Originally published at: CES 2021: Tech Trends to Watch - TidBITS
The Consumer Technology Association predicts the tech trends of the year to come in its annual opening of CES. Jeff Porten shares the thrust of the talk and provides commentary.
Well, the huge elephant in the room for all this is computer security. The Solar Winds Orion attack makes increasing real world/mission critical/even safety critical dependence on networked computer systems a lot more risky, for a bunch of reasons:
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It’s not clear how a CIO/Security Manager could detect an infected commercial product update. That substantially increases risk.
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The CEO and corporate counsel can’t assess that risk, from a financial, legal or operational perspective.
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Government policies and regulation are still well behind being effective in managing computer security, either within government networks or nationally.
All this is a HUGE tail-wind for the kinds of tech trends described here. The fix is both technical and policy/legal/regulatory. (I think a big part of that is formal legal liability for security vulnerabilities in vendor products. But that is certainly not a widely accepted position, particularly among the companies who produce such products.)
So if anyone is doubting the CTA’s comments about robots being a trend to watch, check out this Boston Dynamics video of their robots dancing up a storm.
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