LAS VEGAS — At its inaugural flagship conference “Think” currently being held here, tech behemoth IBM unveiled its annual “5 in 5” innovation forecast that is expected to profoundly change society in the next five years.
The company’s prediction No.1 is that crypto-anchors and blockchain will unite against counterfeiters. Within the next five years, IBM said cryptographic anchors and blockchain technology will ensure a product’s authenticity — from its point of origin to the hands of the customer.
The second tech prediction is that “lattice cryptography” will rise in popularity to fight the increasing scale and sophistication of cyber-attacks. IBM said that as new methods of attack make today’s security measures woefully inadequate, new technologies such as lattice cryptography will mitigate the risks in the online world.
Forecast No. 3 is the emergence of small autonomous AI microscopes that are networked in the cloud and deployed around the world. IBM said these contraptions will continually monitor the condition of the natural resource most critical to our survival: water.
IBM’s fourth prediction is the explosion of biased AI systems and algorithms within five years. But the company also said that new solutions will be developed to control bias in AI and champion AI systems free of it.
Lastly, IBM said the effects of quantum computing will reach beyond the research lab in the next five years. It will be used extensively by new categories of professionals and developers looking to this emerging method of computing to solve problems once considered unsolvable.
