Author: Tim Bajarin

Over the Christmas holidays, I began testing a new product from Lenovo call the Yoga Book. I tested both the Android and Windows OS version and, while testing these two-sided tablets, I began to realize this design is probably one of the most innovative mobile products I have seen in the past 5 years.

Here are some pictures of the Lenovo YogaBook:

As you can see, both sides of this tablet have a screen. One side is the video display while the other is a glass screen used as a virtual keyboard and writing surface. It is remarkably slim and uses “watch band” hinges to tie these two screens together. It is also very light and very versatile.

I am not sure if you know this but the original iPhone design came out of an actual tablet project Apple did about three years after the iPod was released. When the engineers showed Jobs this prototype tablet, he asked if it could be done with a smaller screen and in some type of smartphone form factor. Thus, the iPhone was born.

As I used the Lenovo Yoga Book, I began wondering the same thing Steve Jobs did when he was shown the original tablet design. The Yoga Book has a great display and the second screen adds a lot of extra user interface touches that make it more versatile. Although I am still not proficient using the virtual keyboard, I have become appreciative of the role of the second glass display. Now, imagine if that design was shrunk to the size of perhaps a 5.5-inch smartphone and it actually had three screens on it.

In folded mode, it would look and act like a normal smartphone. But, when you open it up, it has two other displays that, when laid out, doubles the surface area of thr smartphone and turns it into a 8 or 9-inch tablet.

This would take serious engineering chops to create but it could be the kind of design that delivers the next big thing and drive mobility to a new level.

Apparently, I am not the only one who thinks this is an interesting idea. Recently, Microsoft filed a patent for a foldable smartphone that, although it looks like it only has two screens, they clearly have the idea of a folding smartphone in mind.

Samsung has a similar concept in a smartphone called the Galaxy X. It has what appears to be three screens and is foldable. Some reports say this model could be on the market by the end of 2017.

What appeals to me the most about this design concept is that a smartphone could actually double as a tablet. Today, I take with me both an iPhone and an iPad as each is used for different functions. The good news is the OS is the same across both and, with Apple’s Continuity in place, working with and between both form factors allows me to have more versatility in the way I work and play.

While this concept is highly speculative on my part, I am convinced that, if it could be thin enough to be a solid smartphone and, when unfolded, it could be a great tablet too, it could become the design that delivers the innovation the market needs to explode again and drive all types of new use cases.

One of the great things about self-driving automobiles is they should be much safer than ones driven by humans today.

Last August, Gary Shapiro, the CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, told the Wall Street Journal:

“Each year, more than 30,000 Americans die and many more are injured in car accidents, the vast majority of which are caused by human error. Driverless cars could eliminate 90% of these deaths and injuries.

If you read about the safety goals of self-driving cars, you will know this is one of their greatest features. As the technology matures and more data is collected during the next 3-4 years via the millions of miles self-driving test vehicles will collect, I suspect, by the time these cars hit the road officially in the 2020-2022 time frame, they will have the kind of sensors, cameras and AI-based instructions in them that will deliver on the promise of a higher level of driving safety.

As I have surveyed and studied the landscape for autonomous vehicles and marveled at its potential, I am concerned about one downside I see as these cars become safer and reduce traffic deaths significantly.

A member of our family was recently the recipient of a dual lung transplant from a person who died in a car crash and donated their lungs to this person. Although the rules behind this donation will never allow us to know who donated the organs, we do know it came from a victim of a fatal crash. As we waited at the hospital for the delivery of these new lungs so they could be transplanted, we were highly conflicted. We were very concerned for the family of the person who donated the lungs and the fact their loved one had just died. But we were also incredibly grateful they had an organ donation card so that, upon their death, the lungs could be used to save our family member’s life.

That lung transplant took place last June and I am glad to say the lungs have been accepted by the family member’s system and they are on the way to recovery. They still have a tough road ahead to get back to full health but, without the transplant, they would have died. Being close to this issue has made me realize how important the organ transplant program is and if you have not designated your organs for donation should something happen to you, I encourage you to do this as I personally understand how much this can impact the lives of the person and the family that receives them.

But if autonomous vehicles do reduce automobile deaths by 90%, this could have a dramatic and serious impact on the organ donor program. An article in Slate spells out the unintended consequences of fewer deaths due to safer driving with autonomous vehicles:

“Since the first successful recorded kidney transplant in 1954, organ transplant centers have been facing critical shortages. Roughly 6,500 Americans die waiting for an organ transplant each year, and another 4,000 are removed from the waiting list because they are deemed too sick for a transplant. Since 1999, the waiting list has nearly doubled from 65,313 to more than 123,000. Liver and kidney disease kill more people than breast cancer or prostate cancer, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects the incidence of these chronic diseases to rise along with the need for more organs.

It’s morbid, but the truth is that due to limitations on who can contribute transplants, among the most reliable sources for healthy organs and tissues are the more than 35,000 people killed each year on American roads (a number that, after years of falling mortality rates, has recently been trending upward). Currently, 1 in 5 organ donations comes from the victim of a vehicular accident.”

In the case of the person who donated their lungs to our family member, they also donated a heart, kidneys, liver and corneas so several people benefited from this tragic death. What they did is amazing and admirable even though it happened via their death.

As the Slate article stated, only 1 in 5 organs come from the victim of a vehicular accident so there are other ways for organs to become available but deaths from auto accidents are the most reliable source for these organ donations.

Given the number of people on the waiting lists for organ transplants and the safety features of autonomous vehicles, it appears this waiting list may get longer. The irony is this is one of those real life good news/bad news issues related to the impact of technological advancements. Everyone wants to reduce traffic deaths and, as Mr. Shapiro of CTA states, “Driverless cars could reduce traffic deaths by 90%.” On the other hand, it will also reduce the number of organs available for transplant recipients that could save their lives. Given my personal experience with organ transplants, I am afraid I remain conflicted even though I am a major proponent of technological advancements. But in our world, technology advancements are critical to economic growth and it impacts people in so many ways even if sometimes it has unintended consequences.

As I head to Las Vegas for CES, I am assured by pre-CES meetings that self-driving cars will be a hot topic at the show. Faraday Future is set to announce their new car to compete with Tesla and is to have a self-driving feature as part of the new vehicle. Chrysler, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, and Nissan will be announcing their self-driving cars.

But one of the big questions we are all asking is when will truly self-driving vehicles be in use? This is the question I asked Ford Executives when I spoke to them before CES.

Ford has become one of the most aggressive mainstream auto manufacturers and is very active in developing their own home grown self-driving car. I believe they also have what is probably the most realistic timeline for delivering their own autonomous vehicle and, more important to the overall discussion, what the timing will be over the next 5-10 years for the actual rollout of these “robot cars”.

Although we’ve seen Tesla add a self-driving feature to their cars and Google, Uber and others have mocked up self-driving cars that are being tested on roads already, we are not close to seeing truly self-driving automobiles on the road anytime soon. Although I am told that, from a technology standpoint, having a fully automated vehicle is possible as early as 2018. But as one can guess, the real roadblocks to getting self-driving cars on the road in this decade will be from federal, state and local regulatory agencies.

Ford told me they (and just about every other automaker along with players like Tesla, Uber, and Lyft) have been lobbying all of these agencies to help them create the types of laws that would allow self-driving vehicles to be on the road safely. But this is a time-intensive process and, given some of these regulations will also have to go through Congress, it will take awhile. Best guess by Ford is we could have the kind of rules in place for them and others to launch a set of fleet vehicles by 2021 or 2022.

Interestingly, Ford believes the first wave of self-driving cars will be fleets of these vehicles and will be dispatched on demand before they and others actually start selling autonomous vehicles directly to their customers. They see this as strategically important for the rollout of these cars as, during this period, it will give them a great deal of data needed before they actually sell cars to the public. That is why they made the big investment in Lyft although they could run their own fleet as well.

It appears this is the fundamental strategy of Uber and Lyft as well. They want to be the leaders in managing autonomous vehicle fleets and, while they would like to have their self-driving cars on the road sooner than 2020, the regulatory issues will most likely keep that from happening until at least 2020-2021.

This rollout strategy is both interesting and important since it starts to lay the groundwork for a completely new approach to our driving options and needs. The idea of having a fleet of vehicles at anyone’s disposal makes the issue of owning a vehicle a real question. In my case, it would be a cost of ownership vs combined cost of using an autonomous driving vehicle for all of my personal transportation needs.

I lease a car that costs me around $4500 a year plus gas and I drive about 13K miles a year. Once I know the cost per mile of using a fleet vehicle, I would be able to compare these costs and see if using a self-driving fleet vehicle makes sense. There will also be the response time to consider. For this to work for me, the car would have to get to me quickly.

Ford, Uber, Lyft, and others who will manage these autonomous vehicle fleets plan to have a large fleet lot in many areas of urban cities to make the response time as fast as possible.

While you may hear more aggressive timetables predicted than what Ford is suggesting, I suspect their forecast is pretty accurate. While I would really like to have either a fleet of vehicles at my disposal or own one myself, I just don’t see that happening until the beginning of the next decade.

About nine months before George Bush became president, I and about 70 others were asked to join an independent tech advisory board to help then-Gov Bush of Texas understand the role of tech in the new decade as well as give him help to craft a tech policy should he become president. Our first meeting took place in Austin and, from that, came various subcommittees to research five or six key areas the council felt should be an important part of his tech agenda.

Those committees met during his campaign behind the scenes and helped develop the outline of a tech agenda he could announce if he became president. As you know, he did and, true to his word, three months after he took office, he invited the whole tech advisory board to the White House where he shared what was to be his tech and science goals during his presidency. Attending that meeting at the White House was fascinating as I got to see up close and personal how the political machine worked in Washington.

However, after 9/11, president Bush had to commit a great deal of mindshare and energy to national security. While key members of that council who joined his team helped push through some important tech issues, many of the early goals for the tech agenda took a back seat to his duty of protecting the country from further attacks.

But the importance of tech and Washington’s need to help advance a strong tech agenda started when Bill Clinton was running for president and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins and then-Cisco CEO John Chambers began tutoring Clinton about why tech would be a major economic driver. They argued that, should he become president, he needed to back a strong tech strategy to move the country forward with a policy that was inclusive and encouraged innovation. He was advised he also needed to back start-ups and new businesses focused on advancing the role of technology in the US.

During the Obama administration, the role of tech as an economic driver has become even more important and, with the help of a lot of people in Silicon Valley, Obama’s presidency has become one of the most aggressive in helping advance the growth of tech in the US. In fact, all three past presidents had the ear of Silicon Valley and many executives in tech were influential in helping each of these presidents be more pro-tech.

Now we have a new President-elect and, by many accounts, he has very little understanding of the importance of tech as an economic driver. Beside his abundant use of Twitter, he reportedly does not really understand technology and how critical it is to America’s future. Consequently, the need for Silicon Valley to get his ear is important. However, except for one tech exec, Peter Theil, almost all of Silicon Valley supported Hillary Clinton and many spoke out adamantly against his run for the presidency.

That means Silicon Valley already has two strikes against it with President-Elect Trump. He is pretty much tech illiterate and knows most tech execs do not support him at a personal and policy level. That is the atmosphere a dozen or so tech execs will face when they meet with Mr. Trump this week. They somehow need to get his ear and make him see how important tech is to the economy and make sure he does not do anything that will thwart the effort for more tech innovation and investment and not develop policies that will hurt Silicon Valley companies.

But, unlike the last three presidents who were willing to be schooled by tech execs, Trump clearly is his own man and has many biases going into this meeting that will make it a difficult one. He thinks Apple can just move manufacturing to the US without realizing how difficult that would be and, even if Foxconn could set up a factory or two in the US, it would be robotics-driven and not create a lot of new jobs. He also wants to punish China and has threatened to slap a 35% tariff on goods made there. If he did that, an iPhone that costs $650 today would go up to about $800. Tech companies also stand on the other side of a myriad of key issues from Trump — immigration reform, H1-B visas, encryption, along with a range of social concerns.

Although most tech execs want to be invisible and not associated with the Trump administration, many execs are pragmatic and understand that, whether they like it or not, Trump will be our next president. That means tech execs have to mount a concentrated effort to get him to understand the importance of tech as well as be able to confront him directly when his policies impact tech negatively in the future. Given his already somewhat negative view of Silicon Valley and the tech execs who did not back him, that will not be an easy task.

Since I have a bit of first-hand knowledge of the importance tech advisors can be to a presidential administration, I truly hope this meeting has some success and they can seriously get the ear of President-Elect Trump and influence his thinking and policies so they are pro-tech during his administration. If not, it is going to be a long four years for Silicon Valley and the hope a Trump Administration will be a positive force that helps our tech economy grow may not be in the cards.

For the last 28 years, I have written a prediction column for the New Year. I study our research and look for trends and information that gives me hints of what I believe might be the hot topics or issues I believe will impact our tech industry in the near future.

As I looked closely at our research for our current year, I did see some important trends developing. For example, we believe AR will be more important and develop faster than VR in 2017. The development of autonomous vehicles will accelerate in the New Year and we should see even more of a tech focus to try and automate cars and the smart cities that need to develop to make self-driving cars possible. We also expect IoT to begin having a bigger impact in industrial IoT while the consumer market will slow down until the industry gets its act together in developing communication and interconnecting standards that allow these devices talk to each other easily and more accurately. And don’t get me started on predicting new security breaches and ID theft. I have not doubt we will see even more in 2017.

While there are other trends I see developing and will address them in the New Year, our research has also allowed me to see major issues I believe the industry needs to start factoring into their next wave of technology development. Here are some of the major concerns I think the tech industry really needs to start thinking through and acting on sooner than later.

AI and Robots’ mpact on jobs and the need for education reform

The more I study AI and robots, the more concerned I am about them replacing jobs in all types of industries. A lot of manufacturing jobs will be affected but I can now see AI being used in ways that could cause the elimination of jobs in just about every sector of business in one way or another. In fact, I have seen multiple research reports that flag this issue. A couple of them suggest that, by 2050, as much as 35% of all current jobs could be eliminated in favor of AI-based robots taking over in one form or another. The one key problem I see with this trend, besides the fact it would eliminate millions of jobs, is the fact our current education system is not preparing our youth for this inevitability. When I was in Junior High and High School, my educational track was pretty basic but it also had a strong emphasis on traditional vocations. I had electives such as auto shop, drafting and metal work besides the basics of math, english, history, etc. While I don’t think some of these vocations will go away, especially the need for teachers, electricians, plumbers, construction workers and other infrastructure-related jobs, AI and robots will expand their reach to everything where repetitive tasks dominate the job.

I see our educational system that still has an emphasis on more liberal arts needing to have a stronger emphasis on STEM as well as dedicated classes that prepare kids for a knowledge=based economy where technology will drive the jobs of the future. This includes key skills like programing, data mining, digital security and many others that will be needed to prepare them for the jobs of the future. This is a huge issue and, while the impact on jobs has been flagged, I don’t see enough discussion of the kind of education our kids will need to be prepared for the jobs of the future. Even though the impact of AI and robots on the job market will take time as it relates to the future job market, the current track of our educational system is not even close to starting the move towards preparing our youth. This will need the input of tech leaders and educators starting now to craft an educational roadmap that gives our kids the skills needed for tomorrow.

The uberification of transportation and its impact on related businesses

All of us watched with interest the Otto demonstration of a self driving truck delivering beer to a distributor recently. Many of us who use Uber or Lyft love its convenience and ease of use but Uber and Lyft will, over time, move away from hiring drivers to having fleets of self-driving vehicles and self-driving big rigs that eliminate the need for a driver. The truck industry could be hit the hardest as this form of automated transportation will prove to be very cost effective but it could mean that, within 10 years, close to two million truck driving jobs may be eliminated.

And think about the hundreds of thousand of parking garages around the US that could be impacted by self=driving services. Yes, some people will buy automated cars and need parking spaces but, over time, if it is more cost effective to just call up a self-driving car to take you to a destination, owning a car, even a self-driving car, may not be worth the cost. If this happens, it also impacts car makers and dealers as well as taxi and limo services.

AI, cyber security and ID theft

I recently wrote a piece in Tech.pinions about my grave concern reagrding AI and how it could be used for nefarious reasons. I quoted my friend, John Markoff of the New York Times and included this quote from the story:

“The thing people don’t get is that cybercrime is becoming automated and it is scaling exponentially,” said Marc Goodman, a law enforcement agency adviser and the author of “Future Crimes.” He added, “This is not about Matthew Broderick hacking from his basement,” a reference to the 1983 movie “War Games.”

The alarm about malevolent use of advanced artificial intelligence technologies was sounded earlier this year by James R. Clapper, the director of National Intelligence. In his annual review of security, Mr. Clapper underscored the point that while A.I. systems would make some things easier, they would also expand the vulnerabilities of the online world.
The growing sophistication of computer criminals can be seen in the evolution of attack tools like the widely used malicious program known as Blackshades, according to Mr. Goodman. The author of the program, a Swedish national, was convicted last year in the United States.

The system, which was sold widely in the computer underground, functioned as a “criminal franchise in a box,” Mr. Goodman said. It allowed users without technical skills to deploy computer ransomware or perform video or audio eavesdropping with a mouse click.

The next generation of these tools will add machine learning capabilities that have been pioneered by artificial intelligence researchers to improve the quality of machine vision, speech understanding, speech synthesis and natural language understanding. Some computer security researchers believe that digital criminals have been experimenting with the use of A.I. technologies for more than half a decade.”

This is a major threat and will only accelerate unless the tech market can find a way to control the role of AI in security and create the kind of tools and mechanisms to thwart these criminals from using AI for for these purposes. I realize tech experts in security are working hard to prevent any type of cyber attack but, if the crooks start automating the process, these types of attack could be massive and cause great damage in ways we could not have imagined even five years ago.

Although our research has uncovered other concerns, these three were at the top our list as we dug through our data and tried to get a sense of both the top trends and industry concerns for the New Year.

Two weeks before the election, I traveled to Maine to be at a conference. I picked up a car in Boston and drove through Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. Coming from California which is was mostly “Clinton country”, I had seen very few signs or bumper stickers promoting any candidates, at least here in Silicon Valley.

But as I drove through these areas of the US, I found all types of Trump signs on people’s lawns, fences, and bumper stickers on cars. I did see a few Clinton signs but Trump signs were the dominant ones displayed in the cities I drove through. In fact, as I was driving up HWY 1 to Freeport, Maine, home of LL Bean, I drove past a group of about 18 people with signs waving and promoting Trump.

This surprised me. Sitting in my Silicon Valley office, I was pretty insulated from how the rest of the US was perceiving both of these candidates and, like a lot of people, mostly trusting the media and the polls to guide our knowledge about how this election was evolving.

As I spoke to people in these three states which, interestingly enough, voted mostly for Clinton, I saw more passion in the followers of Trump than I did for Clinton. More importantly, when I asked why they were voting for Trump, their anger against the Washington elite and the political landscape they felt did not represent them anymore was at the top of their mind. As I flew home from this trip, I reflected on the comments of the Trump supporters and, for the first time, I thought he had a better chance of winning the election than I thought he would.

Now that Trump has won the presidency, I am seeing all kind of media reports on why he won and how in the world the pollsters got this so wrong. While there have been a lot of explanations, one key observation, from Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, should be a warning for Silicon Valley and their view that the world starts and ends with them.

Mr. Baquet praised his political team and other Times journalists for “agility and creativity,” citing articles about Mr. Trump’s taxes and Mrs. Clinton’s record in Libya. But in an interview in his office, he said, “If I have a mea culpa for journalists and journalism, it’s that we’ve got to do a much better job of being on the road, out in the country, talking to different kinds of people than the people we talk to — especially if you happen to be a New York-based news organization — and remind ourselves that New York is not the real world.”

I believe a similar parallel exists here in Silicon Valley. To paraphrase Mr. Baquet’s comment, “we need to remind ourselves that Silicon Valley is not the real world.”

I grew up in Silicon Valley and have seen its amazing growth. The technology that has come out of it has changed the world. But in some ways, we believe the world revolves around us and so much of our research and tech media is often just focused on those in the know instead of the real people who use the products.

I am reminded of something I learned early in my career when I often encountered a technology product that, to me, did not seem like a viable one. One that comes to mind is something I was shown at Xerox PARC in the late 1990s. Basically, it was a two-handed mouse for use as part of a new form of a user interface for computers. I, and many others, just could not see how this product made sense. But, when I asked the engineer who created it, his answer was, “because I could and I thought people might like it.”

To be fair, because of the globalization of tech, our technology is getting into the hands of people of all generations and income levels but we still often create products that are still too complicated and difficult to use and many of those fall by the wayside.

Taking a hint from the New York Times editor, as tech researchers and marketing professionals, we need to get out more and really talk to the people who use the products and gain greater insight on what they want and what will work for them. Here at Creative Strategies we try and do this often, including going to college campuses and talking with students directly or, when possible, visiting different cities around the US and talking to non-techies about their interest in technology and trying to dig deeper into their interests and demands.

I really think Silicon Valley needs to get beyond its insular way of thinking and start really listening to the people who will use what we create if we want to continue to see technology impact the world as we envision it can in the future. In our case, these polling failures have reinforced that we need to do more research in the real world most people live in and I hope more people in tech marketing do so as well.

For about 20 years, I have been a huge fan of digital cameras, both DSLR and Point-and-Shoot versions. Almost every year, I would buy the newest model to take most of the really important pictures, especially one’s related to my family. I also love to capture things like sunsets and all types of seascapes and architecture as I travel the world. I am by no means a professional photographer but have taken many classes on photography and have learned enough to take pictures that I consider relatively decent.

But in 2007, when Apple introduced the iPhone and included a camera, my smartphone has been the real workhorse when it comes to taking pictures these days. In the early days of the iPhone, the camera had low pixel counts and, while OK, it did not come close to equaling the quality of the images I would get on a DSLR or even some of my high-quality point-and-shoot models. So, I would also carry one of those cameras with me when I traveled as well.

But since 2011, when Apple really started adding a better camera with higher pixel counts and included more imaging features in hardware and software, my reliance on DSLRs and point-and-shoot cameras started to decline. Almost all other mid to high-end smartphones have included high-quality cameras as well and helped make the smartphone the #1 device for taking pictures.

On a recent trip to Maine, during my spare time, I took side trips to capture the changing colors of the trees. I did not even take a separate camera on this trip and instead relied solely on my iPhone 7 Plus with its advanced camera features.

I am not alone in transitioning from stand-alone cameras to smartphone cameras as the primary way people take most of their pictures. As the chart below shows, starting in 2011, demand for DSLRs and point-and-shoot cameras began to decline substantially. They peaked at 121.5 million in 2010 and, in 2015, only 34.5 million were sold. Estimates for 2016 is only 13.5 million will be sold worldwide.

While having the camera in the smartphone makes them the handiest camera one can have, there is another key reason why smartphones are pretty much obliterating demand for DSLRs and point-and-shoot cameras. Although the quality of the images themselves are a major driver, another factor is how easy it is to take a picture and instantly post it to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram or hundreds of other social media sites that have become integrated into our digital lifestyles.

Social media and online photo storage have completely changed the market for anyone who takes pictures these days, even for some professional photographers who are now using the iPhone 7 Plus on a regular basis. The ability to take a picture and immediately send it to the cloud for storage or instantly used in a social media app makes the smartphone camera the most versatile photo taking tool one can use.

What surprises me is how long it has taken the DSLR and point-and-shoot makers to understand this. Yes, some have put wifi connections in their cameras and made it possible to export them wirelessly to some cloud storage solutions but few took the time to really integrate great software into these cameras to take those photos and integrate them into social media easily.

Also, they restricted these cameras to wifi hotspots instead of doing some type of innovative deal to include a cellular radio in their cameras so these connections could be made anywhere like they are in a smartphone. Three years ago, one of the cellular carriers told me they had a program for camera makers but could get very little traction. While costs of the connection could be an issue, given today’s data programs that tie many cellular radios to a family account, using a cellular radio in a DSLR or point-and-shoot is a viable option for these camera makers.

However, I believe that ship has sailed and these types of cameras are going to end up in a niche category. In 2017, we will probably sell less than 10 million total worldwide. Instead, next generation smartphones, especially when they get the high-end features Apple has embedded in the new iPhone 7 Plus and they start having capabilities now in DSLRs, will pretty much replace point-and-shoots altogether and DSLRs become the tools for only pro and semi-pro photographers.

Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking all have something very important in common. All three have gone on the record sharing their concerns and fears about AI and Robotics.

While these technologies hold a great deal of promise and will have a real impact on our future, it would behoove us to understand the ramifications and impact they could have on us personally as well as on the future of jobs.

My first concern about AI was recently highlighted in a New York Times piece by John Markoff who wrote that, while AI has great potential for good, it also has great potential for criminals to use it for their own goals.

In the article, Markoff writes:

The thing people don’t get is that cybercrime is becoming automated and it is scaling exponentially,” said Marc Goodman, a law enforcement agency adviser and the author of “Future Crimes.” He added, “This is not about Matthew Broderick hacking from his basement,” a reference to the 1983 movie “War Games.”

The alarm about the malevolent use of advanced artificial intelligence technologies was sounded earlier this year by James R. Clapper, the director of National Intelligence. In his annual review of security, Mr. Clapper underscored the point that while A.I. systems would make some things easier, they would also expand the vulnerabilities of the online world.

The growing sophistication of computer criminals can be seen in the evolution of attack tools like the widely used malicious program known as Blackshades, according to Mr. Goodman. The author of the program, a Swedish national, was convicted last year in the United States.

The system, which was sold widely in the computer underground, functioned as a “criminal franchise in a box,” Mr. Goodman said. It allowed users without technical skills to deploy computer ransomware or perform video or audio eavesdropping with a mouse click.

The next generation of these tools will add machine learning capabilities that have been pioneered by artificial intelligence researchers to improve the quality of machine vision, speech understanding, speech synthesis and natural language understanding. Some computer security researchers believe that digital criminals have been experimenting with the use of A.I. technologies for more than half a decade.

To some degree, we already saw this play out recently when sites like Amazon, Netflix, and others were almost knocked out by bots that used unprotected IoT devices in a Denial of Service attack. This particular attack does not appear to have a criminal link at the moment and it will take time to figure out what the goal was. But as Markoff points out the criminal potential of AI and bots is real and needs to be understood now to try and head off these kinds of attacks in the future. My fear is it is inevitable that criminals embrace AI and use it to their advantage.

The other area of AI and robotics that has me concerned is its role in replacing people and eliminating jobs. I am hearing more and more from people who look at the job market that this fear is very real, not imagined, and could present a serious problem for our world in the future.

In a piece from the UK’s Telegraph from last April, Science Editor Sarah Knapton wrote:

Robots will have taken over most jobs within 30 years leaving humanity facing its ‘biggest challenge ever’ to find meaning in life when work is no longer necessary, according to experts. Professor Moshe Vardi, of Rice University, in the US, claims that many middle-class professionals will be outsourced to machines within the next few decades leaving workers with more leisure time than they have ever experienced. Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington, Prof Moshe said the rise of robots could lead to unemployment rates greater than 50 per cent. “We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task,” said Vardi, a professor in computational engineering.

While a life of leisure may be appealing to many, the fact is, work and jobs are important to our overall lifestyle and identity and, even more importantly, they provide our livelihood. Forecasters believe that, by 2050, there will be close to ten billion people on the earth. If Professor Vardi is right and robots could replace as many as 50% of the workers in the market, we have a disastrous problem ahead of us.

It is easy for my generation or even the one behind me to cast this off as a problem for the next generation to deal with. But I don’t think we can wait that long to head off this potential nightmare that could be very destructive to our world. Silicon Valley needs to see this issue as one of the tech world’s biggest moonshot problems, and opportunities, and start to factor in this serious threat to all of the products and services they are creating today.

Those working on AI and robotics need to see this threat as Gates, Musk and Hawking do and build safeguards and strict security into the products they create. Our education system needs to begin seriously looking at this threat and working hard to retool our education system to emphasize STEM and the kinds of skills that will be needed to work in a time when technology and automation could wipe out so many types of jobs our school kids are preparing for today.

While I see the good in AI and Robotics, I also see the bad potential it has as well and its impact on our society at all levels. Silicon Valley, the tech world, and our education leaders need to understand this problem and start now to work on dealing with it since the generations behind us will be negatively impacted beyond what we can even imagine today.

For the early part of my career in computers, the only user interface I had to work with was via a keyboard. I started out working with mini-computers and the keyboard is what we used to program it and do data input. When the Apple II and the PC came out, they were controlled by a keyboard. But, in 1984, Apple created the Mac and introduced the graphical user interface with a mouse and a whole new way to interact with a computer was born.

For us old timers only familiar with PCs and keyboards, it took us a while to get the hang of using a mouse and dealing with a GUI but eventually it became second nature. Today, all of our computer and mobile devices use some form of a graphical user interface and either a mouse, touch, or a pen to navigate the computing experience.

But after 32 years of using GUI’s and a mouse or touch to interact with a PC, we are about to enter the next major advance in user interface thanks to AR and VR. While most people think of AR/VR or mixed reality as a means towards interacting with apps, the reality is AR and VR will become the next major technology to impact user interfaces and how we interact with computers over the next 10-15 years. That will be another important part of its impact. Using voice, gestures and VR and AR related inputs for navigation will drive a lot of new innovation in both hardware and software and create new types of apps that take full advantage of this new generation of a user interface.

However, this will not happen over night. A recent Fortune article took a look at the adoption cycle of just VR headsets:

For all the hype around the new Sony PlayStation VR, Microsoft HoloLens, or Nolan Bushnell’s new Modal VR gear, just 6% of Americans will own any of these devices this year.

According to Strategy Analytics research, roughly 11.4 million American adults will pony up for one of the aforementioned devices—or a Google Cardboard or HTC Vive, among other gizmos—by year’s end. In aggregate, the category will drive almost $556 million in sales within the U.S. during that time period.

While this is a good start and, in a way, serves to introduce AR and VR to the high end of the tech market and more importantly, introduce them to this new form of user interface, it will take some time to get this new UI adopted by the masses. As this chart shows, even by 2022, only 44% will be using some form of VR headset or a mixed reality solution by then.

However, the reality is most people will not want to be using goggles as part of their overall interaction with computers. Instead, things like 3D monitors and VR and and AR-based interfaces will be where we see the most innovation on the PC, while AR may be the killer app with mobile devices.

In fact, I think Apple is taking aim specifically on making AR a key part of iOS, perhaps as early as next fall with the introduction of the iPhone 8. Indeed, Tim Cook has said multiple times he thinks AR, not VR, will have the most impact and broad acceptance within next generation mobile computing.

Although Facebook with Oculus, Sony with Playstation VR, Microsoft with Hololens and HTC’s Vive and even Google’s Daydream will blaze the early trails with AR and VR interfaces, I think Apple would like to be the one that brings at least AR to the masses. Apple brought the PC world into the mouse and touch age and it would not surprise me if they plan to make AR their next big contribution to the evolution of computing interfaces. If they got this right on the iPhone, whether it is next year or the following year, the sheer volume of iPhones sold on an annual basis could get AR accepted into the mass market quickly.

That is not to say Apple will be the only one trying to push the envelope in AR/VR as next generation user interfaces. App’s like Pokemon Go already introduced the concept of AR to the masses although it still uses a traditional touch UI for navigation. The real breakthrough would be to to add various AR or VR interfaces such as sensors that capture hand motions above the screen to play games and work with apps in the way of devices like Sony’s Playstation VR and Oculus’ Rift. Or to use AI-based voice commands and gestures in new ways to navigate these AR apps on a smartphone.

Although the mouse and keyboard and even touch has allowed us to be very productive when it comes to interacting with our various personal computers, it is time to take these user interfaces up a notch and I believe adding AR and VR user interfaces to our digital device experiences is the next evolution in interface design.

I grew up in the age of Sputnik and the race for the moon. Like most of the youth of my generation, we were challenged in school to “beat the Russians” to space and were driven by President Kennedy’s promise to have a man on the moon by the end of the decade. That speech was made on Sept 12, 1962.

As I reread that speech, I was struck by how much of it focused on the role technology played in history and President Kennedy’s vision of how it could impact our future. In that speech, given at Rice University, he said:

“To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead.

The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school.”

The speech became the rallying cry for my generation and it produced tens of thousands of students who took this challenge seriously. This gave us the engineers, scientists, mathematicians and educators who not only delivered on the promise of putting a man on the moon, but also helped create the core technology to enable computing, the internet, advanced communications and modern healthcare that we have today.

In essence, this challenge to conquer space and make technology a key part of our world in the 60s and 70s became one of the great equalizers. It created the next generation of workers who studied math, science, technology and engineering, which helped drive economic growth and set the stage for the technological breakthroughs of the latter part of the last century.

But educators tell me that, by the mid-1980s, without a similar strong push by either the US government or schools to emphasize math, science, engineering and technology, we lost almost two decades of youth who chose to go into other fields of learning. During that period, kids studying these tech disciplines decreased.

It was not until the tech boom of the late 1990s we started seeing an increase of students getting degrees in math, science, and engineering. They are the ones who are now driving our current technology revolution in social media, AR/VR, advanced computing and communications and all of the technology that impacts the fabric of our lives today.

In a recent piece in Tech.pinions, I wrote about seven areas of explosive growth in tech that will drive our world and economy in the next 10-15 years.

In the article, I stated that, for us to achieve this type of growth, we are going to need millions of new workers skilled in science, technology, math, and engineering. At the moment, we just don’t have enough of these skilled tech workers to drive this explosive growth and make the vision of a connected world a reality. In fact, when I talk to the big companies like Boeing, Intel, Qualcomm, etc., they all fear that, as they grow their businesses and tech demands increase, they will not have enough tech educated staff to meet their engineering needs.

The good news is there is a very strong movement going on focused on STEM education that, like the space race of the past, has the potential to become the great equalizer of this next generation of workers. Demand for people who are skilled in science, technology, engineering, and math will only increase and these workers will be at the heart of the next major breakthroughs in technology for the first half of this century. According to Adeco, there will be 2.4 million STEM-based job vacancies in 2018 alone.

This push in STEM is partially led by the Maker Movement which the White House and most state leaders are getting behind, along with an increased push for STEM in all grade levels helped by major contributions by Chevron, who has created STEM labs in over a dozen schools, and other big companies like Boeing, Intel, ATT, and others. Even the San Francisco 49ers have pushed STEM through STEM Leadership Institute Program.

A good primer in the Maker Movement and its importance comes from a new book by Dale Dougherty, known as the father of the Maker Faire, and Tim O’Reilly, titled, “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement is Changing Our Schools, Our Jobs, and Our Minds”.

In it, Mr. Dougherty echoes some of the concerns I mention above and says, “‘Free to Make” asks us to imagine a world where making is an everyday occurrence in our schools, workplaces, and local communities, grounding us in the physical world and empowering us to solve the challenges we face.”

Across the nation, special STEM programs are emerging inside our school systems as well as through privately funded programs springing up in communities around America. Business and educational leaders and some major politicians in the US know technology will fuel our future and understand preparing the youth of today for the jobs of tomorrow is now emerging as a major priority.