[ad_1]
Today the Institute for the Future released its report 17th Annual Technology Trends Report, a report on the future across 16 industries and sectors and tracking 900 trends. The subject of this year’s report is a supercycle, which generally represents an extended period of booming demand that sends prices soaring to unprecedented levels. A supercycle can last for years or even decades, and result in or be driven by structural change in the economy.
Fast companyEditor-in-Chief Brendan Vaughn sat down with the institute’s founder, Amy Webb, at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW to discuss some of the highlights.
Webb says that most supercycles start with an event: for example, the invention of the steam engine launched the Industrial Revolution, and the Internet launched two decades of structural change.
“The difference between what’s happening now and what happened in the past is that before, supercycles were just one technology,” Webb says. She now says there are three technologies driving the supercycle: artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and the ecosystem of interconnected wearables.
“We are at the beginning of something that will truly reshape human civilization,” she says. Through this, she believes that companies that build infrastructure will be in high demand, and eventually a lot of back-office tech jobs will disappear.
Rather than looking at what that means from a financial perspective, the institute’s report looks at the supercycle more holistically, and how it will impact business, government and society as a whole.
“I know everyone is talking about AI right now. It’s not new, it’s just that it’s reached some kind of critical mass, and it’s starting to create a flywheel of activity in other spaces,” Webb says.
AI is a foundational layer that acts as a catalyst for change in many areas, Webb says.
In the short term, she says, we will have to start making important decisions regarding artificial intelligence. A big one is open source versus not open source. A closed model like OpenAI’s can be good because it creates a walled garden of sorts that are difficult to corrupt; However, you don’t necessarily know what data was used to train the AI, and without this transparency, the results you get are likely to be skewed.
On the other hand, a semi-open or fully open model is more vulnerable to penetration and can be easily damaged. For example, when Facebook’s Llama 2 launched, someone cloned it and called it Llama 2 Uncentriced, which Webb says “you can do really terrible things” with.
Now, she says, we’ve reached a point where the AI systems we use don’t necessarily need “more” data, but they need “more types” of data. For example, we need to train AI on things like how people move and how they can describe a certain smell. While we captured a lot of the digital world in training these models, we didn’t capture a lot of the physical world, which is where something like Apple’s Vision Pro can come into play.
“I can see going forward, everything has a digital twin,” Webb says. Eventually, you believe that everything from your home, office building to your body will have its twin in the virtual world.
A physical world transformed into a digital world
Why is it useful to have a digital twin? “Because we can track changes over time, that would be incredible for any building,” Webb says. “It also allows you to simulate and test changes in advance.”
These digital twins won’t come without some challenges. For example, Webb points out that we all have millions of movements that we make every day, that we don’t even realize. For example, you may talk with your hands or scratch your eyebrows when you’re nervous.
“So the problem is that when you wear a face computer, your computer is going to start recognizing everything you do,” she says. “On the one hand, it’s a good thing, it will identify that information and link it back to you.”
On the other hand, this might become a problem if you have a personal and work account on your computer, just as many of us do on work phones and computers now. This computer will continue to record your activities, and perhaps very personal activities, even when you log off from work and are home.
“There’s no way to reset your traffic identity the way you reset a password. It’s you. It’s who you are,” she says.
Artificial intelligence may also impact the way we shop. Webb specifically pointed to the dynamic pricing we heard a few weeks ago at Wendy’s. Although Wendy’s isn’t implementing surge pricing as everyone originally thought, the company is offering discounts on products during specific times of the day.
Webb says the next step after generative AI is likely generative biology: Although we won’t have personalized medicine right away, over time we will be able to get more personalized and better medicines and medical care thanks to AI. As has been the case in past supercycles, such as the Industrial Revolution and the Internet Revolution, we are on the brink of change in almost every aspect of our lives.
[ad_2]
Source link
