Where does tech go next when science fiction is our now?

Source: Credit Suisse. Gawdat.

Technology has evolved to the point where what is described in science fiction is already here and change is just going to accelerate to the point where it becomes imperceptible.

"There are no peaks any more, there are no new discoveries," said Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer, Google [x], Serial Entrepreneur, Board Member and Investor during his keynote speech at the 2018 Credit Suisse Global Megatrends conference.

"[Change] is happening so fast that you don't realise the amount of change between this year and last year."

While the classic product adoption curve still exists, describing how an innovation takes root slowly at first, then sees adoption increase, followed by saturation and then a plateau, the time taken from the initial introduction to the plateau is getting shorter and shorter, Gawdat said.

It took TV about 100 years to become ubiquitous, and the Internet just 15 years, he pointed out, whereas Google was entrenched in 10 years, Facebook in six, and Instagram in two. "It's just very, very, very much accelerated," he said. "We're talking about product life cycles that can be in a month, not even years."

Artificial intelligence (AI), is likely the next big thing and will affect five technologies, Gawdat said:

Robotics

AI will enable high-precision machines that are capable of thinking and reasoning. "Robots in reality are software. The hardware is not that complicated," he said. "But because of AI they are going to be democratised."

For Gawdat, the idea of a robot is not a humanoid device, but appliances that look more like vacuum cleaners.

Machines and machine learning

"Machines are learning. They are much smarter than we are on individual tasks already," he said.

Life sciences

The very predictability of humans means that it could be easy to lengthen lives, Gawdat said.

Virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR)

"[VR/AR] are going to be part of everything we do in a very, very short time," he predicted.

Blockchain

Gawdat asked the audience not to ignore Blockchain, even though it is early days yet as it could "change everything, especially for finance". "It's going to disappoint you for a while," he said. "Not every Blockchain that exists today is going to survive."

Returning to his science fiction analogy, Gawdat pointed out that many of the futuristic concepts in popular entertainment are already here today:

- Star Trek featured people using a touch screen to watch TV and using flip (clamshell) communication devices.

- Using gestures to control computers, seen in the 2008 movie Iron Man, has been supported since Playstation Wii launched in 2006, and the Xbox Kinect was introduced in 2010.

- The movie I, Robot features self-driving cars

Telepathy is already here, in the form of WhatsApp – "it just needs a screen", Gawdat said, and so is
teleportation. "With the proper virtual reality headset I can literally swipe through and be in Singapore," he said. "It's not the same way you've seen it but it'll definitely happen in your lifetime and mine.

"We live in a world where we will probably create more than we will in see in science fiction movies."

When it comes to investing in technology, Gawdat suggested focusing on a specific industry player in the short term, but on the whole industry in the medium term. As an example he noted that Nokia enjoyed great success for mobile phones for some years, but no longer, whereas mobile phones as an industry continues to be popular.

He had no recommendations for the long term, however. "I don't believe that the cycle of seven to 20 years will be there in future, I believe you need to be on your toes all the time, looking for the next one and the next one," he said.

The next big thing can be hard to predict. Trends such as the rise of cloud services, coupled with the popularity of digital cameras and the declining cost of storage gave rise to YouTube, and the successful investor will look at how several trends come together to enable another winning "thing", he said.

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