Technology is amazing and can change the world in positive ways. Take, for example, the breakthroughs made in life-saving medicine, or the new developments in industrial automation that save us from having to do dangerous work, endangering lives or simply wasting them. routine and mundane activities.
5 life-changing innovations that most people still don’t understand
But it can also be terrifying, whether it’s concerns about the privacy implications of computers and the internet, or more existential fears, such as robots taking over the world and creating toxic emissions and pollution.
But sometimes that fear and uncertainty is simply due to a lack of understanding. This is not always our fault. When new technology is first introduced to us, it is often more about selling it as a solution to our problem than explaining exactly what it is or what it can actually do. Interested marketers and salespeople!
Here are five groundbreaking developments in technology that have gone mainstream over the past decade or so. In my experience most of them are still not properly understood and can cause a lot of misunderstanding! I will try!
Artificial intelligence (AI)
This is probably the most commonly misunderstood technology and also the one that causes a great deal of anxiety. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t worry. But it’s not about building robots that will one day take our jobs or our planet!
The term “artificial intelligence” used in technology and business today usually refers to machine learning (ML). This simply means that the human operator doesn’t have to be explicitly told what to do, does a particular task over and over again, and can get better and better at a particular task as it is exposed to more. means a computer program (or algorithm) that can data. Ultimately, they may outperform humans at these tasks. A great example of this is his AlphaGo, a machine intelligence that became the first computer to beat a human champion at Go. Go is a game with more possible moves than atoms in the universe. This means that it is very difficult to program a computer to react to every move a human player might make. This is how it works. However, by teaching them to play Go and try different strategies until they win, they “learned” to beat humans effectively by assigning higher weights to moves and strategies they found to be more likely to succeed. “Did.
Until about ten years ago, most people understood AI from science fiction. Specifically, the robots in TV shows and movies like 2001, The Matrix, and Star Trek. The fictional robots and smart machines featured in these shows were generally shown to have what we call “general-purpose AI.” Be decisive and creative and perform the required tasks. Real-world AI (or ML) today is mostly what’s known as “specialized” (or weak/narrow) AI, which can only do the specific jobs it’s created for . Common examples of this include matching customers to items they want to buy (recommendation engines), understanding human speech (natural language processing), and recognizing objects and items spotted by a camera. (computer vision).
quantum computing
Most people can forgive this. In general, knowledge of quantum physics is required to gain a low-level understanding of quantum computing.
At a higher level, however, there are also many common misconceptions. Quantum computers are not just computers that are much faster than regular “classical” computers. In other words, quantum computers are only good for a narrow range of highly specialized jobs, so they won’t replace classical computers. , involves solving very specific mathematical problems. These problems include the simulation of quantum (subatomic) systems and optimization problems (for example, finding the best route from A to B when there are many variables that can change). . One area of everyday computing where quantum computing may replace classical computing is cryptography. For example, it protects communications from being hacked. Researchers have already invested in developing quantum-secure cryptography because of concerns that some of the most advanced cryptographic protections used for security at the government level could be easily broken by quantum computers in the future. It is working. But you can’t run Windows faster or play Fortnite with better graphics!
metaverse
Many people probably first heard the term “Metaverse” in Neil Stevenson’s 1992 dystopian sci-fi novel Snow Crash. And when the concept went mainstream in 2021 after Facebook changed its name to Meta, many articles saw it in the virtual reality (VR)-focused novel-turned-film Ready Player One. I linked to an idea that could be But the reality is that the concepts associated with today’s technology are not necessarily restricted to VR alone. And hopefully it doesn’t have to be dystopian!
In reality, no one knows yet what the metaverse will look like, because it doesn’t exist in its final form yet. Perhaps the best way to think of it is that it encapsulates a collection of somewhat vague ideas about how the Internet might evolve next. Whatever it is is likely to be more immersive, so related technologies such as VR and augmented reality (AR) can play a role in that. However, many proto-metaverses and metaverse-related applications, such as the digital gaming platform Roblox and the virtual worlds Sandbox and Decentraland, do not yet include VR. It can also build on the concept of persistence in many different ways. For example, users may use persistent representations, such as avatars, as they move between different virtual worlds and activities. Also, users expect to leave the virtual world and come back later to find themselves still in the same “instance”. This is not the case, for example, in virtual worlds, which many people are accustomed to exploring. In video games, the entire world can reset when a new game starts.
Once it becomes part of our lives, we may no longer even call it the Metaverse. It’s well explained by Apple CEO Tim Cook stating that he doesn’t think it’s going to be popular. But he believes that individual technologies that are part of the metaverse, such as AR and VR, will be part of the Internet’s evolution.
Web3
Web3, which is most widely used today, refers to another idea about the Internet’s “next level” evolution, but it is tied to concepts that include decentralization, blockchain technology, and cryptocurrencies. This is confusing because there is another group of ideas named “Web 3.0” proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, who is often called the father of the web. Similar to the term “metaverse”, both web3 and web 3.0 refer to what the Internet may evolve into. The ideas are somewhat related and not necessarily mutually exclusive, but each explains something different! Confused? Don’t worry, so does everyone else!
Specifically, web3 envisions an Internet where power and ownership are not concentrated in the big corporations that ultimately own the servers on which data is stored and software programs run. For example, large social network companies such as Facebook and Twitter have too much influence over public discourse because they will eventually be able to control who has a voice and who does not. Many believe that there is A decentralized web3 social network could theoretically be controlled by its users and act as a true democracy with the ability to weed out those who think it shouldn’t have a platform Mark he Zuckerberg or Elon His mask doesn’t exist.
A metaverse-oriented internet can run on web3 principles (decentralized), but it doesn’t have to. Similarly, the web3 internet can be configured as a metaverse (with immersives and avatars as key features), but it doesn’t have to. So these ideas are compatible, but not necessarily related, visions of what the Internet could be.
5G
With the advent of the new generation of mobile Internet technology, there has been considerable misunderstanding. This also includes concerns about potential health effects. Many feared that the high-power radio waves emitted from telephones and transmitter masts could lead to health problems such as cancer. However, hundreds of studies conducted around the world by governments and independent research institutes have failed to find any evidence that this is true.
There is also a common misconception that 5G is a single technology or standard implemented. We are currently waiting for results such as faster internet, mainly on mobile phones. In fact, 5G is an evolving standard. Most of the infrastructure currently in place relies on his slow 5G, which effectively “piggybacks” on the existing 4G LTE infrastructure. Indeed, “standalone” his 5G is being rolled out gradually, allowing it to reach its full potential in the coming years. This includes allowing more users to connect within a limited physical geographic area such as a shopping mall or sports stadium, which theoretically often occurs in densely populated areas. Connection issues are resolved. The real potential of the 5G Internet is not only faster data transfer, but also a mobile Internet that allows new and exciting forms of data to be transferred in a variety of ways to create applications that do entirely new things.
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