What will be the game changing Internet technologies by 2023?

By January of each year, I,T media and consulting firms release their usual bets on the “new techs to come”. The list in particular focuses on tech that have the potential to change the game in business, work and society. 

Going through those lists (over 35 of them , from YahooFinance, Forbes, Inc, Marketwatch, MIT Technology Review, and the major IT services and consulting firms), the usual tech suspects remain:

1. The most common “three” ( those are apparent put on at least 80% of the lists reviewed) are: a) extended reality/metaverse ; b) quantum computing, and c) artificial intelligence/machine learning. (Our note: interestingly , the metaverse beats AI in the number of references, while qauntum computing is more an European lense than in the US)
2. Beyond those three high buzz suspects, come intelligent robotics, IOT and the cloud (those are visible on 65% of the lists reviewed ); ( Our note: those techs are not really new, but keep evolving and are the foundations of frontier tech)
3. Close to all the above, but less frequently quoted are cybersecurity technologies, then blockchain/cryptos ( Our note: given the lsits are 50% hype, crypto tech has surely suffered from the crypto winter of 2022, and from repeated scandals of the FTX likes. ( Our note: cryptos remain however in the majority of list reviewed).

Most predictions fail — so I won’t make mine. Instead, I’ll add five simple observations from checking those lists: 

1. If you take the list as “the one” and aggregate the market size around each of those technologies, the total amount to a market of more than 1,5 trillion USD yearly, growing at 13% for next year. While I would have thought the implied growth could have been at 20% a year, it is because some tech markets are maturing ( eg IOT), some have limits to spent (cybersecurity) and some are yet to expand (quantum computing). Given size and growth, the cloud remains king. This of course has to do with the massive adoption of the cloud by the business community, but it also clearly shows that our society cannot go backwards and will continue to virtualize. 

2. Along the way, it creates major opportunities, including smart robotics, but two “hundreds of billions of dollars” gorillas will shape the next few years, namely AI, and cybersecurity to counter the negative aspects of the virtual world (ransomware, fraud, intimidation, identity theft) 

3. Analysts above consider blockchains and the metaverse as important markets, but in reality they are a mix of infrastructure, hardware or assets/investments (e.g. crypto-currencies). The general truth is that analysts have very different defintion of those tech and their related universes, — but there is enough of clue among those lists, that the metaverse/crypto/blockchains will expand more in 2023, possibly in shapes not foreseen. And here is the trick: do not confuse the strategy posture of Meta with what the metaverse can become. Meta had reported ten billion of losses in its Labs divisioin by 2021; that same loss was built up in less than 9 months by 2022, making the bet of Meta expensive. One possible reason of the “flop” is that the full tech stack is not there yet, which makes it difficult to anticpate what people woud then want from a metaverse that they can not yet experiment. However, the early days of SecondLife have demonstrated the appetite of some to spend huge amount of time in such universes — and to cocreate early buildijng blocks of a virtual and thriving economy. Finally, the industrial metaverse in the form of digital twins is a segment that is growing at fast rate, (-often more than 50% a year if we trust analysts) — and has proven its ROI not only for recruiting, but for design testing, learning, and much and more ( have you ever tought how those twins will give lots of opportunities to build synthetic data for the real world?) 

4. By looking too broadly at technology and by putting a separate list, analysts and the media are probably missing the real substance. 

The first issue is granularity. As said above, metaverse is not a game changer per se in 2023. But it is becoming one in the digital twins segment. Likewise, AI has had a major breakthrough with generative AI. 

The second issue is that techs are especially crucial given their disruptive nature, not because of the size of spent. While we all know about the major advances of generative AI (DALL-E 2 and OpenAI), what is being overlooked is the versatility of content generation powered by deep learning algorithms, whether it’s images, text or video. These developments are game-changing because they would fuel the metaverse, change media and FAANGs, and disrupt ther recent thinking on the Future of Work. After all, creative tasks which were once seen as the true domain of our cognitive skills are becoming done by generative AI (note: 35% of coding is already leveraged by GitHub Copilot), and coders love it. 

The third issue is that a "falling technology angel" does not mean the tech will die, -rather it will consolidate. A case in point? the crypto-currency world. If it is in the midst of a downturn, it is also at a classic tipping point which portends a major consolidation phase ahead. The tech is not gonna die —witness the“fast and furious” DeFi innovations and the move towards proof of stake (and a significant drop in associated energy consumption). 

The fourth and final issue is that all those technologies are strategic complements- what happens with dgitial twins may revolutionize synthetic data and AI; what generative AI will do, will make the matverse more viable, etc. 

5. A final observation, raised by James Bessen, in his recent book “The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation”, is the “disruption” paradox, whereby Bessen argues that disruption no longer works at the top of digitized industries, because top digital leaders are consolidating super-profits thanks to the benefits of the exponential economy. 

However, a series of breakthroughs seen lately, may reveal a tipping point by 2023 and thus even more hypercompetition. One may imagine that a rebalancing is to come where a centralized internet may be challenged once more towards a more democratization of the Internet; Against Dalle-E, we see a culture of sharing with Stable Diffusion; initiatives like OMI or Mozilla Hubs are flourishing for the metaverse; and PKI is an open cloud initiative which may partly bypass the cloud consolidation we know . History reveals that after a “good crisis” (as in 2023) comes a new wave of regulation, aiming to make competition even more fluid. 

The tech world is always on the move and 2023 could be very exciting — (oops, I said no prediction).