The Digital Hype of 2018 - Blockchain, AI, ML, Quantum Computing and the Prediction of Singularity

We live in a world of fascination and admiration of digital innovations simply because of the reasonable progress and innovations around digital has been very much scalable to humanity in a very visible way through the internet, unlike other branches of science.

We all use a lot of fossil fuel and continue to pollute without much hope for meaningful renewable energy replacement anytime soon!. No flying cars or supersonic commercial flights yet, after decades of anticipation!. No superconducting materials at high temperature to transfer energy without the huge waste or operate the quantum computer at room temperature! Just naming a few things that could have shifted our fascination to other branches of science instead of digital. Unfortunately, the rate of innovation in other branches of science are not happening with any massive scale of impact to humanity!!

Blockchain and cryptocurrency have been at the forefront of everyone as the next big thing!. It is indisputable that blockchain technology, with its immutable and distributed model, have opportunities to replace clearinghouses and bring verifiable traceability to all kinds of things in the digital world. But it is too far of a stretch to think that, 195 countries would sacrifice their sovereignty and replace the currencies and create a "world currency". What we know for sure from history is that the pride of sovereignty will never ever allow these ambitions, even if it is technically possible!. Just like any other technology, blockchain will have many use cases to connect and manage content and commitments across a broad group of people and entities and will eventually survive based on the real value!

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have been in the hype cycle for a while including 2017. It is very clear that we can train systems to do specific domains and use cases and get to a state of faster and accurate execution than humans. Well none of us should be surprised with this because machines are faster than humans in math and are not prone to make mistakes like humans who can get distracted by the context of execution in many ways!.

But lets us just examine some facts. After driving millions of miles and machine learning and AI, we are just able to create just first versions of partial autonomous cars!. Well, you and I have learned driving perhaps by driving a few hundred miles at max!!. Google image API has to be trained extensively to identify pictures of cats vs dogs!!. Well, I think humans didn't even have to go through a training for this...

I am not at all understating the progress of technology, but the talk of Singularity is very much a hype with very little facts unless we change the definition of singularity as a special purpose computer system which performs better than humans!!.

Thought leaders like NVIDIA have recognized the new market opportunity of special purpose system on a chip and perhaps make the autonomous vehicles and robotics a reality at scale in the next few years. But this is not the Singularity which some depict as the possible evil world. The idea of the self-contained system on chip which can learn based on simulated data(ML and AI) instead of extensive software programming is indeed going to open up the next fascinating time in digital and computing with real-life practical use cases.

In the corporate world, we are so used to live in this hype cycle with no sustainable benefit for a while. Even in this 21st century, a very small percentage of the businesses understands what is "technology sustainability" and are able to change the game and build things that are experience centric and sustainable. Majority of business leaders including many boardrooms are just addicted to "shining object syndrome" and create initiatives which are so hollow from a sustainability perspective.

In 2017, a lot of companies did Big Data projects and the majority used excel to clean up data!!. A lot of companies just moved servers to one of the cloud platforms such as AWS, AZURE or GCE and declared victory!. I expect the majority to continue these journey in 2018 and add something in AI, ML, and Blockchain!!

In spite of fascination and admiration of Digital, Unfortunately, the majority of the corporations are still in the "Information Technology Rust Belt". The majority don't have the will or the thought leadership to address the fundamental problems. Having just basic real-time business insights and a consumer grade, device agnostic experience both internally and externally at scale across the enterprise doesn't exist as the norm in the majority of the corporations.

All most all enterprises are just proliferated with products of the same "Rust Belt IT companies" such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, SalesForce etc. to name a few. Unfortunately, the velocity of change, these organizations can absorb is far less than the velocity of change in the digital technologies.

Unfortunately, getting out of this messy "Rust Belt IT stack" is not easy. It is indeed a long journey for anyone to systematically execute with extreme thought leadership, engineering and risk management.

But, we live a world with very little patience, hyper-fascination with technology and not much focus on sustainability. We all will be bombarded with marketing communications of "the digital promise lands" by technology companies and pundits like the years before!. With these, we will witness another year of hype between blockchain, ML, AI, Big Data, Cloud etc.

In conclusion, a majority of the corporate world will remain with the same digital divide between the personal digital experience and corporate experience for the many years to come!