With the speed of the news, posts, and trends frequently taking our attention from one thing to the next, we rarely get a chance to properly reflect on how our lives are changing. An industry which is at the forefront of creating these societal changes is tech. Here are (arguably) the 7 biggest tech stories of 2019:
1. AI clones voices for audiobooks
AI isn’t just writing content, it’s speaking it too. The Chinese search engine Sogou announced it’s in the process of developing lookalike avatars which can read books in the voice and image of the author. On its website, it showcases its services with two audio recordings of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, created using machine learning. With audiobooks growing in popularity in the UK (one in ten of us now listen to them regularly), competition to produce high quality audio with an author or famous figure is in high demand. Of course, the flipside of this technology is spoof audio that impersonates public figures without their permission and deliberately tries to mislead…
2. Cyber-incidents spiked 1000%
Despite general numbers of increased digital awareness amongst the UK population, cyber-attacks have also been on the rise. The FCA revealed that the number of cyber incidents rose from 69 in 2017 to 819 in 2018, marking a rise of over 1000%. Consumer banks topped the incident list at 486, followed by wholesale financial markets at 115, and retail investments at 53. Some have blamed the increase on the introduction of GDPR in 2018, but others believe that the industry has generally suffered more attacks. In reality, the top root cause has been the occurrence of hardware and software issues, change management, and third party failures. The executive director of supervision at the FCA had previously stated “It is a major concern that a lot of firms still seem to be trying to get the basics right on cyber…A third of firms do not perform regular cyber-assessments… Nearly half of firms do not upgrade or retire old IT systems in time.”
3. Drones to police our roads
More than 160 motorists have been caught speeding in the past five weeks alone in the UK, with some being detected at speeds of up to 127mph. But the Met police have a solution. It was revealed that the Met will deploy £80,000 drone to catch speeding motorists. The unmanned aerial vehicle will target “road users engaged in dangerous driving, such as racing, that could potentially put others at risk”, the force said. The device will be able to follow vehicles for up to 50 minutes at a top speed of 30mph while sending alerts to officers on the ground who can catch up to the speeding driver to intercept. The first drone was set to patrol the A10 in Enfield at the end of July.
4. Facebook beats expectations while Apple’s revenues fall
The tech world often stands still to see the financial results for some of the biggest tech companies. We knew that Apple’s results would be softer than predicted, due to its challenges in China, and it reported quarterly revenue of $84.3bn, a decline of 5% from 2018. Microsoft’s performance was also slightly lower, with revenue at $32.5bn, down 2%. In contrast Facebook‘s fourth quarter results surpassed expectations, hitting $6.8bn, up from $4.27bn last year.
5. UK wants autonomous cars on the road in 2 years
Autonomous cars are coming, and we’re going to see a lot more of them on our roads in the next couple of years. The UK government wants to be a leader in the autonomous race, so it’s set a goal to have self-driving cars on public roads by the end of 2021. It’s estimated that the UK’s connected and autonomous vehicle market will be worth £52bn by 2035. With all the technological advances, the question remains as to how we’ll manage the inevitable crossover when human-driven cars exist alongside autonomous vehicles.
6. 5G phones and roll-out dates announced at MWC
2019’s Mobile World Congress event was dominated by 5G, not surprisingly, as the mobile industry gears up to roll this new technology out worldwide. US carriers in particular used the show to announce their plans, while Vodafone announced agreements with AT&T and Arm. The other trend was folding phones – will these catch on?
7. EU backs controversial copyright law
After GDPR in 2018, tech regulation is firmly in the spotlight of EU lawmakers. During March the EU passed Article 13, holding tech companies responsible for material posted without copyright permission. (Don’t worry, GIFs and memes will still be allowed.) Another set of regulations, called Article 11, were also passed, stating that search engines and news aggregator platforms need to pay to use links from news websites. Both sets of regulations demonstrate again that the EU is making the most active efforts of any jurisdiction to curb the freedom of the tech sector. Whether these rules help encourage competition, or simply reinforce the incumbents’ advantage, remains to be seen.
Priscilla McGregor-Kerr
@cillahope
cillahope 