The Covid-19 pandemic has brought technology and our reliance upon it for both business and leisure to the forefront. As the pandemic looks to rumble on to 2022, we take a look at the technologies that are set to build momentum in the new year and beyond.
1. Life Science Technologies
Of course the life science industry had to be the first on our list, this industry has seen huge innovation over the last 2 years as we’ve seen high investment in vaccine and testing technologies. This sector comprises of pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, environmental sciences, biomedicine, nutraceuticals, neuroscience, cell biology, and biophysics. Our reliance on this industry isn’t set to stop as the world currently battles the latest variant.
2. Networking and Interconnectivity
The expansion of 5G-6G and Satellite-Based Internet Usage will continue to be key as the world’s working patterns shift to remote-based working. According to Cisco's Visual Networking Index forecast update for 2018, 1.4 billion more people will be using the internet by 2022, compared with 3.4 billion users in 2017. This equates to almost 60 percent of the global population, assuming a population of eight billion by 2022.
We will see an increased focus on 6G in 2022, China already started researching 6G in 2018. By late 2020, the country had launched a satellite to test terahertz signal transmission. A Next G Alliance was started in 2020, with companies on board including Apple, AT&T, and Google. Korea, Japan, and some European countries have started looking into 6G too.
3. Security on the internet
As the world becomes more digital, we see increased numbers of personal and organisational cyberattacks around the world. Businesses have become more vulnerable to destructive attacks due to increased remote working and our security intelligence agencies are also detecting the heightened level of threat. As we explored in our recent blog Artificial Intelligence (AI), quantum computing and digital technology have combined to completely transform the way human intelligence is gathered by spies, presenting MI6 with major challenges in the digital age.
4. Artificial Intelligence
In a recent Forbes article looking at 2022 AI trends, Charles Fisher, CEO of Unlearn.AI said “We’ll see the rise of systems for efficiently cleaning and structuring data. Today, armies of individual data scientists at large companies create their own notebooks and manually work on datasets with no shared infrastructure or coordination across teams. We’ll see the rise of tools that will standardize and dramatically accelerate the creation of these data-munging pipelines.”
Where as Hadi Hosseini, Assistant Professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University said 2022 will bring “Conversations around ethical AI and ethical data analytics will attract more attention from academia and industry. Hopefully, this emphasis will work its way toward policy-makers and politicians. The recent press coverage on whistleblower documents about giant social media companies could help accelerate meaningful change in 2022. “
5. Boom of the Metaverse
If you’ve not come across the Metaverse yet, our recent blog explains this latest trend in detail. Essentially, Metaverse refers to shared virtual world environments which people can access via the internet. As the Metaverse expands during 2022 it’s expected to become immersive, universal, and free to access. It will be digitally focussed encompassing entertainment, social connection, work productivity, and behaviour modification at scale. Inc.com predicts it will create an entire ecosystem for developers, apps, ads, and new digital innovations. The metaverse will facilitate convenience, consumption, and a frictionless access to services.