2022 was a year of highs, false starts and big opportunities in the world of tech and innovation. From my position in a corporate role looking for what technology my company should be applying next, I’m seeing an acceleration in hype hiding some strong opportunities for the future.
2022 started off badly. It seems so long ago, but Omicron was top of mind then, with worries about its global impact. The threatened return to heavy restrictions from Omicron would have had major repercussions in the tourism industry, but happily, despite some restrictions, 2022 did get better in many areas and tourists again started to travel.
Outside of the travel industry the world was hearing about Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFT’s in the popular press, for the first time. For a few weeks, the social web and mainstream press were full of stories of NFT millionaires, but that bubble burst as quickly as it formed.
Underlying the sale of ape images is a serious technical opportunity though. An NFT is a secure ownership mechanism that has many opportunities in the space of authentication, loyalty and contracting, and it is a technology that I am confident we will see used more in the future, but without the hype.
In many ways NFT has followed a similar story to the Blockchain technology it uses. Blockchain should be a boring, secure ledger tool that businesses use and nobody else cares about, but with applications like NFT and cryptocurrency, it keeps getting attention. The Ethereum merge in September to a more sustainable proof of stake method will help blockchain be more acceptable to enterprises. I’d expect to see wider business use of the technology and concepts over the next couple of years.
While NFT and blockchain are likely to become of interest in the right business scenarios, cryptocurrency may take a long time to recover from 2022. This year we have seen a huge rise and an even bigger drop in crypto values, which will put investors off for a long time. The FTX crash is the latest example of trusted partners in crypto who shouldn’t have been trusted. In 2023 maybe crypto, like blockchain, will find a place as a boring mechanism used for international finance, bypassing the hype and “get rich quick” that it has been through a few times now.
Metaverse, VR and AR
In addition to blockchain, NFT and crypto (although potentially very connected), metaverse was another highly used word in 2022. Huge amounts of money are being poured into metaverse with different companies all looking at how to be the next big web property and how to monetize it. This has also been accompanied with discussions about Web3 and related, but not related (depending whom you ask) improvements in virtual and augmented reality hardware.
Toward the end of the summer, reports started to emerge of the scale of use of two of the major metaverse players, with Sandbox having a reported 522 active users in one day and Decentraland a mere 38; clearly not numbers that will sustain a business.
The whole metaverse space has failed to deliver so far, but the potential is still huge. Today we are seeing online experiences that are worse than in person connections or video calls, but the opportunity is certainly there to create more engaging interactions that can complement or improve on video calls. Perhaps there has been too much focus on land building and monetization using crypto at this stage, which have focused many metaverse plays onto a very narrow consumer segment.
If this can be broadened to build differentiated and useful experiences for a wider audience, we will see an acceleration into this space again. We also need to discover the right interactions for this new medium; replicating offline experiences in a digital channel is often a first use case, but it is only a fun distraction until the real experience evolves.
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Aligned with metaverse is the use of VR and AR. 2022 has been a mixed year in that space. The latest Meta Quest Pro is impressive at a cost and starts to overcome some of the comfort issue with most VR headsets. Others will rapidly follow with better hardware, but to move VR out of its niche in gaming and training will take effort. At some point, if the quality and comfort of VR hardware meets differentiated and useful VR experiences, then together they can drive a new method of digital interaction for the masses.
AR didn’t have such hype or major market advances this year. There are a few new headsets around, and a few new use cases using phones, but AR seems like this is a market where everyone is waiting for Apple to do something (much like 2020, 2021 and 2022). I believe that AR will be a game-changer in the travel industry, so hopefully 2023 is the year.
Electric vehicles
Electric vehicles seem to have jumped from the early adopter to mass adoption over the last year (e.g. in the U.K. the percentage of electrics sold rose from 11.6% in 2021 to 16.6% in 2022). The number of decent platforms designed for electric (as opposed to retrofitting existing vehicle platforms) has seen a surge, so it is no longer a choice between Tesla and something much worse from a legacy builder.
While the move to electrification in itself isn’t the big technical jump, it does provide the platform for the early stage automation market. Walking around San Francisco, it is easy to believe that automated driving is everywhere as there are so many auto-pilot enabled Teslas and very visible cars from Cruise and Google on every street, but that jump hasn’t been made everywhere yet.
The reward here is huge, so it is a question of the time it takes for technology and regulation to give us an experience better than today.
AI hype versus reality
The star performer in the world of tech over the last months of 2022 was without doubt artificial intelligence (AI). The fact that so much has been written in the mainstream press about Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, ChatGPT, Midjourney and Lensa that there is an impression that AI is now ready to take over the world.
Generally, when there is this much discussion in mainstream press about a tech story, then it truly is hype, so what is the reality here?
From my perspective, we have seen in 2022 how a diffusion model can bring us a big step forward in the illusion of real intelligence, and some hugely impressive demos have certainly given us a glimpse of what is next. What is also clear is that these demos have limits today, which means graphic designers, coders and writers don’t need to look for new careers just yet.
There is, as always, pushback on what can be done by these tools, such as how schoolchildren will be able to generate rather than write their assignments or images based on styles of real artists. These arguments always come up, and we always find a way to live with all the benefits and consequences; when the Luddites destroyed textile machinery it didn’t stop progress, and neither will a few kids cheating on their homework stop AI.
I would expect 2023 to be when these technologies are applied to specific use cases and industry data, going deep rather than wide to really drive accuracy. For example, ChatGPT is not a general AI, just an AI trained with a wide range of data. Using the same techniques on specific data such as scientific research, medical knowledge or legal rulings could significantly change those and research-based fields.
Overall, 2022 was a huge year of advances, with unsustainable hype for some technologies and quiet, but rapid progress from others. 2023 should be another huge year where we should start to see some real benefits from the latest AI research, business-lead uses of NFT and blockchain, and maybe even some movement in the automated vehicle world.