields and offer a degree of protection for wildlife.
  
  

• Get your DNA sequenced for just $100
  Surprising as it may seem this is not as revolutionary as it at first sounds.  A new nanofluidic chip developed by BioNanomatrix makes this such cheap sequencing possible.  In the future personalised medicine will mean that your doctor will be able to determine (for example) genetic changes in a cancerous tumor with increased accuracy -  and for the what it would cost you today to have a chest X-Ray.
• The year of the Memristor
  Your cat is smarter than a supercomputer;  its synapses switch on and interconnects thousands of neurons, modifying brain circuits and boosting functions such as facial recognition. University of Michigan scientist, Wei Lu, told The Register that he believes that "Memristors can potentially learn like synapses and be used to build human brain-like computers".
• VoIP phone calls (made via the Internet on platforms such as Skype) will surpass the use of standard land-line connections in 2014
• Your check out operator at the local supermarket will become an increasing novelty as retail turns increasingly to automated systems
• Apple's Touch ID technology will; find greater use in other applications and products
• 3D Printing which has already ushered in a new 'industrial revolution' will expand it use exponentially in 2014

..and, remembering another 1964 prediction of Isaac Asimov,

"Complete lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be stored in the freezer until ready for processing"

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Wearing Thin - Copy Watches, Cops and Cop-Outs

At one stage in my life I had a draw full of watches, albeit a small drawer and a few of the watches were euphemistically titled "copy watches".  One only had to visit most Asian cities a decade or two ago to be propositioned by furtive street vendors who offered you a 'Rolex" for a couple for dollars.

Not only were they bad fakes but their guarantee lasted only as long as its battery life.  After moving up the corporate ladder a real dress watch may be added but that was really the limit of my interest in timepieces as fashion accessories.

So the recent release of the over-hyped iWatches offers no appeal to me at all.  In fact I would go so far as to say that thus far, the whole iWatch movement (pun intended) is a bit of a cop-out.  These are not wearables that dazzle with innovation and I really can't see the point of having an adjunct to my smartphone strapped to my wrist?

While I made an earlier prediction in 2011 that wearables would be a significant megatrend, iWatches were not what I had in mind.  To me these 'wristlets' are examples of the dangers of moving away from innovation to commercialisation; the latest iPhone being another example.

Another example of where technology innovation doesn't quite fit the gadget is the taking of photographs with an iPad.  To see a horde of avid photographers holding their iPad's aloft always reminds me of Charlton Heston holding up the tablets of stone in the Ten Commandments.  The results though are far from similar.

Some wearable tech is moving in the right direction. The BioMan shirt keeps track of your body vitals through a weave of embedded steel threads which transmit data via Bluetooth to another device such as a smartphone.  Great for fitness fanatics but with a more serious capability of alerting your health professional in the event of your 'ticker' playing up.

According to an article looking at the intersection of the fashion industry and technology there were some 14 million such items on the market by the end of 2012 and the prediction is that this number will rise to 171 million by 2016. Another guesstimate from Juniper Research is that there will be 15 million wearable smart devices sold worldwide in 2013, rising to 70 million in sales by 2017.

So to put it succinctly, what is my expectation of the 'wearables' of the future?

I see such devices as being embedded into the Internet of Things and not operating as a standalone body add-on.  For example, my hat turning into a weather station and transmitting data, my clothing adjusting to the climatic conditions during the tropical hear or Arctic cold, better still priming my washing machine form afar to say that grimy work clothes were coming its way.

Wearables that monitor the smells that surround us, eliminating the less desirable. My personal tastegraph influencing such decisions.

Some wearables are  designed in a slightly less serious vein. The Cocktail Making Robot Dress in this video is enough to drive one to drink; quite literally.


Let us also not forget the commercial value of wearables and how they can potentially drive traffic for retailers.  Econsultancy, in collaboration with YouGov, looked at the impact of Google Glass as an example of wearable in-store.

Their key findings were:

• 38% of customers said they would use Google Glass to create a shopping route
• 27% would use Glass to check stock availability
• 22% saw Glass as an opportunity to unlock additional offers and promotions. 
• 70% of women however felt they would be embarrassed wearing such a device and the figure for men who felt similarly disinclined was 54%.

This UK reticence when it comes to wearing Google Glass ties in with other research conducted by Omnibus in May.  In that poll, less than a quarter of those surveyed (24%) said they would consider buying and wearing a pair of Google Glass-es.

It could well be that wearables will have a greater future with enterprises than consumers and Forrester sees this as a more likely trend.  If you doubt their findings look no further than  Motorola's Connected Law Enforcement Officer Of The Future.

Source: Motorola

Which reminds me, I need to get a new battery for my watch.

Will Google Glass actually harm our perception of the world rather than aid it?

I am as keen on tech gadgets as the next person but I can't help but wonder if the advent of virtual technology actually takes something away from our perception of the world, rather than adding to it.

There is a marked difference between 'looking' and ''seeing.  As a person who started my professional career as an art teacher I know that the secret to visual creativity is to train the mind to actually take in and process the visual stimuli that bombard us every day.

To do this one needs to focus on the subject at hand and exclude the other 'visual gunk' that surrounds it.  Only then can the creative juices start flowing and creative interpretation follow.  Let's face it, the world needs creative people who can dream.

So in our brave new world where a pair of high tech 'specs' provides us you a constant stream of third party data, are we muddying the creative process rather than aiding it.  Imagine how little Leonardo would have achieved if he had been constantly bombarded with virtual reality data? Very little I suspect.

Put bluntly, is too much virtual data for tech-delivered sources scrambling our cranial database?

Robert E. Franken in his book Human Motivation suggests that to be creative, one needs to be able to "view things in new ways or from a different perspective".  But I don't believe he had in mind a quite literal 'different perspective' delivered through technology. The 'uniqueness of alternatives' cannot be considered and interpreted creatively if they are constantly being prompted by pre-programmed data.

According to Hungarian psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other.

I would suggest that the problem with tech gadgets such as Google Glass is that they only allow an individual focus on the latter.

While I wouldn't go as far as Brian Merchant in suggesting that "products like Glass may turn daily life into a neurotic consumerist hellscape", I wonder if people have fully thought through how the purchase of a virtual technology device might effect them?

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