Predictions From IEEE’s 2024 Technology Megatrends Report

It’s time to start preparing your organization and employees for the effects of artificial general intelligence, sustainability, and digital transformation. According to IEEE’s 2024 Technology Megatrends report, the three technologies will change how companies, governments, and universities operate and will affect what new skills employees need.

Contents

The benefits and drawbacks of artificial general intelligence

Adopting digital technologies

A megatrend, which integrates multiple tendencies that evolve over two decades or so, is expected to have a substantial effect on society, technology, ecology, economics, and more.

More than 50 experts from Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and the United States provided their perspectives for the report. They represent all 47 of IEEE’s fields of interest and come from academia, the public sector, and the private sector. The report includes insights and opportunities about each megatrend and how industries could benefit.

The experts compared their insights to technology predictions from Google Trends; the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Xplore Digital Library; and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

“We made predictions about technology and megatrends and correlated them with other general megatrends such as economical, ecological, and sociopolitical. They’re all intertwined,” says IEEE Fellow Dejan Milojicic, a member of the IEEE Future Directions Committee and vice president at Hewlett Packard Labs in Milpitas, Calif. He is also a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Fellow.

The benefits and drawbacks of artificial general intelligence

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) includes ChatGPT, autonomous robots, wearable and implantable technologies, and digital twins.

Education, health care, and manufacturing are some of the sectors that can benefit most from AGI, the report says.

For academia, the technology can help expand remote learning, potentially replacing physical classrooms and leading to more personalized education for students.

In health care, the technology could lead to personalized medicine, tailored patient treatment plans, and faster drug discovery. AGI also could help reduce costs and increase efficiencies, the report says.

Manufacturing can use the technology to improve quality control, reduce downtime, and increase production. The time to market could be significantly shortened, the report says.

Today’s AI systems are specialized and narrow, so to reap the benefits, experts say, the widespread adoption of curated datasets, advances in AI hardware, and new algorithms will be needed. It will require interdisciplinary collaborations across computer science, engineering, ethics, and philosophy, the report says.

The report points out drawbacks with AGI, including a lack of data privacy, ethical challenges, and misuse of content.

Another concern is job displacement and the need for employees to be retrained. AGI requires more AI programmers and data scientists but fewer support staff and system administrators, the report notes.