How will the technologies of the future look like? Nils Müller, the founder of TrendONE, doesn’t have to guess: he knows. He works with a network of 80 trendscouts worldwide, identifying the key trends in technology. During the M2M/IoT Forum CE in Vienna, all participants had a unique opportunity to travel in time to the year 2027 and see the world of the future. Robots learning how to cook from YouTube videos, face detection like in Minority Report, tiny Sony Mesh devices that let an eight-year-old create an IoT object – the future is already there!
Müller is especially excited about quantum computing and 5G that will soon turn the internet into outernet – the world in which the digital in irreversibly intertwined with the tangible world. Augmented vision or hololens are a part of this future. Imagine that you can discuss an architectural project together with a partner from Dubai while walking around a holographic model. A 5G network, necessary to ensure zero latency and high bandwidth, will be developed until 2020.
The second trend that will come in huge is hypermobility: autonomous, shared, electric vehicles such as self-driving pods, but also an innovative approach to lighting, such as drones acting as flying streetlamps. Cities will become responsive, collecting all of the data possible and providing us with 100 billion IoT devices until 2027. All of this data must be stored somewhere, that’s why the topic of the Cloud of Things will become relevant very soon. Talking about the devices: everything will be smart. Everything. Even your bra.
The last trend Müller touched upon was the shift from off-body devices, such as tablets, through on-body devices, such as smartwatches, to in-body devices that will make us superhuman (or, more precisely, Human 2.0). But smart implants or thought-controlled prostheses are just a part of this picture. We will also use devices such as the ili translator to improve our non-physical skills – in this case, to easily translate between 30 languages in real time. To top it up, humanoid multifunctional robots are very likely to take over the most mundane tasks. They will become concierges, the cleaning staff, gardeners, or security guards.
This future is already out there. We can see these technologies entering our lives at this very moment. And even though some of them are still expensive, hard to obtain, or quite unknown, they will be our reality just in a few years’ time.
