Professional Pilot, April 2018

FORECASTS Technology Timeline 60 I t has been awhile since our last edition of the Technology Timeline Pro Pilot Feb 2016 page 66 and it has also been a busy period in the world of R D So its time once again to assess our performance and catch up on recent developments As always some of our forecasts have come true Some are taking a bit longer than we expected And a few items have come to our attention that we overlooked in previous editions of the Timeline So it goes Winners and losers Dr Marvin Cetron Forecasting International founder once ran 17 research laboratories for the Navy Department In the late 1950s he and his team went back over their early forecasts looking for possible lessons to guide future work They found 2 When long term forecasts failed it was usually because unpredictable breakthroughs either dramatically advanced the schedule or delivered a new idea that made the original work obsolete Look at the smartphone and consider possible technologies that were never developed because it co opted their markets And when forecasts 3 years or less into the future proved wrong as they often did it was because engineering required more time than expected Either that or bureaucracy slowed their development or adoption The Timeline offers 2 short term failures As recently as 2016 we predicted that 3D video conferencing would appear and Massive Open Online Courses MOOCs would be broadly accepted for general education We imagined both would be seen in 2017 It was easy to be optimistic about 3D video conferencing A team from the MIT Media Lab had been refining a 3D display since 2011 Six years seemed time enough to demonstrate a practical business oriented use for it Dr Cetrons observation about engineering clearly applies here There have been interesting developments in this field but lesson learned We will push our arrival time out a few extra years MOOCs have won any number of followers Coursera 74 PROFESSIONAL PILOT April 2018 alone has over 26 million registered students Khan Academy some 40 million Yet pre college schools rarely incorporate them into the curriculum for at least 3 reasons Courses are rarely certified for classroom use There is no guarantee that students do their own work And in those regions of the world where general education is most needed internet access remains slow unreliable and expensive We have no idea how long it will take to overcome these handicaps For now we are retiring this forecast We have one qualified success to report Our 2016 Timeline said that we would see a smartphone based ATC system for drones by 2017 NASA last year completed testing of its Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management technology which is designed to allow drones to fly beyond the pilots line of sight With computing based in the cloud drones will communicate with the system via cellular networks Verizon Qualcomm and AT T are all working on the project Readers can decide for themselves whether our forecast was close enough to score this as a success Now for some clear wins Shortly after the 2016 Timeline appeared we learned that Dr Victor Gura of Cedars Sinai Medical Center had created a wearable artificial kidney And in 2017 our target date researchers at the University of California announced an artificial kidney that can be implanted in the body and functions just as a natural kidney does Clinical trials are expected this year Score 1 for us Also for 2017 we anticipated that cell phones would translate conversation among 10 languages as a standard feature Bragis Dash Pro earbuds for use with iPhones offer real time translation among 40 languages So do Googles Pixel 2 Pixel Buds Both were announced last year That makes 2 For 2018 we predicted that AI technology would imitate the thinking processes of the human brain Since our forecast MITs Ian Goodfellow has become famous among AI researchers by giving neural networks a reasonable equivalent of imagination Something called a spiking neural network operates much more like natural neurons than previous technologies And the recently announced memtransistor combines memory and information processing into a By Owen Davies Forecasting International TechCast Global Predictions for your career and your life Israeli startup Eviation Aircraft introduced its all electric airplane in 2017 First flight is due this year with service beginning in 2021 This is just one of many innovations coming to air transport Photo courtesy Eviation