The Seven Wonders of the Business Tech World

Just over 2000 years ago, Philo of Byzantium sat down and made a list of the seven wonders of the world at that time. Like any such subjective list, it was met with criticism in its own time. The historian Herodotus couldn’t believe the Egyptian Labyrinth was left off and Callimachus argued forcefully for the Ishtar Gate to be included.

At Gigaom Change in September (early adopter pricing still available), we will explore the seven technologies that I think will most affect business in the near future. I would like to list the seven technologies I chose and why I chose them. Would you have picked something different?

Here is my list:

Robots – This one is pretty easy. Even if you make your trade in 1’s and 0’s and never touch an atom, robots will still impact some aspect of your business, even if it is upstream. Additionally, the issue of robots has launched a societal debate about unemployment, minimum wage, basic income, and the role of “working for a living” in the modern world. We have dreamed of robots for eons, feared them for decades, and now we finally get to see what their real effect on humanity will be.

AI – This is also, forgive the pun, a no-brainer. AI is a tricky one though. Some of the smartest people on the planet (Hawking, Gates, Musk) say we should fear it while others, such as the Chief Scientist of Baidu say worrying about AI is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars. Further, the estimates to when we might see an AGI (artificial general intelligence, an AI that can do a wide range of tasks like a human) varies from 5 years to 500 years. Our brains are, arguably, what make us human, and the idea that an artificial brain might be made gets our attention. What effect will this have on the workplace? We will find out.

AR/VR – Although we think of AR/VR as (at first) a consumer technology, the work applications are equally significant. You only have to put on a VR headset for about three minutes to see that some people, maybe a good number, will put this device on and never take it off. But on the work front, it is still an incredibly powerful tool, able to overlay information from the digital world onto the world of atoms. Our brains aren’t quite wired up to imagine this in its full flowering, but we will watch it unfold in the next decade.

Human/Machine Interface – Also bridging the gap between the real world and the virtual one is the whole HMI front. As machines become ever more ubiquitous, our need to seamlessly interface with them grows. HMI is a wide spectrum of technologies: From good UIs to eye-tracking hardware to biological implants, HMI will grow to the point where the place where the human ends and the machine begins will get really blurry.

3D Printing – We call this part of Gigaom Change “3D Printing” but we mean it to include all the new ways we make stuff today. But there isn’t a single term that encapsulates that, so 3D Printing will have to suffice. While most of our first-hand experience with 3D printing is single-color plastic demo pieces, there is an entire industry working on 3D printing new hearts and livers, as well as more mundane items like clothing and food (“Earl Grey, hot”). From a business standpoint, the idea that quantity one has the same unit price as quantity one-thousand is powerful and is something we will see play out sooner than later.

Nanotechnology – I get the most pushback from nano because it seems so far out there. But it really isn’t. By one estimate, there are two thousand nanotech products on the market today. Nano, building things with dimensions of between 1 and 100 nanometers, is already a multi-billion dollar industry. On the consumer side, we will see nano robots that swim around in your blood cleaning up what ails you. But on the business side, we will see a re-thinking of all of the material sciences. The very substances we deal with will change, and we may even be said to be not in the iron nor stone age, but the nano age, where we make materials that were literally impossible to create just a few years ago.

Cybersecurity – This may seem to be the one item that is least like all of the others, for it isn’t a specific technology per se. I included it though because as more of our businesses depend on the technologies that we use, the more our businesses are susceptible to attacks by technology. How do we build in safeguards in a world where most of us don’t really even understand the technologies themselves, let alone, subtle ways that they can be exploited?

Those are my seven technologies that will most effect business. I hope you can come to Austin Sept 21-23 to explore them all with us at the Gigaom Change Leader’s Summit.

Byron Reese
Publisher
Gigaom