A great year for technology

While the Covid-19 pandemic-lockdown-recession was really tragic, the real silver lining was the way technology stood up, accelerated and filled in the vacuum so that mankind could not only cope, but look forward to boot. We are entering a brand new era which we are still struggling to define and predict what it will actually be like. Terms like “New Normal” and “Post-Covid” have entered the popular lexicon.

Pandemic I: 20-50 million may have been killed in the Spanish Flu of 1918. The upper estimate has been put at 100 million. This is alarming and shocking even more so when you realize that the global population at that time was well under 2 billion. Today we are racing toward 8 billion. Millions died in India too at that time, where it was called Bombay Fever. The infection may have come from US sailors visiting Bombay.

If there is one thing clear at that time—We were woefully short on both medical technology to fight and cope and even general technology to adjust to a lifestyle change. There could be no collaboration—There were limits to what you could do with the telephone and telegraph. You couldn’t Work From Home—That old economy totally depended on everyone going to their farms, factories or offices. The globe just had to let the curve flatten itself without being able to manipulate it too much.

Technological Acceleration I: World War I (1914-18) was followed by the Spanish Flu (1918-20). After that we had the Great Depression (1929-late 1930s). If that wasn’t enough, all that was followed by the Holocaust and World War II (1939-45). If there’s only one thing that saved the world, it was the rapid technological acceleration that took place in this time period that was unparalleled in history.

The Germans invented the jet engine which was adopted by the whole world and it ushered in an era of air travel. But the biggest advances they made were in the field of rocketry. That kick started the Space Age and the formation of NASA. The greatest offshoot of that was the Satellite Revolution which enabled the likes of satellite TV, GPS and other advances in communication, weather and astronomy.

The Allied Forces countered the Axis Powers with technological breakthroughs of their own. When the Germans started jamming all the frequencies of the British transmissions, they came out with Code Division Multiple Access to counter it. Later CDMA was an integral part of the mobile broadband story. The Germans came out with the Enigma machine. It was a great feat which was countered by the British with immense feats of code breaking. They made great advances in cryptography that serve us to this present day in the Internet Age. The Colossus Computer that they created preceded ENIAC and has been called “the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer”. In a way, that’s where you could say the Computer Revolution actually began.

While Hiroshima and Nagasaki were great tragedies, there have been no nuclear attacks since then thankfully. One offshoot of that research was atomic energy. That could be the key to the future if we want to get off fossil fuels because so far the combination of solar, wind and hydrogen is woefully short. Today startups are trying to promote Generation IV nuclear plants which are safer and more compact than the current outdated ones. Some can even use nuclear waste as fuel, making it a rich closed energy cycle. One of the big promoters of that is Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

There is a myth that Charles Holland Duell, the Commissioner of the United States Patent Office (1898 to 1901), declared at the beginning of the twentieth century, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” If he actually said that, then it would be one of the most failed predictions in history. The way Gates is supposed to have declared grandly in 1981, “640KB of memory ought to be enough for anybody”. But it seems there is no basis for the quotes of either Duell or Gates. (Gates is also at the forefront of pandemic prediction and suggesting healthcare solutions.)

Duell in fact is supposed to have said, “In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold.” If that’s the case, then he was spot on!

Singularity I: There is a popular concept in Silicon Valley called the Singularity. It refers to the time when humankind could merge with Artificial Intelligence. It is also called the Technological Singularity. The 2010s was the greatest step in that direction with the proliferation of the smartphone.

Earlier there was no invention which you used to be with 24X7. During the industrial revolution, workers would go home after spending the day at the factory. The same was with the work computer. You shut off your home workstation and laptop. But your smartphone is with you 24X7 and is an extension of your personality. You take it wherever you go. You use it in the bathroom and sleep with it. You feel lost without it. It is your comfort device. It’s both your library and book. It knows where you are at all times and helps you around anywhere in the world and hails your cab.

You can book tickets or order your meals and groceries. It is both for work and pleasure. It’s your road to communicating with everyone in the world and your social life thanks to the many social networks it is part of. It's your jukebox, TV set and cinema hall. If you’re part of the mobile workforce, then it's your office too and a handy video collaboration device. In a way you are like a cyborg integrated with your mobile. One sociologist called this the greatest lifestyle change for humanity since the end of World War II.

Sequel to all of the above: Covid probably merged all the above concepts. We had another pandemic, further digital acceleration and came closer to and became dependent on technology like never before. Many of the things that have happened are irreversible. The 2020s New Normal will be totally different from the hypothetical 2020s Normal that would have happened had there been no Covid in the first place.

Last time during the Spanish Flu we were totally off guard and the upper estimate put the human loss at a whopping 5% plus of the global population. This time while we seem to have been caught off-guard, we had much greater tech tools than last time. The death toll is in the region of 1.5 million. While every life is important, you have to note that this time the death toll has been 0.02% of the global population. Did we get such a low rate because of all the tech tools we had for healthcare and social distancing? We shall never know, but that’s food for thought.

The global healthcare industry has seen a fillip. For one telemedicine may now be promoted with the need for social distancing and the rise of collaboration and bandwidth. This will be quite useful for a first consultation where the doctor screens out the serious and non-serious cases and can sort out the mild cases easily. Ecommerce for medicines also saw an upswing and that will also be handy for remote areas where a medical shop isn’t nearby.

The use of Big Data analytics and AI may also go up in the medical field. Of course, privacy will be a huge issue here. Wearable IoT devices that transmit the health of the user may also increase, as this is favoured by insurance companies. The use of robots is already seeing a spike in Western hospitals. Could we also have more robotic surgeries? Nanotechnology is one field that is beneficial for things like vaccines and PPEs (Personal Protective Equipment).

Superfast vaccines: The vaccine story during Covid has been spectacular. Past vaccines used to take years and sometimes even decades to make. Indeed smallpox and polio had been around for thousands of years and some vaccines took hundreds of years to develop. Covid-19 came at the end of 2019, the vaccines went through the entire developmental phase and are ready for release by 2020-end. That’s lightning fast in the world of medicine.

Nowadays these vaccines are designed on the computer and can be replicated on a machine. If found successful: They can be put into mass production at once. The messenger RNA vaccine was conceptualized in the middle of the last century and earnest research began in the 1990s. But no mRNA vaccine was given clearance till now—but here we are ready for release. There were hundreds of vaccine trials and just one of them—Pfizer—is ready to vaccinate 1.3 billion by the end of 2021. These are unheard of numbers made possible thanks to technology. The Government of India is pushing States to start working on a cold storage network to accommodate vaccines, but such a network will be beneficial for many other things too.

What about the next pandemic? How will we handle that? I had written in an editorial some time back: In the future, facial recognition systems across airports and other public places will report a sudden spike in people suddenly sneezing or coughing. Based on that an AI system will personally alert every such mobile user and also warn the healthcare industry. Based on the change in patient symptoms across the world, governments will be alerted that a global pandemic is on the way.

AI will check the geographical densities of cases and recommend a lockdown timetable for each and every part of the world. Drones and driverless cars will press into action to ensure essential services and supplies. The global network of IoT devices will give real-time information on the status of goods, supplies and movement of humans. AI will track everything at a micro and macro level modifying its recommendations repeatedly. When the curve has been flattened, an AI timetable will bring the world back to normal.

Smart Work From Home: The first industry that really took off in 2020 was collaboration. The thing is, it wasn’t just Zoom. A multitude of collaboration tools proliferated and more importantly the global bandwidth was upped suddenly. Companies maximized their use for official purposes while we saw a lot of first time users for personal use.

It wasn’t just about video collaboration. They facilitated official calls, strategy meets and the exchange of important files and data. Webinars, virtual conferences and video round tables filled in the void left by physical meetings and conferences. Going forward 3D and VR collaboration could be an emerging market that could become quite big.

In conjunction with this the global real estate industry is seeing a huge change. The Smart Home and WFH culture will now emerge to become SWFH. In the past Smart Homes used to be for the rich, but with the proliferation of devices like Alexa and Google Home, they can be the cornerstone of a Smart Home quite easily for the middle class. The Amazon Ring is an external doorbell with a camera that can monitor the outside of a home and even alert the police. It has an indoor version and one with a home drone plus one for the car too.

The coronavirus was discovered in the 1920s, but it was only in 2003 that it became a serious threat with SARS and we had MERS in 2012. Covid-19 is in fact SARS-2 and we will probably have to be on our guard permanently from now on. That means with threats and lockdowns, temporary WFHs could become a regular affair. Of course there’s also the fact that many jobs have become permanently WFHed. The exact numbers will be clear for a couple of years. The construction of flats and independent houses will see a sea change and integration of the office functionality will become a regular affair.

Expansion of ecommerce: Certain geographies have seen growth in the region of 40-50% in ecommerce sales and there has been a sharp rise in its penetration. Getting first time users on board used to be the biggest issue but that happened seamlessly in 2020. Ecommerce initially struggled to cope with the load, but now there has been an upgrade which will fuel growth in the 2020s.

Mobile workforce: The regular office space, the SWFH and mobile workforce will now form the trifecta of the New Economy. The smartphone is getting greater compute power and apps that can make it do anything a laptop or desktop can. We also have mobile SaaS. Once storage used to be an issue, but thanks to the cloud and rising mobile broadband capability, that is no longer so. The mobile workforce can include things like iPads and in the future wearable IoT devices too.

There can be many advantages. There is no need for real estate for the mobile workforce; it can ensure business continuity, better operational costs and faster resolution times for the customers, especially enhancing last-mile service. It has proved handy in industries like retail, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, construction etc. In the Covid collaboration era, WhatsApp had to increase video calls from 4 to 8 people.

Rise of online education: Said Scott Adams, political commentator, tech evangelist and creator of the popular cartoon strip Dilbert, “The biggest industry of the future, the one with the most dollar amount, will be online education. Colleges will eventually have to disappear because they don’t really make sense for the price.” Adams is usually spot-on with most of his predictions.

Online education has many advantages. The costs can be drastically brought down, they can service all remote areas, timings can be made much more flexible, syllabi can be updated more frequently and more customized courses can be added. The online world can accommodate a long tail. The only thing required is government approval which can even promote a new online university culture if it wants to. In fact all the major online EdTech players can be the universities of tomorrow. BYJU’S is already the globe’s most valuable EdTech company.

Collaboration players are tailoring their offerings to suit the online class. For example Microsoft Teams came out with an amphitheatre mode to make students more comfortable. But a real game changer could be Virtual Reality to beat staring at a screen all day. In geography class you could visit places around the world virtually, visit them in the past in the history lesson. Medical students could get familiar with the human body along with applications in subjects like engineering, architecture, archaeology etc.

The fall of Hollywood/Bollywood: It was Annus Horribilis for studios, production houses, cinema halls… in fact the whole ecosystem. It will take years for them to get back to some amount of normalcy and they may never return to full form. The biggest beneficiary has been the OTT industry which was a big bandwidth guzzler and saw a record number of new users. This will continue with the rise of SWFH culture. Also raising traction are things like virtual concerts and virtual events.

The No Touch Era: This year municipalities in India used drones to sanitize streets while the police used them to monitor curfews. Drones can be used for anything from delivery to surveillance to surveying. Here too legislation was holding them back but they have huge potential. Waymo (parent company Google) got permission to launch a driverless car service in America.

IoT devices already outnumber human beings on this planet and have a great potential to form a global network of data collection and transfer unprecedented in history. Robotic assistants will be handy as receptionists and entry points at airports, train/bus stations and large buildings. VR robots can be used for a host of things.

All this will power Industry 4.0 which will be indispensable for business continuity in a world where natural disasters and pandemics strike. Dark or lights out factories will be of great value. Suddenly Smart Cities with smart utilities seem closer especially if we can get our 5G act together.

The cloud world has become all the more indispensable as data is increasing quickly in geometric proportions. We already have millions of data centres which are accessed by billions of devices. The governments are getting into the act. Data analytics is getting more sophisticated by the day and it will be all held together by AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning.

Next-gen startups: After the financial crisis of 2007-08, the following were launched in 2009-10: WhatsApp, Instagram, Uber, Ola, Paytm, Xiaomi, Vivo, Venmo, Slack, Square, Pinterest, WeWork, Snapdeal, GoFundMe etc. (Even Zoom came closely in 2011). Most of them dominated the 2010s. The startups that will dominate the 2020s have already been conceived/funded/launched and they would have been heavily influenced by the Covid crisis. They will cover both established and the above-mentioned emerging areas.

Record profits for tech: It has been a great year for tech and many companies have made record profits. Now most of the traditional companies will be forced into digital transformation and the dependence on tech will grow ever more so. In July this year, Tesla overtook Toyota as the most valuable car company in the world. Since then its market capitalization rose to half a trillion dollars.

Apple touched a marcap of 2 trillion in comparison and has since diversified its manufacturing to countries like India and Vietnam. Giants like Microsoft and Amazon benefited greatly from the increasing use of cloud and the latter by ecommerce too. The trillion dollar club (marcap) is filled with companies from the tech field. A time came this year when Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft had a combined weightage of approximately 23.5% in the S&P 500 index. Chinese and Korean players also saw the profits continue.

In India companies like HCL had great quarters while TCS became the most valuable IT services company in the world. The biggest success story was Reliance which is positioning itself to be a top tech company. It has invested in many tech companies and has received funding from more than a dozen players involved with technology.

In both the good times and bad; In normal times and crisis; Whether there’s a pandemic or not; If there’s only one thing you can depend on then its technology. That will continue to be a high growth area well into the 2020s.