At the beginning of October 2013, the best and the greatest minds of the consulting company Gartner - the one whose recommendations cause huge companies to change direction, and entire governments to reshape plans for the future - gathered and formulated their main predictions for the coming decade.
At the beginning of October 2013, the best and the greatest minds of the huge consulting company Gartner - the one whose recommendations cause huge companies to change direction, and entire governments to reshape plans for the future - gathered and formulated their main predictions for the coming decade. These forecasts are going to determine the way of preparing for the future of national and international companies in the coming years. Oh, and they also point to a future world that will be very different from the one we know today. So you should know about them, right?
The ten main forecasts that Gartner agreed to distribute following the conference are divided into four different areas.
As part of this revolution (which I also referred to in my book "The guide for the future"), the information technologies - the computers and the network - will be used to create new and useful information, and will promote a future in which every person can be an entrepreneur and creator and compete successfully even in large economic and industrial systems.
First prediction: By 2018, 100D printing will result in a loss of profits of XNUMX billion dollars per year as a result of copyright infringement.
This prediction is only a symptom of the problem that the XNUMXD printers will face with the law authorities. In a world where anyone can scan the doll, earring or figurine they have purchased, and create a copy of it in a few hours and with minimal effort, copyrights will not be worth more than movie copyrights. And you know what happened to the movies, right? Everyone downloads them from the net for free.
Second prediction: By 2016, XNUMXD printing of tissues and organs (bioprinting) will spark a global discussion about our ability - and our desire - to control the technology or prohibit its use for humans and other needs.
Gartner's information analysts and futurists believe that we are close to the day when human organs will be printed in their entirety in XNUMXD. This development will certainly have an impact on society, just as the heart and kidney transplant surgeries in recent decades forced governments to establish rules and conditions for carrying out the transplants in a way that would be fair and ethical towards the donors, and would not lead to the creation of a 'black market' for human organs.
Printing organs will certainly have less strict ethical rules than donating organs, which inevitably harms the donor. However, it will also oblige the governments and religious bodies to establish appropriate procedures and rethink the ethics of transplants. One extreme scenario, for example, might be the one where a healthy person wishes to replace his original liver with a new liver for non-medical reasons, or to add a third kidney 'just in case'. What would be the ethical procedures in this case? According to Gartner, the public and professional discussion on the subject should begin in the coming years.
digital business
Digital businesses are businesses created through the use of digital assets and/or capabilities. They involve the use of digital products, services or customer experiences, or are conducted through digital channels and communities. Gartner's forecasts in this area focus mainly on the impact that digital businesses will have on the labor market, on the income from consumer products and on the use of personal information. When we come to examine the volumes of businesses, it is enough to look at the internet business index or the websites of digital businesses to understand their importance and enormous scope.
Third prediction: By 2017, more than half of consumer product manufacturers will use crowdsourced elements to research and develop most of their innovative products.
Many companies employ audiences of engineers, scientists and information technology specialists, using digital channels to reach a larger (and in many cases more anonymous) pool of opinions, calculations and information. Gartner predicts a massive movement towards new solutions that rely on the masses and will be made possible by technology. These include advertising, creating online communities, solving scientific problems, generating new product ideas, and designing products specifically for (and by) the customer. We can see this trend in the stages of development even today, when even large technological entities such as DRA (the security agency for advanced research projects, with an annual budget of 2.8 billion dollars) open competitions for engineers and scientists to solve various technological challenges.
Fourth prediction: By 2020, the increasing penetration of digital technologies into the labor market, and the fact that they reduce the amount of work required of individuals (and therefore also cause redundant workers to be fired) will cause social outrage and raise demands to develop new economic models.
It is important to understand that this is not a simplistic situation where "the computers take our work". Gartner refers to the beneficial effect of digital technologies, and the fact that they allow people to perform tasks and crafts more easily. Thus, for example, data processing software such as Excel led to the dismissal of many accountants, and the introduction of the automatic call routing system caused the dismissal of hundreds of thousands of human operators in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Although these technologies have led to rapid growth and greatly facilitated the citizens, the rate of penetration of digital technologies into the labor market is increasing, and they are able to facilitate the workers in a wide variety of fields. What this means is that a growing number of workers are finding that they must constantly keep up with new technologies and maintain creativity and mental agility in order to stay at the forefront of their profession and master the new technologies.
This issue will mainly affect mature and mature societies, such as European countries and Japan, because the population growth in these countries is falling, and accordingly the number of young people in them is extremely low. The aging workers will have to deal with newer technologies and find ways to improve their performance and overcome past habits. Will they succeed? for future solutions. However, it is likely that in the coming years he will encounter larger versions of the "social protest" or the "occupation of Wall Street", which will force the leaders of the nations to take a serious look at the social problems caused by technology.
Fifth prediction: By 2017, eighty percent of consumers will collect, track and trade their personal information to get price discounts, or for convenience purposes only.
The photos we upload to Facebook, our personal information that reaches Google, our networks of connections on LinkedIn - all of these will be used by the big companies to understand us better, to sell us products that are better suited to our needs and to know where we are every day and every hour.
For me, this is good news. Instead of being flooded with advertisements that do not interest us everywhere, we will receive personal advertising tailored specifically for us. And not only that, but consumers will have control over their personal information on the network, and will be able to actually trade it for favors!
This is, of course, the optimistic approach. The pessimists will claim with a great degree of justice that such a world will be a "big brother" world, where the government and various companies will control various aspects of our lives and will be able to direct us and guide us as they wish. The idea that we can protect ourselves from the theft of personal information also sounds dubious, especially given Gartner's next forecast.
Sixth prediction: By 2020, companies and governments will fail to protect 75 percent of the sensitive information in their possession.
The source of the failure in defense will not be as a result of a lack of effort, but because the amount of information used by governments and companies will continue to grow in the coming years exponentially (that is, exponentially. Or in simpler words: a really, really high rate). The companies and governments will not try to protect all the vast information in their possession, but will choose only a small part of it and protect it well. This principle of selective protection will also work for the benefit of the small citizens, because they will get more knowledge about the government and industry and their occupations, thus preventing abuse of the power in the hands of those in power.
Smart machines
Computers are expected to begin to take part and enhance decision-making processes, and along the way they may also remove the need for some humans in these processes. Company leaders will see this development as a way to achieve higher efficiency, but will have to find the golden path between the human workforce and the cold efficiency of smart and learning machines.
Seventh prediction: By 2024, at least ten percent of the activities that carry a potential risk to human life will inevitably involve the use of a smart system.
The reasons are self-evident. There really is no need to add to this prediction.
Eighth prediction: By 2020, a large proportion of knowledge workers will find their careers disrupted by smart machines in both positive and negative ways.
Gartner believes that smart machines will disrupt the work path of most people in the knowledge industries by 2020. These smart machines will be able to learn new jobs and perform them better than humans through machine learning algorithms. They will operate autonomously - that is, without constant human intervention - and will be able to learn to re-adapt to the environment. They will learn from the results of their activities and develop new and improved laws that will allow them to work better and propose new theories. They will be able to identify new and unique situations better than the humans who operate them. And those who did not know how to work with them, will find themselves at a significant disadvantage.
Does this mean we all need to learn programming? Not necessarily, due to the ninth forecast.
Ninth prediction: By 2017, ten percent of computers will be 'learning' computers.
What are learning computers? These are computers that receive as input a very large amount of information, and invest a relatively low amount of energy to identify complicated repeating patterns and patterns in the information. In this way, the computers will be able to start learning new tasks and crafts even without guidance from an experienced programmer.
But where will all this information come from?
The Internet of things
Gartner's latest forecasting area deals with the "Internet of Things". If until the end of the 2013s the Internet mainly connected bulky computers, and in XNUMX it also connects smartphones, then in the next decade the Internet will also begin to spread to the everyday objects we use: washing machines, border crossing gates, the clothes we wear and even trees and bridges and the ground. All of these will be packed with tiny sensors that will transmit information to large servers. And all this information will, of course, go to the learning computers. The entire world will inherit the Internet of Things, and information will flow between humans and inanimate objects that will respond to their wishes as if they were alive. It will be the networked world, the living world, the world that never stops transmitting information.
All these data will provide the one who controls them a huge advantage. When the municipality can receive non-stop information from sensors embedded in bridges and buildings, it is also able to know in advance when cracks begin to form in them that will lead to their collapse within a few hours. When the physiological data (heart rate, blood pressure, sugar level, mental state, etc.) of each person are transmitted to the computer every minute thanks to the tiny sensors he wears, it is possible to investigate medical diseases at an infinitely higher level than what exists today - and to treat them as soon as possible. And of course, it will also be possible to sell them exactly the goods and objects that will meet their needs. And this is Gartner's latest forecast.
Tenth and final prediction: By 2020, the information obtained from wearable devices will drive five percent of the sales of the thousand largest American companies.
The world is changing
These, then, are Gartner's predictions. These are predictions for a better world: a world in which computers perform certain tasks with much higher efficiency than humans, and are "power multipliers" that allow a few people to perform tasks that previously required the involvement of many. This is a world where everyone can use their talent and imagination to design new devices and devices with XNUMXD printers, and sell them through a digital business that can be easily launched on the Internet. This is a world where injuries and diseases can be treated by transplanting tissues printed for the individual. This is a world where information flows from every bone on the street and from every bone in the body.
In short, this is the world I would like to live in in the future. And this is also the world that I personally believe we are moving towards.
At the same time, it is also important to consider the less pleasant aspects of the future world, which we would like to mitigate through proper conduct. XNUMXD printers will find it difficult to enforce copyright laws, and the laws themselves may need to be changed to deal with the new situation. The information that will come from wearable computing may leave us without a hint of privacy in the eyes of the law, the industry and the neighbors. And the computers that will make people's work easier, may also leave many jobless in a short time. All these are problems and difficulties that we must start thinking about how to solve them right here and now, so that we will have proposals for solutions when we reach the future.
And maybe... not?
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As I take pains to emphasize in my book and in every lecture I give, it is impossible to know for sure what will happen in the future. At most, we can guess how trends we observe today will develop. The predictions of Gartner's experts are based on their assumption that the trends will continue to develop in the same direction as they have moved to date. And if they change? So surely some of the predictions will also be disproved.
The scoffers will get up at this point and ask to break the dishes. "What is the point of an apparent prediction, if we cannot give confidence in the predictions?" will ask To this we can only answer that every company and every country must always prepare for the future in order to understand where they should invest their money and resources in the present. Because of this, even educated guesses about the way current trends will develop are of great value.
To spice things up and encourage healthy skepticism, here are some past Gartner predictions and recommendations that failed miserably. I leave it to the astute readers to decide how much their current predictions can be trusted as well.
- Forecast from 2004: HP and IBM will leave the personal computer market. It hasn't happened yet.
- Recommendation from 2006: Apple should leave the hardware business ("Bye bye, iPhone!").
- Forecast from 2012: Windows Phone will take over the smartphone market. We're still waiting.
You can read the article (with additional photos and links) on the "Other Science" blog site
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XNUMXD printing is a relatively new and still immature technology. Beyond the printing of plastic materials to which the public is exposed, pioneering work has been going on for years in the printing of various metals and ceramic materials. This technology has many potential applications - it can address complex engineering problems that existing manufacturing methods have never adequately addressed. The addition of XNUMXD printing to the traditional methods, i.e.: casting, rolling, machining, forging, sintering, pressing-sintering, and the other derivatives of all the methods - is welcome.
Connects to what Gilgamesh wrote
A XNUMXD printer, especially those that will have the ability to combine several materials together, will be complex and expensive
It is possible that houses will have printers that can create the simplest things and some of them will be more artistic, etc.
But in the final calculation, their product will be very expensive compared to the total mass production of XNUMXD printers that are producing all day and that's how they recover their price.
refers to the paragraph:
"But they will have to find the golden path between the human workforce and the cold efficiency of the smart and learning machines", well that won't happen, the golden path is where the money is found and where the industry will be,
Manpower, the human resource, these are beautiful words to create the conditions for man so that he continues to be productive,
But as soon as it is possible to reduce costs, a different method is used, the kick method
flew out of the factory gates,
Just as the tariffs and barriers between countries collapsed and a large part of the industry moved to the far East from the West, so no one will be able to stop it, it's very simple as soon as the competitor is more efficient he will sell more, it's competition and no one can stay behind otherwise he will disappear, who will buy a car that costs more 2x to support human brotherhood,
And delay it, the future is robotic and it's happening like lego blocks one after the other, you see it in the industry,
Systems are becoming more dynamic (it's still a bit difficult to call them a robot even though that's what they are called and look like)
At the same time, artificial vision is developing as smarter trackers that are based on the analysis of an image coming from a camera
When these 2 systems meet the sophisticated feedbacks and the dynamic system includes a more dynamic logic
We get a robot, you can't always put your finger on it and say here is a packaging machine and there is already a robot here,
And there is definitely the singular number and it is an example in the industry where the technologists are with the managers
The company recognizes that there is a system that has already matured and provides them with a solution at a competitive price
For an application that has been the property of man until now, it takes a few years for companies to figure it out
And everyone is moving to the new technology and it will not disappear,
It has another interesting aspect and it is for the 3rd world that will no longer be able to enjoy cheap manpower
There will be no advantage in moving production to another place when it can be produced in a company with dynamic robots with the suppliers
Crazy people that no human can compare to, there is no need to worry about China because it will also be a technological leader at this stage
But countries like Bangladesh that make clothes from sewing and all that could be made again in the West by robots
It will take another 30-40 years, but you can already see the first steps of the robots today,
This will probably be the century of the robots, where we will end up in this whole story is not clear,
We look more like a wave rider than one navigating our way in complete control.
On copyright infringement using XNUMXD printers:
There are very few products that can be included in this category: these will be products that are produced without finishing processes, with limited assembly processes, and with a limited variety of materials. Furthermore, even if the mechanization improves (in my opinion: no way) it will not be possible to get a product equivalent to the products produced in mass production. Not in quantity, not in quality, doubtless in features, not at the same time, and not even in money.
In this respect, even if a brave new generation of replicators arises - it will always be worthwhile to purchase a designer shirt, or a screwdriver, or a car, or a health snack from a well-known manufacturer, without any real fear of his copyrights.
Already their first forecast sounds loose to me. XNUMXD printing is not a movie or song or software that can be copied at zero cost. Just like we don't see people printing books. In fact, it seems to me that for a few geeks to talk, XNUMXD printers will remain only in the industrial sector and will not be wanted in every home
Why is there never any reference to global warming, population density, limited resources that will eventually become very, very expensive (or alternatively new energy?)
I really liked the idea of changing the shape of the economy... I heard about it even when I was a small child 15 years ago...
But still, it seems that a lot is needed in order for there to be a revolution even though it is certainly possible to see that the current method is outdated, does not fit the modern product at all and creates a terrible injustice.
I will give this revolution another fifty years and not ten (but I hope that I will confess and there will be no need for it, and that the system will be replaced by the authorities with the understanding that this is what is right for the people)