In yesterday's "Time Capsule" panel at the Journey Conference held by EY Israel and "Globes," entrepreneurs and inventors told the audience their predictions for the high-tech industry in 2020. Seed fund founding partner Gigi Levy said, "The field that excites me the most is synthetic biology - a combination of data and biology. The cost of automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and DNA sequencing has been falling in recent years. Today, for the first time, we can use AI in biology. Biology has become something that can be hacked. For now, regulation is slowing us down, but my prediction is that most talented high tech will switch to biology. In five years, most of the new unicorns will be in the biology sector. Death is unavoidable, but if we can, I don't see why we shouldn't try to prevent or delay it. In my opinion, our children will live for an average of 110 years."
Mercedes Benz Research and Development Tel Aviv CEO Adi Ofek predicts that in five years, the auto industry will switch to different business models combining micro-mobility, data, connectivity, and creating an individual environmentally-friendly transportation experience that will enable users to fulfill their personal needs. "It will change the insurance, health, and many other industries. In five years, we'll have a lot more shared transportation, and we'll launch a completely autonomous Mercedes vehicle," she says, predicting that 15-25% of vehicles will be electric by 2025. She added that by 2022, Mercedes would have 10 completely electric models.
Veteran cryptocurrencies expert Maya Zehavi asserts, "Data is the new gold, and we need shovels to dig it - processors with calculating power. Our goal is calculation, and these will be our new products. We'll rely on a third party or ourselves to learn how to behave in the world on the basis of this data. We won't share our data or meta-data about our data. We’ll see three financial systems: the system we know today, an open blockchain system, and a third system in which either several governments will take over all of the data, the direction that China is following, or on the other side, a system in which all of the data is completely private, which is where the West is going."
Assaf Wand, cofounder and CEO of insurtech company Hippo, expects "innovation in insurance to replace the existing approaches to insurance. In order to record a lot more information about the customer, companies may arise that will give customers IoT devices for free with an insurance package - none of the current companies. Maybe Amazon and Comcast will insure customers in the coming years."
Entrepreneur and investor Yanki Margalit told the panel, "We're seeing the final moments of homo sapiens as a species. It's time to stop talking about technology, because this isn't about technology. Let's talk about humanity, about us, and about the next stage. People starting talking 40,000 years ago, and this change created homo sapiens. Now we're creating homo sapiens 2.0. Let's talk about what we want to do, no about what we can do. My prediction is that within five years, it will be clear to everyone that homo sapiens 2.0 will separate themselves from the rest of the homo sapiens. We'll have to ask ourselves what criterion will determine who advances towards the future and who will be left behind."
Saban Ventures managing partner Barak Pridor gave the panel not one, but 15 predictions of what he expects to happen by 2020, including one out of four telephones being collapsible, live sports broadcasts on Internet taking the lead over conventional television sports broadcasts, and everyone being connected to television streaming services instead of music. He also expects blockchain technology to be used to manage digital rights. Pridor also asserts that it will be scientifically proven that mobile phones cause health problems, and predicts that mobile phone use will be regulated in order to prevent addiction. Finally, Pridor said that Netflix would become a Fortune 500 company, and that Apple and Disney would merge into a single company after Apple acquires Disney.
Samsung NEXT managing director Eyal Miller commented, "In the next decade, the market will be flooded with magical devices using IoT technologies - all of them connected and all of them transmitting and receiving data. The Internet will be flooded with zettabytes of data that will simply be too much for the cloud's current computational capabilities. Like the mainframe computers of yesteryear, they will simply be unable to handle the current information load, so that the cloud systems and data centers will be unable to cope with the likely quantities of information. We at Samsung NEXT believe that the solution is decentralization. I predict that in another decade, cloud computing will be replaced by end-user computing, and that the volume of computing on mobile devices and smartphones will be at least as much as in cloud computing."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on October 18, 2018
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