The world we will have

Technology as enabler

Technology is an extraordinary enabler of innovation and enables comprehensive solutions that meet the main goal of innovation: to improve people's lives by generating value in the economic, social and environmental fields.

Whoever operates in this extraordinary context should always consider the set of available technologies as a collection of tools that, properly used and integrated with each other, are able to act significantly on the different areas of people's lives: simplifying the relationship between citizens and public administration, optimizing production in companies through digital transformation processes, improving and making safer working conditions or enabling better and safer access to entertainment content.

All of this, which might seem like a lot, is actually not enough.

We cannot be happy with knowing the technologies that are available today, the real challenge is to consider emerging technologies as important, those that will be innovative tomorrow and whose maturity is not yet enough for real use in the building of digital platforms, but for which we can foresee the impact in our future lives.

In the next ten years we will live in a completely new world, thanks to the enormous technological evolutions that await us.

Two lines for the future

Our relationship with machines will radically change, and this will happen along two parallel and complementary lines: the use of voice and the massive adoption of Extended Reality, all thanks to the enormous contribution of Artificial Intelligence.

Voice

Using voice to communicate with machines, as we do today somewhat timidly with voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa, will become the standard, and later the only way in which we will relate to the providers of the services we need, i.e. not just basic home automation, but true and complete interaction with heterogeneous external systems and service providers of all kinds. So we will move from the current 'Alexa, turn on the kitchen light' to a much more interesting 'Hey Siri, call the plumber and arrange an appointment one morning next week, but only on a rainy day because if it's nice I want to go for a run in the park', or from a simple 'OK Google, what will the weather be like tomorrow?' to a more useful 'Alexa, book the room and organize the video conference for the meeting on Monday morning, send everyone an invitation and agenda and get the coffee break at 10:30. Also remember the gluten-free croissants and decaffeinated coffee. The cost of the room goes on my cost center'. The level of interaction will soon become comparable to that which we have between human beings, because the improved natural language recognition component will be complemented by a better understanding of context and, above all, the ability to transform complex sentences into operational sequences of commands to be put in the right order and addressed to the external service providers that will be part of the ecosystem.

Third-party services will therefore have to be interoperable and integrated within that ecosystem, so that they can no longer be activated solely by the direct action of human beings, but also and above all in 'machine-to-machine' mode, i.e. directly by other machines that will relate to them in a fully automatic manner.

Extended Reality

The second line will be enabled by a new generation of smart glasses, intelligent spectacles capable of improving our interaction with reality. There are already a few devices on the market, but we are still a long way from what is really expected: being a significant leap forward in terms of technology, infrastructure, ecosystem, business model and availability of applications and services.

They will be devices capable of allowing us to fully experience what is called Extended Reality, the union of different paradigms of interaction with reality.

The lenses will become to all intents and purposes non-transparent screens on which video content, virtual reality experiences, video-games, as well as new modes of education, virtual tourism and experiences of a new kind yet to be identified. It will be common to see people on trains or planes lost in viewing content or interacting with social networks through their smart glasses. Unfortunately, this type of interaction will be even more addictive than what we experience with smartphones today, and this will be an issue to be taken seriously.

With a voice command, a gesture or a neural impulse, the lenses will become transparent and will add new layers of information and content directly superimposed on the vision of traditional reality, this will allow us to drive with navigator instructions directly in our field of vision, to automatically access information about a place we are visiting, a work of art we are looking at in a museum or a person we are talking to. When looking at a monument in a city, we will be able to get historical, tourist or other information, whether free or paid for, simply by having a screen in front of our eyes that can superimpose a layer of additional information on top of reality. During a visit to a museum, we will be able, for example, to buy the entrance ticket, make the payment, access the map of the museum site, select the route we want to follow, and use a comprehensive smart guide to the works. While shopping, we will be able to have our shopping list in evidence, automatically cross out products just by seeing them in the glasses' field of view and confirming them. We will be able to pay automatically, without even having to stop at the till.

What companies should do

Again, there will be a lot of work to be done for application providers who will find themselves with a completely new channel on which to deliver their content and services and, given the immediacy of interaction that these devices will provide, it is conceivable that this channel could quickly become the priority channel. We will therefore move rather quickly from 'mobile first' to 'glasses first'.

There will of course be new issues to deal with, such as the protection of personal data handled by these new devices, a lot of awareness will be needed that we do not have today.

In all the activities of our lives we will be helped by a digital assistant capable of providing us with information and performing tasks for us, an extraordinarily evolved version of the voice assistants we are used to. Initially we will find it inside our smartphones, but little by little it will migrate into our smart glasses, because eventually the smartphone will simply not be used any more. Some companies are already putting these assistants on the market and calling them co-pilots, in some cases helping programmers to write code, in other cases assisting in the use of productivity suites. This paradigm will be extended to all activities of our daily lives and we will learn to take advantage of these digital co-pilots.

We are facing a next decade full of potential, in which emerging technologies will make great strides and anyone involved in innovation will have the opportunity to invent new products, new services and new business models to bring to the market.

We will have many excellent opportunities to take advantage of this technological abundance to realize the true spirit of innovation: generating value in the economic, environmental and social fields.

We must do everything we can to make the best use of these opportunities and to build a better world, remembering that only those who work in this direction are truly innovating.

The future is full of transformative changes in the way we work, travel, consume information, maintain our health, shop, and interact with others.

My latest book, "Augmented Lives" ?? explores innovation and emerging technologies and their impact on our lives.

Available in all editions and formats on augmentedlives.com, and on all Amazon stores, starting from here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTRTDGK5