Technologies of the future

 How they will transform human life in the next few years.

Will we see drones on the streets in the next few years, tourists in space, and a 3D bioprinter in every hospital? In a column for Forbes, Pavel Cherkashin, founder and managing partner of Mind rock Capital, discusses how future technologies will allow a person to go beyond the cramped reality

No long-term forecast of the development of specific technologies will be accurate, and confirmation of this is the annual Gartner Hype Cycle and other analytical reports. We have long been waiting for drones, smart cities, quantum computers, and tourist flights into space. They are actively developing but still have not come into life as analysts predicted. This year showed that even the most accurate forecast can undergo unexpected changes due to several factors.

Over the next few years, we'll see drones, street astronauts, and 3D bioprinters in every hospital.

 

Why man?

Only now technologies have begun to mature to the point of taking on the increase in the efficiency of not conditional machines, but of a person. According to the UN, over the past five years, the human potential index has increased by an average of 0.6% per year, and this is very little. It suddenly became obvious that with such a growing population and levels of education and medicine, it was almost impossible to maintain GDP growth, even if there was good growth in technology and sufficient capital in the market.

In addition, questions have accumulated related to how a person will live: they concern not only medicine and education but also ecology, the production of food for an increasing population, space exploration for the future needs of mankind, the protection of privacy, data, and any significant social changes.

Medicine of the future: what technologies will allow people to overcome old age, disease, and death?

People are afraid of the violation of freedoms, manipulation, and lack of demand because technology will displace people, as well as the deliberate restriction of access to goods. But real innovation allows you to go beyond the narrow reality, although mistakes and difficulties occur in this process. How does this happen?

Availability of technologies

Technological advances have focused on increasing accessibility. Any conspiracy theories that, for example, advanced medicine will be available only to the rich are fantasies. If the cost of technology can be reduced, it will be reduced. If it is possible to enter a new market, they will enter it. 

Manufacturer Luminar became a billion-dollar company by creating lidars for drones that cost ten times less and see better. As a result, all top automakers began to cooperate with the company. Thanks to it, it became possible to accelerate the development and bring closer the mass introduction of drones that promise to be safer for humans.

Another example is from medicine. Already, 3D printing has reduced the cost of transplants dozens of times: the cost of a kidney for transplantation in the United States is $ 330,000, and a bioprinter is $10,000, while the cost of a printer is also gradually decreasing, and the quality is growing. In medicine, we would like to have significant progress, but in this industry, there are certain difficulties in collecting data for analysis, legal and ethical obstacles. The fusion of humans and technology and instant repair of breakdowns will not yet occur as in the Neuromancer novel, but the idea of ​​full-fledged artificially created organs and personalized medicine controlled by artificial intelligence is exciting and gives hope. Moreover, lower prices make it possible to develop entire industries, such as medicine or commercial space exploration. Now any startup can launch a satellite and connect its activities with space, and this contributes to the emergence of new companies, ideas, and competition in the industry. 

Wind of change: how an emigrant from Ukraine made a fortune of $ 1.5 billion on "green" energy in the United States

Available technologies already invented will penetrate more and more widely and thus find new applications for themselves and become available to an increasing number of people. Even cheap Internet is not as common in the world as it would seem to be by 2021 (but we believe that Starlink will fix this)  -  what can we say about regulating relations between the state and business using artificial intelligence (as the FiscalNote project is already doing in many countries of the world) and other new technologies.

Virgin Galactic sold out the first suborbital flights for $250,000 15 years ago when neither the flights themselves nor such prices were unthinkable, but the company promises to send tourists into space as early as next year. It is clear that with the development of technology and public interest, not only will the prices for such flights be reduced, but real space tourism will also become possible.

Workplaces

The Internet and technology, in general, provide a more equal opportunity than anything that has come before in business and education. You can be unclaimed in your village and work with top companies around the world, you can be physically handicapped and still be entrepreneurial and invest in your cool guitar idea for the disabled, you can make huge money while still in school creating in-demand content on TikTok or YouTube, and you can learn almost anything for free.  

  There are many more possibilities. People want to learn and adapt to the new reality. In the first months of the pandemic, the EdTech industry shot in a way that no one expected back in 2019: the number of users of the online learning platform Udemy grew by 425%, Coursera - by 520%. Each technology means new industries (dozens of new industries and directions are waiting for us in space alone) and applications (which is worth only the potential of artificial intelligence, which already has dozens of applications).

Online with a head: how the isolation of education became a threat and an opportunity at the same time

Technology is already giving us jobs and opportunities for intellectual development. The number of information workers, that is, all those who earn money from mental activity, is growing rapidly in the world and a year ago it reached a billion people, while in 2012 there were four times less, and this is due to automation, robotization and the introduction of artificial intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence

As an investor, I bet on artificial intelligence and its further spread to various sectors of the economy. Soon, he will make even more noticeable progress in healthcare and biomedical research, security, entertainment, business and people relations with the state, education, production and logistics of distribution of goods, ecology, content moderation, and the fight against fakes.

In addition, artificial intelligence can transform a person: to give him new knowledge where the human brain is no longer able to analyze information and identify connections between data and Events including the brain itself and the human body. It will also foster intellectual development: people will engage in truly complex intellectual activities and decision-making processes, using more complex systems and data. In such a complex event, experts from different backgrounds will communicate, and artificial intelligence will help predict the impact of different events and solve problems.

Jokes over: How does artificial intelligence leave human jobs?

 

 

 

Restriction of freedoms

Technology has not yet reached the point of manipulating the human will and is unlikely to reach it soon, no matter how frightened we are by futurologists and the documentary film "The Social Dilemma". If we consider the manipulation of, say, the distribution of certain content on social networks or the use of artificial intelligence to keep the user in the application, then the problem can be solved by removing the application or enabling critical thinking.

Companies that collect data have also increasingly received requests for greater transparency about what data they collect, how they store it, use it, and how algorithms work. Recall the history of Facebook. Legislation such as the European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that protects data and guarantees the right to forgetting (i.e., complete removal of information about a person from the source) is likely to be finalized and adopted by a growing number of countries. Should be requested by those people.

Of course, no one wants total surveillance, as in China, even under the plausible pretext of improving security. The social scoring system also raises questions. We also don't want technologies that can affect people's freedoms to fall into the wrong hands. There are negative examples, but this does not mean that they cannot be modified in the future. History has known both the tightening of screws, the flourishing of freedoms, and the work on mistakes.

10 signs of the times that changed our lives

 

The fact that Apple could go to court with a lawsuit against the FAS was previously reported by Durov's Code.

In August, the FAS found Apple guilty of abusing the online application market. The service began litigation against the American company after a complaint by Kaspersky Lab about Apple's actions regarding the parental control service Kaspersky Safe Kids. "Laboratory," said that Apple blocked the placement of an updated version of the application in the App Store, while simultaneously launching a similar Screen Time service. FAS sided with the Russian company. Apple also said that it does not agree with the decision of the antimonopoly service and will challenge it.

FAS demanded from Apple to change the rules for allowing applications in the App Store

According to the FAS order, Apple had until November 30 to exclude from its rules for admission to the App Store the rule that allows third-party developers to refuse in any case. Within five days after the implementation of the order, the company had to report this to the department. “Until now, the Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia has not received information from Apple about the fulfillment of the order,” a representative of the department told TASS earlier on Monday.