Technology is amazing and can change the world in a positive way – take medical discoveries that save lives, for example, or the new developments in industrial automation that make dangerous tasks and routine and routine activities save our lives.
5 life-changing technological innovations that most people do not yet understand
However, concerns about the privacy implications of computers and the Internet, or of things like robots taking over and harming the world—creating emissions and pollution—can also be frightening.
Sometimes, however, that fear and uncertainty is simply a lack of understanding. This is not always our fault, because new technology is often introduced to us by salespeople or businessmen who are eager to sell it as a solution to our problems, rather than explaining what it is and what it actually does!
So here’s a look at five technological advances that have emerged in the mainstream over the past decade or so. In my experience, most of them are still not well understood and can lead to many misconceptions! So I’ll try to give a super simple explanation of what each one actually is, as well as clear up some common misunderstandings I’ve come across!
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
This is probably the number one most misunderstood technology and also causes a fair amount of stress! I am definitely saying that it is not a cause for concern and anyone who wants to use it should be careful. But it’s not about building robots that will one day take our jobs or our planet!
As used in technology and business today, the term “artificial intelligence” usually refers to machine learning (ML). This simply means that computer programs (or algorithms) can get better and better at a particular task over and over again and exposed to it, rather than needing to be explicitly told what to do by a human operator. Data. They may eventually become better than humans at these tasks. A good example of this is AlphaGo, the machine intelligence that became the first computer to beat a human champion in the game of Go. Go is a game where there are more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe. This means that it is very difficult to program a computer to respond to every move a human player can make. Computers that play common, programmable games, such as chess computers, work this way. But by teaching Hid to play and trying different strategies until he wins, assigning higher weights to moves and strategies with higher chances of success, he “learned” to beat a man.
Until a decade or so ago, most people’s understanding of AI came from science fiction, and particularly robots as seen in TV shows and movies like 2001, The Matrix or Star Trek. The virtual robots and smart machines in these scenarios are shown to be capable of what we generally call “general AI” — that is, all aspects of natural (human or animal) intelligence — reasoning, learning, decision-making, and creativity — and perform any task they are supposed to. Today’s real-world AI (or ML) is almost always what is known as “special” (or weak/narrow) AI – capable of performing only the specific tasks it was created for. Some common examples of this are matching customers to items they want to buy (recommendation engines), understanding human speech (natural language processing) or identifying objects and objects when viewed by cameras (computer vision).
Quantum computing
Most people can forgive this. A low-level understanding of quantum computing requires a general knowledge of quantum physics, which is beyond anyone who has not studied the subject academically!
But, at a high level, there are also many common misconceptions. Quantum computers aren’t just computers that are much faster than regular “classical” computers. In other words, quantum computers will not replace classical computers because they are only good in a very special, narrow range. This generally involves solving highly specialized mathematical problems that do not come up as everyday business requirements. These problems include the simulation of quantum (sub-atomic) systems and optimization problems (finding the best path from A to B, for example when there are many variables that can be changed). One area of day-to-day computing where quantum computing is replacing classical computing is in encryption – for example, making data exchanges unhackable. Researchers are developing quantum-secure cryptography because of concerns that some of the most advanced cryptographic safeguards used by governments for security could be easily defeated by quantum computers in the future. But it won’t let you run Windows faster or play Fortnite with better graphics!
Metaverse
The first time most people heard the term “metaverse” was Neal Stephens’ 1992 dystopian science fiction novel Ice Crash. And in the year When the idea went mainstream in 2021 following Facebook’s name change to Meta, several articles linked it to the idea of putting together a fictional virtual reality (VR)-focused spin-off gamer. But really, the concept associated with technology today isn’t necessarily all about VR. And hopefully it doesn’t have to be dystopian!
The truth is that no one knows exactly what Metavas will look like, because it is not yet in its final form. Perhaps the best way to think about it is to include somewhat vague ideas about what the Internet will become next. Regardless, it can be more immersive, so VR and related technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) can play a great role there. However, many proto-metaverse and metaverse-related applications, such as the digital gaming platform Roblox or the virtual worlds Sandbox and Decentraland, do not yet incorporate VR. It is also likely to build around the concept of persistence in many ways – for example, users may use persistent representations of themselves, such as avatars, as they move between different virtual worlds and activities. Users also expect to leave a virtual world and come back to it still in the same “avatar” – this is not the case, for example, in the virtual worlds that many people are used to exploring. In video games, the entire world can be restarted when a new game starts.
Once it becomes part of our lives, we might not even call it the “metaverse” – just like nobody uses the word “World Wide Web” anymore. This is well explained by Apple CEO Tim Cook, I don’t think the idea will catch on because he doesn’t really understand what the “average person” is. However, he believes that individual technologies such as AR and VR, which are part of the scale, will be part of the evolution of the Internet.
Web3
Web3, as it is commonly used today, refers to another idea for the “next-level” transformation of the Internet, but is associated with concepts that include decentralization, blockchain technology, and cryptocurrencies. This is confusing because there is another group of ideas that is called “Web 3.0” by Tim Berners-Lee – the man who is often called the father of the World Wide Web. As the term “metaverse” both web3 and web 3.0 refer to what the Internet may evolve into. And although the ideas are somewhat related and not necessarily contradictory, they each express different things! Am I confused? Don’t worry, so is everyone else!
In particular, however, web3 looks forward to an Internet where power and ownership are decentralized within large corporations, where data is ultimately stored on servers and software programs are executed. For example, many believe that large social networking companies like Facebook and Twitter wield so much power over public debate that, ultimately, they can control who does or does not have a voice. A decentralized Web 3 social network is theoretically controlled by its users and functions as a true democracy. Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk don’t have the power to cut off anything they don’t think a platform should have.
A meta-opposite oriented internet can work on the 3 principles of the web – decentralized – but it doesn’t have to be. Similarly, the Web3 Internet could be organized as a metaverse (with immersion and avatars as key features) but, again, it doesn’t have to be. So the ideas are compatible visions of what the Internet could be, but not necessarily related.
5G
The advent of a new generation of mobile Internet technology has brought its own fair share of controversy. This includes concerns about the impact on health. Many people are concerned that the high-powered radio waves emitted by telephones or transmitters can cause health problems, including cancer. However, hundreds of studies conducted by governments and independent research organizations around the world have failed to find any evidence that this is true.
It is also a common misconception that 5G is a single technology or standard, but now we are just waiting to see the results, which will mainly be faster internet on our phones. In fact, 5G is an evolving standard. Much of the infrastructure currently relies on slower 5G, which effectively “piggy-backs” onto existing 4G LTE infrastructure. It’s true, “only” 5G is being rolled out slowly, allowing it to reach its full potential in the coming years. This involves enabling multiple users to connect within a limited physical geography, such as a shopping mall or sports stadium, theoretically eliminating connectivity issues that often occur in crowded areas. The true potential of 5G Internet is not only fast data transfer, but mobile Internet that allows us to transfer new and interesting types of data in different ways to create applications that do completely new things.
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