2022 is coming, and the technology world is not sitting still. As I cover tech news daily for Daily Tech News Show, I get a front row seat as trends arrive, accelerate and disappear.
Here's my take on the top five tech trends to look for in 2022.
1. Central bank digital currencies or CBDCs. You have seen coverage of this about limited experiments in China or small countries implementing them. I mean actual government digital currencies like the Bahamas not adopting bitcoin like El Salavador. This year, more major governments will get in the game of creating a government-issued digital currency in an attempt to stave off perceived threats of the cryptocurrency wave.
2. Battery tech. I'm not going to predict a big battery tech breakthrough – that is 5-10 years away. But solar and wind are going to keep getting better and more innovative and that's going to shine a bright light on what we can do with existing battery tech. Imagine what you've seen happen to smartphone batteries happening to industrialized power storage.
3. The chip shortage. Sadly, I do not think it will end this year, but by the end of 2022 we will see the light at the end of the tunnel, or shipping lane, or whatever logistical metaphor you fancy. In fact, get ready for stories around managing capacity, as fabs catch up, and all those new plants being built need to be justified.
4. Metaverse. You will hear the word metaverse a lot. Still, just like now, it will largely be meaningless. There will be no actual metaverse in 2022, though several companies will claim they have done it. Web3 is real – metaverse is not... yet.
5. AI backlash. I'm going to guess the backlash against AI will swell. There has been a growing concern over bias in machine learning algorithms, which will continue to grow into mainstream consciousness. That, fed by somewhat unfounded fears of the effects of AI, will lead to boycotts, and calls for more regulation. Expect what's happened to data privacy to start shifting to AI.
Sorry, I know all of that wasn't sunny, but they are the trends I see before me. Check back next year to see just how right or wrong I was.
2022 will be a year of big tech promises. Whether companies can deliver is another question.
We’ll get our first clues at this week’s CES electronics show in Las Vegas — a sprawling event that offers an exclusive glimpse at the tech that could help shape the year. (That is, unless the high transmissibility of the omicron variant of the coronavirus forces organizers to shutter the show. Big-name attendees including Intel, Meta and Amazon have pulled out, and show organizers have shortened the event by one day — it now runs Wednesday through Friday.)
Before the show and the rest of the year kick off in earnest, we wanted to break out our crystal ball to suss out what the new year will mean for the tech in your life. Some of the developments we’ll discuss are long overdue. Some build on progress or change we saw in 2021.
In many ways, 2022 will be a year of “hurry up and wait,” Carolina Milanesi, a technology analyst with research firm Creative Strategies, told us. Big tech developments like “the metaverse,” autonomous vehicles and greater repairability will take time to catch up to their hype, and companies must be careful not to overpromise, Milanesi said.
At the same time, companies need our buy-in more than ever. Smart home technology, health wearables and virtual reality all depend on our personal data to improve. If we don’t trust companies enough to share a whole lot of it, that technology gets stuck in the “my voice assistant still doesn’t understand me” phase.
Here’s what we expect — and in some cases, hope — to see in 2022.
A race into the ‘metaverse’
Facebook parent company Meta may have generated the most buzz with its foray into the metaverse — a theoretical shared space where people can hang out in virtual reality — but the other tech giants won’t be far behind.
2022 will be a “race into the metaverse” as large tech companies wrestle for slices of an emerging market, according to Rolf Illenberger, CEO of virtual reality software maker VRdirect. Google, Microsoft and Apple may introduce their own headsets and operating systems for the metaverse, like their equivalents for PCs and smartphones. (Just how “meta” this collection of walled-off virtual environments will be remains to be seen.)
The smart home will make a lot more sense
If you walk into a big-box retailer or hardware store, it probably wouldn’t take you long to find smart-home goodies like connected lightbulbs and thermostats. What can take awhile is finding stuff that works with the products you already have — but that might not be the case for much longer.
Some of the biggest names in Big Tech, including Apple, Amazon, Google and Samsung, have teamed up to develop a new smart-home standard called Matter. The aim: to ensure that the home gadgets you buy in the future all play nice with one another, regardless of who made them or what virtual assistant you want to use when interacting with them.
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