If you are someone who is aware that Blade Runner was set in the year 2019, you’ll know just how far our predictions of the future tend to be from reality. We don’t have cyborgs, we don’t have flying cars, we don’t even have Back to the Future hoverboards or clothes shoes which do up by themselves!
It’s hard to predict what advancements in technology will mean for society going forward, but if we were to look at what the latest technology advancements are, we could give an educated guess on how those technological advancements will affect the world in the future. Read on to find out how these tech advancements can change things going forward.
Virtual reality
Virtual reality has been around for a minute, but it’s having trouble getting its feet off the ground. The original pushers of virtual reality are game developers, but they’re stuck in a rut right now. Customers aren’t seeing the point in buying their headsets when the games offered are few and far between, and those that are offered are simple with little gameplay or engaging narratives. So developers face a chicken and egg situation: no money from headsets means no quality games, no quality games means no headsets get sold.
One prediction for the virtual reality market is about its gaming genre. With some money sourced either from an investor or moved from another project, a developer will release their first quality VR game. It will need to have new gameplay that isn’t simply walking and shooting. It will need a narrative that is better than the haunted houses you find in VR entertainment rooms, and it will need superior graphics to make wearing a headset worth it.
Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pushing his own idea of what VR offers society. He may say he sees it as the next step in the internet, but what he means is that it will be the next social media platform. There are a lot of applications to VR, and more are getting discovered every day, but unfortunately, a lot of these ideas are met with a shrug and a “But I can do that on my phone?”
One idea that already has crumbs in reality, is the idea of virtual influencers. As social media progresses to virtual reality, so will all the influencers. There will be two types of virtual influencers. The virtual influencers of the future will be influencers that have already established themselves and are simply migrating to The Metaverse, with a photorealistic avatar to stand in for them, and then there are the virtual influencers we have now that are entirely fictional, usually posing as a mascot for one or many brands. This can throw up a lot of questions around marketing ethics, the same way deep fakes and #ad did.
Cryptocurrency
As yet, there has been a lot of hype around cryptocurrency, as it lives on, and yet there are few practical applications for it. So far, in broad strokes, you can buy a Tesla, or you can gamble. Without trading it in for your national currency, there isn’t much use for it.
In order for cryptocurrency to become more mainstream, which in turn will encourage other industries to embrace it, crypto needs to clean up its act.
The concept is not without its flaws. Transactions are final, which means if you’ve been swindled, you’re not about to see that money again, or be reimbursed by the bank. Which is why you’re going to hear a lot of talk about regulating The People’s Currency. Guidelines are currently being written up by Washington D.C. and around the world.
There is a possibility that cryptocurrency becomes as common as national currency, with mentions of the Hanging Man Pattern next to bank posters offering crypto insurance, but it might well lose all those things the techies of today love about it: namely it’s “Stick it to the man” anti-regulation nature.
Smart tech
Smart tech isn’t just any gadget that is connected to another. Smart tech actually has a definition, that being Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. Smart tech is defined by its ability to assess a situation it is given and reporting back to your smartphone with a solution.
The second defining feature of smart tech is that most of it is being developed in an age of global warming awareness. More and more gadgets are coming out with, not only a smart element, but a sustainable element. They dim or turn off lights with energy saving bulbs, they regulate your room temperature, they shut off power to your plugs, etc.
There are already housing developments that have taken this to new heights. Named smart apartments, they are electrically wired from the foundations to host a range of smart gadgets, like smart thermometers, sockets, lighting, fridges, and every other appliance you can think of. They lower our energy usage, they keep our spaces secure, and they make life easier in a lot of small ways.
So, why should just homes have it? The concept of a smart city is on the rise, and you can already see it happening in the bigger cities of the western world. There are contactless payment machines on buses and in train stations, but there is also talk of LED streetlights that emit Wi-Fi and collect data on citizens.