Gartner: 7 disruptive technologies you may not see coming

Yesterday, Gartner distinguished vice president analyst Partha Iyengar hosted a webinar that talked through what disruption is, what you can do to avoid it, and seven disruptive technologies you might not see coming over the next few years.

Disruption in this context is, of course, when a new technology emerges that does something faster, better and often with greater results than the traditional way of doing it.

“If you don’t recognise that preventing disruption is important, and arguably becoming more important, you will face a fairly bleak future,” Iyengar said.

“As industries are transforming quicker, customer behaviour is changing more rapidly - even before the pandemic that was in place and it is accelerated during the pandemic. Disruption is coming at your from multiple directions … more and more of these disruptions are technology-driven and more and more of the response to disruption, what we call future-proofing, is technology-driven.” 

Disruption is nothing new. However, as Iyengar pointed out, there have been a couple of cases where disruption has hit modern companies hard: Kodak’s failure to invest early into digital image capture and processing, and BlackBerry being taken down by pane-of-glass phones. 

However, he also points to Microsoft as a success story when it pivoted to a cloud-first model and became the disruptor, rather than the disrupted.

The difficulty, Iyengar explained, is that it is so incredibly difficult to know what is going to be The Next Big Thing.

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How to prepare for disruption

“It is about looking at what might happen, placing bets on how likely that event is, and what can you do to either leverage an opportunity or protect yourself against disruption,” Iyengar summarised.

He warned about buying into fads, short-lived changes that may cause some shock on, but ultimately pass.

“Some fads do have monetary value … but it's also important to realise when that fad is going to disappear so you don't invest for the long term and then you'll see wasted investment.”

True disruption, as Iyengar defined it, is “a fundamental shift in a market, in customer behaviour, in product set.” Obvious examples are the iPod and iPhone or Netflix.

Iyengar said that to identify whether something is a feature, a fad or a true disruption, you need to ask questions about the market you are selling into: What is the real market? Can investments be shifted? Is the potential market bigger than current markets? Who are the real customers?

To paraphrase, he talked about imagining alternative universes, thinking about all of the possible futures, and looking at what would be most likely and most profitable.

Revisiting, reviewing and extending roadmaps in light of potentially disruptive technologies can help you stay ahead in a world of disruption.

Speaking of potentially disruptive technologies, here are the seven Iyengar outlined that you may have never heard of, or are closer to reality than you might have thought.

Non-traditional compute

This entry is actually a collection of technologies that use non-silicon processing for computing power.

More familiar names like quantum computing are in there but also less well-known technologies, a few of which Iyengar specifically called out.

He spoke of:

• Neuromorphic computing, “which is computing driven more by AI-centric relationship-based computing as opposed to traditional algorithmic computing, which allows the computer to start mimicing more of human behaviour, human relationships, human sentiments.”
• The memristor, “a device that can actually hold multiple states at the same time, it can also hold the states in extremely low power, or interestingly enough, no power situations, which again, takes computing and the need to keep states alive for a persistent period of time, to the next level.”
• Chemical and DNA computing that uses “synthetic DNA to drive computing capabilities. The four nucleotides of DNA being used to drive compute.”
• Carbon nanotubes, a result of the “science fiction, or some would call it mad ambition, of creating an elevator from Earth to space.”

With so much of today’s economy based on computing, “collectively, non-traditional computing will have a transformational impact on industries, on marketplaces on customers, and all of you, you as enterprises and companies,” Iyengar stated.

DNA data storage

To be clear, this technology is concerned with storing data on synthetic DNA, not inside animals. 

What is revolutionary about it is not only the storage capacity that it could offer, but also lifespan.

“Data and biology are completely intertwined, and why this will have such a strong impact is … a single gram of synthetic DNA can hold 215 petabytes of data,” Iyengar explained.

“Gigabytes, megabytes will become ancient history, we will really move into the exabyte and petabyte regime. One exabyte is 1000 petabytes [and] five exabytes can actually store all of mankind's spoken language. 

“It's about encoding ones and zeros in the four underlying nucleotides in DNA. It gives us completely transformative energy-saving, storage density and storage management capabilities. 

“DNA storage, when it's prevalent, will have a minimum of 500 years of storage capability ... add to that the fact that DNA can be fossilised and, arguably, DNA storage can have up to a million years of storage resilience.

“Why we would need that is still unfathomable at this point but, if you look at heavily regulated industries, security-related industries, etc. the resilience and density, especially as you start throwing AI at some of these problems, the extent of explosion in storage is really where some of these storage mechanisms will really start seeing value. 

“By 2025, we believe that this will have reached the (second-highest) Reinvent level of disruption.”

Distributed cloud

Distributed cloud, Iyengar said, is about getting the customer out of their own way when it comes to responsibility for managing “the fundamental heavy lifting of operation, governance, ownership, asset management, asset, ownership, etc.”

It will take advantage of the growth of edge compute to distribute public cloud services to different physical locations known as ‘cloud substations’ while all the responsibility remains with the cloud providers.

“Hybrid cloud management, for example, is a complex undertaking for the average enterprise. But what if you could separate that out and leave that with the public cloud provider who has the capability, that is their bread and butter, and you just derive the benefit or the value from those cloud services on your premises in a more controlled manner?” Iyengar postulated.

One benefit is that “even if your cloud provider is another geography, if your data can be resident where you are, and hence subject to the same regulatory privacy rules, etc, that may give you a tremendous amount of flexibility in terms of your compute environment.”

This could change the face of migration services, meaning another value-add for partners providing guidance to clients on which services should be moved local, when and for how long.

Digital twin of the Earth

The idea of creating perfect digital replicas has been around for some time. Iyengar points to Maersk’s creation of digital twins of all of the ships in its fleet to add flexibility in terms of managing logistics.

However, a true digital twin of the entire planet would take that concept to the next level.

“It will have a significant impact across climate management, pollution, behavioural sciences, environmental management, etc. And it will have real-world implications in all of the areas that are already transforming how businesses operate, how we, as individuals live our life, how societies operate in terms of mapping, tracking, remote sensing.

"The practical uses of a digital twin are limitless in many ways. One can argue that everything gets disrupted. The geopolitical boundaries disintegrate because the reality of a digital twin of the Earth is, it doesn't matter whether you're in Germany or Australia, or China or India, this is truly a global operation."

It could also mean being able to connect large islands of process and data and being able to leverage low Earth orbit tech like Starlink to create global connectivity and make global decisions faster, no matter where the data is being generated. 

Augmented humans

It could be argued that we are all already augmented humans, in many ways. From contact lenses to tooth fillings to shoes, using technology to augment our ability to interact with the world is a defining characteristic of our species.

To become digitally augmented, we are now talking about a brain/computer ‘mind link’ interface, or what Iyengar calls “I think, therefore the cursor moves.”

He highlighted a Science magazine article about a ‘mind-reading’ algorithm that can pull images from the brain and display them on a screen.

“PC thought control is something that is already demonstrated, brain/computer interfaces have moved forward significantly, the AlterEgo project in MIT puts a lot of the content of their brain and cognitive, cognitive research and cognitive curriculum out, open-source.”

People born without or who have lost certain senses or abilities can have them restored beyond the norm using technology and “disabilities can become superabilities.”

“With this human augmentation, the possibilities are endless.”

Technological biohacking

Adding onto the concept of human augmentation is the ability for technology to provide potentially life-saving insights into our biological functions. 

Iyengar offered the anecdote of his doctor recommending that people who can afford it buy the Apple Watch because “the watch can save more lives than I can as a cardiologist” by tracking biorhythms and being able to “sense cardiac disturbances long before even an ECG can, or long before the person is uncomfortable enough to actually come into a doctor and get checked up.”

“We have seen advances in things like voice helping diagnose an illness, we have seen strong advances in AI-driven engines diagnosing things like cancer before a human doctor can. But it's also creating interesting evolution of, how do you protect embedded information as you look at devices like PegLeg, an implantable hard drive, that also is a wireless router? 

“It's collecting data from within your body and can actually broadcast it externally, what happens to that data? What are the security risks? Who has ownership of that data that is coming out of my body and being stored somewhere externally? Will there be diagnoses of things that you don't want people to know? Will you be fired, because your employer is able to diagnose something by looking at this data? Is that is an infringement on your privacy?

“We are going to be faced with significantly new questions at the early stage of that has already happened, what Gartner calls AI ethics, but how do you protect that? How you manage that is a non-trivial question.

“This will reinvent entire industries, entire societies and for all fields, as technology and digital professionals or the new security frontier, you will have to create new data ownership policies.”

Emotional experiences

From the intersection of the physical and the digital, to that of the emotional.

By 2024, Gartner predicted, AI identification of emotions will influence more than half of online adverts.

But Iyengar even posited a world where an employer could say “Hey, you weren't happy enough all of last year so, unfortunately, we're gonna have to terminate.”

“The technology actually allows this to happen, where if you look at the cost of sensors plummeting, if you look at AI actually starting to be able to map emotional intelligence and emotional sentiment, you already have this being used in experience and evaluation technologies, where you're not asking your customer how they feel, you're sensing how they feel based on monitoring their emotions, monitoring their feelings, monitoring their eye movement, etc. 

“Many IT services companies are actually moving into this in a mainstream way and it is starting to influence buying decisions. The next level of intrusion is almost upon us in terms of really being able to monitor and align with what do you see as important, which you may think is great, but it's also a tremendous infringement of privacy. 

“How do you create an in a workplace where it isn’t Big Brother watching every single goal, but you can leverage the technology for employee benefit, for company benefit for things like employee evaluations, etc. It's a slippery slope, but one with tremendous promise if done correctly.”

Conclusion

Iyengar said that no one needs to be on top of all of these emerging technologies all of the time.

“It is really about priorities. there are too many disruptions happening. Once you start creating the ability to really manage these, how do you kill those that are not relevant? How do you revamp your performance management systems to drive innovation? How do you create this culture of rewarding failure and making your teams agile, and smaller? In order to drive that agility. We call it modular teams in order to respond in a realistic manner to this goal of getting ready for disruption, because that, to be honest, is half the battle.”

It is also vitally important to note the potential for inequality that many of these technologies present. 

With the example of the Apple Watch, only those who can afford it, or are provided it through other means like governmental grants, will gain those life-saving benefits.

“I believe that the opportunity is bigger in the developing economies of the world,” Iyengar said. 

“The problem is, will access to these technologies be the same in the developing parts of the world? And that is where the role of some of the foundations, the NGOs, the vendors come into place. But if done correctly, these disruptions will truly be global, and even though there will be impacts in the developed world, the bigger impact will be in the developing world.”