A whole lot more than AI… Emerging Technologies are changing everything we do for the better

So, what’s new?…well quite a lot, actually. Obviously, there’s AI…although that’s been promising a lot and delivering little for years now, with all its talk of generating content that “chimes with human preferences”, but so what? My children write things that chime with my preferences all the time: things like letting me sleep through a football game or putting an order together for the next take-away. But neither is the next best thing. And if I hear or read one more person grouching that these Newswires bear the suspicious hallmarks of Chat GPT…well, I won’t answer for the consequences. What I’m writing, what I’ve always written, is individually crafted, stroke by stroke, tapped out on my long-suffering laptop…AI isn’t even in the room, let alone its much uglier GPT brother. No, let’s forget about AI for a moment, just like Apple seems to have done…at the iPhone 16 launch this week, la Pomme were at pains to stress AI wouldn’t be on any of its devices this year, which might just be a good thing for my children (and me) given the new model’s starting price is £610. My first house cost £2,175…

No, let’s instead do a deep dive beneath the headlines. Unlike the latest iPhone morph, emerging technologies are a constant, and to say we’re living in fast-moving times has to be the understatement of the new millennium. All those rapidly evolving trends have to be throwing up something better than new ways of packaging human preferences and writing fast food orders…and you’ll be happy to know that’s exactly what they’ve been doing.

Quantum Computing

Take, for example, Quantum Computing, which is the digital equivalent of a turbocharger: leveraging the (to me) magical and mysterious properties of quantum mechanics to deliver processed data at a rate unimaginable three months ago (when Rishi Sunak was still trying to work out how to unfurl his umbrella). It can significantly speed up the rate of new pharmaceutical discoveries by seamlessly simulating molecular structures, and if you think that’s a little recondite, remember how we were all wishing so hard to discover a vaccine for COVID-19 just three short years ago. Quantum Computing can deal with that in a heartbeat. And it can break seemingly intractable codes and conundrums too, which is why the US Department of Energy has just announced $65 Million of new funding for ten separate quantum computing projects…and they’re not exactly the kind of institution notorious for wasting money, still less for forgetting to put their finger on the future’s pulse.

Quantum computing is likely to revolutionise the way we go about solving complex, multi-dimensional problems in the future: problems that are currently way beyond the “understanding” of today’s supercomputers (addressing COVID-19 is only one but a readily understandable example of what that can mean in practice). This is the archetypal brave new world, and that’s what it’s going to look like.

5G and so much more

On a more day-to-day level, 5G is set to expand too, with ever faster downloads and more stable connections, making banking for all a practical possibility, which might not sound much if you live in Greenwich or Greenwich Village, but it means the earth (often literally) if you live in Sub Saharan Africa or the vast hinterland of the Indian Subcontinent, where remote banking facilities are still a vague ambition rather than a practical reality. If we’re going to harness the full potential of our fellow citizens across the globe, giving them a bank account that works is the best start. And for those still labouring away in the harsh, remote regions of the earth, new Agricultural Biotechnologies are a good start, too: deploying increased resistance to blight and disease and making best use of gene editing to counter drought and other environmental threats. They sound like sci-fi, space-age creations, but to those on the ground, they’re a matter of life and death.

And then, of course, we have Green Energy Technologies and Sustainable Tech, with a focus on solar power, energy preservation, wind power and bioenergy: together spearheading the fight against a climate crisis of potentially cataclysmic proportions. 

So, yes…there is indeed a lot more to emerging technologies than AI and Chat GPT. A whole lot more…

Executive Overview

What’s new…well, it’s a lot more than AI and Chat GPT.