Mystic WIll Guyatt gives his predictions on what will be hot in tech for 2023
4 January 2023, 16:11
Being asked to write tech predictions is a tough gig – despite being told as a child we’d be in tin foil suits by 2020, I’m still sadly in jeans and a t-shirt in 2023.
Even the straight-talking Lord Sugar famously predicted the iPod would be dead by Christmas 2005.
And despite all my years of experience, I’m the journalist who last year said he would eat his hat if Elon Musk purchased Twitter.
That said, there's a couple of emerging tech trends I'm going to follow closely in 2023 - because if they aren’t buzzwords now, they certainly will be when we’re welcoming 2024.
Artificial Intelligence
Mention the above and most of us think of clunky robots like the Terminator, but AI will play a massive part in 2023 – both as we become increasingly aware of the things it can do well, but also as industry and politicians wake up to the revolutionary fact that computer code will soon do many things better than us humans ever can.
Tech developments like ChatGPT - a realistic chatbot almost indistinguishable from human beings, and AI art generators like Dall-E, which can generate Van-Gogh quality art just by describing what you want it to paint - demonstrate just how quickly AI is evolving.
Soon – intelligent computer code will begin to disrupt huge areas of employment – from customer service to highly trained positions in accountancy and law. It’s even coming for us journalists too!
Mixed Reality
Tech companies big and small are betting the farm on the concept of the Metaverse becoming the future of the Internet – it’s the biggest buzzword in tech right now.
The idea is that we’ll all want to make our online experience far more interactive, hanging out in a virtual world with other users.
That’s certainly the dream of businesses like Meta – but the reality is that most of us can think of anything worse than shutting ourselves away in a virtual world. The current crop of headsets are claustrophobic and can make some people feel nauseous.
Mixed reality will take over in 2023 – instead of shutting us off, they bridge the digital and physical worlds, merging our real world with a computer generated one.
It’s one area of growth that Apple are rumoured to be very interested in. Unconfirmed reports suggest the world’s biggest tech company has been developing its own Mixed Reality glasses for the last few years, and we may finally see them in 2023.
It's difficult to understand how Apple has made many forms of tech mainstream – sure, others have been there first, but Apple made them mass market.
It could do the same with Mixed Reality, and with the very suggestion Apple want to own the market, other tech companies will rush to get their versions out too.
