Trendspotting at SSP 2022 | Society for Scholarly Publishing | JUN 29, 2022 | Donald Hawkins, Charleston Hub

"...In the SSP meeting, the focus was on technology trends and trying to identify how likely they are to impact scholarly communication. In his book, Tech Trends in Practice (Wiley, 2020), Bernard Marr identifies the following 25 trends and gives a summary for each one. 

1. AI and machine learning. We are using AI every day.
2. The Internet of Things (IoT). We now have more interconnected and smart devices.
3. Wearable technology makes our lives safer, more efficient, and healthier.
4. Big data. We now have a world full of data—bigger than ever, which gives us unprecedented insights from data-intelligent spaces.
5. Intelligent spaces. Homes, offices, and buildings are becoming smarter and more intelligent.
6. Blockchains are super secure ways to validate and store our transactions and will transform the way we live and work.
7. Cloud and edge computing. We can store and process data via the internet on other people’s data centers, and we can process more of it on our devices such as smart phones
8. Extended reality. Real worlds are being extended into the digital world through augmented reality.
9. Digital twins—virtual copies of processes without having to do them on the real process.
10. Natural language processing will give machines the ability to understand our language, read and understand text, and even write entire books.
11. Voice interfaces and chatbots. Alexa, Siri, etc. will understand our emotions and we will be able to communicate with them much better than we can today.
12. Computer vision and facial recognition. The ability to understand who is on a photograph and what is on it. Machines are getting extremely good at this.
13. Robots and cobots. Increasingly autonomous robots are able to understand their surroundings and become intelligent co-workers with which we can work together.
14. Autonomous vehicles. We are starting to see self-driving cars and self-driving delivery robots and will see many more in the future.
15. 5G. The 5th generation of mobile communications will give us speeds and latencies of internet communication on our phones that is as good as fiber optics.
16. Genomics and gene editing is the ability to understand what we are made of and edit ourselves to cancel things like cancer and create new beings.
17. Machine co-creativity and augmented design means that we can use AI to enable creative design of new products like creative music, which will transform the creative processes in our organizations.
18. Digital platforms. Platform businesses like Facebook, Airbnb, and Uber have been extremely successful, are transforming how we interact with the world, and are bringing us into the gig economy.
19. Drones. These autonomous flying objects will not only transform our passages but will be also transport passengers. Autonomous cars will be replaced by self-flying drones.
20. Cyber security. We are facing digital threats not just by people but also from the latest technologies being used to automate attacks.
21. Quantum computing is completely redefining what a computer is and could give us computers that are a million or trillion times more powerful than even today’s supercomputers.
22. Robotic process automation will use tools to help automate processes, watch over them, and improve what we do.
23. Mass personalization. Companies are learning more about us and are able to serve us with products and services at the exact moment when we need them.
24. 3D printing is transforming the way we manufacture things by using innovative materials layer by layer.
25. Nano technology and materials science is transforming our understanding of materials at the micro level and will give us new products..."