This story is from January 11, 2023

Technology stories that are likely to trend in 2023

Technology stories that are likely to trend in 2023
It is notoriously hard to make predictions in technology. Nevertheless, here goes my thoughts on the technology stories I expect will be prominent in 2023.

Rollout of 5G


5G cellular has been unveiled in India. While there is growing talk of 6G in the west, the 5G coverage in India is not widespread yet. I expect this will change substantially in 2023 as service providers start to roll out the 5G infrastructure more widely through the country.
We will grow to love the lack of buffering in streaming content, and critical applications of public safety, asset monitoring, and augmented reality will be developed using 5G networks.

Wobbly steps of Metaverse


Metaverse was supposed to have wow-ed us in 2022; the entire ecosystem of hardware (Oculus, Quest, etc) and software were supposed to have been well integrated to drive throngs of people to create engaging virtual worlds. Instead, we were met with jarring user experiences in empty virtual worlds. There is enough money being poured into this technology and many smart people working in this that I believe we will start to see something meaningful come out of it in 2023.

End of globalisation in tech


We saw national governments increasingly put up barriers to the exchange of technology across borders, some of it for sound reasons. The US government effectively put a stop to the use of AI hardware by China. India has banned a large swathe of Chinese apps. Walled gardens will continue to be built against free flow of information using networking firewalls. So the illusion of a global village in tech will continue to fade.

Genomic sequencing to track viruses


All viruses mutate as they replicate and spread. Viruses that have RNA as genetic material, such as the virus that causes Covid, mutate much faster than viruses with DNA. Genomic sequencing will allow us to figure out if there is a new variant of the virus and how prevalent it is in the population. It will also allow us to figure out if current vaccines are going to be effective against these variants. Genomic sequencing will help us beat a resurgence of the Coronavirus.


Facial recognition


This will be used more and more for daily events like authenticating ourselves to our devices or to smart spaces at work. Its use will rise more for public use cases like crowd control and fighting crime. This has obvious worries for privacy. Regulations will come piecemeal like the Personal Data Protection Bill (2019) to try to reduce the harms. This will continue to be a dual use technology and a ripe field for technical innovations (computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing, etc), as well as regulations.

Cybersecurity of critical infrastructures


Critical infrastructures have come under increasing number of cyber attacks, most prominently ransomware. In 2023, unfortunately, such cyber attacks will continue and some will manage to evade our best defences. On the positive side, we will adopt smarter defences that are constantly changing and thus are not sitting ducks against the attackers. This will lead to an increasingly sophisticated arms race between the defenders and the hackers.
Saurabh Bagchi is professor in electrical and computer engineering and computer science at Purdue University. He is a member of the board of governors of the IEEE Computer Society
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