Tabla de contenidos para 2021 en The Wired World

DAVID BAKER “When The WIRED World in 2020 went to press in October 2019,” says Baker, who has edited the magazine since its launch in 2012, “none of us had any sense of the catastrophe that would envelop the world just a few months later. But we humans are an adaptable species and, as many of our predictions for 2021 show, we’re already working out how to respond. From smarter ways to work, to AI-based approaches to tackling disease, to more resilient and interconnected global politics, 2021 will demonstrate we’re good at bouncing back from adversity.” JENNIFER DOUDNA Co-winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Doudna predicts that, in 2021, “CRISPR gene editing will allow us to act more boldly in the face of interconnected issues.” NIGHAT DAD “Freedom…

TODAY, THERE ARE MANY EXAMPLES OF artificial intelligence interacting with us to make our lives more efficient and effective. Machines recommend products for us to purchase through e-commerce websites, they rank news for us through social-media feeds, they introduce us to people on dating apps, price goods and services in real-time and so on. However, the common factor with all of these is that each machine is limited to influencing our lives through a software interface with a website or an app. In 2021, AI will go beyond this. We will see the emergence of the first physical interfaces between humans and AI-driven machines. Today’s autonomous machines operate in controlled and closed environments, such as factories and warehouses, physically separated from humanity. They are rigid, manually programmed machines with limited…

THE YEAR 2020 HAS TAUGHT US WHAT’S really important in life: health, family and a stable internet connection. Following the long weeks of social distancing and spending time at home, we were compelled to re-evaluate the merits of working from a shared office. Business meetings can now be conducted via video conferencing, collaboration is possible from the comfort of our own homes, and teams have proved how they can work efficiently without the need to co-ordinate everyone in a physical space. Remote work through online collaboration isn’t a new concept. Wikipedia, the ultimate achievement of this practice, will celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2021. Millions have contributed their own knowledge and collaborated to create what is widely seen as the best encyclopedia ever produced. Yet most of us have never…

ARTIFICIAL ORGANS – GROWN IN THE lab and transplanted into someone’s body – have been on the horizon for some years now. They present many challenges but, if we can overcome them, they will open up the possibility for patients who need a new organ no longer having to wait for a human donor. They will also save health services money, eliminating the high costs that accrue during years of treatment, especially for some chronic conditions. In 2021, we will see significant breakthroughs around how artificial organs function, while the technology used to produce them will take them one step closer to use in the clinic. To date, the greatest success we have had in this field has been the production of lab-grown epidermis, the outermost layer of skin, to…

IN 2021, WE WILL START TO USE IDEAS from the operating room in the intensive-care unit (ICU). The Covid-19 pandemic has compelled us to rethink our understanding both of the human body and of systemic medicine. We have seen that pathological inflammations in patients with the virus can appear anywhere, and patients can present disorders in any organ system, from simple fevers to major strokes. This has led to novel approaches concerning the treatments being tried in hospitals and traditional divisions between departments breaking down. One example is how we monitor patients who are sedated. Sedation is a major part of treating an ICU patient who needs a ventilator, just as it is of treating one in an operating theatre. In the past we have taken different approaches to monitoring…

AT THE START OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC, empty supermarket shelves prompted people to ask – sometimes for the first time – where their food comes from. In 2021 we will see more food in cities provided by producers who are less vulnerable to the disruptions of long supply chains we experienced during 2020. The pandemic caused consumers around the world to turn to smaller, local and regional food providers that could secure access to food during lockdowns. In the UK, the Farmers to Feed Us digital platform created new ways for small-scale food producers to provide fresh produce directly to consumers. Sales of food from community-supported agriculture (CSA), where consumers subscribe to receive in-season harvests from groups of UK farmers, increased by 111 per cent from February to April, with…

FINDING THE PRODUCT-MARKET FIT FOR any new technology always involves trial and error: autonomous driving has so far has swallowed an estimated $50bn in investment with relatively little to show in return. In 2021 we will see autonomous driving finally find its fit – and it’s not in personal travel. Billed as the first everyday consumer application of AI, self-driving has simultaneously inspired its champions and proved a worry for its investors. Aiming high in terms of functionality has delivered plenty of exciting business cases, but the science and engineering problems they entail are not easily soluble. Aiming low has not delivered business cases that make sense and deliver a return. This conundrum has sent technology companies in a number of exciting directions, whereas automotive firms have ended up favouring…

SEXUAL AND RACIAL HARASSMENT WILL MOVE into digital workspaces during 2021, with work platforms destined to go the way of social media. Companies will have to introduce guidelines for online behaviour. Working from home has blurred the line between professional and personal behaviour. There have been examples in which some employees have made offensive comments in their conversations with colleagues – and companies are finding these interactions hard to police. Combined with the stress caused by lockdown, this inaction means conflicts escalate and employees feel increasingly isolated. Discrimination by race and gender is a long-standing business problem, and my organisation, Project Include, has found that it has become a bigger issue in a number of online workplaces. In 2021, companies must provide training and guidelines for employees on what is…

AN INCREASINGLY LARGE PROPORTION of video content online will be synthetic in 2021 – meaning wholly or partially generated by AI. Some of it will be benign, and even hilarious, such as the YouTubers who are using the power of AI to deepfake Nicolas Cage into every Hollywood movie ever made – but there will be plenty that have been created with wholly malicious intent. Indeed, the first widespread use of synthetic media – non-consensual deepfake pornography, which almost exclusively targets women – has proliferated wildly since it first emerged at the end of 2017. According to Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Sensity, which was founded in 2018 to combat deepfakes in the visual media, the number of deepfake pornography videos online is doubling every six months, and by next summer, there…

THE TECHNOLOGIES AND STANDARDS that underpin communication around the world are, for the most part, global and interoperable. From the microprocessor architectures that power everything we do, to the standards set by bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force, which oversees the way the internet works, and 3GPP, which has a similar role for mobile communications, we have developed an inexorable tendency to commonality. We all use Intel- and ARM-designed microprocessors in the devices we own. Our mobile phones can work pretty much anywhere on the planet. Transport Layer Security protects our online lives whatever browser we use and whatever service we are using – something that has been critical during the Covid-19 pandemic. Common standards mean that designs can be checked once by all interested parties and having…

DURING THE EARLY DAYS OF THE CORONAVIRUS pandemic, there were various prognoses regarding the nature of a future economic recovery. Around April – perhaps buoyed by the way in which some Asian countries were beginning to rebound after having managed the public health crisis with relative success – many analysts in the west were talking about a V-shaped recovery: a precipitous decline followed by a sharp incline back to where economies had been at the beginning of 2020. As the global economy struggled through the year, the idea of a V-shaped recovery was replaced by something resembling a K. Data from China in the autumn suggested that retail is back at pre-virus levels and exports are growing at double digits. However, it also demonstrated that the bottom 60 per cent…

IN A WORLD THAT IS INCREASINGLY DIGITAL, OUR online identities hold the key to accessing social, economic and democratic activities. According to a 2019 report by McKinsey, the potential economic value of digital identity by 2030 will be the equivalent of six per cent of GDP in emerging economies, and three per cent in developed economies. This will come from many sources, including increased use of financial services, better access to employment, escalated agricultural productivity, higher tax revenues and less fraud. Yet, the World Bank estimates 1.8 billion people have no legal form of identity. Without this, individuals are more likely to be exploited, trafficked or confined to a life of servitude. And many of us who do have an online identity find that it is managed by companies such…

IN 2020, THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC AND THE protests that followed the senseless death of George Floyd in Minneapolis made millions reflect on their own role in perpetuating social inequity and systemic racism. In 2021, we will act on that newly understood responsibility. We will work across sectors, disciplines and industries to deepen our understanding of systemic problems and collaborate to find meaningful solutions. This will lead to real change in science and technology. In 2019, Black people made up only three per cent of the UK tech workforce – and only 2.6 per cent of UK technology company board members are from ethnic-minority backgrounds. Attempts to address this critical lack of representation have often been siloed and seen as only a “nice to have”. In 2021 they will be a…

PSYCHEDELIC MEDICINE WILL BEGIN TO CROSS OVER INTO the mental health mainstream in 2021. In both Europe and the US, medicines regulators have eased restrictions on using MDMA to treat post-traumatic disorder (PTSD), and on psilocybin – the active substance in magic mushrooms – to treat depression. 2021 will bring new clinical trials, as support for the use of psychedelics in medicine continues to gain momentum. Clinical research into psychedelics has boomed in the past five years and investors are taking note. The US Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which researches the topic, reached a $30 million (£23 million) fundraising target in 2020, on top of $80m of historical funds. This money will enable the completion of a phase-3 trial in the use of MDMA to treat PTSD, which…

IN 2021, GOVERNMENTS WILL BE WRESTLING WITH THE economic downturn caused by Covid-19 and they will face significant pressure to include in their recovery plans and measures to reduce the rate of global warming. An Ipsos poll conducted in April 2020 found that 71 per cent of people surveyed across 14 mostly affluent countries felt that climate change was as serious a crisis as the pandemic. Research by my own company, Bulb, has shown that more than a third of the UK public lived more sustainably during the lockdown. The challenge for 2021 will be to ensure that support for climate-friendly policies continues to grow and that intentions are transformed into long-term actions. Ipsos also found that, despite their stated concern about the environment, people were on the whole no…

IT TOOK A PANDEMIC FOR US TO REALISE that the world’s 20th-century model of production, in which people huddled into large enterprises, honed specialities and shared their competences with co-workers, was no longer working. 2020 has shown that many people are able to study, work and organise their everyday life independently from their habitual geographical location. The online world has made borders redundant and this challenges the very nature of nation states. In 2021, states will have to respond. So far states have been built on the idea that most people live at fixed addresses and work for specific employers. They and their employers pay taxes to the government, which redistributes them back through society – schools in people’s neighbourhoods, doctors within a reasonably close distance to home, and so…

THE RISK MODELS THAT BANKS USE TO help inform their commercial-lending decisions have been dealt a blow by Covid-19. The pandemic has presented a crisis where historical correlations do not hold. In 2021 we will find new ways of assessing risk that use forward-looking as well as backwardlooking data. This will make lending smarter and better for everyone. Traditional risk models are based on historical data, but the dynamics of the Covid-19 crisis mean that extrapolating from the past may now be a less helpful approach. As is the case with trade wars, natural disasters or, indeed, climate change, pandemics are by their very nature situations that are hard to predict or plan for. We can make assumptions based on what we have seen with similar events in the past,…

DESPITE PREDICTIONS OF THE DEATH OF the office in the 1990s, remote working has been slow to take off. Across the EU the share of the population working from home has hovered between four and five per cent for the past two decades. However, Covid-19 looks likely to change all of that. In 2015, researchers at Stanford University found that remote work increased performance by 13 per cent due to fewer breaks, sick-days and a quieter working environment. And several anecdotal studies of remote working during the pandemic show that people working from home have become more productive. In 2021, however, we will have to grapple with its downsides. While working from home brings efficiency gains in the short run, the danger is that it will imperil the innovation that…

COVID-19 HAS FORCED POLITICIANS TO confront something they have up till now preferred to ignore: the fact that most rich countries have effectively outsourced large parts of their medicine production to a handful of other countries – notably China and India. This is especially true for the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) that are the building blocks of pills and injections. The global medicine market is shaped like an inverted pyramid. Its base comprises APIs, made mostly in China. Many countries manufacture antibiotics, for example, but in 2018, the latest figures available, China was the origin of 82 per cent of all antibiotic ingredients used worldwide. And above that lies a layer of cheap generic medicines, a very high proportion of which are produced in India. In 2021, calls to bring…

ONLINE WILL BECOME THE “THIRD PLACE” where we do much of our socialising in 2021. As the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted the distinction between the workplace and the home space, we are starting to look beyond video calls and turning to virtual worlds to give us the same experience as our favourite gathering places. The pandemic saw sharp increases in the numbers of players across many gaming platforms. With schools closed and outdoor opportunities limited, players flocked to Epic Games’ Fortnite. There are now 350 million registered Fortnite players, compared to 250 million in March 2019, helping propel the company to a $17.3 billion (£13.3 billion) valuation. Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which offers wholesome co-operation and virtual outdoor adventures, drove Nintendo’s operating profits up 428 per cent in the…

WE WILL SEE A SHIFT IN THE WAY PEOPLE PLAY, work, learn or simply hang out in 2021. Some of this connection will move into the Metaverse, a digital place where people seamlessly get together and interact in millions of 3D virtual experiences. Early iterations of the Metaverse emerged in the 1980s with VPL Research’s DataSuit and Linden Lab’s Second Life in 2003. However, it started to feel very real in 2020 as several platforms have been envisioning – and building – their own versions of the Metaverse. The pandemic, with its requirements of physical distancing, has brought people into online digital environments for a growing range of shared human experiences. Gaming platforms are being used to host meetings ranging from online birthday parties to job interviews. We’re already seeing…

DURING 2020, INSTITUTIONS OF ALL kinds were forced to adapt to a dynamic world where the usual projections and five-year marketing plans did not apply. Economic reports show marked GDP reductions of greater than 20 per cent in many countries, with continued decline into 2021. Businesses and workplaces will increasingly turn to models of work in dynamic fields – such as cybersecurity – to make them more resilient. Organisations that emerge out of the pandemic and the ensuing economic turmoil will have spent 2020 continually adapting to previously unimagined circumstances. This is a very familiar environment for people working in security, and particularly cybersecurity, because quite often we don’t know what the next couple of hours will look like. Businesses of all kinds will discover the need to adopt fluid…

ONLINE CONSPIRACY THEORIES ARE surprisingly convincing – and present significant danger to the real world. At Jigsaw, a division of Google focused on countering digital extremism, cyber attacks and misinformation, we conducted more than 70 in-depth interviews in 2020 with people in the US and UK who believe the Earth is flat, that school shootings were government plots and that white populations are being intentionally replaced by non-whites. Those beliefs lead to changes in behaviour: we found that people who believe disinformation about the origin of Covid-19 shun face masks and ignore social-distancing. In 2021, anti-vaccination activists will use the internet to warn about what they see as nefarious motives behind any pandemic-vaccination programme. Social-media platforms have now started to respond to Covid-related, racist and xenophobic conspiracy theories by removing…

OUR INTERCONNECTED WORLD IS completely reliant on satellites. In 2021, there will be an increasing number of attempts by states and independent groups to mount cyber attacks on space infrastructure, with consequences for terrestrial systems. In 2017, 20 ships in the Black Sea lost their ability to navigate due to a spoofing attack on their GPS systems, almost certainly carried out by Russia. In 2021, Russia will continue such attacks alongside the US, China and India, but they will also be joined by other nations, including Iran. Iran has targeted critical infrastructure in the past – in 2011 it hijacked a US drone by interfering with its navigation system – and since then it has been building its space capabilities. Space is now so crowded that physical attacks on satellites…

2021 WILL SHOWCASE THE REAL POWER of distributed computing, with significant processing taking place not in centralised servers in the cloud, but on the “edge” of the network, where much of the data we rely on is generated. This will deliver big gains, not only in computing, but also in the lives of the increasing number of people who will be connected to the power of the internet as a result Edge computing will be crucial to the success of the internet of things (IoT). Between them, IoT devices – from smartphones and smartwatches to tiny computers embedded in machines and infrastructure – generate huge amounts of data. This is processed in the cloud, with relevant data then sent back to the device, instructing it how to react. But latency…

ISTANCE LEARNING HAS BEEN AROUND for years. But it still came as a rude shock to parents and children when the pandemic forced more than a billion students around the world to try to learn via a screen at home. Under-resourced teachers, unfamiliar technology and massively variable home-schooling conditions meant that, for some, the experience was fraught and ineffective. For many, it even left them questioning the very concept of distance learning. In 2021, however, we will see how technology, specifically artificial intelligence (AI), is the future of education, as it works alongside teachers to deliver successful online lessons. China leads the way in mass-scale e-learning solutions that combine human teachers and AI, with nine education technology unicorns of its own, including VIPKid, Zuoyebang and Yuanfudao. AI allows these companies…

MAKING MACHINES ARTIFICIALLY intelligent is a time-consuming practice of collecting and manually labelling data for AIs to learn from. Today, researchers are enabling machines to learn new concepts continuously from far fewer data samples; in 2021, this will continue, as AI systems rely less on human labelling, and more on teaching themselves directly from interactions with users. This will make a big difference to the “intelligence” of AI assistants. Today, it is second nature for us to complete transactional requests with AI assistants, either by issuing requests such as “Set the thermostat to 20°C”, or “Navigate to Wembley Stadium”. But, at the same time we are left yearning for more human-like conversational experiences, such as “Any ideas for this weekend?” or “Find me cameras under £400”. As we enter the…

PHOTOSYNTHESIS IS THE SOURCE FOR much of the world around us. It produces wood for our buildings, fibres for our clothes, food to sustain life and much more, including medicine, dyes, rubber and, of course, fossil fuels. Indeed, our current society burns in one year what photosynthesis took one million years to make, leading to the enormous amounts of carbon now present in our atmosphere. In 2021 we will move towards harnessing this extraordinarily powerful process – artificially. Photosynthesis is a two-step process, taking place first in light and then in dark. In daylight, a leaf uses the energy in photons from sunlight to separate water into its elemental components of oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen is released into the atmosphere; the hydrogen is stored as a component of a…

SCENTS AND SMELLS PROVIDE us with unique clues about the environment but, unlike animals or plants, humans massively under-use this wealth of olfactory information. This will change in 2021, and smell will be treated as data to enhance products in real time and in response to users’ engagement. Smell-based communication has been mooted for some time, but in 2021 we will see sophisticated ways of encoding, recording and reporting olfactory signals. Processing of olfactory data will be added to searchengine/voice-search queries and integrated with multimedia information for sales, marketing, public messaging and educational purposes. Companies such as Olorama Technology, based in Valencia, and Aromyx in Mountain View, California, are already developing smell simulators, voice-activated scents and bespoke odours tailored to individual projects and customers’ needs. The use of smell for…

IN 2021, PEOPLE WILL GAIN ACCESS TO THEIR health data and use it to make decisions about their medical care. And those funding healthcare – public bodies or private organisations – will redesign systems to meet these expectations. Research published in July 2020 by GSK, the pharmaceutical conglomerate, found that 84 per cent of people in Spain, 77 per cent in the UK, 75 per cent in Italy and 63 per cent in Germany consider it important to take their health into their own hands to relieve pressure on healthcare systems. Consumers have also become accustomed to managing many aspects of their lives remotely via technology; they wonder why the same is not possible when it comes to their health. Healthcare systems will evolve to accommodate the demands of individuals…

ZERO-CARBON POWER OUTSTRIPPED fossil fuel in the UK’s electricity mix in 2020 for the first time since the industrial revolution. Back then, Thomas Edison’s Holborn Viaduct coal plant – opened in 1882 and the world’s first coal-fired power station – could light 1,000 lamps. Today, a single rotation of a wind turbine off Scotland’s coast can power a home for a day. The challenge of green power is that while we humans are creatures of routine – we get up, travel and cook at the same time, creating predictable peaks and troughs in demand – wind and sunshine can show up at unexpected times or not at all. This causes fluctuations in power that our engineers at National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) must smooth out by balancing supply and…

THE STARTUP WORLD LIKES TO CELEBRATE exciting new technologies, such as AI and autonomous vehicles. But these are newcomers to the party compared to the electric motor, whose precursor technology celebrates its 200th birthday in 2021. Yet today, mobility overwhelmingly runs on fossil fuels. Electric-powered vehicles have been confined to the wealthy, the geeky and the green – not sufficiently affordable, accessible or practical for everyone else. In 2021, startups and industry disruptors will proliferate, heralding a new era of e-mobility for all of us. The driver for this is, of course, climate change. Over 77 countries and more than 100 of the world’s biggest cities have committed to achieving net-zero emissions. Globally, transport is one of the largest sources of CO2 and other greenhouse-gas emissions. Governments have imposed future…

THE US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WILL OCCUR JUST after The WIRED World goes to press. Here, I assume that Donald Trump will lose. If that assumption proves incorrect, the following will remain an aspiration… Looking ahead to 2021, the bad news is that the pandemic’s effects will linger, casting a pall over world economic growth, limiting the mobility of people, and causing untold human suffering. The good news is that the pandemic itself will have demonstrated the value of openness and collaboration, and political change in the US will put an end to a particularly poisonous form of economic nationalism. The countries that have best survived the onslaught of the coronavirus have demonstrated the value of science, the importance of swiftly learning from the experiences of other countries and the precious…

IN 2021, ORGANISATIONS OF ALL KINDS will realise that they have to make racial justice a core part of their mission, not just an add-on. Prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement, many organisations made gestures in this direction – publishing slogans on Instagram, asking Black people and minorities what they could do to fix these problems and so on. But gestures don’t always lead to change. In 2017, a report by McKinsey found that in the US, companies were spending more than $8 billion a year on unconscious-bias training. A meta analysis of decades of research conducted in 2018 by Frank Dobbin, professor of sociology at Harvard, and Alexandra Kalev, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, found that even firms that engaged with diversity training…

ENTREPRENEURS WILL FLOCK TO TACKLE the challenge of decarbonising our economies and industries in 2021. The global economy emits 38 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. Other greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrogen oxides, add the equivalent of 12 billion tonnes of CO2 to this figure. Decades of work and trillions of dollars of investment in fossil-fuel-driven industries have deep roots in our societies. Achieving “net zero”, as the elimination of carbon emissions is known, is a lofty goal. This drive towards net zero has attracted few entrepreneurs and is a tough sector for investors. In the first decade of the century, clean tech was heralded as the next boom area. Between 2006 and 2011, $25 billion flowed into the sector. Half was lost. Now, however,…

RESILIENCE IN PUBLIC HEALTH – UNTIL now seen as a cost to be minimised as much as possible – will be reframed as an investment in national security. Governments will lead the shift in mindset, but they need not shoulder the burden alone. The private sector and individuals also have a part to play. This will require us to learn not only what went wrong in 2020, but what went right – not for reasons of blame, but for self-preservation. We may have to live with this virus for a long time, even indefinitely. Covid-19 exposed the fragility of how most of us have been living – and how vulnerable we are to further large-scale, multi-factor catastrophic events. The pandemic has also revealed some exceptions to that trend which may…

RANSOMWARE IS ONE OF THE FASTEST growing threats in cybersecurity, with global damages predicted to reach £15bn by 2021, up from £262m in 2015. Attackers will in 2021 target companies under pressure from the post-pandemic economic recession and they are more likely to cave to ransom demands. Conventional ransomware attacks work by denying an organisation access to its own data until it pays a ransom. In 2020, however, we have seen attacks grow in sophistication. The developers of Maze ransomware, for example, have begun taking copies of data and threatening to release it publicly. Others, such as REvil, threaten to delete it entirely. The business of ransomware is also changing. We are seeing actors ramping up demands – in some cases, seeking payment of one sum in five days, but…