2022 tech themes: A look ahead

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Having recently reviewed the past year, our intrepid engineer now tackles forecasting the hot topics of the year ahead.

www.ednasia.com, Dec. 30, 2021 – 

Recently, I took a stab at summarizing what I thought were the key tech themes of the past year (see "A 2021 technology retrospective: Strange days indeed"). This time around, once again after skipping a year in the cadence, I'm going to tackle an even more challenging project: prognosticating what I believe will be the hot topics of the year ahead. In doing so, I've strived to not reiterate the same themes from 2021 to 2022, unless I truly believed that they'd clearly repeat at the top of the heap in the year to come. That said, about that pandemic...

The continued COVID-19 question mark

Initial reports of a previously unknown pneumonia virus first emerged from China in mid-December 2019, and the world quickly and dramatically changed. It hasn't yet reverted to pre-pandemic characteristics, and it very likely never will. Entire industries have risen and fallen in response to the effects of government-decreed lockdowns, individuals' and families' layoffs and income downturns, severe (and often long-term) illness and deaths, and the like. And two years' (give or take) worth of "Zoom school" have fundamentally affected an entire generation of children, their teachers, and their parents.

Sad but true, the pandemic isn't even close to being over yet. One of the downsides of writing about fast-moving issues in advance is that you have no solid idea how things will look when your words finally appear in print. COVID -19 is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Literally the same day I initially sat down to write this section of the piece, the first reports of a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 (now known as Omicron) started coming out of South Africa. Analysis indicates that it's a notable mutation of Delta and previous versions. But what does that mean? Is it significantly more transmissible? More infectious to the unvaccinated, the vaccinated, and/or those who've already had COVID-19? Does it affect those infected more significantly than prior variants? And to the degree that any of this is true, how do the results vary with age, gender, culture, and other variables?

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