Technology trends of 2018

                  

                

• There are now 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created every day, and 90% of all the data that exists in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. 

•  By 2006, the people of the world were doing 100 million Google searches every day- by 2018, about  4.5 billion searches a day--45 times as many--which shows just how far and wide the digital revolution is still sweeping the planet. 

• It took radio 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million users. TV did in 13. The iPhone? Just 3.5 years. Facebook took 2 years. Two summers ago, the Pokémon Go app did it just 19 days.

"The only thing constant in life is change," said 17th century French thinker François de La Rochefoucauld.

That goes for double in the tech industry. Today, information technology is capable of so many great things. However, we are not yet ready to fully enter the 4th Industrial Revolution.

In this article, we will focus on the modern technological trends that took off well on the market in the beginning and the end of 2018. 

MIND BLOWING TECHNOLOGICAL TRENDS OF 2018

Artificial Embryos

For the first time, researchers have made embryo-like structures from stem cells alone, without using egg or sperm cells. This will open new possibilities for understanding how life comes into existence – but clearly also raises vital ethical and even philosophical problems.

Rotman told me “Artificial embryos could provide an invaluable scientific tool in understanding how life develops.  But they could eventually make it possible to create life simply from a stem cell taken from another embryo. No sperm, no eggs. It would be an unnatural creation of life placed in the hands of laboratory researchers.”

Blockchain Privacy 

Blockchain-based privacy systems make it possible for digital transactions to be recorded and validated while protecting the privacy of the information and identities underlying the exchange of information. This means it is easier to disclose information without risking privacy or exposure to threats such as fraud or identity theft.


Growing Meat In Laboratory 

Would you eat a burger that you knew had been grown in a lab? Meat grown from cultured cells could cut the environmental costs of producing meat and eliminate the unethical treatment suffered by animals that are raised for food.


Start-ups like Mosa Meat, Memphis Meats, SuperMeat and Finless Foods have already attracted millions in funding, even though the production costs remain very high and taste-test results have been mixed. With the technology improving all the time, duck, chicken, and beef produced without slaughter could be on its way to a kitchen near you sooner than you think.



Augumented Reality 

Overlaying information and animation on to real-world images is set to go mainstream. While the technology isn’t new - many of us have used a car display with guides to aid parking or played the game PokémonGo - it’s set to take a leap forward in terms of sophistication and everyday use.


In the future, augmented reality will help surgeons visualize tissues beneath a patient’s skin in three dimensions and conjure up holographic-like guides to take you through a museum.

Zero-carbon Natural Gas

New engineering methods make it possible to capture carbon released during the burning of natural gas, avoiding greenhouse emissions and opening up new possibilities for creating clean energy.

Currently, 32% of electricity used in the US is produced by burning natural gas – a process which accounts for around 30% of carbon emissions from the power sector. 8 Rivers Capital, Exelon Generation and CB&I are highlighted as key players here.

The clean natural gas technology holds the promise for generating electricity from a cheap and readily available fossil fuel in a way that doesn’t generate carbon emissions.

Quantum computing

“Quantum computers promise to solve problems that digital computers have difficulty with or can’t solve. In the near term, they will be able to assist firms in optimizing risk portfolios, setting appropriate prices, building advanced machine learning applications and discovering new materials and drugs. Eventually, they may lead to a new field of cryptography, boost information search speeds, advance general AI, enable new disease treatments and help solve some of the world’s biggest problems.”


Gene Drive 

Changing genes knowingly can be controversial and often goes hand-in-hand with ethical questions. And while gene drives - natural or engineered genetic elements that spread through populations quickly - are no different, they offer enormous power to fight disease or eliminate species of pests such as mosquitoes that transmit malaria. Such efforts got a shot in the arm in recent years with the introduction of CRISPR gene-editing, which makes it easy to insert genetic material into specific spots on chromosomes.


Genetic Fortune Telling ( Genetic Birth Result) 

Huge advances are being made in predictive analytics using genomic data by players including Helix, 23andMe, Myriad Genetics, BK Biobank and the Broad Institute. This is making is possible to predict chances of diseases such as cancer, or even IQ, by analyzing genetic data. This promises to be the next quantum leap in public health protection, but also raises huge ethical concerns, including the risk of genetic discrimination.


“Genetic fortune telling will make it possible to predict the chances that you’ll be smart or below average in intelligence. It will also make it possible to predict behavior traits. But how will we use that information? Will it change how we educate children and judge their potential?”


Deep learning

“Deep learning creates digital neural networks that mimic the interaction of neurons in the human brain. Today, these algorithms are used to detect objects in images, analyze sound waves to convert spoken speech to text or process natural human language into a structured format for analysis.”



Electroceutical 

Could we cut down our reliance on drugs to treat most health conditions? Some say yes, with electroceuticals offering the ability to treat ailments using electrical impulses. One approach, targeting the vagus nerve - the system that sends signals from the brain to most organs - is poised to transform care for many conditions, since it has the potential to regulate the immune system.


This has been used to treat epilepsy and depression for more than a decade, and now looks set to aid sufferers of migraines, obesity and rheumatoid arthritis.



Babel-Fish Earbuds

In the cult sci-fi classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you slide a yellow Babel fish into your ear to get translations in an instant. In the real world, Google has come up with an interim solution: a $159 pair of earbuds, called Pixel Buds.

These work with its Pixel smartphones and Google Translate app to produce a practical real-time translation.



Internet of Things / Digital Twins 

The intelligent things are everyday devices capable of smarter interactions with people and the environment. These things operate either semi-autonomously or autonomously in uncontrolled real-world conditions without the need for human intervention.

It is a network of collaborative intelligent things will be created where multiple devices will work together developing IoT to its full potential.


Connected to the global web and combined via wired and wireless communication channels, things will turn into a one big integrated system driving a major shift in the human-machine interaction. The fusion of artificial intelligence with the Internet of things brings about new amazing technologies to create smart homes and cities.


Digital twins, which are digital representations of real-world systems, offer information on the status of their real-world counterpart. These representations can respond to changes or improve operations, potentially saving companies billions of dollars in maintenance repair and operations.


While most examples of digital twins today exist within the IoT space, there are a growing potential for digital twins to exist for objects that are not actually “thinks,” such as a digital twin for a human that offers biometrics and medical data to doctors, or a digital twin for a city, that could offer information to city planners about operations and maintenance.


Computer vision

“Thanks to the increasing availability of cloud-based computer vision platforms from major vendors and startups alike, the retail, insurance, market research and security industries are now taking advantage of the insights in video feeds, marketing content and other image data sources. These apps can identify customers’ age and gender for content targeting; analyze facial expressions to comprehend human emotion; and identify suspicious actors to reduce security risks.”


Sensing City

A new smart city project in Toronto, called Quayside, is working to rebuild the urban neighborhood around digital technologies. The project aims to base decisions about design, policy, and technology on data gathered from an extensive network of sensors, that can measure factors such as air quality, noise level, and human activity. The plan calls for all vehicles to be autonomous and shared. Robots will roam underground doing menial chores like delivering the mail.