5 technologies for the next five years: forecast from IBM

The singularity is near. We humans are bringing her closer every day.

Every year, IBM introduces "5 in 5" - technologies that came out of the laboratories of the company itself, which it considers the most promising for the next five years. This year is not an exception, the company introduced a new top five, which is worth reading in more detail. As for the previous forecasts - some of them turned out to be realistic, others - no, as it happens with the forecasts.

The “beautiful five” of this year includes quantum computing, microscopic robots, artificial intelligence, free from human prejudice, cryptography, and blockchain. By 2023, according to IBM, these technologies will allow to move far ahead in their development, so that the achievements will be "simply unseen." Moreover, the technologies in question will affect not only business, but the whole society.

AI miniature microscopes help save seas and oceans

Representatives of the corporation are confident that for five years, miniature microscopes under the control of artificial intelligence, connected to the "cloud", where all the collected data will be sent, will monitor the state of water in many seas and oceans. In any case, in the most polluted regions.
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By 2025, more than half of the world's population will live in regions where water is polluted. Somewhere stronger, somewhere - weaker, but polluted. We know that our reservoirs are not in the best condition, but not all the situational picture is available to man. The study of remote regions and relatively large depths is required in order to obtain the necessary data on water quality.

Already, there are specialized devices that can monitor the chemical composition of water almost in real time, as well as to study the presence of foreign particles. The problem is that such devices can not work independently, a person needs to constantly monitor them. Plus, if we talk about complex analysis, then it is not so easy to carry it out, and the main thing is not a cheap pleasure. Few of the representatives of business or government agencies will allocate huge funds for solving environmental problems.

But there is a plankton solution to the problem, which allows one to get by with little. Miniature living organisms are a natural indicator of water health. If something goes wrong, the plankton dies or its population decreases sharply. It becomes clear - there is a problem, the water is polluted.


The inventor of the microscope Tom Zimmerman is testing a prototype device

IBM engineers have proposed an original solution - to place autonomous microscopes in water, which will monitor not the water or the suspension of particles in it, but the plankton, tracking the movement of these organisms in three dimensions. In this microscope there are no lenses, it depends on the chip, which is in any mobile phone. The microscope camera receives an image of plankton passing through the holes in the chip. The data collected by miniature devices is transmitted to the cloud, where various parameters are analyzed, including the concentration of plankton in a certain volume of water, the speed of movement (which makes it possible to judge the health of organisms) and some other characteristics.

The microscopes will be controlled by artificial intelligence, naturally, its weak form. All this will allow to obtain data on the state of water in one or another region practically in real time, and the funds necessary for the implementation of such a project are not too large.

Cryptographic anchors and blockchains

Losses due to fraudsters cost companies from different business areas about $ 600 million a year. In some countries, about 70% of life-saving drugs sold in pharmacies are fakes. That's because the chain of supply of goods to the stores is quite difficult to analyze. They are tangled, sometimes intersect, sometimes they run parallel. Often, scammers connect to regular, legal supplies. Finding problems is not so easy, because global supply chains include dozens of individual suppliers from different countries. Somewhere, control is carried out well, and fake will not be missed, well, and somewhere it is not there at all, so low-quality and even harmful goods flow into the supply chain without any problems.

According to representatives of IBM, this can be avoided if we use the technology of supply control, including cryptographic anchors and blockchain.

As for the “anchors”, this is how the developers of the technology see digital “fingerprints” that are embedded in any product or element of the product. Such prints are associated with the blockchain infrastructure. The identifiers themselves can be very different, the main thing is that they are all associated with the blockchain and are registered in the supply chain when passing through any of the intermediate points. It is extremely difficult to fake such "prints", but if the product is deprived of them, then it will immediately be clear that this product is counterfeit.

Such a mechanism is quite reliable, because it allows you to control the entire supply chain, without the fear that someone will forge an identifier - with the blockchain, this becomes impossible.

IBM experts believe that the technology will be available already in the next 18 months, at least in the form of test projects. But in five years, all this will become a familiar reality. "Anchors" will be put on the packaging, medicines, computer parts and much more.


In some cases, these “anchors” will be highly technological and will be miniature computers the size of a grain of salt. IBM introduced such a computer, saying that it is the smallest in the world. The cost of its production is very small, so that it will be available to any company or individual (unless, of course, an ordinary person needs something like that). More details about the miniature computer have already been written on the GT.

Cryptography

Hacking technologies are constantly being improved. Of course, information security experts also do not sleep, but their work is not always effective. Now a big help is encryption. But it is not a panacea, because when using encrypted data they are still decoded. This allows attackers to access information in its “free” form.

Well, if quantum computers will still be brought to the level of practical use, then any traditional encryption will be simply useless. So for the protection of their data will have to use other methods and technologies.

For example, the so-called lattice cryptography. So called a way to build algorithms for asymmetric encryption using arrays. The search for tasks resistant to quantum computers began in the second half of the 1990s.



According to experts from IBM, these methods allow the user to access encrypted data without having to decode them. Thus, the information will remain protected in any case, there are no exceptions. And it is impossible to intercept the decoded data. An example is the study of the credit history of the buyer without the need to extract his personal data. The computer works with encrypted data, and there is no risk. The same can be said about corporate data.

Impartial AI

Not so long ago, Geektimes published information that Twitter users very quickly made a chat bot from Microsoft, based on AI, racist. Hearing about a chatbot capable of developing, users found several ways to teach him bad things and succeeded.

Actually, the problem is not so much in the chat bot, but in the fact that people teach AI based on data samples with problem elements from the human world, including racial, gender, ideological prejudices. Not every AI is trained on problem data collection, but it happens. Over time, AI-technology will spread around the world, and hence the "clean" data sets will not so much.

For scientists, it is imperative that decisions made by computers are not based on such problematic data. But to clear the information that is “fed” to computers is quite difficult, because we are talking about huge amounts of data.

IBM specialists have developed a technology that allows you to find problem areas in the information that is given to AI for training. As a result, an “objective” artificial intelligence will be formed that will not be able to contribute to the spread of inequality. Its appearance, according to experts, will help to make a breakthrough in the field of training other artificial intelligence systems.

Quantum computing

They have already been mentioned, but in the context of data encryption. Now we are talking about the fact that within five years quantum calculations will leave the stage of laboratory experiments and will be used everywhere by a variety of specialists.

Quantum computers are incredibly powerful machines that will help a person reach new heights of knowledge. They will solve problems that were previously considered intractable - simply because man and his machines lacked the resources to solve. With quantum computers everything will be different.

Industry, science, medicine - many areas of knowledge will begin to use quantum computing. Already, access to a quantum computer (prototype) can get specialists working in the relevant field.

In five years, such computers will appear in open access and specialized applications will be developed for them to solve a strictly limited range of problems. And, by the way, there will be a new category of computer technology specialists - “quantum system programmers”, if, of course, working with this category of computers can be considered programming.

By the way, on a quantum computer, we have already managed to simulate a chemical reaction. Namely, to conduct a virtual reaction, leading to the formation of a compound BeH2.

What's next?

Nobody knows. The technologies shown by IBM can either “go out to the people” or remain in the proof-of-concept stage. Nevertheless, the world does not stand still and continues to evolve. Along with it are developing technologies, which are much more than five. Perhaps some of them will determine our future?