The Tech That Will Invade Our Lives in 2023

NYT TECHNOLOGY: The Tech That Will Invade Our Lives in 2023
By Brian X. Chen
Section: Technology
Source: New York Times
Published Date: December 29, 2022 at 02:00AM

Say hello to new-and-improved A.I. assistants, and move over to brands like Twitter and Tesla.

Each year, I look ahead at what’s new in technology to predict the tech that may affect your life in a big way — and the tech that will most likely be a fad.

Before we get into that, though, let’s take a quick look back at 2022.

Hardware was very “meh.” This year’s iPhone, with mostly unnoticeable improvements, was an even more incremental upgrade than last year’s model. Separately, Meta released a $1,500 virtual-reality headset that Mark Zuckerberg envisioned would change the way that people worked — though with two hours of battery life, most people will probably use it only to play games.

Social media became very weird. Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, bought Twitter for $44 billion, gutted the staff and suspended the accounts of some journalists and techies, which sent droves of Twitter users to seek alternative sites.

And the fate of TikTok is in jeopardy, as more than a dozen states, citing national security concerns, have banned the app’s use on government-issued devices.

Then, toward the end of the year, came something truly remarkable. OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company, released ChatGPT, a chatbot that can generate seemingly intelligent responses to questions. People prodding the bot with requests quickly realized it could compose essays, write code and draft business proposals.

All of this is just a sample of what’s in store for us next year. We can expect lots of interesting advancements in A.I.-powered, language-processing tech, along with the same trends that have endured in the past few years, including advances in electric cars and the metaverse. Perhaps there may even be a rebirth of social media.

Here are the tech developments that will invade our lives in 2023.

1. New chatty assistants

Early adopters who have been wowed by the linguistic competence of ChatGPT have just as quickly been stunned by how wrong it can be, particularly with simple arithmetic. Flaws aside, we can realistically expect A.I. companies to improve on the strengths of these chatbots with tools that streamline how we write and read text, A.I. experts say.

The Rise of Electric Vehicles

• Battery Recycling: As sales of electric cars and trucks take off, the race is on to recycle used lithium-ion batteries — but few will be available to reuse for a decade or more.
• Mail Trucks: In a win for the Biden administration, the United States Postal Service said it would spend nearly $10 billion to create one of the largest electric truck fleets in the nation.
• Going Mainstream: U.S. sales of battery-powered cars jumped 70 percent in the first nine months of the year, as non-affluent buyers are choosing electric vehicles to save money on gas.
• A Bonanza for Red States: No Republican in Congress voted for the Inflation Reduction Act. But their states will greatly benefit from the investments in electric vehicles spurred by the law.

For one, it’s very likely that next year you could have a chatbot that acts as a research assistant. Imagine that you are writing a research paper and want to add some historical facts about World War II. You could share a 100-page document with the bot and ask it to sum up the highlights related to a certain aspect of the war. The bot will then read the document and generate a summary for you.
“If you want to enrich your writing with a historical fact, you won’t need to go and search the web and find it,” said Yoav Shoham, a professor emeritus at Stanford University who helps compile the A‌‌I‌‌ Index, an annual report on the progress of artificial intelligence. “It’ll be right there with a click of a button.”
That doesn’t mean that we’ll see a flood of stand-alone A.I. apps in 2023. It may be more the case that many tools we already use for work will begin building automatic language generation into their apps. Rowan Curran, a technology analyst at the research firm Forrester, said apps like Microsoft Word and Google Sheets could soon embed A.I. tools to streamline people’s work flows.

Read More at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/technology/personaltech/new-tech-2023-ai-chat-vr.html

technolog News and Tweets