In the field of AI, IBM points out that there will be robot microscopes with artificial intelligence that can save the oceans from pollution. He explains that in five years these small autonomous microscopes with AI will be connected to the cloud and deployed around the world, and will be in charge of continuously monitoring the water situation in real time.
Thus, IBM scientists are working on a system that uses plankton, since this is a natural biological sensor for aquaculture health. IBM AI microscopes can be housed in bodies of water to analyze the movement of plankton in 3D in their natural habitat, and use this information to predict the state and behavior of the waters. This could help in cases of oil spills or releases from other sources of pollution, as well as predict threats such as “red tides”.
IBM also tells how in the next five years the biases of artificial intelligence will increase, but at the same time new solutions will appear to counteract algorithms that are created with some type of racial, gender or ideological prejudice. In this field, researchers from the American firm have developed a methodology so that no AI algorithm perpetuates an inequity by subsequently learning from the data. IBM scientists have also developed a technique to examine artificial intelligence systems, even when the data that has been used for their training is not available.
About quantum computing, IBM says it is still a matter for researchers, but that in five years it will already be popular. Thus, professionals and developers in any field will be able to solve problems that could previously be considered unsolvable due to their difficulty or because they would take even thousands of years to solve. In the field of research, IBM has already achieved some important milestones in quantum chemistry. For example, a team of professionals has successfully simulated the atomic bonding in beryllium hydride (BeH2), the most complex molecule ever simulated by a quantum computer. In the future, quantum computers will continue to tackle problems with increasing complexity, meeting and exceeding what we can now only do with classical computing systems.
Blockchain technology, IBM further says, will team up with crypto to fight counterfeiting. In the next 5 years “cryptanch”, the size of an ink dot or smaller than a grain of salt, will be inserted into everyday objects and devices. And they will be used to guarantee the authenticity of an object from its origin until it reaches the consumer. These “crypto anchors” provide the basis for new solutions to address food safety, the authenticity of manufactured components, genetically modified products, the identification of counterfeit objects and the provenance of luxury items, for example.
Despite this, says IBM, cybercriminals will attack, and for them encryption models are being developed that can adapt to new emerging technologies and quantum computers that will soon appear. The “cryptographic grid” is the name of the technique in which the American company works, with which it will be possible to work on a document or encrypt it without putting sensitive data at risk from cybercriminals.
