Learn to ‘speak machine’ this yr to keep

automatons in check
This Will Help Fix The Imbalance Between Humanity And Tech Too
John Maeda

In 2010 when I made my predictions for 2020, I wrote: "Technology of 2020 will more deeply consider
art, design and you: Products and culture that are made by many individuals, made by hand, made well,
made by people we trust, and made to capture some of the nuances and imperfections that we treasure in
the physical world."

Now 10 years later, with the repercussions of social media, my wish for 2020 remains the same. Finding
our way back to what is important as human beings in the age of artificial intelligence and machine
learning will require us to separate hype from reality by the people who responsibly "speak machine".
Only by truly grasping what Big Tech (the Googles/Facebooks, etc of the world) is doing behind the
scenes can established businesses manage to navigate the changes that are already happening. And in the
process, they have the opportunity to actively fix the imbalance between humanity and technology.

The mass adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning today is creating hyper-optimised
experiences. This is being delivered by data-fed algorithms in the cloud that have segmented us down to
the individual level. And because it’s a computational machine on the other end that never gets tired, it’s
going to be nearly impossible to escape their reach. That’s why we’ll be pushing hard in 2020 for
"organically farmed" data as the healthier alternative to fuel our digital experiences — otherwise we’re all
going to be chased around the inter net with machine-lear ned stereotypes that we really are not.

Finally, with new 5G connectivity, by the middle of the next decade, anything that can be connected to the
internet will become fully interconnected. With the evolution of communication modalities from voice,
text, multi-media to transmitting and receiving petabytes of data, 5G will give us a world where all
previous limitations of digital technology will have disappeared. Every internet-of-things (IoT) device will
be able to communicate with everything else, and everyone; at speeds we can’t come close to today even
with the fastest home broadband.

IoT device ecosystems deployed at scale and with 5G will have massive implications on how we manage
our lives, businesses and even our countries and states. It will give artificial intelligence all the data they
need to learn from us and about us — and our work and play lives will become infinitely more pleasurable
in the process. But it means giving up all of our privacy and giving up some of our humanity to our
machine overlords — so be aware, and do everything you can to learn how to speak machine to be ready
for the new world.

(The writer is chief experience officer at Publicis Swapient. He is a designer & technologist)