Now showing items tagged future

The tech world is off to a great start this year with the famously ground-breaking and mind-blowing tech convention, CES, presenting some breakthrough innovations. The Las Vegas megashow is known for showcasing the most futuristic and quirky of the tech world’s inventions, and this year’s event lived up to its reputation.

Here are some of the most promising gamechangers.

In years past, flying cars were the stuff of science fiction and fantasy. Developments of the last decade, however, are seeing the reality of this vision edge closer and closer. Unlike the fantasy and luxury imagined in our previous visions, the future of our driving cars serves practical purposes – cutting down commute times, enhancing efficiency and enabling contactless transactions.  

Buying a car has long been esteemed as a core milestone for people of all ages. Many of us fondly remember buying our first car, and we all celebrate the buying of a new one, turning to social media and friends to showcase our shiny new purchase. However, trends of recent and coming years are pointing towards a way of living in which celebrations of these purchases will happen less and less.

Britain’s first female Member of Parliament, Lady Astor, once observed: “The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change nothing – or everything.”

Perhaps the most common fear of teachers in a classroom is that of losing control. The fear of students running amok and dominating the room is enough to send many teachers back into the traditional authoritarian format, where silent and repetitive work is the key means of learning. In my experience of working with schools and teachers, the words ‘Project-Based Learning’ are often quick to conjure up these fears.

For as long as work has existed in the form we know it, the idea of a workplace has been a given. Work has traditionally been the place you go between 9 and 5, Monday and Friday, where the tasks of your job are conducted in the vicinity of your colleagues.

Recent years have seen changes in the workplace begin to emerge with the advent of automation and Artificial Intelligence. Working from home has become a viable option for many businesses in recent years as our capacity for online connection has increased and autonomous work has risen in popularity along with collaborative work.

Automation is a word that often strikes fear into workers who cannot help but feel threatened by its emergence in the modern world. Most of what we hear about automation surrounds the ways it will take our jobs and force the everyday worker into irrelevance.

However, there are many ways in which automation will work wonders for our jobs, ways of working and our economy.

In a recent address at the World Economic Forum, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau argued persuasively that the “the pace of change may never have been this fast, but it will never again be this slow.”

As another year draws to a close, it’s worth pausing and taking stock of just how much has changed in the space of 12 months - while recognizing that the coming year will see changes of even greater scale and significance.

In this 2019 Tech Trends Review, I explore the good, the bad and the bizarre. In other words, which breakthroughs have been most positive and hopeful, which trends are slightly more concerning (in my humble opinion), and which new technologies have been downright strange.