I was minding my own business yesterday (a.k.a. frantically editing content for this news site you may know called Silverlinings) when our friends at Google Cloud reached out via email with six trends that the big brains in their CTO office are expecting to be important in 2023.
Below are the trends. While I was tempted to turn their headshots into pirates, I decided not to, and much to my dismay the Google Cloud folks were relieved. I mean who would not want to be turned into a pirate?
Okay, I digress. People of Silverlinings, here's what the whiz kids are saying we should pay attention to this year.
Privacy
“Privacy will be a massive area to watch in 2023, as it continues to evolve with the tech stack and cloud infrastructure layer. Technologies — including multi-party computation, confidential computing, zero-knowledge proofs, differential privacy and fully homomorphic encryption — will begin to have use cases for critical, real-world problems. These advancements will profoundly propel standardization efforts and enable data collection, which powers the global internet, in a more decentralized, federated and ultimately privacy-preserving way.” – Pablo Rodriguez, director, Google Cloud, Office of the CTO
Energy Security
“In the year ahead, we expect technology leaders will be laser focused on reducing energy usage — not only to reduce emissions, but to protect businesses from increased costs. It will become a critical focus area for three primary reasons. First, the lack of supply that is driving up cost — especially in Europe because of the war in Ukraine — has shown that energy is a top national security concern. Second, as economies continue to emerge from the pandemic, there is growing demand for reliable energy flow. Lastly, the energy efficiency directive, especially in European countries, will be an important contributing factor.” – John Abel, technical director, Office of the CTO, Google Cloud
Collaborative Accountability
“We’ll continue to unravel the challenge of confidential data sharing in 2023. While there’s a huge opportunity to collaboratively solve climate challenges, this can only happen through shared accountability and more importantly, sharing information and insight between companies, investors, suppliers, regulators and others. 2023 will mark the year we discover new applications of technologies and mechanisms to share data in a way that protects confidential data and trade secrets while promoting shared accountability and climate action.” – Jen Bennett, technical director, sustainability, Office of the CTO, Google Cloud
Sustainable Finance
“I believe sustainable finance will make strides in 2023, driven by two macro trends coming together. First, financial services firms will be pushed into action by the cumulative buildup of global regulations around the world, formalizing the stakeholder demand that has been building up since the pandemic. Second, financial services firms will finally have enough high-quality, powerful technology and data to move from theoretical ambition to implementable action. – Jeff Sternberg, technical director, Office of the CTO, Google Cloud
Confidential Computing in Maturing Data Sovereignty
“As we look towards 2023, I believe we will see an increased focus on confidential computing in an effort to put technological guards in place to retain ownership and control of one’s data — data sovereignty, if you will. Data sovereignty includes aspects of residency, data protection and usage control, which refers to what happens to the data once access has been granted. By restricting access to and observability of one’s data. Confidential computing can ensure that data is only processed by workloads that have been cryptographically verified. It will also ensure that data can be encrypted while in use, which will prevent system operators from observing the data, even while in memory. Because confidential computing is still nascent, we will see its use explored in 2023. Organizations will look to collaborate on analyzing data at scale in an architecture that is secure by default and private by design.” – Patricia Florissi, technical director, Office of the CTO, Google Cloud
Generative AI
In 2023 we will experience a changing world of creation and curation with generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. We'll be surprised and delighted with AI-generated multimedia images, videos, and sounds. Foundational models, particularly those regarding language, will further assist our everyday workplace tasks, improving our productivity and quality of our efforts. – Kawal Gandhi, technical director, Office of the CTO, Google Cloud
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