THE FUTURE OF TECH
CES, WHICH TOOK PLACE IN LAS VEGAS IN EARLY JANUARY, is the world’s biggest and noisiest tech convention. It was a dazzling display of futurism: More than 4,400 exhibitors unveiled some 20,000 new products to 170,000 attendees across 2.9 million net square feet of exhibition space.
The show is the first stop every year for anyone wanting to see the latest and greatest gadgets and gizmos they’ll be able to buy or sell in the coming 12 months (see top picks, page 26). But four days of looking at the thousands of current, upcoming and prototype products on display—not to mention more than 300 conference panels and keynotes on everything from smart homes and privacy to autonomous cars and wearables—also offer a window into the future of technology, its potential successes and failures and, ultimately, what will make the biggest difference in the lives of consumers.
As always, there was plenty of unrealized promise. Despite all the ads from wireless carriers, 5G hasn’t really arrived since, as yet, there’s isn’t a critical mass of usable products or consistent and broad network reach. Robots are thriving in commercial and industrial sectors, but the illusive robo-butler is years away. And artificial intelligence (AI) is still just a buzzy term for narrow machine learning-based functions that do specific things really well—say, identify passengers before they board planes or respond in increasingly nuanced ways to voice queries—but we’re still decades or more away from anything resembling or HAL 9000. Still, the number and usefulness of those specific machine-learned functions in everything from TVs and toothbrushes to washing machines and vibrators was impressive, and suggests that AI is already making our lives easier and better and, while still evolving, is here to stay.
