From Precision Medicine to Artificial Meat: frog's Tech Predictions for 2017

Is our world getting better? Sometimes technology has no particular purpose — it just explores whatever it can explore.

In 2017, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and big data will flourish and reach into every corner of our lives, reshaping the relationships between people, between people and space, between people and business, and between people and society. Our dealings with machines will enter the age of voice. Drones and self-driving cars will make life better. And more ocean food and lab-grown meat will show up on your dinner table.

Those are some of the arguments in a technology trends report from the innovation consultancy frog.

frog is a San Francisco company, now 40 years old. It started in industrial design, moved gradually into consulting, and has now entered startup incubation as well. Design has been stretched into a much larger concept — and, of course, so have the margins.

You may find that some of these trends are phrases you've heard plenty over the past couple of years, while others are things you've half-sensed but never thought through.

Let's take a look.

Artificial intelligence will flourish, growing more and more human-like and seeping into business, art and every part of life — but we may reach a symbiosis by learning from each other:

• Soft robotics

The lifelike robots in Westworld are not something the writers invented out of thin air; the shift is already underway, step by step. Materials that come close to the softness of the human body are now being used in robots — soft robotic grippers, for instance, and dielectric elastomers (electroactive polymers that deform when a current runs through them).

The technology will keep developing and will reach deep into every part of human society and daily life.

In factories, soft robotics can add to our strength and precision, freeing us for more complex, creative work. In medicine, it can give amputees their confidence back. As this kind of modification improves, more and more cyborgs — beings that sit between organism and machine — will appear. And at home, you may want a robot to handle your errands; its lifelike look makes it easier to grow attached to.

Toyota, Disney and the healthcare provider Kaiser have already begun applying soft robotics in their own fields.

• Business AI

As intelligent systems and automation advance, robots will become capable assistants in business.

The entrepreneur Jiro sells vintage electric skateboards to a market of aging hippies, backed by a powerful virtual team. His R&D bot crowdsources the designs he needs to a hand-picked pool of designers. His operations bot manages manufacturers and watches production schedules. His sales and marketing bot runs promotions and tunes his e-commerce channels.

When machines take over a large share of the work, will the freed-up labor push people to explore and build in more complex fields, or will it set off social problems? That is worth thinking about.

• AI that makes art

Making art has been seen as the last fortress humans cannot be driven out of by AI. In the future, AI may turn out to be the most fashionable artist of all. Google's new Magenta project, devoted to AI's capacity for artistic creation, recently produced AI composing software.

Plenty of AI-made art has already turned up online.

Sony's CSL Research Laboratory recently produced a song, "Daddy's Car": an AI ran audio synthesis over thousands of pages of sheet music, a human composer polished the result, and out came a track with a distinctly Beatles flavor.

In games, from the randomized dungeon corridors of Activision Blizzard's Diablo to the near-endless worlds of Hello Games' No Man's Sky, you can feel the artistic force of AI-generated imagery.

Earlier this year, a sci-fi short written entirely by an AI, "Sunspring," premiered at the London Film Festival.

These works still carry obvious traces of imitation and still need human improvement. But machines' powerful capacity to search and learn will keep evolving. They will study humanity's most advanced creative work online, trace creativity back to its oldest history, and remix it into something new.

Think about it for a moment, and the human creative process is not much different.

Daddy's Car

Sunspring

• Learning from machines

The companies at the frontier of AI are working on machine deep-learning algorithms — Nervana Systems, MindMeld, Google.

When AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, one of the finest Go players alive, it marked a milestone for machine learning — and alarmed a lot of people. But the training and the matches that led up to that contest also sharpened Lee Sedol's own game.

Humans can take lessons from machine learning and let them reshape how we think about education and training, arriving at a symbiosis in which people and machines learn from each other and both get better.

We could draw inspiration from combinations of AI-made songs, films and text, for instance, or teach a child and a computer to translate at the same time; in the competition, the child picks up something from the way the machine learns.

Demand for virtual reality keeps growing, and beyond entertainment it will be used in medical treatment

Some say virtual reality is humanity's last invention. Without leaving home you can experience a marvelous world, even walk into all sorts of fantastical spaces and stories. It is cheap, absorbing, high-quality entertainment. For content creators, that is clearly good news.

The entertainment companies The Madison Square Garden Company, MLB (sports) and Vevo (the music-video site) will sell VR tickets to their live events next year — from a Beyoncé concert at Madison Square Garden to the UEFA Champions League, all available to experience from your living room. These companies will also release the data gathered during those VR sessions, and it will be extremely valuable: it can record exactly which part of Beyoncé's dance made your pupils widen.

For consumers without VR hardware, more and more offline VR stations will appear in malls, transit hubs and other public spaces.

VR's effect on people is not confined to entertainment. Virtual reality therapy (VRT) can fool our brains into treating psychological conditions — phobias, depression, addiction — and can help limbs regain movement.

Mindmaze builds a virtual environment for stroke patients, reconnecting the brain with the limbs it has forgotten and switching movement back on. Other companies already doing this include CleVR, Virtually Better and Meddiction.

As medical research advances and the technical barriers to VR come down, the field will produce more and more experiments and discoveries that unlock brain function.

Using big data for precision medicine is the direction of the future

In the future, medicine will drop the one-size-fits-all approach. With the mass of data captured by caregivers and medical professionals, we will be able to assess a patient's treatment precisely and tailor a plan to them, moving medicine's focus from identifying symptoms to understanding how disease works, and paying attention to health environments and social determinants.

The shift has already begun in education, supported by fairly mature big-data technology. UCSF (the University of California, San Francisco) has started training doctors to hold a different kind of conversation with patients, one that takes in their social, environmental and economic circumstances. HealthVerity supplies medical big data, Tidepool makes tools that put all your data on a single device, and NantHealth has a powerful precision-medicine system called CLINICS.

Making space intelligent is changing how people and organizations relate to it

• Smart materials are making buildings "biological"

The steel-and-concrete buildings of future cities, and energy-hungry industries such as hospitality, will become friendlier to the environment.

Borrowing forms from living things in nature, materials scientists and architects have developed a brick laced with bacteria that lets cement capture carbon dioxide, and have built a cooling system for buildings that runs on nothing but sun and wind. bioMASON uses microorganisms to develop bio-cement, and Blue Planet uses sustainable technology to sell companies carbon-dioxide solutions.

Some large companies have already started to change. MGM Resorts, the Wynn and the Las Vegas Sands recently fitted out their properties with solar equipment, a first step toward sustainable facilities that will cut costs and draw environmentally minded customers.

• Smart buildings: space joins in human life

Cheap sensors are now everywhere, so spaces can be wired with them easily. As the data piles up, the machines will learn to recognize patterns and recommend new configurations of the space, becoming participants in what people do there. This will change the spaces we build for healthcare, retail, research, manufacturing, work and living.

Take healthcare. Hospitals will use data on a patient's physical condition, stress level, type of illness and personal habits to tailor the layout of a room, update signage, and adjust light and sound. As the intelligent machines inside a space keep learning and evolving, they will deliver the best experience and the best treatment outcome for the patient — and, over time, lower the hospital's costs too.

Intelligent Buildings is doing exactly this, developing a set of technologies and solutions to make spaces smarter. Older technology companies such as GE and IBM are working on intelligent space as well.

• Scalable automated data processing reaches further and further

When Google said it would drive every road and every mile of it, recording everything its sensors picked up — audio, video, weather forecasts, traffic conditions — and turn it all into maps, everyone thought Google had lost its mind.

Drones have made that kind of project a good deal easier. Companies such as SenseFly offer drone services for mapping data.

More companies and organizations are also applying automated data-processing systems in all sorts of fields. New York police use Shotspotter to detect gunfire; the software syncs the sound and location of a shooting in progress in real time, helping officers subdue suspects faster. Sense is a home-monitoring system that tracks every device in the house — how long the TV has been on, when your children go to bed, when the bedroom light went out.

Scalable automated data processing lets human surveillance expand without limit. For some companies, it has already become an essential part of their success.

Human-machine interaction enters the age of voice

In the future, the interface between people and machines will move past the screen into audio that is always there. Apple's AirPods earbuds drew endless mockery, but they point to where voice interaction is going.

The Detour app syncs audio to users as they walk through different cities, creating a new kind of social experience made of sound.

Detour

Here One, a pair of wireless earbuds, offers augmented reality for the ears: Smart Noise Cancellation lets you pick the sounds you want to hear and block the noise you don't.

We already know voice-driven AI well enough — Siri on your phone, for one — except that for now these systems are still fairly stupid. Amazon's Echo speaker can already handle simple tasks: ordering food delivery, hooking up to a fitness app for spoken coaching.

The experience is far from smooth, but one thing is certain: the technology will keep improving, and audio interaction will come ever closer to talking with a person, as in the film Her.

Self-driving cars and drones will make the future world better

• Self-driving cars with superpowers

Tesla's self-driving crash was not long ago. But more than 1.2 million people die in road accidents every year, and 90% or more of those deaths come from human error, so there is room for optimism: people can trust the deep-learning ability of self-driving cars and the vast intelligent network behind them, and in the future autonomous vehicles (AVs) will protect us from the disaster of the car crash.

Picture this. At an intersection, a human-driven car is racing toward a self-driving car stopped at a red light ahead, and the light has just turned yellow. To protect its owner, the self-driving car switches on an emergency-evasion mode, using its sensors and its intelligent network to turn the intersection's signal red and halt the traffic.

On the technical side, Google, makers of LiDAR, radar, sensors and other semiconductor auto components, and carmakers including Ford, Tesla, Honda, GM and Volvo are all working on driverless cars. Making that scene real will also take a push from governments, legislatures and regulators.

• Drones will play a bigger part in humanitarian aid

A drone is defined as an "unmanned aircraft," but behind every one there is always a person or an organization that understands its flight and its potential.

Zipline works with the government of Rwanda, in East Africa, using drones to fly blood to emergency patients in remote areas, and is now building airfields meant only for drones.

Many developed and developing countries have begun pushing drone programs under the banner Drones For Good. UAE Drones for Good is an annual competition run by the government of the United Arab Emirates to encourage drone technology that benefits society.

It is not only government bodies: many Drones For Good projects are started by ordinary citizens. A few thousand dollars up front is enough to test what this powerful technology can do and put it to work on a social problem. Drones mean humanitarian aid is no longer something only large organizations with specialist expertise can carry out.

The double-edged sword of technology is here too: the technology itself is neither right nor wrong — it is defined entirely by the people who use it.

In the future, more ocean food and lab-grown meat will show up on your dinner table.

• Ocean farming

Cities take up more and more land and the population keeps exploding. To solve the food problem, people need to grow more food on abandoned land and in fresh water. The Earth's huge ocean resources may be the next answer. Ocean farming could become humanity's ultimate "blue ocean" strategy — growing kelp and mussels, raising fish in open water — developing the chance to produce food far below the surface while doing as little damage as possible to the seabed ecosystem.

The change has already begun. On the production side, new tools and techniques for growing and harvesting at sea are coming online; on the demand side, new value chains and supply chains are taking shape.

GreenWave is building a vertical underwater farm, where seaweed and mussels grow on ropes floating in the water and gear for catching oysters and clams sits on the seabed below. Innovasea sells companies open-water aquaculture technology and solutions.

• Artificial food and cellular agriculture move toward the mainstream

After millions of years of taking what they wanted from nature, people are paying more and more attention to the environment and to animal welfare, and environmentalism and vegetarianism are spreading. As demand grows for cruelty-free food and for ways to fight climate change and greenhouse-gas emissions, artificial food and cellular agriculture will move into the mainstream.

The race to feed people protein without any animal in it is splitting into two product categories. The first extracts plant protein, then reworks and repurposes it to produce the mouthfeel and nutrition of meat.

Impossible Foods invented a burger made entirely from plants, the Impossible Burger; it does not just look like meat, the patty eats like it too. Beyond Meat, another food company using plant-protein extraction, already sells a pure plant-protein burger, beef and chicken ready meals, and meat sauce.

The second uses tissue engineering and biology to grow artificial food in the lab — meat, eggs, dairy. That technology needs enormous funding.

Since 2004, New Harvest has researched and developed ways of making artificial meat by culturing muscle and fat cells, starting with turkey. They call it "cellular agriculture," and some of their meat has already reached supermarkets. The Silicon Valley startup Memphis Meats is doing the same thing, and is currently crowdfunding on Indiegogo.

One prediction is safe: in 2017 supermarkets will sell all kinds of plant-based meat substitutes, similar in nutrition and getting tastier. You can now be a vegetarian bold enough to eat "meat."

Cover image: frog