Last updated on November 16th, 2022 at 07:59 pm
Estimated Read Time: 8 minsIn today’s world technology is evolving with a blink of an eye. It is very difficult to keep track of every technology. Every tech comes with its pros and cons, nothing is fully beneficial or fully disadvantageous. In this post, we will cover the top 6 most trending technologies of 2019 with their advantages and disadvantages.
Futurists of the 1950s predicted that by the 2000s, flying cars would be a part of our everyday lives. Instead, we live in a world dominated by artificial intelligence, smartphones, and social networks.
While those futurists didn’t get the timing right, they got the technology right. This time, technologies like Voice assistants and self-driving vehicles are under development. Soon, these technologies described below will go mainstream, changing the world in the process.
1. Voice assistants
A voice assistant is a digital assistant that uses voice recognition, natural language processing, and speech synthesis to provide aid to users through phones and voice recognition applications.
You can ask your voice assistant questions, control home automation devices, and media playback via natural language, and manage other basic tasks such as emails, to-do lists, and calendars with verbal commands.
According to our research between 2019 and 2024, the market share for voice assistants will grow at an annual rate of almost 35 percent. More and more sectors of the economy, like smartphones, automotive and health industry, are finding uses for the speech recognition technology in addition to those found in devices like smart speakers and web applets.
Even now, Amazon releases regular updates to its smart speaker Echo. The company recently reported seeing major gains from its voice assistant, which is why Amazon is increasing its production.
Voice assistance is making major significance in our markets around the globe. According to some experts in the future, we will communicate with technology using natural language rather than text.
But the technology is still in its early stages, and while there are clear advantages to using speech recognition apps and devices with voice assistants, there are some downsides too.
Pros and Cons of Voice assistance
Advantages
1) People with mobility restriction or visually impaired, speech recognition has always been a big help. Virtual assistance is extending the accessibility of technologies to a much wider audience.
2) The expansion of IoT (Internet of things) has created completely new generations of smart objects, appliances, and accessories. Some are designed to do jobs that do not require manual activation or guidance. Such devices can be controlled via voice recognition to enable users to control them from distance.
3) At early stages of speech recognition, everyone thought it will be put an end to keyboard era – but the technology of speech recognition wasn’t good enough.
However, today’s more advanced algorithms make
a promising alternative to hardware-based input devices like keyboard, mouse,
and touchscreens, etc.
Disadvantages
1) Some reporters suggest that by 2020 there will be 24 billion IoT connected devices around the globe. The concern is that all of these devices will cause localized pools of interference, and a continuous struggle for bandwidth. Factors like this may harm devices to access their servers and perform actions.
2) Finally, there is an issue of lack of initiative and intelligence. Voice assistance is mostly responsive. But they are pre-programmed for conversations (Mainly responses to conversations which programmers have already feed in it).
2. CRISPR
Imagine a world where major genetic diseases like Cystic Fibrosis and Down Syndrome can be cured. Thanks to CRISPR, these major genetic diseases can be cured.
CRISPR technology is the most powerful tool for editing genomes. It easily alters DNA sequence and modifies gene function. Its potential applications include correcting genetic defects, improving crops and treating and preventing the spread of diseases.
As a result, it can permanently eliminate genetic diseases from bloodlines. This technology has already been used in some cancer patients with some promising results.
Pros and Cons of CRISPR
Advantages
1) The most important advantages of CRISPR/Cas9 over other genome editing technologies are its Efficiency, Simplicity, Multiplexed mutations, Its cheaper and faster than other techniques and its more accessible to researchers.
2) It can cure genetic diseases like Cystic Fibrosis and Down Syndrome and many other genetic diseases from bloodlines. Like hair fall, height, heart diseases, etc. One report says it can also cure genetically caused blindness.
3) Some other major applications are a transgene-free modification, site-specific DNA integration, Virus resistance, Gene expression regulation, genome-wide functional screening, and chromosome structure/number manipulations.
Disadvantages
1) It can cause irreversible frameshift disruptions, meant for knocking out genes, which make it difficult to study essential genes and inRNAs.
2) The double-stranded breaks can be cytotoxic.
3) Cells can be good at accidentally fixing the damage due to error-prone DNA repair, limiting the ability to knock out alleles.
3. Robot Assistants
Robot assistant is a machine. Which is helpful to do work which is dirty, distant, dull, dangerous, repetitive or not possible for a normal person to do.
Recently, in 2012 Nasa launched Curiosity Rover (RIP) on Mars. It explored mars for over 6 years and helped researchers to find more about mars. Due to this huge success, Nasa is planning for its next trip to mars based on robots which will build a home for scientists. After that Nasa will send the first human mission to Mars.
Companies like Boston Dynamics have already developed a wide range of robot assistants that are useful for factories, battlefield, for your home and security reasons.
Knightscope is another good example of a company working on its K5 robot which features four cameras capable of recognizing 300 licenses plates per minute, per camera.
Hanson Robotics is another company in the field of robotics. They developed Sophia which made a big splash in 2018. Sophia is smart and capable of emphatic artificial intelligence.
Pros and Cons of Robot assistants
Advantages
1) Robots can go to places where humans can’t go such as the deep sea, war-zones, other planets or they can be useful to explore space.
2) Robots can work 24/7 without any food and salary. Plus they don’t get bored.
3) They can perform tasks faster than any human with consistency and accuracy.
4) Robots can’t tremble or shake as the human hands do, They can have much smaller & versatile moving parts than the people, They have performed medical surgeries because they can be faster and more precise than the people.
5) Robots can do the jobs that the people are unwilling to do, many robotic probes have been sent throughout the solar system to never return to Earth.
Disadvantages
1) Robots needs a lot of supply power.
2) Robots cost a lot for maintenance and repair. It costs a lot of money to make or buy a robot.
3) Their software needs a constant update to keep them in work or suit them according to the environment.
4) Robots can store large amounts of data but the storage, access, retrieval is not as effective as the human brain.
5) Robots are not intelligent or sentient, they can never improve the results of their jobs outside of their predefined programming.
4. Augmented and Mixed reality
A few years ago, it was unclear whether augmented or mixed reality would take off. Given the fact that big companies like Apple are investing billions of dollars in Virtual, augmented and mixed reality. Now it’s clear that this technology will be mainstream in just a matter of time.
Walmart announced that it is using 17000 Oculus Go headsets to train its employees in various skills such as compliance and customer service.
Additionally, the US Army has announced a deal with Microsoft to use its HoloLens technology in military training, meaning soldiers will get real-time readings on their environment. It shows the growth of this technology in the education segment and it has more room to grow.
Pros and Cons of Augmented and Mixed reality
Advantages
1) Virtual Reality in education field makes education more easily and comfortably.
2) It can share your experience with different people in real-time over long distances.
3) Virtual Reality user can experiment with an artificial environment and can lower the cost of instruments and saves much space.
4) In the future, we will be able to play our favorite games using VR making it more realistic than ever.
Disadvantages
1) It is quite expensive to use it in everyday life and it might be expensive for small businesses.
2) Regarding user experience, socially using Augmented Reality may be inappropriate in some situations.
3) VR is becoming much more commonplace but programmers are still stuck with how to interact with virtual environments.
4) Escapism is commonplace among those that use VR environments and people often live in the virtual world instead of dealing with the real one.
5. Quantum Computing
Discovery of atom in the early 20th century gave birth to another important field of science known as quantum physics. It turns out atoms do not follow the traditional rules of physics. Quantum particles can move forward or backward in time and even exist in two places at once and can “teleport”. It’s these strange behaviors that quantum computers aim to use to their advantage.
Quantum Computing, still an emerging technology, is one of the most appealing things researchers, organizations, and governments have been working on in this century so far. The race to building the first fully-functional quantum computer (also called supercomputer) is on.
With its remarkable computational power, quantum computers will most like be a cloud service soon rather than on-premise machines. IBM is offering cloud-based quantum computing services meanwhile.
Google announced it has a quantum computer that is 100 million times faster than any classical computer in its lab.
The first quantum computer is going to have a significant lead over the others. In 2020, the ability to achieve supercomputer supremacy will strengthen. As a consequence, the last mile in the race will remain mostly private, for obvious reasons.
The major market player included in this report are:
- D-Wave Systems Inc.
- IBM Corporation
- Lockheed Martin Corporation
- Intel Corporation
- Anyon Systems Inc.
- Cambridge Quantum Computing Limited
Pros and Cons of Quantum computing
Advantages
1) The main advantage of quantum computing is it can perform any task faster as compared to a classical computer. Because atoms move faster in a quantum computer than a classical computer.
2) In quantum computing qubit is the conventional superposition state and so there is an advantage of exponential speedup which is resulted by handle number of calculations.
3) The other advantage of quantum computing is it can easily perform classical algorithm calculations.
4) Quantum computer will speed up the development of drugs which will improve the chemical industry and even suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to curb climate change.
Disadvantages
1) The main disadvantage of the quantum computer is its price. Most of the small business can’t afford such an expensive machine.
2) The technology required to implement a quantum computer is not available at present. The reason is that electron (Essential element of quantum computing) is damaged as soon as it is affected by the environment.
3) According to theoretical research with quantum computing every computer on this planet will become vulnerable even nuclear codes can be hacked with quantum computing. What will happen if it gets in the wrong hands?
6. IoT devices (Internet of things)
The Internet of things or IoT is a system of multiple interrelated devices connected to the Internet with unique identifiers, which can import or export the data collected from different sensors over a network, the data is saved on the cloud and can be seen on some app or a computer from anywhere.
This work is done without any human-to-human or human-to-device interaction. The devices collect the data from their environment and can send and act on that data.
The IoT is used for the automation of things and to monitor
those things which are not near you this time as if you want to monitor your product from another place you can easily do it by using this technology through your mobile phone.
The industries rapidly adopt this technology for monitoring and
automation this reduces their expenses and work can be done more
efficient in less time. This improves their services and cut down the labor cost as well and a person can monitor his overall business process through it.
In 2020, it will be paramount for IoT producers and all of their supply chain to dramatically increase the security in all the products that come out to market. It can be a linked refrigerator, a robot, a drone, an automobile, or a health tracker.
Producers must implement a level of security that keeps hackers at bay. Otherwise, there is a good chance we are going to eyewitness a global IoT security breach in 2019.
Top 5 companies using this technology (IOT)
- VironIT
- R-Style Lab
- ScienceSoft
- HQSoftware
- Magneto IT Solutions
Pros and Cons of IoT
Advantagss
1) You can access information at anytime from anywhere.
2) Saves time and budget
3) Improves the performance
4) Reduces need for labor in a company
Disadvantages
1) As information is shared on internet hacking can be possible.
2) Devices compatibility with each other is challenging.
3) A single bug can corrupt the connected devices.
4) Managing and collecting data from millions of IoT devices is also a challenge.
With a degree in IT from Bahria University Islamabad, Hamas Sohail possesses a solid educational foundation that enhances his technical expertise. His time at the university has equipped him with the necessary skills and knowledge to excel in the ever-evolving field of technology. Combining his academic achievements with his gaming enthusiasm, web and mobile app development prowess, and writing abilities, Hamas continues to make a significant impact in the world of games and technology through his insightful articles and innovative creations.
