The speed of technological innovation has left tech gurus in awe and much of the rest of society scratching their heads. Keeping up with all the latest tech trends has proven to be no small feat, but why keep up when you can stay ahead? We’ve zeroed in on five tech predictions for 2022, all of which are guaranteed to spark conversation and fill awkward silences during your next Zoom call.
No, we’re not referring to Optimus Prime, Autobots and Decepticons, but rather to technology that will be used to advance natural language processing (NLP). Transformers will play a vital role in capturing the relationships between words in sentences, helping machines to understand a natural language and thus turbocharging the ability to accurately automate language.
This phrase will most likely see a shift from buzzword to business requirement in the near future. AI continues to advance and intertwine with everyday tech, and AI adoption boomed considerably during the pandemic. According to a recent study by PWC, 86% of companies surveyed indicated that AI is becoming a “mainstream technology”, but the rapid adoption of AI has also spurred widespread debate regarding the present shortcomings and negative impacts of artificial intelligence. Ranging from AI bias and terrorism to accelarated hacking, these concerns shine a light on the much-needed policies and regulations that will become evermore necessary in the development of AI systems that are safe and trustworthy. Some headway has already been made to regulate AI use, such as the EU’s proposed AI Act and New York’s new law that mandates the auditing of businesses that use AI during their hiring process.
Data has become currency in the modern age, but collecting and processing data accurately is an extensive, expensive and time-consuming process, which has paved the way for synthetic data. AI-generated data that reflects real-world data will have a massive impact on AI development and implementation in the coming months and possibly revolutionise machine model training. Synthetic data will give teams access to domain-specific, high-quality datasets to test and train AI applications more efficiently and better combat poor generalisation and privacy violations.
Creativity is a uniquely human feature, but AI can provide the necessary tools to further human ingenuity and creativity through novel combinations, exploration of conceptual spaces and enabling the generation of intangible ideas through AI-powered transformations. In July 2021, South Africa became the first country to grant a patent to a creative AI system, named DABUS, for inventing a food container based on fractal geometry. Although the EU and US rejected this patent application, the legal recognition and protection of products invented by AI will most likely encourage further development and innovation of creative AI. According to Forrester, we can expect dozens of new patents awarded to AI systems in the year ahead.
Cybercrime has been cause for concern even before the internet; in fact, it dates back to 1834 when a pair of thieves hacked the French Telegraph System and stole financial market information. Since then, cyber attacks have become common, and with the increased sophistication of cyber attacks and the rapid migration of assets to cloud platforms, cyber crime will most likely increase further in the coming years. According to Gartner, the answer lies in incorporating a flexible infrastructure known as a cybersecurity mesh. Predicted to be one of the top cybersecurity trends for the year ahead, this composable architecture allows the best of the best independent security services to work together and improve overall security while moving control points closer to the assets each system is designed to protect.
To quote Mark Twain: “Prediction is difficult, especially when it involves the future.” Will these innovations take off in 2022? Only time will tell. But rest assured that if they do materialise in the near future, our trusty readers will be kept in the know.
Digital Marketing Specialist