Modern technology seems to show no signs of slowing down its development. It keeps making people’s lives easier by offering new ways of organizing, operating, and strategizing.
In the modern world, technology is a necessity that ensures one’s competitive advantage. Businesses and organizations utilize current tech capabilities to succeed by staying relevant and sustainable. In this piece, we have gathered modern technologies that are here to upend the way we live in 2021.
Artificial Intelligence
Although AI has already experienced its share of popularity in the past decade, it still remains one of the major technologies used in 2021. That is due to the new, early trends in its application in different industries and its notable impact on how we live, work, and entertain. Currently, AI is famous for its advanced abilities in image and voice recognition, which has gifted us high-precision navigation apps, digital personal assistants, ride-hailing and delivery apps, and much more.
In terms of future perspectives, AI is expected to be used in interactions analysis with the purpose of identifying connections and insights to aid in demand prediction for services like healthcare. This will allow authorities to improve decision-making when it comes to resource utilization and to track customer behavior patterns by analyzing data in near real-time. Such an approach to data processing will not only increase revenues but also improve personalized customer experience.
One of the biggest industries that rip the benefits of AI in 2021 is agriculture. Different AI-powered tools leverage various algorithms for ag monitoring, enabling farmers to manage their fields remotely, based on accurate and relevant analyzed data. It’s critical for modern agriculture due to the growing population and hence higher food demand. AI helps growers to satisfy this demand thanks to smart decision-making and higher yields while using the same or even fewer resources in production.
Robotic Process Automation
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology aimed at workplace automation by freeing a person from repetitive routine tasks using AI and Machine Learning algorithms.
The main difference of RPA technology from traditional business automation solutions is the imitation of human actions. Robots or software interact with a variety of tools to perform time-consuming tasks. But these are not physical machines. In simple terms, you could call them digital bots. For example, they can send out automatic responses to simple customer inquiries, perform transaction processing, analog input, and more.
Although it may seem that RPA is a threat to a job market, depriving people of their jobs, this technology is actually creating new jobs while altering the old ones. Besides, only a very small percentage of occupations can be automated completely, and a little more than half can be automated partially. On top of that, RPA offers new career opportunities for AI and ML developers, consultants, solution architects, project managers, and business analysts, which are also well-paid jobs.
Data Trusts
The issue of numerous cyberattacks is relatable to many organizations. Such attacks are the consequences of poor data stewardship: storing personal and work data in public cloud storage, logging into corporate services from home laptops, and neglecting cybersecurity technology.
Since practice shows that users themselves are not able to ensure the safety of their data, this should be done by special structures – data trusts. The trust will be fully legally responsible and will only act in the best interest of the user, similar to a Swiss bank. All user information will be securely stored in such a trust, and online services will be accessed only on the terms of the owner.
Global Navigation System
GPS is nothing new in the modern world. But GPS technology allows for only 5 to 10 meters accuracy. New, hyper-accurate positioning technologies provide accuracies within a few centimeters or even millimeters, offering new high-precision navigation possibilities for various industries.
The most renowned of such hyper-accurate global navigation systems is China’s BeiDou. It provides positioning accuracy of up to 1.5 meters to anyone in the world. Besides, since GPS was originally developed for use in military operations, it is still under control of the US military, which prevents many other countries from relying on this navigation system. The presence of a satellite navigation system is very important given the current geopolitical and economic situation in the world. BeiDou aims to provide more accurate positioning services and possess a bigger number of satellites compared to GPS.
Quantum Computing
Quantum computers are fundamentally different from ordinary computers: they process information much faster and have significantly more memory, and store data. That is because they operate based on quantum bits (qubits) instead of bits. Experimental prototypes of quantum computers are already able to solve some issues faster than the most powerful supercomputers. Such machines can be used to create new drugs, composite materials stronger than titanium and lighter than plastic, achieve absolute encryption security, or develop universal artificial intelligence.
Quantum computing technology is based on quantum phenomena like superposition and quantum entanglement, enabling monitoring, analysis and action on data regardless of the source. Quantum computing is already applied in banking and finance (credit risk management, fraud detection, high-frequency trading).
Lithium-metal Batteries
Although electric vehicles become more and more popular each year, they’re still relatively expensive and require recharge too frequently. These drawbacks are due to the limitations of lithium-ion batteries. A possible solution is the use of new lithium-metal batteries that can be rapidly recharged and could increase the range of an electric vehicle by 80%.
For now, such batteries are still just a prototype and are much smaller than required for a car. But if lithium-metal batteries succeed, they could finally make electric cars accessible to millions of consumers.
GPT-3
Just like its predecessors (GPT-1 and GPT-2), GPT-3 is built on the “transformer” architecture with the purpose of automatic text generation. The main function of this neural network is to predict the next word or part of it based on the previous ones. Basically, it calculates the connections between words and suggests the most likely sequence. The model works on the principle of autocompletion. Starting from one or two phrases, it can instantly generate over several pages of text.
Now, GPT-3 can also answer questions about the text, as well as write poetry, solve anagrams, and translate. The algorithm needs only from 10 to 100 text examples to perform an action. The main task that the developers have managed to solve is to make the pre-trained NLP algorithm universal, which means GPT-3 requires a minimum of training data for each new task.
