Business Trends
Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020
Recently, the “Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends” for the year 2020 were released. The first section already contains an exciting thought. It’s about “human augmentation” – a topic with many facets. This topic will have a big impact on us over the next 5 to 10 years, according to Gartner. I also like the general distinction between the trends in “people-centric smart spaces” (i. e. customers, employees) and places that they live in (i. e. home, office, car).
Have fun reading about the trends. Here are some thoughts I had while reading (please share your thoughts).
Trend No. 3 “Democratization”: This term means the easy accessibility of technological and economic knowledge. That reminded me of my recent experience with ML. Fortunately, access to this complex topic was easy, thanks to SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation. I can use services without having understood the details behind the technology. This has advantages and disadvantages. Honestly, I don’t know all the details of the computer of my car and drive with it every day 😉
Trend No. 8 “Autonomous things”: The last sentence on this trend is remarkable: “However, autonomous things cannot replace the human brain and operate most effectively with a narrowly defined, well-scoped purpose.” That sounds really good. Do one thing right. On the other hand, there are perhaps 10,000 other autonomous things and they try to do their job right and sadly they disturb each other 🙂
Trend No. 10 “AI security”: The use of artificial intelligence (AI) also creates new “security vulnerabilities”. Three key perspectives are mentioned here:
- Protecting AI-powered systems
- Leveraging AI to enhance security defense
- Anticipating nefarious use of AI by attackers
Even if I can only imagine something under no. 1, it all makes sense at first glance. A medical diagnose based on AI should be as safe as possible. Therefore, the systems, connections, training data and everything else on which AI is built, should be as safe as possible.
Best regards and thanks for reading
Michael
Interesting read.  Perhaps a cool topic in coffee corner too?
"As no single tool can replace humans" - Mmmm... Perhaps no single tool but a combination of tools?
And these are just the things that jump out to me in minutes - typing while I think of them.
So do I think we should stop moving forward? No if you look above there are many good things that are happening. I do think our job outlook is changing.
Here's another good read.
And yes, I have watched one too many Terminator movies.
Self-checkout! Our local Target is down to 2 human-manned registers and now there are sometimes lanes for self-checkout even though a regular cash register is open.
Interesting article. Thanks for sharing. In the '80s, people were perhaps really scared of Terminator. Ok, in 2019 the robots are already doing somersault.That could still be a long way to create a Terminator 😉
You think? We don't know what we don't know.  IE Government and large businesses.  DNA testing / splicing, cloning, AI inside of robot technology....
Yes I read and watch too much scifi. The Scifi of today is the future of tomorrow. I'm still waiting for the flying cars. 🙂
I thought they are currently being built in South Korea and are flying there soon?
Oh wow! You are right. I never would have guessed they would have flying cars anytime soon. But it looks like it will be awhile before they hit the market. So if you have a car crash in the air, I wonder what the survival rate will be.
I do not think this is moving forward, actually.
Automation as is currently - provides better profit margins for corporations. there are no "advancements" or "new dev opportunities" for replaced people.
And that... That is a truly scary thought. Replaced people are now jobless. So what do they do to support there families?  Now that worries me.
At one of my old companies, they automated the warehouse. (For the most part) Machines picking and delivering to the line. That did displace workers. The forklift drivers did not have the opportunity anymore. They did move to other jobs. Since I'm not in HR, I don't know what other jobs were available.
Slowly we are automating people out of jobs - including ourselves. OK, now I have something to keep me up at night.
Automation enthusiasts will tell you that this has always have happened. Secretaries and data entry people were replaced by machine and all was well, eventually.
Somehow, I do not believe that at all...
Interesting thought. The modern word processing had just birthday: 70 years old. More people produce more text and more people produce now more data today.
more white noise. 🙂
Yeah, Top 10 Buzzword Bingo Entries for 2020.
I appreciate your blog with your own perspective on technology but personally, I find it difficult to take Gartner’s lists seriously.
P.S. Also, congrats on the first actual business trends blog in this space! 🙂
I try a good mix of everything for my blogs. In the past, I was not interested in technology trends. But there will also be some impact on ABAP. A few years ago, I thought that Cloud would not be accepted that way ... I was very wrong 😉
#3 - leads to situation where no one, but small group of people know how things work.
Anysort of set back civilization wise will be catastrophic to majority....
#8 I don't recall which utopian author said - Utopia is when a human has at least 3 robots (slaves originally) 😉
#10 - since AI are built by the same people who build networks and software we already use -- security will remain a hot topic.
#3 - Absolutely right. In my opinion, one should therefore learn to grow basic foods such as potatoes.
Agree completely.
#3 highlights the importance on including technology fundamentals in baseline education. It's great that technology frees us from many mundane tasks, allows amazing connectivity, etc. And I'm fine without knowing how exactly Netflix content appears on my TV. 🙂 But I think it is important to know how Internet works, how computers work and what happens, in general, when we press a button or tap a screen, for example. Just like we study biology to know where our body parts are and what they do, we need to understand technology basics. This will allow us to use it better and to avoid getting taken advantage of.
In Germany it was discussed to teach computer science alongside mathematics and the German language. At first I thought "Nope, why?", meanwhile I am "Yeah, sure, absolutely, start immediately!". But I would teach more practical things like working with wood, metal and stone or growing vegetables, too 🙂
what grinds my gears -- this promoted everywhere notion that you can just start coding with no math or comp architecture knowledge.... "code in one week" etc...
p.s.
computer science is math.
and a bit of physics
I think there are two sides to it. On one hand, I feel it's actually great that IT is a sort of democratic and more approachable industry than others. One doesn't have to go to school for many years and then pass a bar exam or get a license, like lawyers or doctors. This opens many opportunities for people and brings more talent into the industry.
For example, I started programming right out of high school, while still studying for my degree. At that time I couldn't tell a motherboard from HDD. 🙂
But it's problematic when (a) "code in a week" folks don't circle back to learning the fundamentals (like I did eventually); (b) there is no understanding of difference between casual coding and working professionally in IT.
It's totally fine if someone just picks up coding as a hobby. But it is not the same as being a full-time developer (or any IT professional).
Simple example: to understand difference between READ itab INTO wa and READ itab ASSIGNING <fs> one does need to know what computer memory is, how it works, difference between a reference and value. All that is not SAP or ABAP specific and should be part of basic CS education. Otherwise you might be writing code but you just won't be very good at it. And it's not really OK because, as we all know, bad code can be quite expensive in the end.
I completely agree.
this is how we end up with products that are twice as large and twice as slow as previous versions 😉
Please print that on T-Shirts, walls, posters and more and tell the world. I don't want to fight alone 🙂
In our county (in the US, schools are managed at state/county level), many elementary schools teach technology. In my kid's school, the teacher retired last year and was not replaced, sadly. But before that he had technology since 1st grade. They didn't study client-server architecture, of course, but their class made some killer PowerPoint presentations. 🙂