In a recent report, Predictions 2018: IoT Moves From Experimentation To Business Scale, Forrester Research predicts that the IoT will become the backbone of future customer value, the IoT infrastructure will shift to the edge and to specialized IoT platforms, developers will have a significant impact on platforms and initiatives, and security will remain a key concern.
A recent Forrester Research report, Predictions 2018: The Honeymoon For AI Is Over, predicts that in 2018 enterprises will finally move beyond the hype to recognize that AI requires hard work—planning, deploying, and governing it correctly.
But Forrester also promises improvements: Better human and machine collaboration due to improved interfaces; enhancing business intelligence and analytics solutions by moving resources to the cloud; new AI capabilities facilitating the redesign of analytics and data management roles and activities and driving the emergence of the insights-as-a-service market.
Kai-Fu Lee is very bullish about the future of AI in China. He started his lunch keynote at MIT’s AI and the Future of Work event by predicting that self-driving cars will become a mass phenomenon in the U.S. in 15 to 20 years. But in China it will be “more like 10 years.”
That may come as a surprise to many American observers of and participants in the rush to capitalize on recent progress in artificial intelligence. Especially when such predictions come from someone with the stature of Kai-Fu Lee and his deep familiarity with the state-of-AI in both North America and China. Lee completed his PhD in artificial intelligence (speech recognition) at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1988, worked at Apple, SGI, Microsoft and Google and, in 2009, established Beijing-based Sinovation Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znfOevNzjBo]
Read Kai-Fu Lee on China’s AI Revolution, December 2017 (PDF)
Driven by the rapidly growing adoption of smart speakers, the installed base of smart home devices in the U.S. will reach 244 million in 2022, up from 24 million in 2016, according to a new Forrester Research forecast. Amazon sold over 11 million Amazon Echo devices in 2016, and Forrester expects this number to double in 2017. Smart speakers, including Amazon Echo, will account for 50% of the total installed base of smart home devices in 2017 and will reach 68% by 2022.
In June 2017, the number of active phone connections (7.7 billion) exceeded the world’s population for the first time ever.
The judging panel thought this statistic was worthy of ‘Highly Commended’ status as this landmark was finally reached in 2017 after several years of dramatic increases in phone connections around the world.
It now seems astounding that, in 2001, more than half of the world’s population had yet to make their first phone call.
Sources: Statistics of the year 2017, GSMA Intelligence
Ten trends, which Forrester breaks into three phases of dawning, awareness, and acceptance, are setting the pace of technology-driven business change.
To help cybersecurity and privacy professionals prepare for a future in which their organizations will increasingly be held accountable for the data on consumers they collect, analyze and sell, Forrester Research investigated the current state of the 20 most important data protection tools.
Digital transformation has taken over the business world in recent years, upending incumbents while creating new opportunities for established companies and startups alike. But many organizations stumble in the pursuit of digital-driven revenues and operations. A new guide to the digitally perplexed, written by an experienced business technology executive, provides valuable instructions on how to successfully navigate the digital tsunami.
Driving Digital: The Leader’s Guide to Business Transformation through Technology by Isaac Sacolick is a timely, engaging, and practical roadmap to developing and implementing digital strategies. It shows how to make the culture of the organization more digital-friendly, generate growth through new digital channels, create digitally immersive and rewarding experiences for customers, develop new competitive advantages, and drive new operational efficiencies.
Nothing gets the Silicon Valley-obsessed media more excited than watching the online mud-wrestling of two tech titans, especially when the fight is over the hottest topic of the day: Will AI destroy our jobs or will it be a force for good?
It all started with Elon Musk declaring that “robots will be able to do everything better than us,” creating the “biggest risk that we face as a civilization.” To which Mark Zuckerberg responded that the “naysayers” drumming up “doomsday scenarios” are “pretty irresponsible.” Musk retorted on Twitter (where else?) “I’ve talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited,” and Zuckerberg blogged on Facebook (where else?) that he is “excited about all the progress [in AI] and it’s [sic] potential to make the world better.”
And so it goes. I don’t agree with the notion that only people who are actually doing AI can comment on AI and I’m sure both Musk’s and Zuckerberg’s understanding of AI is not limited. Like the rest of us, however, they inject into the debate their own biases, perspectives, and ambitions. It may help anyone interested in the question of what AI will do or not do to our jobs and civilization to study its history (you may want to start here), to look for evidence refuting what we believe in, and to assessments of the current and future impact of AI technologies that are based on relevant data analyzed with minimal assumptions.
Surveys, interviews and conversations with the people that actually make decisions about creating or eliminating jobs are an example of the latter category and they often serve as the basis for market landscape descriptions and better-informed speculations from industry analysts. A recent case in point—and recommended reading—is “Automation technologies, Robotics, and AI in the Workplace, Q2 2017” from Forrester’s J.P. Gownder (his blog post on the report is here).
Omer Schwartz
How secure is your smartphone? Do you know what you can do to help the hackers who increasingly see it as a desired and lucrative target?
Yossi Oren’s research lab at Ben-Gurion University in Israel is dedicated to exploring vulnerabilities emerging from this interface, “cyberattacks that allow the extraction of secret information from various devices by exploiting their precise physical behaviors such as power consumption, electromagnetic emanations, heat or vibration.”
Together with a group of foreign journalists, members of the press delegation to Cyber Week 2017 hosted by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I watched as Omer Schwartz, one of Oren’s graduate students, demonstrated what could happen to your data when you install on your phone a replacement part.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83VMVrcEOCM]
