THE DIGITAL eVOLUTION
Digital technology has evolved rapidly and growing exponentially over the last few decades. Here’s my perspective on digital evolution and what I see coming in the next 15 years. This is my first attempt @Medium on #Digital #IoT #AI #Autonomous #Mobile #OS. Follow @yashprakash
Then:
Technology that we know today more or less started with the invention of electricity and telephone a few centuries ago. Then came a computing device together with an operating system to become a personal computer.
Connectivity between two or more computers led to internet (or the world wide web), advances in wireless communication resulted in cellular phones
Moore’s law led to smaller and faster computing chips which resulted in the smartphones as we know it today.
Now:
As devices got powerful, cheaper and operate at low power, the connectivity became faster and free, making everything around us to be connected to one another (called the IoT). We now collect and save more data than ever before and save every detail in digital form. We have evolved to a stage where every single thing that we have built on the planet looks like a basic building block that can be connected to one another. Over the next 15 years, all or almost all the devices will be connected to one another in some form which is the true IoET (connecting Everything)
Analogy:
We as humans have evolved for thousands of years. Knowingly or unknowingly we are casting the same evolution curve on things that we build (both physical and digital). What I mean by that is by drawing parallels between what we have developed to how our brains develop
Computing & Networking: A human brain before birth, starts as a lump of jelly with neurons (neurons are those computational nodes that process one set of input information and outputs something). Multiple neurons connect with each other to form a network of neurons even before we are born. In Digital world — this is like one PC connecting to another over internet using networking technologies
IoT: More connections are established between neurons at birth and continue to increase as we grow older, in matter of couple of years. Similarly, in digital world, we have started to see the rapidity of how these connections are being enabled between devices / PCs and other electronic gadgets in the name of IoT (Internet of Things) and started to enable individual functions and enable new use cases (Smart Homes, Smart Cities, Connected Health etc)
Big Data: After birth, in the first few years, each group of neurons in our brain starts to evolve and build memories while it processes & interacts with external world. That’s when and we start to understand the external world and make intelligent decisions and build more experiences with time. In digital world — We have collected more data over last 1 year than we have ever collected in the history of mankind. We have started to process this big-data (relatively big compared to past but nothing compared to future) and are now trying to understand these data points to make intelligent decisions.
AI: New experiences, memories, and capabilities are formed over time in our brains as we grow over the first couple of years. We become aware of our surroundings, develop complex social & psychological emotions strengthening our cognitive intelligence — ability to reason. In digital world — The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) although known to researchers many decades ago, its now ready for prime time innovation for a variety of reasons; ease of data collection, faster processing of enormous amounts of data, cheaper memory costs and newer smaller device form factors that combines all of it together, making it much more manageable and usable. We have seen how some of the AI features have started to evolve. It has already started to redefine the users experiences with the digital world. Example: Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Assistant.ai, AI calendar X.ai, AI stock trading, Self-Driving cars etc.
In human terms, the digital world is probably just a few months old baby now ! Barely getting a hang of the real world and trying to collect more data and learn everyday.
Self-Awareness & Autonomous: An adult’s brain reaches a stage when its fully developed and makes us into personalities that defines and drives out actions and behavior. All the AI that we know today is very primitive, yet to evolve to a stage when it can start to solve larger / complex problems which we cannot think of. Lets take an example of cellphone to look at it further.
What is Next?
Let’s look at that evolution from a cellphone perspective. When cellphones came to market as ‘Feature Phones’ in late 90s, we had a handful of applications built into the device like Dialer, Calculator, SMS. Fifteen years later, we now have millions of Apps and we actively use over a 100 apps on our ‘SmartPhones’; our user experiences and how we use them has changed only because of touch screens, hardware and OS capabilities. Right now the Apps on our phones are developed by different companies and each app pretty much delivers a specific capability to users and dont talk to other Apps.
What happens when we have 1000 different apps on the phone ? what happens if there is a ‘Super App’ that uses these smaller Apps and is self aware and learns how we use them and help us in our day-to-day lives? Have you thought of how it would be for a phone without visual interface (like display, touch screen etc)? Basically no hardware/software capability of digital devices will remain the same as we know it today — it has continued to grow smaller, more powerful and take different shapes and sizes. We now wear smartwatch which is more powerful than a PC about a decade ago. They will continue to get smaller and powerful till it disappears ? or get embedded inside of us
‘The implantables will augment our biological functions of memory & intelligence making us ‘Super Humans’ in the next 100 years. Maybe ?
This evolution is bound to happen. And I believe innovation in OS will be the one that will dictate the future of digital world. A new OS comes and goes every 10–15 years. It takes various forms and shapes that define the evolution of newer devices and form factors; just how the feature phones and it’s dominant OS like Symbian started the downhill ride in 2007 when the touch-screen phones with iOS/Android OS came along only because these OS’ enabled new capabilities of touch screen and enabled us with easy access of information with intuitive user experiences on Smartphones. Smartphone industry has disrupted many industries in a way we could not imagine just 10 years ago. Many countries and billions of people now rely only on smartphones to connect to the rest of the world. We are relying on these devices so heavily that we don’t even realize how its controlling our lives.
Having said that, everything has a complete life cycle that follows a Gaussian Curve or Normal Distribution that rises to the top and falls gradually down. Every know OS has gone through that cycle.
Android and iOS, the two dominant OS that drive the smartphone space are on top of this curve right now and has taken over last 7–8 years to get there. There will be a different OS or a new avatar of the same that will start to replace them over the next 7–8 years. The new OS will fundamentally change the way people consume information of interact with external worlds. May companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple have invested heavily trying to identify that ‘Next’. The true winner will be that one that embraces AI to the next level. Furthermore, these systems will become ‘self conscious’ and will become an integral parts of human life.
The next best form factor in personal digital device will not have an external interface or a screen like we know today or even be a smart phone device that we use today.
Next best personal digital device will be just an artificially intelligent self-aware software (or should i say ‘Agent’) like an OS that we only hear and talk to — maybe? It will be something that will make us feel empowered and more capable but still controls us in a way that we won’t realize ? We are already in the Matrix now…. Singularity is inevitable.
