Fortunately, history has told us that difficult times can bring out some great innovations. And there is no exception for the tech industry. In this article, we are going to present the 5 newest technology trends you shouldn’t miss in 2023.

1. Better Understanding AIs
2. Increasing Visibility of Robots in Our Daily Life
3. Autonomous Vehicles for Specialized Uses
4. Sustainable Technologies Are Not Going Away
5. Growing Importance of Cybersecurity

#1. Better Understanding AIs

You won’t be surprised to see this emerging tech trend at the top of our list. People always bring up artificial intelligence (A.I.) whenever they talk about technology.

Without a doubt, A.I. has a wide range of applications in our daily life. Whether it is something as simple as filtering spam emails, answering customers’ questions in a chat box, recommending users music based on their playlist, or something as complicated as weather forecasting, diagnosing diseases, self-driving vehicles, A.I. plays a part in it.

One of the biggest milestones of A.I. can be traced back to 2016 when a computer program called AlphaGo beat the South Korean professional Go player Lee Sendol. The Go match attracted the attention of millions of people, including those who knew little to nothing about the board game. But how exactly did AlphaGo beat the legendary Go player? Not even the company that created AlphaGo had the exact answer as the computation behind it was too complex for humans to understand.

Since people always describe the decision-making process of A.I. as being like a black box, no one knows exactly how it arrives at its decisions. Because of that, it opens the door to a new field called Explainable A.I. (XAI). The goal of XAI is to provide people with transparent reasons for the outcomes, which has a far-reaching impact on optimizing A.I. applications.

One of the most important implications of XAI is that it helps fulfill legal requirements. It is particularly important to industries like legal and healthcare as they use machine learning to help conduct risk assessments on the customer profile. Failure to exclude discriminatory factors to make predictions can lead to legal consequences for the companies.

Another implication of XAI is that it forms the foundation of a practical and successful deployment of A.I. The reason is that, when the decision-making process of A.I. becomes more transparent, people realize that they can explain, comprehend and reproduce A.I. outputs with ease. With that said, people are more likely to feel comfortable with implementing A.I.

#2. Increasing Visibility of Robots in Our Daily Life

In case you’re a frequent online shopper, you must’ve noticed that it took you longer to receive your packages during the pandemic. You guessed it right!

In order to lower the spread of COVID-19, many strict policies were imposed by the governments, such as limiting people’s movement and the number of people being allowed in enclosed spaces. These policies resulted in an increase in the time of moving goods and products from one location to another.

With the goals of reducing reliance on human labor, as well as increasing efficiency and reliability, many logistics and supply chain companies started using robots in their facilities years ago. And that’s why we listed this among the top tech trends.

Thanks to the advancement of robotic technology, these robots can now do more than just locate goods and transport them to a designated area in the warehouse. Some robots, like Amazon’s Sparrow, can pick up goods of various sizes and shapes, and put them in a box before they are packaged.

Others can sort packages by grabbing them out of a bin and regrouping them based on the destination. There are also robots that can unload goods from ocean-freight containers. If the robots mentioned above do not sound fascinating to you, what about robots that can work directly and alongside workers?

Amazon has recently showcased its latest warehouse robot, Proteus, to the public. Don’t be fooled by its look, this tiny machine is smarter than you think. Unlike other robots, Proteus does not need to work in a constrained area. It operates in the same physical space as warehouse workers and can navigate around them. 

Logistics and supply chains aren’t the only industries that are benefitted from robots. Owing to a labor shortage and lower technology costs, robots are rapidly making their way into restaurants. More and more restaurants, including chain restaurants and sushi restaurants, are experimenting with robot servers.

Restaurant owners believe that the robot servers not only perform basic customer support functions but also give a one-of-a-kind experience for customers.

While some robots work in the restaurant’s customer-facing areas, others work tirelessly in the back of the restaurant. Robots created by Miso Robotics are ready to help chefs cook different fried food perfectly every single time.

If you think that frying food is too easy for robots, what about giving them some complicated cooking tasks? Companies like Picnic Works and Piestro are already making robots that help prep and bake pizzas.

Among all the robotic companies targeting the food-serving industry, artly and Nala Robotics are the ones that set the bar high. The former has already installed robots in shopping malls that make coffee for the customers, while the latter created a robot that doesn’t only automate the entire pizza-making process but also takes customers’ orders with natural language processing technology.

Having learned about what robots are capable of doing in our society, can you imagine what else they can do for us in 2023?

#3. Autonomous Vehicles for Specialized Uses

Really? Autonomous vehicles again? You may wonder why they will be an emerging tech trend in 2023. After all, people have been talking about autonomous vehicles for so many years. Some of them even start to wonder how far we are from them or if they will ever be a reality?

Regardless of how familiar you are with autonomous vehicles and how often you follow the news about autonomous vehicles, allow us to explain why it is worth your time keeping track of autonomous vehicles in 2023.

Generally speaking, autonomous vehicles can be divided into two main categories based on their functionality – the ones designed for carrying people and the ones designed for transporting goods. People always think of the former whenever they talk about autonomous vehicles.

Unfortunately, due to various reasons, some car manufacturers believe that autonomous vehicles designed for carrying people are still not quite ready yet. That is why one of the tech trends in 2023 we would like to share with you today is autonomous delivery vehicles, the ones that transport goods.

According to onfleet, last-mile delivery costs can account for more than half of the total shipping cost. As you can imagine, this cost could be much higher during the pandemic as a result of a shortage of last-mile delivery drivers and an increased cost of carrying out disinfection measures.

On the bright side, this actually provided an excellent growth opportunity for the autonomous last-mile delivery vehicle market.

Many logistics companies, including but not limited to FedEx, Japan Post, and DPD, saw this opportunity and started pilot delivery projects with autonomous delivery vehicle companies in different parts of the world in 2021.

In the following year, some of them decided to move forward to provide last-mile delivery using autonomous vehicles. In Europe, Estonia-based autonomous delivery vehicle maker Clevon became the first to provide autonomous delivery services on the streets.

On the other hand, in the US, Nuro announced that they reached a 10-year food-delivery partnership with Uber.

Don’t get the wrong impression that autonomous delivery vehicles are about the same size as an actual vehicle and can only provide delivery solutions by making deliveries on the streets or outdoors. A lot of them can be as small as a mini-fridge and have no problem operating indoors.

Like Ottonomy’s autonomous delivery vehicles, they have recently been deployed at Pittsburgh International Airport for a trial project. The company hoped to provide a new airport shopping experience to customers by allowing them to buy things from airport shops on their mobile phones and having their purchases delivered to them by the autonomous delivery vehicle, no matter where they are in the airport.

According to Global Market Insights, the autonomous last-mile delivery market is expected to reach $3 billion by 2030. It should come as no surprise that some companies have taken the chance to expand their autonomous delivery vehicle fleet or even their operations to another continent.

#4. Sustainable Technologies Are Not Going Away

In the past few decades, we’ve witnessed global warming, rising sea levels, and acceleration in ice loss in Greenland on our planet. Many believe that, if we don’t act now, these problems can result in worldwide societal collapse or even human extinction.

That is why we believe that sustainable technologies remain one of the tech trends in 2023.

Hydrogen fuel

While electrification has been the center of discussion about sustainable energy for years, the development of hydrogen fuel is slowly catching up. The advantage of hydrogen fuel is that it can be produced from different sources like natural gas and biomass.

At the same time, it does not produce any zero greenhouse gas. No wonder why a lot of energy companies, like BP, Sinopec, Air Products, and AES are increasing their investments in hydrogen production.

Decentralized energy systems

As we all know, the energy we use today is mostly generated from energy plants owned by large energy companies.

The problem is that no matter how reliable and consistent the centralized energy systems are, they remain highly vulnerable to disruption from natural disasters. And that is where the idea of decentralized energy systems arises.

It is believed that decentralized energy systems offer a number of advantages over centralized energy systems, such as being more resource efficient, more environmentally friendly, and more resilient and flexible to natural disasters.

Better demand and supply management in food production

It is ironic to see that some countries are facing food shortages while others are overproducing them at the same time. In the case of overproduction of food, we are wasting natural resources when we produce more food than we need. Alternatively, if we don’t produce enough food, there will be a hunger crisis.

In the agriculture industry, people have long been focusing on how to increase the efficiency of food production. But this approach only solves part of the problem. When the overproduced food goes to the landfills, it will produce methane, a greenhouse gas that is even more potent than carbon dioxide.

To address this uneven balance of demand and supply of food, some companies proposed the idea of farm-to-home. But to make this idea better, some came up with the use of A.I. technology to predict the demand-supply. With the help of technology, it brings all the stakeholders (i.e. consumers, farmers, and our planet) together to solve the climate problems.

The end result is that consumers can eat more sustainably by having a deeper understanding of how the food we eat can impact climate, and farmers can minimize the chance of wasting resources by growing food based on consumers’ demand.

#5. Growing Importance of Cybersecurity 

New technologies bring us new security concerns

Whether you are working from home or working remotely during the pandemic, you will notice that online collaboration is becoming a norm at the workplace. To employees, online collaboration brings flexibility and allows them to work more efficiently. But, to the hackers, the shift in work culture means more opportunities for them.  

Earlier this year, Google identified some security vulnerabilities in Zoom. But don’t be too surprised about it as It’s not the first time security flaws have been found in these online meeting tools. Before that, security vulnerabilities were reportedly found in Microsoft teams, Webex, and Slack.

Some of these vulnerabilities could expose users’ location and online identity while others allowed hackers to gain full control over the victim’s device without leaving any traces behind.

Building a secure-aware culture

People always say that humans are the weakest link in cybersecurity. That is why, no matter how updates can help patch any vulnerabilities found in software or hardware, the easiest and the first step in protecting ourselves in cybersecurity should always start from us – the users.

Social engineering refers to psychological manipulations aiming at exploiting human nature to trick users to perform certain actions. Unsurprisingly, one of the social engineering techniques nowadays is phishing. The idea behind it is to send fraudulent messages to the targets so that they can be tricked and reveal sensitive information to the attackers.

People are easier to fall into the victim of phishing than you think. Statistics tell us that phishing attacks account for a shocking 90% of security breaches in companies. Imagine that you are working from home and you receive a message from your boss saying that he has an urgent task for you to complete. How confident are you that you are not going to open the link included in the message?

Final thoughts

As we are welcoming the post-COVID-19 world, do you notice our way of living has changed a lot? We are not talking about people spending less time in the offices and more time working from home. Instead, some of our jobs, mostly the repetitive and low-valued ones, are slowly being replaced by automated processes and robots that can run 24/7.

Increased transparency in A.I.’s decision-making also helps speed up the process of A.I. implementation. In the meantime, besides VR or AR, new technologies are being developed to solve ongoing problems in energy, food, as well as cybersecurity. 

On the surface, all the latest tech trends are tackling some of the pressing issues we have in our daily life. But will they actually make our lives better? What if autonomous delivery vehicles and robots are hacked? Can humans be educated to be more aware of cybercrime? How do we deal with the demand and supply of food in the midst of a growing population?

If A.I. is getting smarter and smarter, how do we make sure that A.I. always follows humans’ instructions? Since no one has the crystal ball to foresee the future, how these 5 tech trends will unfold remains to be seen in 2023.

Learn more about current and future trends in UX/UI

Want to know more about the UI trends of 2023 and what are the things that people love? Read our article about UI trends 2023.

Wondering what could be UX design trends of 2023? A new design language? Or chatbots? These are cool things, and many people will list them as the hot UX design trends of 2021, but we think there have to be more out there. Here are our ideas about UX trends for 2023

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