Thirty years ago, it was a big deal when schools got their first computers. Today, it's a big deal when students get their own laptops.

According to Thomas Frey, the senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute think tank, “In 14 years it'll be a big deal when students learn from robot teachers over the Internet.”

It's not just because the technology will be that sophisticated, Frey says, but because the company responsible for it will be the largest of its kind.

"I've been predicting that by 2030 the largest company on the Internet is going to be an education-based company that we haven't heard of yet," Frey said.

Frey's prediction comes amid a boom in artificial intelligence research. Google is developing DeepMind; a complex piece of machine-learning software and IBM is developing Watson-powered robots.

"Nobody has quite cracked the code for the future of education," Frey contends.

His vision for 2030 includes a massively enhanced version of today's open online courses – the kind of instruction you may find with Khan Academy, Coursera, or MIT OpenCourseWare. Only, the instructors won't be humans beamed through videos. They'll be bots, and they'll be smart enough to personalize each lesson plan to the student sitting in front of the screen.

Frey suspects that a new kind of efficiency will allow students to learn at much faster rates than if they had to compete with 19 other students for the teacher's attention. Students will breeze through their material at four or 10 times the speed, completing an undergraduate education in less than half a year.

"It learns what your proclivities are, it learns what your idiosyncrasies are," Frey explains. "It learns what your interests are, your reference points. And it figures out how to teach you in a faster way over time."

He uses the example of Google's DeepMindlearning to play the Atari video game "Breakout." Not only did it quickly pick up on the rules, but within a half hour it figured out a way to achieve incredibly high scores – all with little human input.

Machine learning will accelerate similarly in the education space, Frey says. Online bots will pick up on a student's strengths and weaknesses and use a series of algorithms to tailor the lessons accordingly. Research suggeststhis personalized method is among the most effective at raising kids' overall achievement.
Frey doesn't go so far as to argue education bots will replace traditional schooling outright. He sees them more as a supplement or a kind of tutor. If a child struggles with algebra, a bot may be able to offer some help during homework time or over the weekend.

It's up for debate whether AI can master the subtleties of language, thought, and reason all within the next 14 years. One of the most significant hurdles for machine learning is grasping social interactions. Many AI systems today are still less capable cognitively than a 6-year-old.

Frey trusts 14 years isn't too generous a timeline for the technology to ramp up, given how quickly technology innovation builds on itself. The Internet was beginning to enter a lot of people's homes 14 years ago. But by 2007 people were already surfing the Web on their iPhones, and today the Internet is almost omnipresent in daily life.
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Frey predicts that artificial intelligence will have the same trajectory in the education space. By 2030, DeepMind's ability to master "Breakout" could seem as quaint as dial-up modems do today, and what seemed like a massive library of online content in 2016 could look to future students like a skimpy collection that hardly does anything.

Sometime in early 2019, the self-driving e.GO Mover bus will hit the streets in Germany. The electrically powered vehicle can transport up to ten people, with a battery that lasts for ten hours or so.

And, it's powered by the cloud – the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, to be exact.

While autonomous vehicles powered by the cloud are not new, e.GO Mover highlights how artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing projects are increasingly coming together to power smart cities. Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, boasts customers including DriveAI, nuTonomy, TuSimple, and Mapillary—all of which work on autonomous vehicle systems.

Google Cloud Platform also lists best practicesfor building a connected vehicle solution for autonomous driving and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication on its platform as well.

The growth of such a trend is enabled by the availability of powerful AI tools on these cloud platforms. Machine learning tools are crucial to the development of such autonomous systems, and public cloud giants make them much more accessible. This helps the growth of IoT projects in smart cities as well.

Of course, the cloud on its own will not be able to drive the digital transformation of smart cities fully. Improved latency through next-generation 5G connectivity will also play a role, as autonomous vehicles and IoT devices will be able to send and receive critical data while operating more readily.

But, what happens when connectivity is spotty? That's when edge computing comes into play. Edge computing occurs when data is processed at the same location where it is collected. This means that autonomous vehicles or IoT devices will need some compute power on-board to be able to analyze the data they're receiving, without having to send it over a network to be processed and sent back.

Edge computing is especially crucial in autonomous vehicles, as the potential danger posed by poor operations is immense.
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As more and more cities begin to embrace digital transformation, these three technologies will play an integral role in their future. And, as city officials start to rely more and more on these tools, we may see network operators, public cloud vendors, and IoT providers operating similarly to the way our utility providers operate today.

If there's one downside to powerful computers, it's that they're too big.
Luckily, that's about to change. At least, if IBM has anything to say about it.

Earlier this month, IBM held its flagship conference, Think 2018, where the company unveiled what it claims is the world's smallest computer. They're not kidding: It's smaller than a grain of salt.

But don't let the size fool you: This little fella has the computing power of the x86 chip from 1990. Okay, so that's not great compared to what we have today but cut it some slack — you need a microscope to see it.

The computer will cost less than ten cents to manufacture, and will also pack "several hundred thousand transistors," according to the company. These will allow it to "monitor, analyze, communicate, and even act on data."

It even works with blockchain. Specifically, this computer will be a data source for blockchain applications. It's intended to help track the shipment of goods and detect theft, fraud, and non-compliance. It can also do basic AI tasks, such as sorting the data it's given.

According to IBM, this is only the beginning. "Within the next five years, cryptographic anchors — such as ink dots or tiny computers smaller than a grain of salt — will be embedded in everyday objects and devices," says IBM head of research Arvind Krishna. If he's correct, we'll see way more of these tiny systems in objects and devices in the years to come.
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It's not clear yet when this thing will be released — IBM researchers are currently testing its first prototype. But one thing's for sure: The future is here. You just might need a microscope to see it.