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The WIRED team spends its day talking to innovators - the thinkers, entrepreneurs, designers and scientists who are driving meaningful change in the world. The result is a growing multi-platform portfolio of reporting, storytelling and analysis that enables our readers to understand what's coming next.
Over the past six years, we've embarked on an ambitious annual project that enables us to exercise a specific muscle: one that requires predictions about the year ahead. Clearly, what futurist Kevin Kelly refers to as "inevitable" technologies, like artificial intelligence or virtual reality, will shape our world in the coming years; but quite when - and how - is hard to determine, so we ask some of the experts in the WIRED network to make one definite prediction about the coming 12 months. These are compiled into the WIRED World in 2018.
Our contributors gamely stick their necks out and offer us their thoughts and - I'm happy to report - have a high degree of accuracy. This year we welcome another cohort of fearless forecasters who have shared their predictions with us: Sir Martin Sorrell, who believes that Amazon will prove to be the biggest threat to Google; Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind, reveals the growing importance of ethics in AI; Vint Cerf, the co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, on how we balance free speech and the open internet; Jody Medich from Singularity University on the rise of the intelligent interface; the creative director of the Serpentine gallery Hans-Ulrich Obrist examines how the blockchain will drive a crypto-enabled rave culture; and entrepreneur and investor Mike Lynch details how malicious attacks will become ever more refined.
We look at how augmented reality is about to go mainstream, why voice is the new interface, how onshore wind and solar will become the cheapest forms of energy, the rise of the microgrid, how ethics will guide AI's development, why terrorist groups will recruit by using psychographic targeting and the introduction of buildings with personalised thermal clouds. Also, London-based art and technology studio FIELD creates some arresting images based on the structure of computing code.
We hope you find the annual trends report an interesting and useful resource for the year ahead. One thing that we can predict with a high degree of certainty is that the WIRED team and the big thinkers who we are honoured to have in our network will continue to be ever curious about our fast-moving world.
The WIRED World in 2018 is out in print and digital now. You can get the WIRED app on iTunes and the Google Play Store
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
