If previous years were mostly marked by the exciting evolution of emerging technologies, 2020 will be different. Technology advances will often be accompanied by various public and private issues that companies and the public will need to consider and deal with. Still, this doesn’t mean 2020 won’t hold anything exciting, or that the big-scale adoption of new technologies will stop.
In this article, we will make projections across 5 technology areas:
AI algorithms in fake news and the future of media
The not-so-comfortable truth about the state of AR & VR adoption
Endpoint growth, edge computing, and other IoT industry trends
Financial organizations embracing a shared ecosystem
First steps of face recognition technology in financial services
There are many interesting developments to talk about. Let’s start.
AI Trends: Algorithms In Media & Fake News
The media industry has already seen AI-driven virtual TV presenters in action. The technology paves the way for a potential revolution in the industry, allowing media companies to produce a lot of content on-the-fly.
Still, over the last two years, the public, the media, governmental organizations, and prominent artists have grown increasingly alarmed about how deepfakes can sway opinions online, influencing political events. In 2017, the University of Washington created the notorious deepfake video of President Barack Obama, there was a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a deepfake video of Mark Zuckerberg, and other examples. The resemblance between the real and fake political figures proved almost uncanny, prompting discussions about the big perils of deepfake technology and other AI uses.
Today, doctored videos can be spotted upon closer examination, but the technology keeps evolving, while easy-to-use deepfake creation tools are available online. Although current countermeasures can detect deepfakes and their creators quickly and easily, this may change soon: the technology is evolving, so the countermeasures will need to evolve as well.
Fighting fake articles online will be more challenging, though. MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has been going to great lengths to showcase the scale of the problem. CSAIL has conducted two scientific investigations (publishing a paper for each in the August of 2019), and both showed that current AI-driven fake news detecting systems, no matter how sophisticated, are not effective enough and face many nuanced challenges.
With other companies joining the battle, (including Facebook), this means that we will definitely see more sophisticated AI tools aimed at reducing the quantity and impact of fake news in 2020 and beyond, across the board.
The laws will follow suit as well. In 2020, we may expect new deepfake and fake news scandals, hearings on that cases, as well as first instances of comprehensive regulation in the most progressive countries. All popular platforms would use AI algorithms to automatically detect and block deepfakes and fake news, as well as trace their creators.
All in all, trends in AI will be a hot topic in 2020.
Augmented & Virtual Reality Trends Slow Down
Although established companies use AR in manufacturing, building construction, retail, and other industries, the general adoption progresses slowly. Games and gamified customer experiences continue to be the main driver for both AR and VR.
According to a survey by XRDC, fifty-nine percent of AR and VR projects are game-related. This won’t change anytime soon, at least for VR. Steam will be pushing its SteamVR platform with the recently announced Half-Life: Alyx, driving the competition on the VR market. Still, the adoption of both technologies continues to grow steadily in other industries, like education and training.
As AR has been growing slowly in the last two years, there is no indication this will change in 2020, despite the release of HoloLens 2 in November 2019. There is the usual back-and-forth in the rumours about Apple’s AR headset, but hard evidence on whatever the company is developing will are non-existent.
Still, we can expect AR to continue breathing new life into familiar experiences. Readers tired of consuming content the old way will definitely enjoy immersive experiences and new story angles enabled by the technology, like those seen in The New York Times AR/VR section and by TIME’s new AR/VR app.
As for other augmented reality trends, the technology will also help ecommerce drive sales in 2020 and beyond. As customers are tired of the same types of ads and their ubiquity, brands will follow into the steps of Instagram (who released its Spark AR Studio to public this year), building AR catalogues of their goods and creating digital experiences with AR lenses in mind.
AR lenses and filters are booming, but they should be approached carefully by development teams in the future. For example, Instagram removed filters that depict or promote cosmetic surgery amid concerns they harm mental health.
AR try-in on web pages and in mobile apps would also gain more traction. This option is more cost-effective compared to other AR solutions as well as convenient for users, who would only need to open the camera on their smartphone to try a T-shirt or sunglasses on.
According to a study published by four UK universities, AR improves decision comfort, prompts users to give positive word-of-mouth recommendations, and drives sales of more expensive products.