Look back at my 2018 predictions
By: Madhavan Malolan
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain, Social Media, Bitcoin

In the beginning of 2018, I made these predictions.

Here’s a look back at how well I did.

Technologies

Blockchain

We can expect to see Casper implemented in Ethereum, and lightning networks on Bitcoin. This will be a big push to the scalability problem that we have been complaining about all of 2017 with respect to crypto currencies.

This didn’t turn out exactly like this. However Plasma made up for it. Starting with Plasma MVP that started the fire all the way to various iterations of Plasma Cash.

Wired : Plasma turned out to be the most dominant topic in scalability this year.

Tired : Casper made progress but no where close

We will also see a fall in prices of the tail currencies. Expect to see much fewer crypto currencies seeing the end of 2018, but expect them to finish much stronger.

Not bad!

I think we will see some solid usecases being implemented on blockchain outside of just currency, that will connect to the end customers, albeit a select few.

Wired : My favorite blockchain implementation was Augur. Bringing prediction markets to blockchains.

Tired : No real usecase came out. I’d have liked to see something from Filecoin.

AI

We can expect self driving cars to hit atleast one major city this year, especially on highways. … i expect some forward looking companies to start re-imagining the car itself

I think I grossly overestimated the state of the art. Unfortunately, I didn’t follow this space closely enough in ’18 to comment any further.

Voice assistants : I am a skeptic on this, i expect the enthusiasm to fall in this space. … That said, Google Now, Siri and maybe Cortana will continue to advance the technology in useful ways.

Wired : Google probably stole the show with the bot that places phone calls for you.

Tired : Hard to judge by any means if enthusiasm fell in this space. It seems to be still going strong.

Social Media

Social media (especially Facebook) seemed to take a beating in late 2017, and i feel that trend will continue this year. We can expect more commercialization of social media.

Wired : Facebook did take a lot of beating!

Tired : Commercialization didn’t change much, did it?

We may see commercial bots and proactive ads this year. This will primarily be driven by Messenger/Whatsapp playing around with commercial accounts.

Tired : Didn’t happen

The social feed is likely to be replaced by something else.

Tired : Mildly disappointed that this didn’t happen.

Wired: In other matters, WeChat introduced stories.

AR VR

… i am convinced there will be a push to the development efforts with the release of standalone devices like the Occulus Go.

Wired : AR-VR didn’t lose steam

Tired : Go didn’t make it to mainstream

My best bet is we will continue to see improvements in this field and wouldn’t be surprised to see no real useable product coming out using this technology.

Wired : This was easy.

Fields

Healthcare

I think we will see some more wearables and AI coming together to make this more feasible this year.

Wired : Apple led the way with the heart sensor in the Apple Watch 4

Tired : Software is yet to catch up

FinTech

I would like to see payment gateways comeup (into mainstream) where payments may be made in crypto. This is definitely far fetched, but we should start seeing some leading indicators.

Wired : Coinbase released Coinbase Commerce. (Stripe for crypto)

Tired : Never saw Coinbase Commerce actually used anywhere

… it will be interesting to see innovations we have on the newsfeed, and the way people consume content. I will be looking forward to proactive feeds, where content is pushed to me when it is most relevant (more intelligently).

Wired : Bytedance owning TikTok became the most valuable startup. No feeds at all

Tired : Proactive feeds? I don’t even remember what that meant when I wrote it. Apologies!

I’ll be writing my predictions for 2019 too!

I had made predictions for 2017 and reflected on how bad they were. I did much better this time :)