3 Tech Trends to watch in 2019

By Amy Webb

    It’s been a tumultuous year. Once-venerated companies found their stock trading below a dollar. Tweets rattled investor confidence. If 2018 has taught us anything, it’s that chaos is the new normal, and that it’s time to get smarter about anticipating change. But it also revealed an unsettling truth: We simply aren’t paying enough attention to meaningful signals in the present, and that’s why we’ve been caught in this constant cycle of surprise.

To understand the future of one thing, you must consider the future of many things. Otherwise, you’re essentially looking at the world through a pinhole.

    This is especially true when it comes to technology’s influence on the economy. In the coming year, we will see tantalizing advancements in a host of emerging technologies—artificial intelligence, smart devices, space travel, genomic editing, electric vehicles, and automated hacking tools—that will move further from the fringe into the mainstream. As these technologies begin to converge, we’ll start to see acceleration. This is why pharmaceuticals must closely track developments in deep learning, and big agriculture should keep a close eye on CRISPR experiments in China. AI will help researchers develop precision medicine techniques, while gene editing could yield new crops that don’t require pesticides.

    My approach is to intentionally look for weak signals and emerging trends across different areas, to find meaningful connections. Here are three tech trends on my radar for 2019.

This is the beginning of the end of smartphones

    Globally, smartphone shipments are in decline. Apple will no longer report sales numbers for any of its hardware products, including iPhones—it’s a clear signal about what’s on the mid-horizon. And even as new form factors enter the consumer marketplace next year—you’ll see dual-sided phones and models with foldable screens—the functionality isn’t improving fast enough to merit tossing out existing phones for new ones. In the next ten years, we will transition from just one phone that we carry to a suite of next-gen communication devices, which we will wear and command using voice, gesture, and touch.

5G will be deployed at scale

    The fifth generation of wireless technology will, at last, power up—but not where you’re expecting. While local governments continue to fight over incentives, private companies will ditch WiFi for 5G, which will shorten transmission latency from 30 milliseconds to just a single millisecond, allowing essentially instantaneous connectivity between devices on a network. Unlike WiFi, a private 5G network can be built to prioritize certain data transmissions over others. In practice, this means that heavy manufacturing companies and utilities can finally take advantage of the Internet of Things and begin to automate more of their core processes using robots. It also signals a massive emerging market for all of the components, devices, and consulting services that will soon be required.

Data regulation is coming, and it won’t be pretty

    From ongoing privacy and security debacles at Facebook to how much influence Google and Amazon wield in our everyday lives, big tech will face a reckoning, one that will likely affect every single company mining, refining and storing our digital data. In the U.S., a newly Democratic House, joined by key senate members, will consider some important questions: Who should be the ultimate gate-keepers of our digital data? What role should automated decision-making play in our everyday lives? How can a publicly traded company serve both its shareholders and the broader interests of democratic society?

    Policy-makers are not prepared to deal with new challenges that arise from emerging science and technology, and the relationship between our big tech titans and governments continues to be transactional at best. As a result, we are likely to see proposed regulations, rules, and legislation that are either too restrictive or don’t acknowledge that science and tech are in constant motion. It’s unlikely that sweeping new rules, like the E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation, would pass in the U.S. Even so, going through the process will prove a serious distraction for big tech companies.

    The best strategic positioning for 2019 is simple: think exponentially but act incrementally. You’re going to need to get comfortable with uncertainty. Broaden your thinking, look for intersecting vectors of change and figure out ways to make incremental decisions as often as possible.

    Amy Webb is a professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business and author of The Big Nine: How Today’s Tech Titans and their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity.

(Fonte: https://www.barrons.com/articles/technology-trends-2019- 51546007213. Acesso em 28/02/2019)

Read the text below.

(CNN) US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has denounced President Nicolas Maduro's obstruction of aid deliveries to Venezuela as the actions of a "sick tyrant." 

At the call of opposition leader and the nation's selfdeclared interim president, Juan Guaido, foreign aid has been shipped to Venezuela in response to worsening food and medicine shortages.

Maduro, who has been in a standoff with Guaido for the presidency, denies that a humanitarian crisis exists in Venezuela and suggests that aid efforts are part of a US plot to orchestrate a coup.

After Guaido named Saturday as the deadline for the aid to cross the border, Maduro vowed to stop the supplies from coming into the country. At a large rally in Caracas on Saturday, he dared the opposition to call for elections and called Guaido a "clown" and a "US puppet."

Trucks carrying supplies were blocked at most spots Saturday. Witnesses said two trucks were set ablaze while attempting to cross into Venezuela from Colombia.

Witnesses who spoke to CNN said the trucks went up in flames as Venezuelan troops loyal to Maduro prevented the vehicles from crossing the border. CNN cannot independently confirm the incident or the circumstances of how the two trucks were set on fire. National Assembly Representative and Guaido supporter Adriana Pichardo told CNN that at least five people were also killed in clashes with Venezuelan security forces on Saturday. CNN cannot independently confirm the number of fatalities.

Adapted from: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/24/americas/venezuela-pompeo-maduro-colombia/index.html. Acesso em: 24 de fevereiro de 2019. 

What is a Programming Algorithm?

So, what is a programming algorithm? You can think of a programming algorithm as a recipe that describes the exact steps needed for the computer to solve a problem or reach a goal. We've all seen food recipes - they list the ingredients needed and a set of steps for how to make the described meal. Well, an algorithm is just like that. In computer lingo, the word for a recipe is a procedure, and the ingredients are called inputs. Your computer looks at your procedure, follows it to the letter, and you get to see the results, which are called outputs. A programming algorithm describes how to do something, and your computer will do it exactly that way every time. Well, it will once you convert your algorithm into a language it understands! However, it's important to note that a programming algorithm is not computer code. It's written in simple English (or whatever the programmer speaks). It doesn't beat around the bush--it has a start, a middle, and an end. In fact, you will probably label the first step 'start' and the last step 'end.' It includes only what you need to carry out the task. It does not include anything unclear, often called ambiguous in computer lingo, that someone reading it might wonder about. It always leads to a solution and tries to be the most efficient solution we can think up. It's often a good idea to number the steps, but you don't have to. Instead of numbered steps, some folks use indentation and write in pseudocode, which is a semiprogramming language used to describe the steps in an algorithm. But, we won't use that here since simplicity is the main thing.

Adapted from: http://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-an-algorithm-in-programming-definition-examples-analysis.html. Acesso em 28 de fevereiro de 2019.