Evolution of the Society — What Next?

Trying to figure out what is going to happen in the future

Motivation

The Society is evolving at such a great pace, that lots of people are losing jobs and even more people are roaming a world with skills that need slight tweaks.

I wouldn’t call any skill that has been achieved through long hours of training and practice as waste.

Many nights I have spent trying to get into scope the entire field of technology and where everything is going.

I see a lot of people haphazardly try to learn things like Python, Data Science, AI and all these. Yes, AI is going to be a big thing in the future, but, I can’t imagine someone, who can make AI applications, give it a cool interface, deploy it on different platforms, connect the platform to the world all alone in one lifetime.

Team work is the only way out.

One cannot learn everything from building Autonomous Vehicles to Genome Sequencing, from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to Quantum Computing.

Respected Engineers of the world, please do not be narrow minded.

Back when Electricity was the big thing, people didn’t know AI was coming. Now AI is the big thing…we do not know what is coming.

Lets talk data,

A Use case has to be designed — Data has to be collected — Stored Efficiently for Retrieval — Analyzed Efficiently — The Solutions have to be used appropriately.

The amounts of data will get massive, so massive that we might have to keep looking for better and better ways to store and process it.

So, what do we have here,

Scaling Memory :

Memory is the bottleneck of almost all systems, it requires energy to store and retrieve it.

The human brain is said to have 2.5 Million GB of RAM. We aren’t even close to replicating it. There are lots of research scopes in the data storage field.

Processing :

Quantum Computing :

Quantum Computing is the next big thing you might say, but I’ll give you one better, as Quantum Computing open new and bigger doors for humanity, we will be needing more and more people to enter those doors and explore.

Protein Folding, Drug Discovery and complex Bio-Informatics tasks might find answers, but, who is going to explore?

Here are some more applications :

• Cybersecurity.
• Drug Development.
• Financial Modeling.
• Better Batteries.
• Cleaner Fertilization.
• Traffic Optimization.
• Weather Forecasting and Climate Change.
• Artificial Intelligence.

But Quantum Computing will take time, at least 50 years, and it is hard for me to think that far ahead, and don’t be fooled by the myth — Quantum Computers will replace Classical Computers. Thing is Classical Computers have some unique properties that Quantum Computers might never be able to achieve.

The applications for Quantum Computing is vast alright I have barely scratched the surface, but, vast is the scale we need to start thinking in to look at the future of opportunities.

High Performance Computing :

Keep developing Classical Computers if you want to leverage the power of quantum computing to the maximum.

As of now, and for quite a while, they will be the ones that will be the ones that will be processing our data as quantum computers are just not good enough.

Just because one has all the computing power in the world doesn’t mean the same person has all the time. We need to keep making our algorithms more and more optimized, and optimizing algorithms is well, not our best skill.

You can just take a deep dive into Data Structures and Algorithms and start drowning in the sheer amount of questions that remain difficult or presumably impossible in algorithms.

What will happen if an AI is able to predict the growth or fall of a particular stock?

If the news is made public, people will buy the stock, increasing its value, and if it predicts a fall, people will sell all or most of their stocks and make the value drop, now who is controlling the market? The AI or the People?

Data is getting massive.. how? Where is all this data coming from?

Internet Of Things :

All this data comes from devices that are connected to the cloud. These devices will mostly include, “Things”. You know where I am getting at, we have all watched I-Robot and Terminator.

IoT and Smart Things also have a huge amount of importance in the future.

Development of Smart devices require people who have a cross-over experience in different field. (Its Internet of Things). We need people to design such devices, sparking a need for good designers.

Developing such devices isn’t an easy task either, even small mistakes can be super hard to fix, and mistakes are easy to make given the amount of complexity.

After deploying them we need to allow human communication with these devices which requires people with good level of knowledge in Human Computer Interaction.

The Field of HCI is rapidly advancing with AR, VR and MR becoming, common talk.

Apart from this, we also have a field called Brain Computer Interface which is slowly pacing forward, but has a promising future.

This field has varied applications from Gaming to Healthcare.

There are many more interesting types of HCI tech, that I would like to discuss, but I will let you find that out for yourself. Now, back to IoT.

IoT devices require power to run, talking of power, we need to figure out ways to emit cleaner, and scalable sources of power.

Lithium unlike Silicon is not super abundant. Batteries are made from that stuff, research says, proper e-waste management is necessary to maintain sustenance.

Human race, cannot imagine scalable and autonomous Electric Vehicles, without proper urban planning and better batteries.

Luckily, it isn’t impossible, we can recycle 97% of the lithium, but will we?

Material Science, Applied Chemistry, Mining industries ain’t going to fall anytime soon, but they do need to adapt to the coming change. I will try emphasizing on these changes in later blogs if possible.

Back to IoT,

We do not have enough standards to govern these devices, so new devices might fail to be compatible with old ones.

Not just development, but scaling the number of IoT devices that can be connected under a single hub is also limited.

The more and more you connect with the world, advanced technologies in Computer Networking become more and more necessary. Networking skills are in good demand. They are actually going to face super high demands in the future, a little research will help you understand better.

Alas with all these networks, humans have a few bad people, and WILL try to hack into these networks and there is an ever growing importance for the Cyber Security field. I am not even going to go there since, what ever you touch in the field has a necessity somewhere.

Warren Buffet has estimated cyber threats to be one of the biggest threats to mankind, even higher than nuclear weapons. We need people who can guard us and our data from these things.

How can there be so much of something and still have high value?

Lots of data, lots and lots of it? Where is the value? We need to keep creating value from this data. Data we have been emitting like rays of the sun since the first tablet was inscribed on, but, garbage in = garbage out.

As data gets more and more varied, we will need people who can understand it, and help clean it. Not data scientists, don’t get me wrong.

When we say data scientists, we say it like there is one person doing everything from cleaning to deployment. Though, there is a high possibility that this is the case in small companies, in the future, even a startup will start looking for people to clean and analyze the data they collect, this is necessary because the industry is evolving.

What we need in packets today, we might need in containers tomorrow.

To understand an analyze the data, domain knowledge is equally important. A person who know nothing about cars cannot extract key details regarding the manufacturing of cars in a factory. A person who knows nothing about finance, cannot efficiently analyze and extract insights from even terabytes of stock-market data.

So prospective data scientists out there, beware, maybe right now, you are managing with common sense and some googling, but it will only get tougher and tougher as your data gets deeply intertwined with the domain.

As we advance more as a society, we will start emitting more data, and in turn we require to collect all this data.Where can more data be extracted from in a system. This is another question people will start asking!

If you want to be a data scientist at Tesla, learn as much about cars as data science. You get the point.

Urbanization and Modernization :

Smart cities, Urban Planning, Battling Climate change, Underwater Structures, these are some big words we hear every now and then.

There will be a need for a civil engineer and a mechanical engineer in almost all renewable energy projects, governments are starting to see the need for it.

Environmental Engineering have great responsibilities to save the future.

Singapore is pouring its millions in Civil Engineering, it faces the Urban Heat Island Effect.

Urban Planning, also looks like a promising career, and the scope has been predicted to rise up to 11% by 2028.

But, unlike other fields this field has grown rather slowly, but will grow, with new ground-breaking research in the field.

As the human community grows, we might eventually run out of space. A well expected thing. We are also combating climate change at the same time. People have started planning for underwater structures.

Humans will always need a roof over their heads. No matter what.

We as a community should also remember that Mr.Musk isn’t guaranteeing us Mars in the near future, and so, we need to take care of earth and as usual we look at new technologies to do that for us.

The construction industry is also going to start using cyber-physical systems in construction.

Humans are just not required in these places anymore, but be glad about it. No more toiling of human labor in the construction sites. We can build unimaginable things, if we start using robots for construction, since, right now, “Built by Humans” is always a huge limitation, but, again how these systems work, how to plan and design them to work in the construction site is another challenge we must face.

We need people to plan the new cities that arise from these changes. Wait a minute, what about the current houses? Current malls?

When brick and cement was ready to use in houses. The term “Cavemen” was introduced.

After going to mars, we ain’t going to sleep on space rock! Musk take note of that.

Many governments are planning on conversion of their cities into smart cities. We need people who can plan them to be sustainable. Where would we have been if our ancestors did not put in their best efforts at planning these things. They built our cities for telephone lines and bullock carts. We are talking Autonomous cars and Internet. Mankind needs to rebuild.

We cannot have telephone towers everywhere. Who is optimizing this? Who does the job of finding out where there is the need for a tower?

And yet again we stumble upon, another important field.

5G Technology, it has the ability to change everything, believe it or not, we might just connect opposite ends of the world in seconds or maybe milliseconds. We want everything to connect to the internet!

I won’t be able to do justice to 5G in this post, but read this blog that clearly explains most possible use cases. Blog

Healthcare :

Bio Technology, is another field that is about to blast off, I do not have to discuss about how we are finding new viruses everyday, but as connectivity increases, these viruses are getting transmitted at breathtaking paces.

COVID19 hit us when we were sleeping, but now we are awake and we have started responding by trying to find various computational methods for modelling drugs, extracting data from genomes, and trying to edit them.

• Gene discovery and diagnosis of rare mono-genic disorders.
• Identification and diagnosis of genetic factors contributing to common disease.
• Pharmacogenetics and targeted therapy.
• Prenatal diagnosis and testing.
• Infectious diseases.

The Healthcare industry is generating Exabytes of data, and processing all of it, is well a huge task at hand. Moreover, medicine and a proper treatment for cancer isn’t that far away.

Doctors will have to give a huge amount of time trying to understand and start using efficiently the large amount of tools given to them. It is true that we will start making robots for surgeries, that are super accurate and have greater chances of successes, but, there is no way a human is going to feel better mentally unless a doctor looks at his card and goes,

“You are fine now, Mr.Avtar Singh, your cancer is gone!”

So, docs stick to your white coats.

Law :

Can Robots debate? Do they know the meaning of justice? They can follow a set of rules pretty well, but time and time again, we have faced many loop holes in our constitutions, that we have had to amend those rules to provide justice appropriately.

AI doesn’t understand right and wrong, at-least according to me. Whatever has been right in the 20th century, may be utter injustice in the 21st century.

So, lawyers stick to your black coats.

I haven’t talked about everything yet, there is still a plethora of things that we can look forward to in the future.

The sheer amount of opportunities we have is growing extensively, but mind you, the need to be well-educated is becoming more and more important. We all know Newton didn’t learn Calculus in his high school and he didn’t even know about photo-electric effects of light.

We must accept it, when computers came to the world, they created more jobs than they destroyed and I assure you, it is going to be the case with AI as well.

Don’t try to learn everything, learn to share your knowledge with others, and when others do the same, we will be able to make amazing things.