The Future Is Now (Better Embrace It)

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Futurists rejoice: This will be a breakout year for several long-awaited technology innovations, according to Jason Tanz, editor at large at WIRED.

No, he doesn’t mention flying cars (and don’t even ask about time machines). But Tanz did tell members of WIRED’s’ Emerging Tech Council earlier this year that 2017 “is going to be a year when stuff that has been in the lab or has been in the R&D department gets out into the broader world. Stuff that we’ve been hearing about and waiting for is finally going to become a consumer reality.”

Among the trends that will shape the immediate future:

• The American Way of Driving is Over

Uber has begun to roll out self-driving automobile pilot programs in Pittsburgh and Arizona, while small municipalities such as Summit, New Jersey, are partnering with Uber to extend their public transportation infrastructure.

“This year we’re seeing that you don’t have to work for Google or a car company or be a member of the press to actually take a ride in a self-driving car,” he said. “They are starting to become available to everyone in a pretty startling way.”

• Devices Will Always Be Listening

Millions of Americans have embraced intelligent personal assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, which respond to voice commands. But how will they feel about their entire houses being filled with intelligent, listening devices?

We won’t have long to wait to find out: Alexa software already is spreading to refrigerators, washing machines, and other appliances. Indeed, Amazon’s voice assistant was dubbed “the darling of CES 2017” by WIRED.

“It’s one thing to be able to open up a computer and interact with the Internet,” Tanz said. “It’s another thing to have your toaster be connected to the Internet. There are all sorts of dystopian conclusions that can come from that, but it’s going to be something that a lot of people are going to be very concerned about. When the walls have ears, who’s on the other end?”

• We’ll Have Genetic Superpowers

OK, not quite (yet). But human trials of low-cost gene editing technology — already conducted last year in China — will begin in the U.S. this year. However, while gene-editing tools such as CRISPR are being used in experiments to cure blindness and cancer, China has used it to manipulate non-viable human embryos, raising ethical concerns.

• Drones Will Black Out the Sun

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) last year loosened commercial restrictions regarding the use of drones. Now the FAA is granting exemptions on a case-by-case basis, which over the year will gradually lead to more commercial usage of drones.

The case for risk over safety

Technology author and Northeastern University journalism professor Jeff Howe laid out a “blueprint for embracing change” in a world where technological progress can be unevenly distributed.

Howe, co-author with MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito of the book “Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future” (Grand Central Publishing, December 2016) said through years of speaking about technology to companies and professional organizations it became clear that many people who “thought they were in the digital age” in fact were being undermined by their “habits of mind, which are very much still stuck in the Industrial Age.”

This inability to adapt has been exacerbated by the increasingly rapid rate of change. “Technology has outstripped our capacity to really comprehend it,” Howe said.

While he and Ito structured Whiplash around nine “principles” they felt people must adopt to make a successful transition to the digital age, Howe elaborated on just one: The importance of choosing risk over safety.

“People are declining to take on risk simply out of adherence to risk profiles that have been rendered obsolete by technological advances,” he said. “Our habit of mind might say making this move, making this investment, building this product creates such risk that we have to go through all of our traditional risk management steps, when in fact often things are so cheap to prototype, ideas are so cheap to float, it’s so easy to quickly activate a network of people that can fill in information and flesh out answers, where previously you would have to use some kind of command and control management scheme.”

Global logistics revolutionize manufacturing

Liam Casey, founder and CEO of Irish custom design manufacturer PCH International (one of the companies featured in Whiplash), discussed how he leveraged years of business contacts and experience in China to help his company develop agile product development and manufacturing methods for clients.

“Time is the most important currency, especially when you’re bringing a product to market,” Casey said. “With global logistics today, what we’re finding is that you can make a product anywhere. We operate on the basis that we’re three hours from all the factories we work with, and we’re three days from 90 percent of the consumers anywhere on the planet that buy the products.”

One of PCH’s clients (and another company profiled in Whiplash) is Lark, initially a maker of a sleep coach/sleep monitor wearable sold in Apple stores, but relaunched in 2015 as a maker of an AI weight-loss coaching app and a chronic disease management app for iOS and Android mobile devices.

Julia Hu, CEO of Lark, emphasized the need to focus more on a goal or destination than a route.

“I think it’s important to have a North Star — your intentions, your values, why you’re doing what you’re doing,” she said. “But how you get there, I think the benefit is you’re getting new information every single day, and it’s up to you as a leader to use that new information to push to the right path. So we haven’t pivoted away from our original intent, but certainly I think we’ve learned much about AI as well as IoT industries that have popped up.”

Which is another way of saying what Howe and Ito argue in their book: “Compasses” are more important to innovation than maps. Inherent in the notion of strategic compasses is enabling creativity, problem-solving, rule-breaking, and risk-taking, all of which are critical to developing emerging technologies.

Low-cost networks and computing resources, along with free and open-source software, will continue to drive down the costs of innovation. All of which means the future is going to be coming at us faster than ever.