EMERGING RESEARCH THEMES

We’ve been reading the technology trends articles that always show up at the turn of each year. These “portrayals of what’s to come” are perennially popular because trend spotting seems to come as close as you can get to foretelling the future.

And it’s not a lie that all these isolated phenomena—machine learning, blockchain, nano-medicine, robotic prosthetics, quantum computing, etc.—have come up over the horizon and are hurtling toward us. But after reading these yearly trends wrap-ups, we never believe that we’ve seen a convincing portrait of the future.

Spotting real trends is like watching waves break on the shore, one after the other, while remaining unaware of the deep currents and invisible undertows that cause this surface-reality. The specific trends change from year to year but the impact of the stories is very predictable. They always focus relentlessly on the technologies alone, whereas the real future clearly lies in the complex inter-relationship of many technological, human, business, and societal forces.

The multiple parallel technologies behind the trends have not evolved in isolation. In fact, they have grown up so inter-related and inter-dependent that they not only reinforce each other but create completely new compound effects.

This phenomenon is not just about the impacts of technology on people, business, and societies. It’s also about the impacts of people, businesses and societies on technology development. Networks and information technology’s most profound potential lies in its ability to connect billions upon billions of smart things and people in a way that will stretch the boundaries of today’s business and social systems, and create the potential to change the way we work, learn, innovate and entertain.

So, rather than focusing on “point” technology trends, we are highlighting what we like to call “emerging research themes” that examine the many reciprocal impacts that are occurring between and among technologies, people and society.

COMBINATORIAL INNOVATIONS

In his book, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, Brian Arthur introduced the idea of combinatorial evolution. Very simply, each of our technologies is a system assembled from earlier technologies. For example, the GPS and navigation systems we take for granted in smartphones combine the predecessor technologies of satellites, computing, radio receivers, transmitters and atomic clocks into a new unified and infinitely more valuable technology.

Today, multiple parallel technology developments appear to be increasingly reinforcing and accelerating one another. Cloud infrastructure resources are providing unprecedented computing scale. Mobile computing devices are extending the reach of computing itself. Machine learning and AI are bringing intelligence to diverse things, and embedded systems and IoT technology are connecting and integrating a broad array of physical and digital applications.

Each of these technologies is powerful on its own, but “catalytic” combinations of these capabilities are multiplying their impacts. Human-connected devices and machine-connected IoT devices enable exponentially more data. The cloud then enables us to capture, analyze and model many phenomena through its computational capacity. This in turn sets the stage for AI and machine learning tools to analyze and capture new insights.

Interestingly, the value of a new technology lies not just in what it does, but also in what future technologies it leads to. Every new technology becomes a building block for new innovations.

INVISIBLE BUSINESS AND INFORMATION AUTOMATION

Digitization, AI, and machine learning are creating an economic and business world that’s vast, automatic, and invisible. Information technology’s impact on “autonomy” is moving ahead quickly. Business that once took place primarily among computer-assisted humans is now being executed by ever more complex adaptive systems without human intervention.

Inside such systems, reliable and blindingly fast processors do what they are very good at doing (and what people are very bad at doing): digesting billions of data-points, interacting with each other about the data, and controlling each other based upon the state of the data. All in a matter of nanoseconds. Human beings cannot do this, nor should they. This incessant stream of ongoing data is becoming automated. Business is increasingly being conducted in an “invisible” unseen digital domain that is quietly creating a parallel economy.

The nature and behavior of this new invisible economy are concerns that have yet to really take center stage—not only in business communities, but in most governments and institutions, too.