Category Archives: Transhuman

OISTE.ORG Foundation endorses preserving the human right to privacy statement during the Covid-19 pandemic signed by a group of more than 300 academics and experts on the human right to privacy

Geneva, 23 April 2020 - OISTE.ORG, a Swiss based foundation with special consultative status with ECOSOC and a recognized member of the not-for-profit constituency of ICANN endorses the views expressed in the "Joint Statement on Contact Tracing" dated April 19, 2020 and signed by a group of more than 300 academics and experts on the human right to privacy.

Governments worldwide have declared or will soon declare national states of emergency to face the Covid-19 threat. Under a state of emergency, governments are legally entitled to dictate measures of exception that would not be accepted or tolerated under normal circumstances. States of emergency are used as a rationale for suspending constitutional rights and freedoms because there is a higher "public good" that makes it justifiable. Nevertheless, experts sound a warning alarm: there is a high risk that governments will overstep and impede rights and freedoms in response to Covid-19. At the present critical juncture, some of the contact tracing applications that are being proposed may override the privacy-protection clauses of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The debate about "contact tracing" using modern digital technologies and the respect of the fundamental human right to privacy is one example of the need to be vigilant of the breaking point where exceptional measures can do more wrong than good. The liberal state has the same obligation to ensure the health and the well-being of its citizens as to guarantee that State surveillance of the individual does not become the norm. There is no doubt that digital technologies have a role to play on the lockdown ease, but not at any price.

Recently, a number of European institutions launched the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing: https://www.pepp-pt.org/ with the objective of interrupting new chains of SARS-CoV-2 transmission by informing potentially exposed people using their Bluetooth devices, though very quickly the two main Swiss technological universities, the EPFZ and the EPFL withdrew their support to the initiative since it is privacy intrusive. That is why the Joint Statement makes the following recommendations:

The authors of the Joint Statement point the following privacy-protecting initiatives as examples of good practice: DP-3T : https://github.com/DP-3T,TCN Coalition : https://tcn-coalition.org/, PACT (MIT) : https://pact.mit.edu/, PACT (UW) : https://covidsafe.cs.washington.edu/

Carlos Moreira, Secretary General of the OISTE Foundation and co-author of the bestselling book "The Transhuman Code" noted: "The digital universe has to be infused by ethical principles. The human right to privacy has to be protected and respected at all times, even during the present pandemic. Applications that permit contact tracing and respect the human right to privacy are being developed."

The OISTE Foundation signed The International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance right after they were launched at the 24th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in 2013. OISTE invites other organizations to join: https://necessaryandproportionate.org/

About OISTE FOUNDATIONFounded in Switzerland in 1998, OISTE was created with the objectives of promoting the use and adoption of international standards to secure electronic transactions, expand the use of digital certification and ensure the interoperability of certification authorities' e-transaction systems. The OISTE Foundation is a not for profit organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, regulated by article 80 et seq. of the Swiss Civil Code. OISTE is an organization in special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC) and belongs to the Not-for-Profit constituency (NPOC) of the ICANN.

Company Contact:Dourgam KummerFoundation Council Memberdourgam.kummer@oiste.org

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OISTE.ORG Foundation endorses preserving the human right to privacy statement during the Covid-19 pandemic signed by a group of more than 300...

Make It Scream, Make It Burn, Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison knows how to write a good personal essay because she doesn't assume you want to read about her personally. This was true in her first collection, Empathy Exams, and it is true in her second, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, which pieces together the things that interest Jamison most. In "Sim Life," Jamison examines our e-companions, those virtual characters we find ourselves strangely invested in. In "The Quickening," she reflects on the anxieties of pregnancy, at times addressing her unborn daughter directly, drawing the reader into the most private spaces of pre-parenthood. Each essay is an exercise in thoughtful restraint, never allowing itself to be confused for the work of a diarist.

Black Is the Body, Emily Bernard

On its most superficial level, Black Is the Body is a collection about storytelling within the familyas Bernard lays out in the subtitle, these are 12 stories from her grandmother's time, her mother's time, and her own. Beneath that, Black Is the Body is an expertly crafted collection about blackness in America, as only Bernard has lived it. One essay, "Interstates," documents the time when Bernard, her parents, and her white fianc pulled over to change a flat tire, exposing the family to every prejudice that may pass them on the highway. Other stories examine the relationship between white and black life in the American South, two experiences "ensnared in the same historical drama."

Interior States, Meghan OGieblyn

There are some writers who leave the worlds of devout religionworlds that are at once large, and impossibly smalland spare no second thoughts, rejecting both the baby and the bathwater. Meghan O'Gieblyn's debut collection leaves no thoughts behind, turning to her upbringing of conservative evangelicalism for a series of essays offering razor-sharp cultural criticism on the state of American life. "Ghost in the Cloud," a particular strong point, sews together the parallel theologies of transhumanism (technology that works to avoid death) and Christian millennialism (salvation that works to avoid death). O'Gieblyn is unapologetic in her takes, producing wholly original commentary slated for these times.

Human Relations and Other Difficulties, Mary-Kay Wilmers

Mary-Kay Wilmers, one of the founders of the London Review of Books and its sole editor since 1979, has a lot to say about writing, and women, and the ways women write for themselves and for men. Human Relations and Other Difficulties is the product of a veteran career in book reviewing, and it showsthe essays are clever, frank and delightfully readable. Some provide the literary commentary that Wilmer is known foron Joan Didion, Alice James and Jean Rhyswhile others turn inward, looking to Wilmer's own life as a child and a parent. "There's nothing magical about a mother's relationship with her baby," Wilmer writes of early motherhood. "Like most others, it takes two to get it going."

If there were ever a time to renew your love for the natural world, as the late poet Mary Oliver did throughout her career, it's now. Upstream, a collection of essays published three years before Oliver's death, is the author in her purest formreflecting on the beauty of codfish, grass, and seagulls on the beach. Life, as she writes about it, is precious in all things, without ever dipping into sentimentality. Oliver's meditation on her literary counterparts, including Walt Whitman, a childhood "friend," gives rare insight into the making of the poet, while other essays invite the reader to observe the outdoors with new eyes.

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Five Essay Collections to Read in Quarantine - Willamette Week

Philosophers involvedin the theories ofpost-humanism and transhumanismare captivated by the possibilities, or dangers, that the future poses to our understanding of human life.

According to Wikipedia,the idea of the post-human originates in the fields of science fiction, futurology, contemporary artand philosophy that literally refers to a person or entity that exists in a state beyond being human. In other words, a human so advanced that he or she is more or less distinct from our current conception of the ordinary person. This will mostly be facilitated by technological developments.

Steps towards post-humanism are already set in motion: they are not simply dystopian fantasies. Despite some of the hype around AI and robots might lead us to believe, noneof these massive changes are happening soon. These developments will be made in incrementally;often two steps forwards and three steps back. This is more linked to the way we humans are, rather than to the state of technology.

Philosophers such as Francesca Ferrando argue that transhumanism understands the meaning of humanity, in relation to technology and ecology. We should start to see humans not as the pinnacle of evolution and the rulers of the world, but as an integral part of the biosphere equal to other organisms. No longer can it be"them and us", with uncontrolled exploitation.

Humans are tribalistic in nature. There is discrimination between gender, race, nationality, ability. We will need to overcome this, yet progress here isn't linear. It is questionable if humanity can overcome tribalism. We might solve some form of these issues.At the same time, humans in their current form will rapidly find new ones to fight over (technology, robots, AI and so on).

In order to overcome some of these deeply ingrained human obstacles, post-humanism pointsto technologies that can be of assistance to manage humanity and our planet earth in a more sustainable way. A prerequisite for this is open societies.

Key issues that humanity will have to surmountare corruption, despotism and roadblocks to human development, whether itbesocially, culturally or economically. None of this will be easy and in the political reality of today, it could be seen as pure fantasy. But over decennia and centuries, things will change.

It is also interesting to contemplate what driveshumans to develop these new technologies.

From a philosophical and scientific point of view, we can think of scenarios that could take us further. Even if we see a global crisis creating massive havoc among our global population, we have already developed technologies that can assist us beyond such a situation, and with the coronavirus, we are seeing a spur of internationally collaborative developments that will greatly enhance this situation further.

In small ways, we are already seeing that "post-humans" will be far more intertwined with technology.

Look at pacemakers, bionic ears and eyes, artificial limbs and so on. We already have smart pills. Cybernetics has seen many breakthroughs in recent years, including the development of advanced prosthetics, used to provide amputees with a better quality of life.

The latest developments here are linking these prostheses direct to our brain and nervous system, making it increasingly more seamless. Soon individuals, otherthan disabled persons, may want similar functionalities. Think here for example about athletes the military and people that are already experimenting themselves with these technologies.

The MIT Media Lab is one of many organisations looking into cyborg developments. This is a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts.

Going one step further, we are seeing the technology ofhumanoids. They are something that has an appearance resembling a human without being one. The current attempts still look underdeveloped,but compare them with the robots from a few decades ago.

Away from the hardware, now on to the software. Digital technology is already having an enormous impact on how we see ourselves.We already have some primitive forms of digital twins: our persona in digital formats, such as on social media. But there are other developments underway that would go far beyond that, if they ever get off the ground.

Neurotechnology is also a growth area. Utilising nanotechnologies, these technologies are progressing well with developments such as Neuralink: an optogenetic technology that will allow a human brain to download directly from a computer.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies will soon be able to assist humans withthe most complex and difficult problems. Through mind-uploading such as theNectomeprogram and mind-merging, the best brains of the world can work together, creating the Brainternet.

A technology known as neural-lace will see the implanting tiny of electrodes into the brain. The result would be the enhancement of memory and cognitive powers by effectively merging humans and AI. Could this lead to a universal consciousness? Is this what we need to overcomecurrent tribal human problems? Is it consciousness, rather than physical appearance, that makes us human?

Obviously, we would need to redefine what human means in such a situation. Who knows what lays ahead in the centuries, let alone the millennia (hopefully) in front of us? Planet earth perhaps has another billion years to goand it's highly unlikely that humans remain the same as humanswe knowtoday. Will we be able to travel to distant galaxies and in what form will we travel?

Most likely, it will be in some form of software that could emulate our mind. It would require highly integrated computer technologies that could instantly process zettabytes of information, something that is extremely hard to fathom.

A huge question will be how are we going to manage these developments? There will, of course, be many ethical issues that we as a society need to address. We also know that looking at the current unwanted digital technology developments that are happening, we must start planning for the futurebefore technologies like AI makethe decisions for us.

Many industry leaders and scientists have urged governments to start this process now. But like taking preventative measures in relation to the current pandemic, governments equally have been procrastinating in this area.

Rather than trying to preempt developments in the decades or centuries ahead, we should follow and, wherever necessary, regulate these developments as we go. However, it is critical to take this post-human concept into account and have a holistic discussion about these topics between scientists, technologists, politicians and indeed the broader community.

Though, it is impossible to make transhuman predictions from our current position.On the positive side, in order to overcome the current political, cultural, social and economic problems, we will need technology to ensure that all global citizens will have a viable and sustainable place to live with a good quality lifestyle.

Scientists and engineers are certainly making progress.

Paul Buddeis an Independent Australia columnist and managing director ofPaul Budde Consulting, an independent telecommunications research and consultancy organisation. You can follow Paul on Twitter@PaulBudde.

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The benefits and risks of AI and post-human life - Independent Australia

The aims of the transhumanist movement are summed up by Mark OConnell in his book To Be a Machine, which last week won the Wellcome Book prize. It is their belief that we can and should eradicate ageing as a cause of death; that we can and should use technology to augment our bodies and our minds; that we can and should merge with machines, remaking ourselves, finally, in the image of our own higher ideals.

The idea of technologically enhancing our bodies is not new. But the extent to which transhumanists take the concept is. In the past, we made devices such as wooden legs, hearing aids, spectacles and false teeth. In future, we might use implants to augment our senses so we can detect infrared or ultraviolet radiation directly or boost our cognitive processes by connecting ourselves to memory chips. Ultimately, by merging man and machine, science will produce humans who have vastly increased intelligence, strength, and lifespans; a near embodiment of gods.

Is that a desirable goal? Advocates of transhumanism believe there are spectacular rewards to be reaped from going beyond the natural barriers and limitations that constitute an ordinary human being. But to do so would raise a host of ethical problems and dilemmas. As OConnells book indicates, the ambitions of transhumanism are now rising up our intellectual agenda. But this is a debate that is only just beginning.

There is no doubt that human enhancement is becoming more and more sophisticated as will be demonstrated at the exhibition The Future Starts Here which opens at the V&A museum in London this week. Items on display will include powered clothing made by the US company Seismic. Worn under regular clothes, these suits mimic the biomechanics of the human body and give users typically older people discrete strength when getting out of a chair or climbing stairs, or standing for long periods.

In many cases these technological or medical advances are made to help the injured, sick or elderly but are then adopted by the healthy or young to boost their lifestyle or performance. The drug erythropoietin (EPO) increases red blood cell production in patients with severe anaemia but has also been taken up as an illicit performance booster by some athletes to improve their bloodstreams ability to carry oxygen to their muscles.

And that is just the start, say experts. We are now approaching the time when, for some kinds of track sports such as the 100-metre sprint, athletes who run on carbon-fibre blades will be able outperform those who run on natural legs, says Blay Whitby, an artificial intelligence expert at Sussex University.

The question is: when the technology reaches this level, will it be ethical to allow surgeons to replace someones limbs with carbon-fibre blades just so they can win gold medals? Whitby is sure many athletes will seek such surgery. However, if such an operation came before any ethics committee that I was involved with, I would have none of it. It is a repulsive idea to remove a healthy limb for transient gain.

Not everyone in the field agrees with this view, however. Cybernetics expert Kevin Warwick, of Coventry University, sees no problem in approving the removal of natural limbs and their replacement with artificial blades. What is wrong with replacing imperfect bits of your body with artificial parts that will allow you to perform better or which might allow you to live longer? he says.

Warwick is a cybernetics enthusiast who, over the years, has had several different electronic devices implanted into his body. One allowed me to experience ultrasonic inputs. It gave me a bat sense, as it were. I also interfaced my nervous system with my computer so that I could control a robot hand and experience what it was touching. I did that when I was in New York, but the hand was in a lab in England.

Such interventions enhance the human condition, Warwick insists, and indicate the kind of future humans might have when technology augments performance and the senses. Some might consider this unethical. But even doubters such as Whitby acknowledge the issues are complex. Is it ethical to take two girls under the age of five and train them to play tennis every day of their lives until they have the musculature and skeletons of world champions? he asks. From this perspective the use of implants or drugs to achieve the same goal does not look so deplorable.

This last point is a particular issue for those concerned with the transhumanist movement. They believe that modern technology ultimately offers humans the chance to live for aeons, unshackled as they would be from the frailties of the human body. Failing organs would be replaced by longer-lasting high-tech versions just as carbon-fibre blades could replace the flesh, blood and bone of natural limbs. Thus we would end humanitys reliance on our frail version 1.0 human bodies into a far more durable and capable 2.0 counterpart, as one group has put it.

However, the technology needed to achieve these goals relies on as yet unrealised developments in genetic engineering, nanotechnology and many other sciences and may take many decades to reach fruition. As a result, many advocates such as the US inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler and PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel have backed the idea of having their bodies stored in liquid nitrogen and cryogenically preserved until medical science has reached the stage when they can be revived and their resurrected bodies augmented and enhanced.

Four such cryogenic facilities have now been constructed: three in the US and one in Russia. The largest is the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona whose refrigerators store more than 100 bodies (nevertheless referred to as patients by staff) in the hope of their subsequent thawing and physiological resurrection. It is a place built to house the corpses of optimists, as OConnell says in To Be a Machine.

Not everyone is convinced about the feasibility of such technology or about its desirability. I was once interviewed by a group of cryonic enthusiasts based in California called the society for the abolition of involuntary death, recalls the Astronomer Royal Martin Rees. I told them Id rather end my days in an English churchyard than a Californian refrigerator. They derided me as a deathist really old-fashioned.

For his part, Rees believes that those who choose to freeze themselves in the hope of being eventually thawed out would be burdening future generations expected to care for these newly defrosted individuals. It is not clear how much consideration they would deserve, Rees adds.

Ultimately, adherents of transhumanism envisage a day when humans will free themselves of all corporeal restraints. Kurzweil and his followers believe this turning point will be reached around the year 2030, when biotechnology will enable a union between humans and genuinely intelligent computers and AI systems. The resulting human-machine mind will become free to roam a universe of its own creation, uploading itself at will on to a suitably powerful computational substrate. We will become gods, or more likely star children similar to the one at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

These are remote and, for many people, very fanciful goals. And the fact that much of the impetus for establishing such extreme forms of transhuman technology comes from California and Silicon Valley is not lost on critics. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, the entrepreneur who wants to send the human race to Mars, also believes that to avoid becoming redundant in the face of the development of artificial intelligence, humans must merge with machines to enhance our own intellect.

This is a part of the world where the culture of youth is followed with fanatical intensity and where ageing is feared more acutely than anywhere else on the planet. Hence the overpowering urge to try to use technology to overcome its effects.

It is also one of the worlds richest regions, and many of those who question the values of the transhuman movement warn it risks creating technologies that will only create deeper gulfs in an already divided society where only some people will be able to afford to become enhanced while many other lose out.

The position is summed up by Whitby. History is littered with the evil consequences of one group of humans believing they are superior to another group of humans, he said. Unfortunately in the case of enhanced humans they will be genuinely superior. We need to think about the implications before it is too late.

For their part, transhumanists argue that the costs of enhancement will inevitably plummet and point to the example of the mobile phone, which was once so expensive only the very richest could afford one, but which today is a universal gadget owned by virtually every member of society. Such ubiquity will become a feature of technologies for augmenting men and women, advocates insist.

Many of these issues seem remote, but experts warn that the implications involved need to be debated as a matter of urgency. An example is provided by the artificial hand being developed by Newcastle University. Current prosthetic limbs are limited by their speed of response. But project leader Kianoush Nazarpour believes it will soon be possible to create bionic hands that can assess an object and instantly decide what kind of grip it should adopt.

It will be of enormous benefit, but its use raises all sorts of issues. Who will own it: the wearer or the NHS? And if it is used to carry a crime, who ultimately will be responsible for its control? We are not thinking about these concerns and that is a worry.

The position is summed up by bioethicist professor Andy Miah of Salford University.

Transhumanism is valuable and interesting philosophically because it gets us to think differently about the range of things that humans might be able to do but also because it gets us to think critically about some of those limitations that we think are there but can in fact be overcome, he says. We are talking about the future of our species, after all.

LimbsThe artificial limbs of Luke Skywalker and the Six Million Dollar Man are works of fiction. In reality, bionic limbs have suffered from multiple problems: becoming rigid mid-action, for example. But new generations of sensors are now making it possible for artificial legs and arms to behave in much more complex, human-like ways.

SensesThe light that is visible to humans excludes both infrared and ultra-violet radiation. However, researchers are working on ways of extending the wavelengths of radiation that we can detect, allowing us to see more of the world - and in a different light. Ideas like these are particularly popular with military researchers trying to create cyborg soldiers.

PowerPowered suits or exoskeletons are wearable mobile machines that allow people to move their limbs with increased strength and endurance. Several versions are being developed by the US army, while medical researchers are working on easy-to-wear versions that would be able to help people with severe medical conditions or who have lost limbs to move about naturally.

BrainsTranshumanists envisage the day when memory chips and neural pathways are actually embedded into peoples brains, thus bypassing the need to use external devices such as computers in order to access data and to make complicated calculations. The line between humanity and machines will become increasingly blurred.

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No death and an enhanced life: Is the future transhuman ...

Michael Kerr reviews Notes from an Apocalypse by Mark O'Connell

This review will be overtaken by events. Its bound to be. While I was reading the book, its writer posted a picture on Twitter of the contents of a box he had just opened at home. Who could have predicted, he asked, that these copies of the US edition of my book about apocalyptic anxiety would be delivered by a guy in a face mask, and that I would open the box using plastic gloves? Notme!

Hes being a little hard on himself. He was well ahead of most of us, already up and on the road long before the Four Horsemen appeared on their mounts in the Chinese city of Wuhan. See that title: Notes from an Apocalypse.

Mark OConnell is a journalist and essayist. He won the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize for To Be a Machine, an exploration of transhumanism, a movement that suggests we can and should exploit technology to improve the human body and, ultimately, make ourselves immortal. He is also the father of two young children, and constantly worrying over what sort of world hes brought them into. Its a world where lies as well as germs go viral, where we humans are making the weather, where old alliances and certainties are being overturned, and where the moneyed are readying to leave the rest of us behind, having bought bunkers in the middle of nowhere, bolt-holes on the other side of the world, or tickets to a life on Mars.

The signs of apocalypse, he reckons, are all around, and while hes anxious, hes also intrigued. So off he goes on a series of perverse pilgrimages to the places where the end-times seem closest from South Dakota, with its underground shelters offering turnkey apocalypse solutions, to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where the abandoned city of Pripyat is a fever-dream of a world gone void. In between, he examines the tech billionaires fixation with New Zealand, mixes with the Mars Society in Los Angeles, and joins an environmentalists retreat in the Scottish Highlands. He has sessions with his therapist, and draws on the work of writers as varied as Carl Sagan and Dr Seuss. The result is a book thats fretful, wise and funny, and often all three in the space of a paragraph.

OConnell thoroughly skewers Americas boasting preppers with a story about one who began eating into his freeze-dried rations because his wife was away, he couldnt cook and it didnt occur to him to phone for pizza. Then he tells of a friend of his who works in publishing, who reveals that she has a go-bag, ready to be hauled out from under the bed at a moments notice.

His friend sees something exciting in the prospect of testing herself and her limits. OConnell doesnt: his comfort zone, he says, is one with four walls, good Wi-Fi, and craft beer and a bookshop within walking distance. On his solo in the Alladale Wilderness Reserve, he breaks the spirit of the rules by taking half a packet of nut-and-berry mix with him. His account of eking it out reminded me of the narrator of John Lanchesters novel The Wall, who, while patrolling Britains borders against climate refugees, breaks upthe time between breakfast andlunch into two sections of 90minutes, with an energy bar in themiddle.

OConnells own book is a work of non-fiction peopled by some characters a novelist wouldnt get away with. I thought perhaps hed overplayed the zealotry of those who see Mars as the new frontier and the new destiny for Earthlings. But no. While I was reading his chapter on Chernobyl, I got an email from a PR firm with this heading: To infinity and beyond: conquering the final frontier with Asgardia. It went on: Whilst plans for holidays and trips away have been put on the back-burner, the desire for outer-orbit travel hasntdiminished.

Notes from an Apocalypse is a book in which even the typos seem to be in keeping with the theme (A state stripped down to its bear [sic] right-wing essentials). Its also one that makes reference to center and specter and neighbors and fibers. Have we in the UK been given the UStext?

OConnell sometimes reaches for the fancy (strewn disjecta) over the plain, and occasionally over-explains. In the Highlands, a woman offers to help him put up his tent; she worked in a camping store, she says, and she knows that: Theyre tricky bastards, some of them. OConnell is struck by the empathic skillfulness [sic] of this revelation and then, in a sentence 132 words long, tells us why.

If he reads that, itll bother him, maybe add to his fretting. But it shouldnt: hes doing good work in difficult times. He offers us hope as well as black humour. And we need that now.

Notes from an Apocalypse is published by Granta at 14.99. To order your copy from the Telegraph visit books.telegraph.co.uk

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Whats the best way to prepare for the apocalypse? Dont ask these guys - Telegraph.co.uk

We may not be living on Mars or traveling to work using jet packs, but there's no doubt the coming decade will bring many exciting technological advances. In this article, I want to outline the 25 key technology trends that I believe will shape the 2020s.

These 25 Technology Trends Will Define The Next Decade

1.Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. The increasing ability of machines to learn and act intelligently will absolutely transform our world. It is also the driving force behind many of the other trends on this list.

2.The Internet of Things (IoT). This refers to the ever-growing number of smart devices and objects that are connected to the internet. Such devices are constantly gathering and transmitting data, further fueling the growth in Big Data and AI.

3.Wearables and augmented humans. What started with fitness trackers has now exploded into a whole industry of wearable technology designed to improve human performance and help us live healthier, safer, more efficient lives. In the future, we may even see humans merge with technology to create augmented humans or transhumans.

4.Big Data and augmented analytics. Big Data refers to the exponential growth in the amount of data being created in our world. Thanks to augmented analytics (highly advanced data analytics, often fueled by AI techniques), we can now make sense of and work with enormously complex and varied streams of data.

5.Intelligent spaces and smart places. Closely linked to the IoT, this trend is seeing physical spaces like homes, offices, and even whole cities becoming increasingly connected and smart.

6.Blockchains and distributed ledgers. This super-secure method of storing, authenticating, and protecting data could revolutionize many aspects of business particularly when it comes to facilitating trusted transactions.

7.Cloud and edge computing. Cloud computing where data is stored on other computers and accessed via the internet has helped to open up data and analytics to the masses. Edge computing where data is processed on smart devices (like phones) will take this to the next level.

8.Digitally extended realities. Encompassing virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality, this trend highlights the move towards creating more immersive digital experiences.

9.Digital twins. A digital twin is a digital copy of an actual physical object, product, process, or ecosystem. This innovative technology allows us to try out alterations and adjustments that would be too expensive or risky to try out on the real physical object.

10.Natural language processing. This technology, which allows machines to understand human language, has dramatically changed how humans interact with machines, in particular giving rise to

11.Voice interfaces and chatbots. Alexa, Siri, chatbots many of us are now quite used to communicate with machines by simply speaking or typing our request. In the future, more and more businesses will choose to interact with their customers via voice interfaces and chatbots.

12.Computer vision and facial recognition. Machines can talk, so why shouldnt they see as well? This technology allows machines to visually interpret the world around them, with facial recognition being a prime example. Although we will no doubt see greater regulatory control over the use of facial recognition, this technology isnt going anywhere.

13.Robots and cobots. Todays robots are more intelligent than ever, learning to respond to their environment and perform tasks without human intervention. In certain industries, the future of work is likely to involve humans working seamlessly with robot colleagues hence the term cobot," or "collaborative robot."

14.Autonomous vehicles. The 2020s will be the decade in which autonomous vehicles of all kinds cars, taxis, trucks, and even ships become truly autonomous and commercially viable.

15.5G. The fifth generation of cellular network technology will give us faster, smarter, more stable wireless networking, thereby driving advances in many other trends (e.g., more connected devices and richer streams of data).

16.Genomics and gene editing. Advances in computing and analytics have driven incredible leaps in our understanding of the human genome. Now, were progressing to altering the genetic structure of living organisms (for example, correcting DNA mutations that can lead to cancer).

17.Machine co-creativity and augmented design. Thanks to AI, machines can do many things including creating artwork and designs. As a result, we can expect creative and design processes to shift towards greater collaboration with machines.

18.Digital platforms. Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb are all household-name examples of digital platforms networks that facilitate connections and exchanges between people. This trend is turning established business models on their head, leading many traditional businesses to transition to or incorporate a platform-based model.

19.Drones and unmanned aerial vehicles. These aircraft, which are piloted either remotely or autonomously, have changed the face of military operations. But the impact doesnt stop there search and rescue missions, firefighting, law enforcement, and transportation will all be transformed by drone technology. Get ready for passenger drones (drone taxis), too!

20.Cybersecurity and resilience. As businesses face unprecedented new threats, the ability to avoid and mitigate cybersecurity threats will be critical to success over the next decade.

21.Quantum computing. Quantum computers unimaginably fast computers capable of solving seemingly unsolvable problems will make our current state-of-the-art technology look like something out of the Stone Age. As yet, work in quantum computing is largely restricted to labs, but we could see the first commercially available quantum computer this decade.

22.Robotic process automation. This technology is used to automate structured and repetitive business processes, freeing up human workers to concentrate on more complex, value-adding work. This is part of a wider shift towards automation that will impact every industry.

23.Mass personalization and micro-moments. Mass-personalization is, as you might expect, the ability to offer highly personalized products or services on a mass scale. Meanwhile, the term micro-moments essentially means responding to customer needs at the exact right moment. Both are made possible by technologies like AI, Big Data, and analytics.

24.3D and 4D printing and additive manufacturing. Although this may seem low-tech compared to some of the other trends, 3D and 4D printing will have very wide applications and will be particularly transformative when combined with trends like mass-personalization.

25.Nanotechnology and materials science. Our increasing ability to understand materials and control matter on a tiny scale is giving rise to exciting new materials and products, such as bendable displays.

Read more about these 25 key technology trends in more detail including practical examples from a wide range of industries in my new book, Tech Trends in Practice: The 25 Technologies That Are Driving The 4th Industrial Revolution.

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These 25 Technology Trends Will Define The Next Decade - Forbes