aRTICLES

The Future of Tech

by Amitay Yamin,
General Partner & Co-Founder

The term disruptive technology—the idea that innovation can significantly alter the way that we do business because of its identifiably superior attributes—has been around since the early 1990s.

With each decade, technology has progressively become a part of our everyday lives. It’s almost humorous to remember that smartphones, autonomous vehicles, AR/VR, and other astonishing innovations were hardly familiar to most people a decade ago.

Today, the world of technology is evolving at such a fast pace that it is almost impossible to keep track of these advancements. The years ahead will usher in a new technological era that transcends previous limitations and introduces innovative ways to integrate technology further.

No, we won’t be writing about flying cars or super-breeding sheep. What we will highlight are the top technologies where key developments will determine the scope and nature of our existence. Here’s to the next decade of innovation.

Cybersecurity

With the announcement in October 2021 that Oracle has created the first underground cloud computing system in Israel, a complex that extends over four floors at a depth of 50 meters below ground level, cloud services for banks, government, defense industries, technology, insurance and even retail just became a whole lot more secure.

Cybersecurity is the practice of protecting systems, networks, and programs from digital attacks. With the underground facility, these systems are also protected from physical attack. The growing focus on data privacy and the security of critical digital infrastructure has made cybersecurity a legitimate commercial priority.

According to a report, cybercrimes may cost businesses upwards of $6 trillion annually in 2021. Failure to prevent breaches will cause devastating financial and reputational damage through penalties and censorship, making cybersecurity spending more of a necessity than an expense. As protective programs become faster at responding to threats and more automated, i.e., less exposed to human error, attackers will have to work doubly hard to infiltrate secure systems.

Cloud Computing

Think of on-demand data storage and computing without direct active management by the user. That’s the essence of cloud computing—the ability to store and retrieve large amounts of data anywhere and anytime.

There are three types of cloud access: public, private, and a combination of the two—multi clouds or a hybrid (public-private) cloud model. Whereas private clouds allow businesses to deal more intently with customers and provide better options for data protection and development tools, public cloud access not only costs less but there’s no maintenance fees.

Within these frameworks, most computing services fall into four categories: IaaS (infrastructure as a service); PaaS (platform as a service); serverless computing; and SaaS (software as a service). The creativity of companies working in this space has already produced the advancement of the hybrid space, an explosion of SaaS, more secure connectivity, and containers that enable workload portability.

Perhaps it is the Covid pandemic more than any other factor that will push future cloud technology as businesses scramble to increase scalability and work with supply chains from a greater number of remote workspaces.

Financial Technology

Technology and innovation are competing with traditional financial methods in the delivery of financial services. This is due in large part to the advent of blockchain. Blockchain is a system of collecting, storing and transmitting data in an immutable and transparent way.

Blockchain technology was created to assist in the transfer of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, but has since proven its effectiveness in enabling peer-to-peer transactions that are disrupting the role of banks and other institutions and pushing us towards a decentralized financial system.

Hand in hand with crowdfunding and tokenization—the transformation of an asset into digital securities—financial reforms may democratize individuals’ access to investments and create an environment that will bank the large swath of our world’s population that is unbanked. As the regulatory cloud over various blockchain derivatives dissipates, the uptake of blockchain in the financial architecture will only grow. An excellent example is El Salvador becoming the first country to adopt Bitcoin as a legal currency.

Agricultural Technology

How is technology in agriculture improving yield, efficiency, and profitability? From software that manages your orchard to drones that can reseed Canadian forests, the digital age is fast changing the way agriculture is produced.

Here, the IoT, the internet of things, allows for a wide system of interrelated computing devices to share and aggregate data from, for example, soil and weather sensors, images from drones, and data on the size and yield of produce. With climate change as a backdrop, the agriculture and food industry is in the midst of a tectonic shift towards plant-based alternatives, particularly dairy and meat substitutes. In 2018, farm-based crop and livestock activities accounted for more than half the carbon emissions worldwide.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere becomes trapped beneath the Earth’s ozone layer, eating it away and leading to less protection from solar radiation and ultraviolet light. Figuring out how to minimize carbon emissions and minimize the use of chemicals within farming processes in general will be on the forefront of tomorrow’s evolving technology. From urine-based fertilizers to farm management platforms to autonomous tractors, it is exciting to realize that what we perceive as “normal” today may soon evolve into something better, faster and more secure.

Health Technology

Dealing with a worldwide pandemic has pushed the health sector to tackle a variety of unusual needs, and technology has played a significant role in possible solutions. For example, the use of robots to fully clean and de-germ a hospital space or the use of VR and AR (virtual reality and augmented reality) to provide patient updates in an understaffed environment. Technological advancements are being made in other fields, too.

It may be an understatement to say that personalized cancer treatments will alter dramatically the way individual patients are treated. Whether targeted therapy or immunotherapy drugs will best attack an individual’s specific cancer is now based on the individual’s profile—race, sex, age, weight, body structure being just a few of the nuanced elements that are catered to.

This idea of personalized care is bound to spill over to other diseases, too. Another area of innovation is in the use of 3D printing. What began as a casual and creative way of building jewelry or other non-essential objects has real potential to transform medical science. Healthcare professionals use 3D printing to manufacture products that precisely match the patient’s anatomy, including custom prosthetic limbs, cranial implants, or orthopedic implants such as hips and knees. Using 3D printing tools, scientists at Princeton University have modeled a bionic ear that can “hear” radio frequencies far beyond the current range of human capabilities.

An altogether different use of technology is how blockchain can track and consolidate information on opioid prescriptions, and on opioids themselves as to distinguish them from the illegal—and often deadly—counterfeits being produced and consumed. Blockchain can also help large health institutions share data and create interoperability without divulging patient confidentiality and without losing control over data ownership.

The technological revolution taking place in all segments of society today, be it how we work, what we eat, or how we care for ourselves, continues to transform the reality of our lives. Rapid innovation and intricate connectivity lead to sometimes startling ways of technological adoption. We can only ponder a world where cars will drive autonomously, where health consultations will occur online, and where a non-meat burger will be the new norm.

We say, bring it on.

November 2021