In the next decade, nearly 30 major technology profiles will impact society and businesses worldover. Understandably, health tracking apps will be a major determinant of movement within and between countries. China and India have the Health Code & Aarogya Setu apps that indicate a person’s COVID19 status; UAE has the AlHosn UAE app that uses a colour code to classify passengers as safe to travel via air.

These are classic pandemic response technologies, and feature in Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies for 2020.

This Hype Cycle highlights technologies that will significantly affect business, society and people over the next five to 10 years,” says Brian Burke, Research VP, Gartner. “It includes technologies that enable a composable enterprise, aspire to regain society’s trust in technology and alter the state of your brain.”

Here are the Top FIVE trends for 2020

• Composite architectures: A composite architecture is made up of packaged business capabilities built on a flexible data fabric, allowing enterprises to respond to rapidly changing business needs and enabling more resilience. A composable enterprise has a modular architecture that allows organisations to recompose during a global crisis. It works on four core principles – modularity, efficiency, continuous improvement and adaption. A comprehensive application of these principles helps organisations move from traditional planning to active agility, enabling innovation, reduced costs and better partnerships. Other technologies under this trend include packaged business capabilities, data fabric, private 5G and embedded AI.
• Algorithmic trust: Heightened consumer data exposure, fake news and videos and biased AI have led to the shift from trusting central authorities to trusting algorithms. Algorithmic trust models ensure data security and privacy, provenance of assets, and identities. This could also lead to the use of blockchain for increased digital authentication and verification. Other technologies in algorithmic trust include differential privacy, responsible AI and explainable AI.
• Beyond Silicon: Moore’s Law predicts that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit would double every two years, but technology is rapidly reaching the physical limits of silicon, leading to the evolution of new and advanced materials with enhanced capabilities designed to support smaller, faster technologies.For example, “DNA computing and storage” use DNA and biochemistry in place of silicon or quantum architectures to perform computation or store data. Although the technology is still in early stages, the impact of a successful DNA computing and storage option would transform data storage, processing parallelism and computing efficiency. Other technologies in this trend include biodegradable sensors and carbon-based transistors.
• Formative AI: Formative AI is a type of AI capable of dynamically changing to respond to a situation. There are a variety of types, ranging from AI that can dynamically adapt over time to technologies that can generate novel models to solve specific problems. Instances include creation of novel content to alter existing content. This technology could lead to the creation of deep fakes that can cause reputational risks and spread misinformation. On the contrary, formative AI could be highly useful in drug discovery and synthetic data generation. Other technologies in this trend include composite AI, differential privacy, small data and self-supervising learning.
• Digital Me: Technology is fast integrating with people – be it health passports or creating digital twins – creating more opportunities to lead to digital clones or versions of people. These digital models represent humans in both the real and virtual worlds. For example, bidirectional brain-machine interfaces (BMIs), are brain-altering wearables that enable two-way communication between a human brain and a computer or machine interface. In the business world, potential applications include authentication, access and payment, immersive analytics and exoskeletons.

Source: Gartner.com

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