Unveiling Hidden Patterns And Connections In Emerging Technologies – Forbes
“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” William Gibson.
Do you ever wonder where things come from? Who coined that expression or came up with those ideas? Where is that food originally from? While many today may associate strawberries with England, potatoes with Ireland and Scotland, and tomatoes with Italy yet none of these foods are native to Europe or the UK and hail, originally, from South America as this cool interactive map (origin of foods) from CIAT shows.
In an increasingly global world, imagine if you could see where and when new ideas, business trends and even technologies first emerged in society and then explore how they spread over time and space. Now, using AI and unconventional data sources there are a number of new ways to map the global birth, adoption and diffusion of emerging technologies.
Firstly, as a new way to explore the emergence of new technologies, in collaboration with research colleagues at Australia’s CSIRO and University of Technology Sydney, we have developed a new technique for mapping the “birthdate” of new technologies based on the how often they are mentioned in all books published over the last century using data from Google Books. Using a list of the Worlds Top 100 Emerging technologies, from our recently published report (Mapping Emerging Technologies), we looked at the frequency of each technologies appearance each year in all books published and found the “Birthday” for each one by tallying mentions each year and noting when each one reached 10% of its peak mentions. Different from when the technology was invented this is a simple and useful measure of when it has begun to come into mainstream usage. Below is a timeline of selected emerging technologies and their year of birth for each using this approach.
Age of Technologies The “Birth” of Selected Emerging Technologies can be traced to when they achieve … [+]
Secondly, the rate of adoption of technologies themselves over time can also be explored through the lens of the relative amount of attention in the hundreds of thousands of new books published each year. Below we have created a figure that shows the Top 10 Fastest Growing Emerging Technologies in terms of the relative number of mentions in English language books published over the last two decades.
The fastest growing emerging technologies by this method include:
Top 10 Emerging Technologies Ten technologies experiencing the greatest growth in mentions in … [+]
Lastly, using new data sources about technology usage around the world we can see patterns in technology diffusion as new technologies are taken up in different markets. Analysis of data from BuiltWith, about all technologies used in most websites around the world, we can see, from the number of websites using their technologies that uptake of TikTok outside of China from advertising and corporate partners is fastest in the Pacific: Vietnam, United States, Japan and Indonesia with European countries much further behind.
Global diffusion of technologies Here using global technology usage data, we can see clear patterns … [+]
The techniques illustrated above and many more like them are examples of a new form of cartography that is helping to better map the birth, growth and uptake of new ideas and their applications in the global digital economy.