More questions than answers

In 1972, American reggae and pop music singer Johnny Nash, wrote a song exploring the elements of what is life and how do we live, expressing that "there are more questions than answers, and the more I find out the less I know". Thanks to all fast paced tech advancements, this is exactly how I feel. And it is probably how you feel too.

Technology, indeed, has become fully integrated in our lives, and - Oh boy! - we came such a long way. In the early stages of internet, we had a group of companies that created a major infrastructure for development; then by mid-2000s we saw this new 'big bang' -- Facebook moved from universities to the world, we saw the arrival of GitHub, Android, AirBnb, Twitter (Jack Dorsey’s first tweet dates March 2006), YouTube consolidates as a advertising tool, IBM launches Watson, AWS provokes a seismic shift in the cloud computing world, and the most important, the arrival of iPhone, named by Steve Jobs as “life in your pocket.”

Here we are, on the verge of 2020 as the end of digital revolution. Most of my colleagues do not necessarily agree when I say that. But after seeing many speakers using that notorious picture ("how long to reach 50 million users?") showing that the mass adoption of digital jumps from Twitter to Angry Birds and Pokemon, what else can I say? Reality is, many companies still struggle on digitization path (and as McKinsey recently noted that less than 40% of companies truly digitized themselves), so this is not the end of the digital technologies, but the end of further advancements in digital. We are moving into something else, and this so called Fourth Industrial Revolution is a very humanistic approach, a real cognitive transformation.

A.I. will potentially make human and machine as parts of the same cognitive unit.

In the core of this new era, we see the advancements of A.I. & Machine Learning, Blockchain, IoT, Robotics, Quantum Computing, CRISPR and many others. And some of them excite us more than others. Look at artificial intelligence. Although we as humans nurture a mixed feeling about A.I. -- in-between of fear and excitement -- we are still far away from its full accomplishment. After the discovery of artificial neural networks (the major breakthrough) we have been seeing huge progress, but still operating under the paradigm of a machine that learns and “thinks” based on inputs. Progress is accelerating, and we are seeing more and more tools like Talos, Goodle Duplex or MIT Moral Machine. The combination of ambient computing and syntactic intelligence will definitely deploy the evolution and shape the new path for A.I., potentially making human and machine as parts of the same cognitive unit.

Blockchain is advancing and turning into a fundamental part of our world by improving or replacing intermediaries and re-writing some of the traditional elements in many market sectors, such as manufacturing and supply chain. Walmart recently showed results of using blockchain for food safety, by reducing the time to trace the source of food from seven days to 2.2 seconds (!). Asset tokenization, supply chain management, digital identity, decentralization of the energy market, distributed ledger for healthcare, and Blockchain for good are some of the hottest topics under exploration right now.

Robotics, once a frightening expectation (“robots will take our jobs, then decimate us!”) is proven to help improving human life, and actually can make us safer. We are now so accustomed to interacting with machines, we have started developing feelings for them, i.e. the viral video about robot Atlas being trained (or bullied). New experimentation with IoT, Cloud and Data are in development, as Predix and Mindsphere for example, elevating performance in industrial machines.

Now think about removing disease-causing mutations. CRISPR-Cas9 was discovered in 2012, speeding up genomics to a next level. Early and exciting days, yes, but this new advancement will represent outstanding progress on the cure of some diseases, and the results could represent a revolution in health care.

Which technology will have more impact in the near future is not clear. Like earthquakes, it is even harder to predict in which level different sectors of society will be affected (changed? improved?) and how we will solve some of the major challenges presented to our generation: will we have control over our data? How we manage the relationship between technology and ethics? Is the new tech a runway for diversification and inclusion? Who will mediate the conversation between things? And what about (as Yuval Noah Harari said) eventually having two brains, organic and artificial? Or becoming a cyborg, as per words of Shimon Whiteson? More importantly, will be possible to write a roadmap for the new tech ecosystem?

"There are more questions than answers, and the more I find out the less I know"

Here we are, the more we know, the more we don't know. One thing is for certain -- the elements of this cognitive revolution will bring far more impact than what we have seen to date. How companies and individuals will embrace this new world is a matter of curiosity and exploration, now the two core competencies. But before we get either scared or excited, let’s not forget the opportunity ahead of us -- as the future is still to be created.

P.S.: If you are interested in exploring how Blockchain is changing business and society, join us for Blockchain Revolution Global (https://blockchainrevolutionglobal.com/), April 2020 in Toronto :)