Industry Leaders Talk Industry Trends for 2020 and Beyond
Written by WWCode HQ
We live in an age of innovation with the pace of progress fueled by the minds of leaders and visionaries in the tech industry. These are the people building the future and setting the course for what our world will look like in the months and years ahead. As such, they have a special insight into how that future will unfold, and what will be most important.
We spoke to several industry luminaries about their predictions for the future of technology over the course of this year and beyond, along with areas they thought would be preeminent in both development and social focus.
Fintech
In recent years, the financial industry has been transformed by disruptions caused by emerging fintech innovations. This has both given financial options to consumers while also being a powerful tool for businesses in almost any industry. And this revolution is spreading around the world at a rapid pace.
“Whether I'm in Africa or any other place in the world Fintech has always exploded within most emerging markets. It's been in the US for a long time, but it is always changing because banks are either buying fintech companies or they're coming up with their own solutions based on what they're seeing on the outside.”
– Anie Akpe, Founder, African Women In Technology
Machine Learning
Machine learning is another transformative technology that is innovating at an incredible pace. Using new and powerful methods for analyzing and understanding data, companies, and increasingly individuals, are able to gain powerful insights that can inform their strategies and decisions.
“Machine Learning (ML) is entering a new phase in its evolution. Specifically, I expect to see more and more development in the ML as a service sector. These companies have existed for some years but they are reaching a new level of maturity. A level of ubiquity that could truly democratize ML, which brings its own host of positive and negative impacts."
– Richard Bakare, Sr. Solution Architect at Zuora
The Ethics of AI
Many of the people that we spoke with raised concerns about the future of technology, and particularly the ethics of AI and facial recognition. While this is a field that offers incredible possible benefits, it also has tremendous potential for abuse. A lack of diversity among teams working on these fields can also lead to uncious bias being programmed into products.
“Towards the end of 2019, we started to see a lot of flags being raised about facial recognition and surveillance technology – the harmful side of AI. Now select cities in the United States are starting to raise the flag and putting moratoriums on facial recognition. I would like to see that continue throughout the States and globally along with more regulation and thoughtfulness put into how technology impacts those that are part of the system.”
– Brandeis Marshall, Faculty Associate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
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“There's a subfield of machine learning, computer vision, that we use for facial recognition and that technology has come under fire at the end of last year. I think facial recognition will still be a big topic this year because, for example, there's a city in California where they actually banned facial recognition technology. This is because of the bias and horror stories that come with using facial recognition and how sometimes it's not that accurate for people of color. The issues that we have with the technology can be solved with the software engineers building these systems being aware of how bias creeps in. It rubs me the wrong way, when a city talks about banning technology when the problems with that technology can be solved.”
– Kesha Williams, Technical Instructor, A Cloud Guru
Automation
Another concern that was raised about technological developments was over the unintended negative consequences of automation. The increased use of robotics in nearly every industry is leading a transformation of the workplace that is often harmful to employees, and particularly those from underrepresented populations.
“There was a McKenzie study that I read in December that said, just in the African-American community, we're gonna lose almost 5 million jobs by 2030, due to automation, robotics, AI and job elimination. Another piece of that is African-Americans tend to over-index in-service positions, meaning paralegals, data entry professionals, and those jobs can be automated to a certain extent. There has to be a solution, whether it is preemptive and proactive, meaning you start public-private partnerships now so that people are able to be retrained or more money needs to be put into education.”
“People also need to be cognizant of their privacy and control of their data, particularly with the new California Consumer Privacy Act Law. In effect, you have more control over your data now.
You need to be cognizant about what you're giving away and what you're getting in return.”
– Bärí A. Williams, VP of Legal, Business, and Policy Affairs at All Turtles
Ethics and Social Impact
Several tech leaders also expressed an interest in focusing on the ethical side of technology and innovation. This included both the development of projects that can do greater social good for people, as well as regulations to ensure that these powerful new tools are used in a responsible and equitable manner.
"In 2020 we'll continue to see more socially responsible tech policies, especially as the political atmosphere continues to be amplified online. This includes everything from policies on political advertising to investments in companies focused on climate change and social impact."
– Candice Morgan, Lead inclusion & diversity strategist at GV
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“The trends that I see very present in our VC communities, investment communities and startup communities are deeply tied to re-imagining the jobs and the work that we already figured out how to do. For example, re-imagining how we create ecosystems around things like cleaning, driving – how to get from point A to point B, etc. But the trends that I would love to see us deeply digging into are the harder and more costly trends where you cannot frame a big exit and move on to the next thing. This includes things such as the preservation of life, the reliability and sustainability of food supply, our overall commitment to the preservation of the environment and predictably anticipating what is happening in our environment and giving us personalized guidance on how we need to adjust our behaviors to create a more sustainable environment that last for generations to come. I would love to see us doubling down on investing there, and letting go of some of the more incremental changes that we're making that allow for big exits and a big money-making but not necessarily thinking about how to make this world a truly sustainable and better place.”
– Regina Wallace-Jones, Sr. VP of Mindbody/ WWCode Board Member
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“I think you'll see 2020 being the year of the woman and the ethical use of technology. Back in the day, one of the first pieces of technology was a hammer. You can use a hammer in the right way or you could use the hammer in the wrong way. We've built these really advanced hammers, but in too many cases, we haven't been using those hammers ethically. And the woman is here to show us how to do it right.”
– Ayori Selassie, AI, Engineer, Writer, Selfpreneur, Ethics
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The technologists we spoke to predicted the importance of several technologies including areas such as Machine Learning, AI, Automation and Fintech. However, there was also a strong emphasis on ensuring that these technologies are developed and implemented in ways that improve the world, and don’t exploit the rights of populations. They wanted to see an emphasis put not just on what can be done, but what should be done.