Ever since humans discovered fire and invented the wheel, human race has been on a relentless journey of new discoveries and inventions. All these discoveries and inventions have been aimed at making our lives easier and better. Today, the pace of that journey to find new solutions has only increased. During this journey, some discoveries and innovations were such that they changed the world. These inventions changed the status quo and created a new way of accomplishing a certain task. They were called disruptive because their sudden appearance destabilized the existing solution and market. With humans, the technology kept evolving.

Use of new technological innovations has revolutionized almost all walks of life be it a communication, commutation, automation, education, healthcare, entertainment, agriculture and so on. With these technological advances, almost everything is now on our fingertips, or just at the tap of a finger.

Technological disruptions have been making existing technologies hard to sustain since quite a few centuries now. The pic below shows some of the recent disruptions caused by evolving technology and business model innovation.

Disruptive technology

For those who are not aware of disruptive technology, in simple words, it’s a sudden technological advancement that impacts the existing market by opening new ways of performing business activities and tasks. Sometimes, these disruptions create completely new industry and/or market.

Disruptive Technologies Changing Your World

Life today is flooded with tech. and digital technologies are steering minds. With the lightning speed of technological advancement, its important to keep the pace with the change. Here is an overview of the latest technological proliferation.

8 Disruptive Technologies behind comfort, ease and entertainment:

5G technology

The mobile technology, after 2G, 3G and 4G, moved one step ahead and the 5th generation wireless technology came into being. It may sound like an incremental improvement, but 5G is several notches above the earlier generation of wireless communication technology. It is going to make several use-cases (like autonomous vehicles) a reality. It’s giving way to much higher speed, almost 100 times faster than the current cellular data network. In simple speed perspective, downloading full HD movie in seconds.

With 90% reduction in network energy usage and up to 10-year battery life for low powered IoT (Internet of Things) devices, 5G promises many more specification requirements.

If you are interested in reading the expected impact of 5G, here’s an article on 5G on the Great Musings platform.

5 Areas To Be Transformed By 5G Network

Robotics and drones

The world of robotics is changing very fast and for good. Robotics and drones have infiltrated almost all the business sectors. There are surgical robots, robots for house construction, chef robots, personal help robots, industrial robots, inspection robots and so on.

Drones on the other hand, have their own use in improving the productivity of businesses. In the agriculture sector drones are doing some of the very cumbersome and somewhat dangerous tasks. A forecast of drones having a 35 billion dollars value in agriculture sector by 2038, has been made via IDTechEx.

Drones are also in use for medical aid, delivering things at door-step, for entertainment and others. But, one of the most valuable use of Drones is being made in the military sector.

Artificial Intelligence

With time, everything is getting smart. AI is slowly becoming the mind behind the robotics and drones. Not just these, but the AI has entered our lives through smartphones. Be it a Google’s DeepMind, Apple’s Siri, automated online assistant or chatbot, all provide customer service at any time. Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana are bridging the gap between people and their smart devices. Giving them competition is Facebook built Jarvis.

Self-driving cars and drones are high profile examples. AI is playing a big role in IoT (Internet of Things) revolution, providing us with all the smart things around. Be it a wearable tech, smart electric ecosystem, conversing with appliances, security surveillance, etc. According to a study by McKinsey & Company, use of AI in commutation in the form of Driver Assist systems and other means, will result in up to 90% fewer accidents and a significant reduction in overall travel time.

Wanna read more on AI and Smart Tech?

Click to read more on Smart Tech

How Smart Tech is Transforming Your World!

3D printing

This technology is also proliferating very fast. 3D printing with plastics and metals moved on to 3D printing with concreted, building a house in no time. There are myriad research projects on 3D printing of human organs and tissue, bionic body parts and so on. 3D printing also known as Additive Manufacturing has already disrupted the traditional manufacturing technology in some areas of sectors like aerospace defense, automotive and so on.

Human skin equivalent has been developed to fulfill the requirement of bionic skin.

3D printing market in 2021 is 12.6 billion dollars and expected to reach 34.8 billion dollars by 2026.

RFID

RFID has been around for long. But, recently, they are being used in very innovative applications. Radio Frequency Identification using radio waves, has given rise to a variety of applications such as tracking of goods and animals, transportation and logistics, healthcare, tax collection and contactless payments.

In recent years, thousands of Swedes have inserted microchips under their skin, to make their life easier. The microchip functions as contactless credit cards, key cards and so on.

RFID market which is 10.7 billion dollars in 2021 is expected to reach 17.4 billion dollars by 2026, according to Markets and Markets.

Blockchain

A distributed ledger technology to manage online transactions or records using blocks are linked and secured using cryptography, creating peer-to-peer network. Besides cryptocurrencies eg bitcoin, blockchain are used for wide variety of applications such as tracking of ownership or provenance of documents, digital assets and physical assets.

The global market size of blockchain is expected to grow from 4.68 billion dollars in 2021 to 104.19 billion dollars in 2028 according to Fortune Business Insights.

Reality Technologies

Reality Technologies is a 3D virtual world. Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality popular as AR, VR and MR are a bit confusing for many. In simple terms,

• Augmented Reality is a technology that superimposes the virtual image on a user’s view of the real world.
• Virtual Reality is the technology in which virtual reality equipment is used to experience the virtual world within a simulated environment.
• Mixed Reality is the blending of AR and VR to produce new environment and visualizations where real world and virtual world co-exist in real time.

Applications of these technologies are entertainment, training, aviation, business, education, social interaction, search and rescue, broadcasting live events and many more.

According to a report Global Forecast, AR is expected to reach USD 60.55 billion and VR to USD 34.08 billion by 2023.

Satellite Internet

A new development in the world of Internet is the Satellite internet. As of today, the world is connected using fiber optic cables under the sea connecting various continents. With satellite internet, a constellation of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites will be used to beam the signal right from the sky to your receiver antenna at home. This will make it possible to achieve data connectivity even in far flung corners of the world where it is very tedious to connect through cables and wires.

Starlink of Elon Musk, Oneweb and Nelco of India are some of the companies working to provide satellite internet to the world.

Even though satellite internet does not promise the speed as wired network, it’s ability to provide connectivity anywhere without the need of fixed ground infrastructure makes it a disruptive technology in the making.

Conclusion

Details of all these technologies and especially Artificial Intelligence is beyond this article. All above is just a dab of disruptive technology.

Technology world is evolving at a very rapid pace. This evolution, while draws the curtain on some business sectors, it is also bringing in many new opportunities. Professionals and businesses need to keep an eye on the technology horizon to anticipate a possible disruption. Adapting and performing with the change is the only way stay relevant in the market.