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TOP 10 TECH TRENDS 2017 Now seven years into an annual review process, Kevin Bloch, Chief Technology Officer for Cisco has seen technology advancing from the driver’s seat. Cisco is a company spending $6 billion a year on development, so they need to understand what the micro transitions are and then look from the outside in, as well as to customers and partners. Such as why is Cisco making investments in some areas and not others. It’s not just about the technology, it’s also about the timing.
So, with technology continuing to transform a complex world environment, here is Kevin Bloch’s top 10 technology trends for 2017:
#1 Business transformation By Chris Cubbage
The world is moving from a ‘world of data’ to a ‘data driven world’ – there is a clear divergence occurring from the ‘old world’ to a new world of digital platforms, data intensive +AI (artificial intelligence), global scales and innovation investment in what is a boundary-less market. There is also a second order effect of digital, such as industry transitions from retail to media, a prominent example being Amazon winning an Oscar. The other key transformation is moving from the human scale to machine scale, which is getting some profound capability. Cisco forecasts there will be 500 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2030, though Chris Dedicoat suggested 10 years at CiscoLive!. Much of the devices will be data driven and predominantly based on AI, thereby likely to cause economic dislocation. A US White House paper found that 83 per cent of people who are earning less than $20 per hour will have their jobs automated, with 2-3 million jobs at risk. Truck and taxi drivers are an example. The risk to this trend is cyber security. The value of intellectual property is estimated at $6 trillion and alongside value is trust. The application of trust in a digital world can be referred to ‘algorithmic accountability’, as we move into AI and self-service on the internet. The Centrelink Robodebt crisis may come to mind.
#2 Software & Artificial Intelligence The project of mapping the exact location of every business, house and road network in France may sound
50 | Australian Cyber Security Magazine
like a massive task – yet it took Google just an hour to accomplish. With this in mind, the question then is, how are you going to leverage big data and its application? Work activities are going to continue to change but with digital transformation, as much as 45 per cent of tasks can be wiped out and when moving into AI – you can take that number to 80 per cent for machine learning to fully scale. This will remove human programming and creates a lot of connected data. This will be the end of code as we know it, as the software is connected, self-learning and increasingly intelligent.
#3 Everything as a Service By making infrastructure ‘smart’ you take it from being a ‘thing’ to a ‘service'. A light pole, when connected to an intelligent network, becomes a pole which delivers lighting, city Wi-Fi, smart parking, metering, digital signage, environmental sensors. This makes the intelligence available as a service. The number of infrastructure services that will evolve will change business models, organisation structures and how technology is used and seen. Cisco is working with the CSIRO’s Data61 which has deployed over 3,000 sensors across the Sydney Harbour bridge to monitor the bridge's performance against traffic, environment and structural conditions and using machine learning to predict preventative maintenance requirements, structural efficiencies and better learn about bridge engineering performance. When this learning can be applied to the 5,200 other bridges across NSW, you can get a sense of the impact and scale of the learning opportunities, just at a state level. On a much ‘smaller’ scale, Cisco is working with the CSIRO on honey bee research with RFID sensors being deployed on the backs of bees to measure and analyse