Tech Trends for 2023
Disclaimer & Transparent Disclosure: I work for AWS, a subsidiary of Amazon. Any views and opinions expressed in this blog post that could potentially be related to Amazon or AWS technology are solely mine, and do not reflect any official policy or position of the company.
It’s been quite a while since I did one of these. And, just like reviewing some of my favorite music of the year, thinking about what I believe to be some of the top tech trends (or non-trends) of 2023 has been fun. I’m always curious to chat on just about any topic, so if there’s something you feel is a huge miss here or that you agree with and want to discuss, feel free to contact me via one of my social channels found on this site. On to the list.
7 - The Metaverse - Nope, Not This Year (and Not for A While)
Decentraland looking empty and my avatar looking bored
There were lots of stories about the “metaverse” in 2022, namely because Facebook (now Meta) changed their name and mission towards a future where people would spend much of their time donning a VR headset and interacting in a virtual world. While I do think this will happen at some point in the future, 2023 won’t be the year. Most virtual worlds just suck right now, with no compelling reason to come back after trying once. Many of these worlds came online in 2022 simply to try to take advantage of the crypto boom. Now that the bubble has burst, worlds based on Web3 and NFT’s are hurting. VR tech, while improving a lot, still isn’t awesome and there’s not a lot of content backing it up.
I believe we’re looking at 7+ years before virtual reality and the metaverse concept takes off in a real way.
6 - Digital Twins & Simulation Technology - Heating Up
Concept image of a digital twin
A digital twin refers to a synchronized virtual copy of something in the physical world which allows testing and understanding of real time changes of the physical object. Along with (and combined with) AI, this concept will drastically accelerate many industries as we collect more detailed data and use the ever expanding intelligence of AI and machine learning to make and refine predictions on that data.
Imagine the possibilities of being able to model changes to something in real-time, whether it be changes to a field of crops, how efficient a power plant is, or the effectiveness of robotics, and then taking that information and running it through AIML algorithms to predict and test the most efficient options. This, and simulation tech in general, is coming up fast. I see this technology as significantly improving how we create and build, and I am excited to see what we see here in 2023.
5 - Blockchain - Damage Done by Crypto, But Not Going Away
Bitcoin got on my radar back in early 2013 and I’ve been following crypto from a distance since. The last few years have been filled with incredible hype with the launch of thousands of cryptocurrencies, NFT’s, and talk of Web3 and the (see above) metaverse. 2022 was a terrible year for crypto with two major events causing major market crashes: the fall of Luna and “stablecoin” Celsius, and the soon to be documented in countless documentaries in Fyre Festival style collapse of the FTX crypto market due to the fraud of it’s founder. Billions gone in minutes. Many people lost their life savings this year because of greed. Awful to hear.
While it’s a terrible story with the entire market tanking and the likely start of more government regulation to stop events like this from happening in the future, crypto is not dead and more specifically neither is blockchain. We have to remember that crypto is not in itself blockchain. Blockchain is the technology that makes crypto possible and there are a lot of uses for blockchain outside of crypto, such as in the supply chain, medical records, traditional finance and record keeping, and more. I do believe we’ll see an increase in the use of blockchain outside of crypto in 2023 along with crypto regaining some lost ground.
4 - Automation - Still on the Path of Replacing Humans
I feel like it was 4-5 years ago when there was a lot of talk about how automation was coming and that very soon lots of workers would be out of a job. This spurred on conversations around how we have to plan around the coming wave of tech so we don’t have major impacts to the economy. Universal Basic Income was a big topic during several of our last elections but are not spoken of much in between. Obviously, automation hasn’t taken over in a big way, but improvements of both the physical and software variety have marched forward since. With what we’ve seen in 2022 I’m guessing we’ll see a big ramp in mechanical and AI driven automation that will bring us a lot closer to previous conversations about human jobs being replaced at scale. And we really need to be aware of and talk about this. Due to the nature of capitalism, the worlds largest corporations have to care more about profits than their workers. As soon as a worker can be replaced, they will be. With other advancements in tech this year, the pace of change will only speed up. While we can’t stop it, we can keep talking about the impact and demand changes that will protect workers and create new jobs in an automated world.
Significant automation announcements this year:
McDonalds continues testing automated restaurants with less workers
Amazon, after many years, starts drone delivery in two states
AI improvements, which will soon impact administrative jobs such as telemarketing, finance, marketing, and more
Manufacturing, delivery, and logistics heavily investing in automation & robotics; the term “cobots” becoming mainstream
3 - Augmented Reality - Takes Off Before Virtual Reality
With all the talk of the metaverse I feel like we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Meta, and many other companies are trying to build up to an inflection point where the masses will want to spend a lot of time doing business and gaming in virtual worlds. I see augmented reality, or the overlaying of digital objects onto our existing field of view will take off first. While Google was many years too early with Google Glass, I think we’ll see something like it get more mainstream over the next few years, with 2023 being a starting point
Reference design image for Niantic’s Outdoor AR Headset
To me, it is too far a leap to jump directly to a fully virtual world. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve played some VR games and they were super fun, but for big adoption of tech it typically needs to solve a major problem before taking off, and I’m not seeing that in VR at the moment. AR has more possibilities for adoption in the near term which I believe will create the bridge to bigger adoption of VR. Companies like Niantic have a vision here and Apple’s rumored headset is expected to have AR focused capabilities. I’ll bet we’ll see a some motion on this here in 2023.
2 - AI
An image generated in Midjourney with the prompt “an image depicting the concept of the possibilities of AI technology”
How could this be a tech post without mentioning the hottest topic in tech for the last few months? With Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E image generation tools we can quite literally anything that comes to our imagination. I see ChatGPT from OpenAI as a new search engine on steroids that sometimes gets things wrong but can be used to inspire ideas, all without forcing us to consume what Google wants us to see. These are some of the most exciting things I’ve seen in tech in years, where we can learn, create and think differently with imagination. Not only will this change so much about how we access information and create, but it will be getting exponentially better over time. There are some things we need to be considerate of like ethics, ownership, and making sure we don’t create Skynet (which I think this is something we may get close to in our lifetime). I hope we can do that all that, but we’ll see. It will be tough when profits are the motive for most tech. Still, this advancement is a is a game changer that we’ll be talking about a lot this year and years to come.
One of the coolest things I’ve seen using AI - A fake conversation between Steve Jobs and Joe Rogan
1 - Quantum Computing
Image of a quantum computer generated by Midjourney
While AI might be on many people’s list as the top technology to watch in 2023 and the coming years, I believe the one to watch is the one that have a big impact on AI capabilities and many of the other technologies mentioned in this list. Quantum computing has been really hard for me to understand, but the more I research it, the more I am blown away by how it works and what possibilities it brings. This technology, per its name, lives in the quantum realm. The realm of electrons and photons; an entire world around us that we can’t see. A realm energy can exist in multiple states at the same time rather than the binary 1’s and 0’s of traditional computing. This allows quantum computers to process particular kinds of data much faster than traditional computers.
These kinds of computers are few in existence right now, and this kind of computing won’t replace the computers we use today by any means, but it will drastically speed up the computations of many kinds of large sets of data and answers that have multiple possible outcomes; thing like searching a massive database, trying to predict the efficacy of treatments and drugs in healthcare, the training of AI tools, trend analysis for just about any industry that predicts trends (weather, stock market, energy sector). We’re just scratching the surface on this one and I believe quantum computing will have a massive impact across much of tech. I’ll be doing a follow up post covering quantum computing at a high level, so be on the lookout for that.
If' you’ve gotten this far, thanks so much for reading! As always I’m curious to connect and discuss all these topics and more. Feel free to reach out on any of the social links you can find on this site to start a chat. Thanks and see you next time.
