How Technology Could Disrupt Our Lives In 2016

This year could see the digital landscape change completely.
Remember the Millennium Bug? The late 1990s were filled with foreboding about what the arrival of a new millennium would do to the world’s computer systems. Most Windows PCs defaulted to January 1st 1970 on first startup, and programmers hadn’t considered that the four-digit year field would eventually have to start with a 2. There were genuine concerns that planes might fall out of the sky and corporate networks would crash at the dawn of the new millennium, potentially heralding a technological meltdown.
In the event, a combination of preventative remedial work and unexpectedly robust software turned the Bug into something of a damp squib, and the butt of a thousand post-millennial jokes. However, as we develop an ever-greater reliance on electronics and the internet, is there any potential for technology to disrupt our lives in 2016?
One area that has received relatively little coverage is how technological advances can leave companies trailing behind forward-thinking competitors. A recent survey among 567 executives in 20 global business sectors revealed that a third of respondents feared losing their competitive edge in the face of relentless technological progression. Worse, a third of IT industry leaders believe their companies will go out of business; the simplification of networking via the cloud has particularly serious ramifications for anyone whose career involves the construction or management of networks.
Mention of the cloud inevitably leads to a discussion of its security. There is no doubt that great strides were taken in 2015 to improve the safety of cloud hosting services following the celebrity phone hacking scandals of 2014. Nonetheless, centralised data is only as secure as the IT programmer who created its firewalls; if it can be coded, it can potentially be hacked. Many people still prefer to keep valuable or sensitive information on computers’ hard drives, despite the risk of data theft taking place from personal computers as well as online accounts. A report by London Chambers of Commerce claimed that 90 per cent of companies who suffer a major data loss will go out of business within two years, and few events can disrupt or damage corporate reputations (and balance sheets) as acutely as data theft.
As 2016 takes off, much of the cloud’s colossal storage capacity will be filled with Big Data generated by the Internet of Things. Billions of devices will soon be automatically uploading information about our lives into an incalculably large data matrix, yet there is no unifying vision for what to do with these vast information silos. Information overload has the potential to become a greater disruptive factor this year than ever before, as we become bombarded with trivial data from mundane devices. What benefits do internet-enabled bathroom scales or online toothbrushes actually bring beyond the generation of fairly trivial data that can be automatically dispatched to us in daily emails or displayed on a web portal?
Automation always poses risks of disruption, too. The applications just before Christmas by Ford and Kia to test self-driving cars on American roads demonstrate how automation can impact on normal daily activities, quite apart from the fact that surrendering our safety to a machine only works if the machine can be fully trusted. Amazon’s experiments with drone-based delivery systems and Associated Press’s use of computer algorithms to generate sports stories (based on recorded events like scores and substitutions) indicate growing automation of previously human tasks. The potential for job losses due to automation has been a worry since the Industrial Revolution, but there is clearly more reason to harbor such concerns as technology increases its stranglehold over our daily lives and activities.
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