Technology's Impact: 8 Predictions for the Year Ahead by Dr. Werner Vogels, Study Guides, Projects, Research of Technology

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F R O M S C H O O L I N G T O S P A C E : Eight Predictions on How Technology Will Continue to Change Our Lives in the Coming Year 2021 is going to be a launchpad for change, and here’s what’s coming Dr. Werner Vogels, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Amazon.com December 2020 AWS | Eight Predictions on How Technology Will Continue to Change Our Lives in the Coming Year 2 Table of Contents Cloud will be everywhere 4 The Internet of machine learning 6 In 2021, pictures, video, and audio will speak more than words 9 Technology will transform our physical worlds as much as our digital worlds 11 Remote learning earns its place in education 13 Small businesses will race to the cloud, and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will lead the way 15 Quantum Computing starts to bloom 18 The final frontier… 20 AWS | Eight Predictions on How Technology Will Continue to Change Our Lives in the Coming Year 5 Today, AWS has regions and Points of Presence (PoPs) that enable cloud technologies to be closer than ever to customers across the world. Customers are deploying devices like AWS Snowball to gather petabytes of data from the slopes of volcanoes in Hawaii and research centers in Antarctica. AWS Outposts, which extend cloud infrastructure and tools into our customer’s buildings, and AWS Local Zones, which put select infrastructure close to where customers need it, are helping those in urban areas to rapidly shrink their cumbersome datacenters. With AWS IoT Greengrass, edge devices can connect with each other, whether that is from inside someone’s kitchen or from the handlebars of a cycle in the gym. As 5G networks expand, operators are deploying Wavelength Zones so application traffic from 5G devices can take full advantage of the low latency and high bandwidth. And when fast connections to the cloud are pushed to the farthest edges of the network, great things can happen. By removing latency, and conducting more of the compute on the device at the edge of the network, we are beginning to overcome the one limitation that still faces all technology on earth, the speed of light. Those operations that require very low latency— from autonomous driving, to natural speech processing and translation, and the active management of vital infrastructure–no longer need to conduct round trips from remote corners of the earth to a central server. Tasks can now start to happen where the results are needed most. The outcome? Driverless cars become real. You can start to have more natural conversations with services like Alexa. Our factories, homes, and office spaces become increasingly efficient and resilient. And if gaming is your thing, not only will you no longer need to worry about lag hampering your experience, your skills will also be at full strength, wherever you are. As the cloud extends out of centralized locations and into the environments that we live and work in every day, what we will increasingly see is the same software that runs in the cloud will run close to you, and that will lead to improvements in all aspects of our lives, from healthcare to transportation, entertainment, manufacturing, and more. In 2021, this push to the edge will accelerate. AWS | Eight Predictions on How Technology Will Continue to Change Our Lives in the Coming Year 6 P R E D I C T I O N T W O The Internet of machine learning We are seeing a data explosion. To give this trend context, today we generate more data in one hour than was created during all of 2000 and more data will be created in the next three years than was created over the past 30. In 2020, whether you were a data scientist or not, we all got a glimpse of this growing data curve as scientific researchers, pharmaceutical companies, governments, and healthcare institutes turned every resource toward developing vaccines, novel treatments, and other means to help the world stay healthy during the pandemic. All these efforts required generating and processing vast amounts of data. Whether in healthcare or other applications, the only realistic way to handle all the information we are seeing is to use ingestion and aggregation tools, married to Machine Learning (ML) models that can help make sense of it. It’s no wonder then that this year ML went mainstream. ML has historically been a computationally heavy workload that’s incapable of running anywhere but on the most powerful hardware. However, with advancements in software and silicon, this will begin to change. Using a combination of AWS technologies, we’ll see hardware and software working together at the edge to have a bigger impact than ever. By moving towards the edge, what we will see in the coming year is an acceleration of the adoption of ML models across industries and government. In manufacturing, we will see ML embedded on production lines, able to spot production anomalies in real time. In agriculture, ML models will help farmers manage precious resources, such as soil and water, more intelligently. AWS | Eight Predictions on How Technology Will Continue to Change Our Lives in the Coming Year 7 For the parts of the world where small-holder farmers are the majority, across Southeast Asia and Africa for example, pushing the use of ML models into new applications and the collection of data closer to the edge will be revolutionary in helping them increase the yield of their crops and find the best price for their effort. One AWS customer in Southeast Asia I have spent time with is HARA. Based in Jakarta, Indonesia, HARA is a great example of this approach in action. HARA uses ML to analyze data from hundreds of thousands of small holder farmers across the region. The data collected in their fields by people and devices includes the seasonal growth cycles of their farms—what it took to grow their crop, and what they were able to earn from it. That analysis not only helps farmers get access to reasonable credit, but as the pandemic has continued, HARA is using its platform to identify the places and people who need food the most, match them with the farmers who have it, and figure out the logistics in between. Yes, this is a hard, human problem, but technology is ready to help solve it. 0 50 100 300 250 200 150 2016 3 2017 60 2018 215 2019 248 2020 250+ Amazon SageMaker is among the fastest-growing services in AWS history, and the pace of innovation in ML is only increasing with 250+ new features launched this year. AWS | Eight Predictions on How Technology Will Continue to Change Our Lives in the Coming Year 10 This shift to more natural forms of communication will also enable greater equity when it comes to accessing services and information for all of us. For those that never learned to read or write, their voice might be their only mode to access information. In Ghana, for example, a company like Cow Tribe dispatches vaccines, feed, or a veterinarian to a cow herder in need, via simple voice commands. People with disabilities who can’t navigate a touchpad or keyboard, can tell a screen to show them photos from last summer, order food from a nearby restaurant, or ask a smart speaker to call the kids. And don’t forget all that video, audio, and all those images—on Twitter and elsewhere— also becomes a source of data that will offer new insights and prompt new products and services. Think about music. As we made the transition to digital music, audio became a source of data for analysis to not just play your favorite song, but also offer new ways to follow trends, discover new artists, and draw on the entire history of music, genres, and artists to match the music to a mood, a few words, or a place. In 2021 and beyond, the use of audio, video, and images will continue to replace written text in everything from social platforms to business operations, and cloud technologies will play a significant role in meeting that demand. AWS | Eight Predictions on How Technology Will Continue to Change Our Lives in the Coming Year 11 Heat map of how people move through a public space. P R E D I C T I O N F O U R Technology will transform our physical worlds as much as our digital worlds In 2020 we were introduced to social distancing. As we spaced ourselves out, it gave us all the chance to take stock and rethink how our cities live, breathe, and flow. Many of the places we live and work have been built on decades-old assumptions (or centuries-old, depending on where you live) that don’t hold up anymore—or at the very least, don’t perform well in a pandemic. AWS | Eight Predictions on How Technology Will Continue to Change Our Lives in the Coming Year 12 With the help of advanced data analytics, 2021 is the year when we will start to figure out how to better design our cities to give us the advantages of social distancing, without feeling so distant. Our planning will consider things like how we make our communities healthier and safer, rather than simply denser and more efficient. It’s the true convergence of the digital and the physical. For example, using advanced data analytics technologies and ML, cities will be able to analyze foot traffic to understand how pedestrians move around, whether that is filing into a stadium, out of a grocery store, or onto a subway platform. Big-box stores have been using a version of this technology for many years to analyze the foot traffic at any given moment, and help move people in real-time past the best deals or advertising. But add ML models to the tool kit, with a desire to solve tougher real-world problems, and we can spot the bottlenecks and the danger spots before they occur. We can start to predict hour-by-hour pedestrian traffic and offer suggestions for how to safely move through our cities and institutions during the height of summer’s tourist season or in the middle of winter’s flu season. Consider a museum. With the aid of these technologies we’ll soon understand how best to place the artwork, or design the exits from a bathroom to prevent people from bumping into each other and maintain a safe social distance. Another physical transformation we will see is less social and more financial—the rapidly vanishing need for cash in our pockets. One of the biggest changes from the pandemic has been the rise of cashless payments. In some bars and restaurants around the world, cash is forbidden. As a result, we have seen the dramatic rise in new online payment platforms whose businesses are built in the cloud, and whose underlying encryption and ledger systems—blockchain is one example—are cloud-based as well. Those options will only proliferate as the world increasingly accelerates to digital technologies that replace antiquated, centuries-old approaches. AWS | Eight Predictions on How Technology Will Continue to Change Our Lives in the Coming Year 15 P R E D I C T I O N S I X Small businesses will race to the cloud, and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will lead the way In 2021 and beyond, we’re going to see a massive shift in small businesses beginning to make use of advanced cloud technology to reach their customers and we’re going to see an explosion of higher-level technologies and service providers—that will cater to these small businesses. It will be helping small business to do everything from spinning up a chatbot to help with answering frequently asked questions, to getting a dead-simple CRM system in place and running within minutes. Small business get the benefits of sophisticated architectures and applications without having to invest in the time and expense of building it themselves. The cloud everywhere trend described above is what is enabling this. What is driving it is the experience that most small businesses faced this past year where, in many cases, the difference between surviving and not was an ability to leverage technology. A little- known fact is that only 47 percent of small and medium businesses in the US have their own website. Expect this number to grow in 2021. Expanding this trend globally, we should look to nations in Southeast Asia including Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam and in Africa—Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa to lead the way. AWS | Eight Predictions on How Technology Will Continue to Change Our Lives in the Coming Year 16 Before 2020, I used to spend a lot of my time in these parts of the world, talking with customers and listening to their stories of how they are using technology to overcome local challenges. In my time in these regions I have seen a great potential amongst their small, and medium sized businesses and have always been inspired by their stories. In sub-Saharan Africa, 90 percent of all companies are small businesses, which make up 40 percent of GDP, and account for $700 billion in the economy. In Southeast Asian countries, small and micro businesses account for 99 percent of businesses in several key sectors, most notably tourism and handicrafts. Online penetration in these countries is already among the highest in the world so going online allows small and micro businesses to reach beyond their communities and stay trading even when their worlds are shutting down around them. 99.8% 99.7% 99% 90% 99.5% 57% 44% 43% 40% 25% 27% 37% 23% 30% 26% Percent of Businesses Share of the GDP Women Owned EU US SE Asia Africa LATAM Source: Eurostat, Individual SME Authorities, Association of SE Asian nations, Mastercard Index of Women Entrepreneurs 2020 SMEs are a vital component of economies, creating jobs and enabling inclusive growth AWS | Eight Predictions on How Technology Will Continue to Change Our Lives in the Coming Year 17 A good example is Warung Pintar, in Indonesia, which combines both the technical services and the small business side with its cloud-connected food stands. Picture the roadside food and sundry stands that are ubiquitous in Indonesia, and across SE Asia and other parts of the world—in Latin America you might call them a tiendita. These very places are usually run by a solo-operator and you can get a cold drink, a snack, and top up your mobile. Warung Pintar’s version offers all of that, but the stall and its operations are connected to the cloud. A Warung Pintar stall operator now gets inventory management and tracking, sales analytics, cashless payments, WIFI, and more, all in a bright yellow package. Operators of these stalls might have previously relied solely on passing foot traffic but can now start to know and nurture their customer base. Previously, the items they stocked and sold were sourced mostly on gut feel, but they can now analyze and understand what’s making them money and what’s just taking up scarce space. As these small businesses bring their unique perspectives and often craft goods to the world, expect them to begin to leapfrog a lot of the business practices we see in more established countries. These countries are not burdened with legacy technology or legacy thinking around what is possible for them, so the sky is the limit. AWS | Eight Predictions on How Technology Will Continue to Change Our Lives in the Coming Year 20 P R E D I C T I O N E I G H T The final frontier… For technology to fulfill its potential to help everyone around the world to live a better life, we shouldn’t go out and around the world as much as we should go up and above it. In 2019, we launched a service called AWS Ground Station that lets you control satellite communications, process data, and scale your operations without having to worry about building or managing your own ground station infrastructure. We have seen a fantastic uptake in this service, but we think it is only just the beginning. In 2021 and beyond, I predict space will be the area where we see some of the greatest advancements when it comes to cloud technologies. We’re already seeing that the ability to access and process satellite data is helping researchers to track glacial recession, maritime agencies protect vulnerable marine reserves, and agronomists better predict food supply. Startups are looking to make space the home for a new breed of fast, secure networks. By making access to space affordable and accessible to every developer, I’m looking forward to seeing the innovations that come back down to earth and can help us all to grow and prosper. Source: Euroconsult, 2019. 9,935 2,298 Past, Present, and Future Satellites Launched 2019 - 2028p 2009 - 2018 An average of 990 satellites will be launched yearly by 2028 aWws