Here it comes, just days away! We expect so much from 2022! Not only for it to finally rid us of the pandemic, but also to bring back normal. And we also expect some purely technological solutions from it, each of which certainly has the power to change the life of every single one of us.
Still: which are the technological fields where we hope the coming 2022 will be especially hot?
We won't dwell on specific technological solutions but on fields, because even at that level things are not all that predictable…
1. A Network in Chains
Yes, the foundation of this technology is a chain, but instead of shackling, it sets free. How is that possible? The answer, as you have most likely guessed by now, is blockchain (more on the technology here). In the fall of 2021 the price of bitcoin exploded, and more, and more, and still more impressive sales appeared through the technology of unique tokens—NFTs. Cryptocurrencies as a whole became an enormous fad.
And all this happened after, two or three years ago, all the enthusiasm around the topic seemed to have died down, and blockchain and bitcoin had vanished as terms from public discourse.
Today the technology is more mature; there is much more sense and capitalization in it. In the beginning, when blockchain first became an interesting and popular topic, lots of ideas emerged about how it could be used. We already had a new technology that guaranteed absolute traceability of transactions and complete decentralization, but, it seemed, we simply didn't yet know what to use it for.
Well, today it is clear that one vital and tremendously promising field is precisely decentralized finance. But won't other blockchain fields finally emerge to catch up with it? Will we uncover more of the potential of smart contracts as a principle (we'll tell you about them in more detail soon)?
For an overview of the topic, read the interview with Valentin Mihov.
Will bitcoin start rising dizzyingly again? Or will we once more find ourselves in a technological winter? Will traditional money become redundant? We expect quite a few interesting answers on this topic from the coming 2022.
2. An AI World
Over the past decade our ears have grown numb from hearing how artificial intelligence will change everything… And we can't help being somewhat disappointed that this isn't happening on the scale we expected. And how could the topic not get cheapened, when the phrase has become so fashionable that by now every saucepan and doormat supposedly runs on artificial intelligence.
What a brilliant intellect that doormat has. And we've grown used to seeing plenty of examples online of algorithms failing. So we've started to underestimate them quite a bit.
The truth is, there's no room for underestimating. Artificial intelligence is quietly making extremely serious progress. Of course, we can hardly speak anytime soon of a technology that resembles the human mind… and it's not certain we even need something like that.
What is certain, though, is that many areas of our lives are changing at breakneck speed because of ever more perfect AI, and others will very soon start to do the same.
Definitely one of the biggest fields where we expect change very soon is autonomous cars. A future in which we won't have to drive at all looks more and more real, and it will benefit our daily lives too. Traffic can be optimized; millions of human hours will no longer be lost sitting in traffic jams. Many traditional professions will disappear… and, sadly, quite a few people will end up out on the street.
Of course, all this won't happen in 2022, but this year we are very likely to see far more successful autonomous-vehicle projects that are integrated into practice.
AI has already revolutionized facial recognition, too. The algorithms are so advanced and so perfect that it's downright frightening. In Russia you no longer need a card or a ticket for the metro; it's enough for the system to recognize your face. Need we say that this algorithm evidently already works with extreme reliability?
I'll add machine translation to the list, which is also advancing by leaps and bounds—you can see for yourself, especially if you use the more popular languages.
AI will make its way into art, news generation, programming, even politics. Machine learning is even joining the battle against fake news.
And what else? What can't we expect? AI will definitely be a hot topic for a long time, despite the skepticism. It seems to be nearing the characteristics of a mature technology…
3. Planet Meta
It's not hard to guess why this candidate is on the list. The topic burst into public discourse with particular force at the end of 2021, after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be the official name of the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
Much other news came at the same time. Facebook announced it would invest enormous sums and hire 10,000 specialists in Europe alone.
Land began to be sold in other companies' metaverses—even yachts, for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
(For an overview of the topic, read here.)
Will we all find ourselves in this new virtual reality in 2022? Hardly. But we will learn a lot of new things, and many new startups and technologies connected to it will appear.
4. The Toys of the Rich
As The Guardian aptly put it not long ago, the multibillionaires did everything they could to make life harder, and now they are racing to save themselves—some in space, some in some parallel metaverse.
Admittedly, this claim is rather extreme, but there is a lot of truth in it. Because the development of technology today definitely runs far too much through the attitudes, decisions and projects of the biggest monopolists of the online world.
When did the United States once again send people into space with its own technology, after long years of stagnation in the field? When people like Musk and Bezos joined the battle with their space companies.
When did talk begin about the future of the metaverse, the next-generation virtual reality? When Zuckerberg started talking about it, in an attempt to divert attention from the truly awkward questions. Meanwhile, Musk became the richest person in history and was named Time magazine's Person of the Year.
Yes, far too much of our technological future depends on the powerful of the online day. And it is definitely worth following their actions, even if we don't approve of them. In 2022, too, technological news and solutions affecting us all will often come from them.
The space race is advancing, and the giants are competing in more and more fields, many of which we've already touched on. Even more interesting things await us, whatever good old Confucius has to say on the matter.
5. Internet Everywhere
Well, the internet is already everywhere, you'll say. Yes, if you live in the center of a European capital. But unless you've strolled around the Sahara lately, say, you have no reason to stop and think that a huge part of the world is still far from life online. Even in Bulgaria we underestimate the enormous number of people who have no internet access for one reason or another—financial or generational.
Only, first—5G arrived. Not all the birds in the world have dropped dead yet, but more and more people will have access on their phones to ultrafast internet of a kind they didn't have even on their desktop computers a few years ago.
And this unleashes huge opportunities for improving the online experience, for new technological solutions, for the next big steps in virtualization. Now everything has to happen in a flash, and very serious computing power can be used right in the browser. Where will this lead? We can only guess.
Satellite access projects are advancing, and not only the best-known one, Musk's Starlink, which plans very soon to have 42,000 mini satellites above us, guaranteeing a connection to the network from anywhere in the world. Its competitor OneWeb plans to have 600 satellites in 2022, while Amazon promises 3,236, which are meant to cover specifically places with weaker access.
How will the network change once the last 3 billion people on the less developed continents join it? It will certainly have an effect in all sorts of directions.
+ A Few Dark Horses
Meanwhile, Musk and his like-minded colleagues keep working, through the Neuralink project, on creating a brain-computer interface. So, will we soon be connecting to the internet directly with our brains? Well, that hardly falls within 2022, but there will hardly be a shortage of interesting news in this direction.
The same goes for the world of medical technology. As Assoc. Prof. Milena Georgieva told us recently, personalized aging is one potential possibility from which we can expect a significant extension of human life.
Cloud technologies are also among the most topical fields. By now almost all of us have been spoiled by the convenience of having our documents everywhere.
So what more can we expect from cloud technologies? Mainly: that they will be refined for more complex tasks. The fact is that their infrastructure applications have reached something like their practical ceiling; they can hardly offer us much more convenience, because they've already given us everything.
But this is where we move on to the big, ultra-heavy computations needed to develop AI. Cloud technologies are only just beginning to make much more serious inroads, offering computing power that was unthinkable until recently. This will speed up both the research in artificial intelligence and the work in many, many scientific fields.
It's important to mention cybersecurity too—2022 will certainly raise many more questions in that direction.
And somewhere out there, stepping once again for a moment outside the most discussed topics, comes the turn of quantum computers. Quite an exciting future, wouldn't you say?
We know—we've asked more questions than we've offered possible answers. And yet, entirely subjectively, we've marked out the main areas where remarkable innovations are simmering. Technology is a world that can always surprise you; it has shown that many times. One thing is certain: there are plenty of surprises still to come. Let's hope that in 2022 the positive surprises outnumber the rest. Both within technology and beyond it.
