A few days ago the report « The Information Society in Spain 2016 » (SIE 2016) was published, a compilation of the steps taken in 2016 in technology, as well as the future trends of ICTs for 2017.A kind of prospective that Telefonica presents year after year with the help of national and international experts.
It is difficult to synthesize almost 300 report pages with technical advances and trends.Here we find, among all, the ones we have considered the most striking.Starting with the milestones achieved in 2016 and ending with the technological trends for 2017 .
The digital divide in older people is reduced
It is one of the most surprising data.While the tablet industry experiences (in general) a decline in sales, its use has increased by 219% in people over 65 years of age .
This helps this population to access the digital world and use the Internet, where access to bank information is at the forefront of their digital habits.
In Spain we can be proud not only of bridging the digital divide , but of reducing it, while in other countries the lack of knowledge about the use of the Internet is alarmingly high, endangering the network itself.
Internet users are worried about your privacy
80.3% of Internet users show a high concern for privacy .
82.2% believe that personal data should be protected; 77.8% say the same about the photographs; and 67.9% add browsing history and search history.
But we go further.Not only do we not trust « Internet ».The distrust on the part of the users is such that only 17.4% would be willing for public administrations to access their data.A figure that amounts to 41.9% when we talk about the security forces.
In general, we have our privacy in great esteem .So much so that 87.9% of Internet users think that it should be possible to identify and delete their personal data from the Internet.A percentage that It stands at 91.2% in the case of women.The right to be forgotten is important for Spanish people.
Faced with this, it is curious that almost no one reads the Terms and Conditions of the applications it installs, 62.7% admit not to do so despite the fact that many applications ask for permission to sell personal data to third parties.
The video format gains weight over the text
If on the Internet 2015 text content still prevailed, now the video comes to the forefront .Probably due to a considerable increase in connection speed and the HTML5 standard adopted by many browsers.
But we are not talking only about viewing videos, series and movies, or making video calls between smartphones .
The Internet has been at the forefront of teaching , even breaking up traditional media such as face-to-face classes in academies and study centers.Some have even transferred the lessons to YouTube.MOOCs in this context (massive online and open courses) have gained immense relevance when learning.
So much so that 95.1% of young people between the ages of 14 and 19 use the Internet to access videos of a formative nature .Current reality requires continuous training, so it does not It is strange that there is an interest in extracurricular studies.
New generation networks outperformed ADSL
The ADSL continues in the collective ideology as a technology of last generation, something very far from reality.Broadband subscribers who use true new generation networks , such as fiber optic (FTTH) or hybrids fiber and coaxial (HFC), I exceed for the first time the number of subscribers of ADSL technology.
This happened in the middle of the year, in August 2016.The same report highlights that Spain remains at the head of FTTH deployment since we started in first position in 2014.In Spain there are more fiberoptic clients than there are in France, Italy, United Kingdom and Germany together.
With respect to mobile coverage for smartphones, tablets and other devices, in June the milestone of giving 4G coverage to 95% of the Spanish population was reached.
The pay TV takes off accompanied by the Internet
The trend began in 2012.Together with Internet packages, other video and private channels began to be contracted.By June 2016 76% of contracts with operators were contracted in a convergent package that included broadband Internet access and pay-TV.
The entry of large content distributors such as Netflix, HBO and Amazon Prime Video (in that order) has helped the sector to stabilize as there is a real competition to offer high quality channels.It has lowered prices and increased demand enough that a large number of customers have made the leap to this type of services.
Several facts have been crucial, as all these new platforms have increased the production of own content; many have added the option to view it offline; and almost all of them recommend content to the viewer based on their previous views.
Instant messaging extends to all sectors
Instant messaging is used by 94% of Spanish users, where WhatsApp remains the king.But it is curious that today users use these means of instant messaging to communicate with companies .A 65% of users admit to doing so.
Millions of messages exchanged in different media.Source: SIE 2016 .
This opens up communication opportunities for companies.While social networks were the boom of communication in 2013-2015, it seems that from 2016 onwards these types of messages will be of crucial importance for talk to customers.
Big Data is already a reality
Big Data will not be a trend or a future sector.Already is used in almost all companies , at a higher or lower level.Evidently SMEs will have databases much smaller than companies medium or large.
The study yields data that seems marginal, as 13% of small businesses and 26% of medium-sized companies regularly use pattern recognition techniques, but leave out those that use the data every few months.or at the end of the year.
Although it sounds like a big concept, Big Data, accompanied by data mining , is nothing more than getting statistical results from large volumes of data .And this exists in practically all SMEs, even in the form of an Excel table or as a result of the billing software that returns the most sold products or customers with more purchases.
Virtual reality became a reality
Pokemon Go took us all (its creators included) by surprise.This game, which integrated a virtual world like one more layer of reality in which we move daily, got more users than Twitter in the first 10 days of operation, and that took weeks to reach some countries.
What started with Google’s affordable Cardboard glasses in 2014 ended up flooding the VR technology market in 2016.Virtual reality went from being curious to having a major impact on GDP, usually from videogames.
Artificial Intelligence will be accessible in 2017
It is already for large and medium-sized companies, as seen in the case of the Japanese company that uses AI Watson without 30% of its workforce, but probably the first commercializations AI towards the public will appear in 2017.
Very possibly from productivity tools or by using robots that help us in diverse environments of our daily lives.
The aging of the population, which will require special care robots soon; or electric vehicles, which have encouraged the appearance of the autonomous vehicle , are two examples of Artificial Intelligence accelerators.There are hundreds.
This, of course, raises future problems such as the one that the European Union is positioning itself very seriously in the area of civil rights associated with the robots Summed up to the economic problems of mass industrialization, such as the concept of pensions , that they may leave robotics in the future.
In addition, the three laws of Asimov robotics are taking on relevance that futurologists did not consider so close in time.The rule of « women and women is mentioned in the report Children first »in case of accidents.Rules like these, not written anywhere but integrated into almost all human cultures, will have to be applied to many intelligent systems that arise around us so that robots and IA make the decisions just as a human would.
And, of course, debates of intellectual property appear on the horizon that we will have to face in a very short time.Who owns the rights to a score created by an AI? Perhaps in a few months, since there are already Artificial Intelligences oriented to the arts.
The cyborgs are already here
The cyborgs are no longer alone in the movies or in some marginal artistic spheres.At the end of 2016 we called attention to how implants and prostheses are a first step towards transhumanism.voluntary, as is the case with an internal insulin pump.
This current of cybernetic improvement can cause a fracture between standard humans and improved humans ( h + ), according to the report, even in very close dates.
More than 10,000 people around the world already have NFC technology implanted in their body on a voluntary basis, and the first sensory chip-which gives the sense of the magnetoreception-is sold for 425 dollars and only requires four piercings to implant it in the chest.
As transhumans improve themselves and gain social advantages over conventional humans, social movements for and against will emerge from both trends.Probably throughout 2017 or 2018.
We will live in a world of devices
Everything around us will be a device.The cell phone, the clock, the headset, the car, the house, each of the appliances, the sidewalk, the solar panel systems...There are no limits to what you can end in the sack of the Internet of Things .
That means that we have to get used to the objects coming alive around us.The barrier between robot, device and computer is going to blur in the same way that now it is difficult sometimes to distinguish what a computer is and what it is a tablet.
It can be a barrier for many when these devices are ubiquitous and even part of human beings .Having something as futuristic as a colony of medical nanorobots implanted in the body, and being ourselves one or more objects of the IoT that in turn surrounds us.
All these data and trends are not regarded with good eyes to technology and development.They have not been devised in the The minds of people who expect reality to collapse in this type of future events, but are the result of numerous studies and the opinion of a large number of international experts.
What we can be sure of is that throughout this 2017 we will see technologies developed that many of us will be caught off guard.We can say, today with data in hand: the future will be surprising .
Images | iStock/phototechno, Iphonedigital, SIE 2016, Google Cardboard, iStock/ktsimage, iStock/Ociacia
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