If life had a tachometer, the needle would have been ticking over the last two years: these are times of unprecedented change and, far from slowing down, innovation continues to surprise us every day. What are the technologies that tend to revolutionize everything in the coming years beyond advances such as the Metaverse?

Artificial intelligence, as it continues to gain maturity, will remain at the forefront of these innovations that seem straight out of science fiction. In recent times, we have seen developments such as GTP-3, the program capable of writing texts that can easily be mistaken for one written by a human, or Dall-E, the social networking phenomenon whereby an AI creates an image from scratch from a basic natural language command.

They are still in the experimental stage, true, but they have the potential to revolutionize the business world: from how documents are written and processed to how a corporate image is created.

Improved human-machine communication will enable, on the other hand, the possibility of making a robot perform a function by simply giving it the instruction: «move that box over there», «deliver this package in a certain direction».

They learn more each time….

Algorithms are becoming more and more precise and learning methods are improving day by day. The concept of reinforcement learning, for example, proposes giving an algorithm an objective and having it analyze the context, the consequences of its actions and the possible paths to achieve the result. In other words, it interprets its environment, understands a set of rules and advances according to the trial-and-error model, receiving rewards for its successes and penalties for its failures. A mechanism very similar to the one used by the human brain to learn.

Another trend in this direction is unsupervised machine learning (UML): unlike traditional machine learning, it works without data training, but rather recognizes and marks unknown patterns to achieve more accurate predictions, since the limitations of pre-existing knowledge are eliminated.

The end of boundaries

The new disruptions are not only about the «what», but also about the «how». The emerging 5G telecommunications technology will take every other innovation to a new level of experience: no matter how complex an application is (3D, virtual or augmented reality), the user experience will be seamless in real time and wherever they are. Edge computing collaborates by processing and delivering data at the same point where it is generated and consumed, avoiding long transfers to data centers.

In the same context, but from a processing point of view, quantum computing is here to break down all existing barriers. One piece of information: a 216-qubit computer of these characteristics (the new measure in quantum computing that replaces bits in traditional computing), can solve in one second a problem that would take thousands of years for a current supercomputer. Work is underway to create quantum computers of up to one million qubits. Their power is unimaginable.

Quantum computing could play an essential role in the simulation of physical, chemical or biological processes to create materials or drugs without going through the costly and time-consuming processes of laboratory experimentation, in the anticipation of natural disasters or in the optimization of any business problem. At the same time, it offers a new challenge: the cryptographic systems with which the digital data of everything we do in the virtual arena are protected today, are tending to become obsolete.

If the present is surprising, the immediate future is fascinating.