Five ways technology will change in 2019
Quels changements dans le monde des nouvelles technologies pour 2019 ?
La technologie fait désormais partie intégrante de nos vies et s’est progressivement imposée dans le débat public. L’année dernière, les scandales qui ont éclaboussé les GAFA nous ont, entre autres, forcés à nous interroger sur la confidentialité des données. Que nous réserve l’année 2019 sur le plan technologique ? Du bitcoin aux taxis autonomes, un journaliste de The Observer fait le tour de la question...
1. SILICON VALLEY’S COLD WAR WITH THE E.U. HEATS UP
1. At the beginning of 2019, as at the start of 2018, Margrethe Vestager remains the most powerful woman in tech. The EU competition commissioner has the world’s biggest companies walking on tiptoe, afraid of her habit of enforcing competition law where the US authorities have refused to do so. In 2018, Google was the subject of Vestager’s cold gaze, receiving multibillion fines for its anti-competitive
practices around its Android operating system, its shopping service and Chrome browser. But in 2019, it’s likely to be someone else’s turn. The only question is who.
2. In the EU Facebook looks vulnerable. The release by the UK parliament of internal Facebook emails appearing to show, among other things, Mark Zuckerberg authorising a hostile move to shut down access by Twitter’s video app Vine won’t endear the company to the competition commission. And, for many, Facebook still represents the great failure of competition commissions over the past 20 years, for rubber-stamping its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp – two of its greatest potential competitors still in their infancy.
3. The powers of the EU are limited – it would take the US to break up Facebook – but another multibillion fine won’t go down well at the already troubled company.
2. THE APP STORES BEGIN TO FALTER
4. It isn’t just Facebook that might be feeling the hot breath of a regulator on its
neck. The EU’s ruling against Google’s dominance of the Android app store could be the first domino to fall in a sweeping change that will reshape the consumer technology industry.
5. Since the birth of the iPhone, a huge amount of digital commerce has been filtered through a few platforms, which have taken a hefty chunk of the revenue they handle. Apple takes 30% of app revenue, whether it be the purchase price of the software or the digital goods bought through it. Google, on Android, and Valve, for PC games, does similar. Each earns huge profits through being, essentially, the single point of entry for an industry.
neck ici, nuque / ruling décision / sweeping radical / to reshape remodeler, transformer / consumer consommateur, utilisateur; ici, grand public. 5. huge énorme / through grâce à, par l’intermédiaire de / hefty important, très grand / chunk morceau, partie / to handle traiter / purchase achat / software (inv.) logiciel(s) / goods biens / to earn gagner, encaisser / profit bénéfice. 6. Now that’s starting to wobble. Slowly, power is shifting through external causes. Epic Games, maker of Fortnite, has become one of the few publishers to rival the power of the platform owners themselves and it is wielding it effectively: launching a new app store for Android devices and another for PCs and offering to take a substantially lower cut of game revenues on both.
3. THE FIRST DRIVERLESS TAXIS WON’T CHANGE THE WORLD
7. There are two schools of thought surrounding driverless cars. One is that the technology is 99.9% complete and that soon “level five” autonomy will be reached, meaning that cars can safely drive themselves in any situation. When that happens, the world will undergo rapid change, as driving jobs begin to disappear, urban spaces are reshaped and road travel becomes safer by the day. The other is that the final 0.1% is harder than all of the previous progress put together. And so we’ll remain, for years, with cars that work well enough to demonstrate, to put on the streets with safety drivers and continue being tested, funded and improved – but not quite well enough to actually build a business around.
8. Both views may be true. In the meantime, however, a 99.9% good enough car is good enough to run a taxi service – as Google is showing in Phoenix, where Waymo One, the company’s Uber competitor, is launching. What’s most interesting about the service is how… uninteresting it is. The taxis aren’t significantly cheaper than the competition; the journeys have the occasional glitch, as overcautious algorithms get stuck at T-junctions. Maybe one day driverless cars will change the world, but not yet.
4. WE CAN STOP THINKING ABOUT BITCOIN
9. Only a fool would predict the death of bitcoin, let alone the wider industry it has spawned. The community has repeatedly shown an impressive capacity for survival against gigantic crashes, crippling hacks and severe legal roadblocks, and the nature of the blockchain is such that, if even one diehard is still mining bitcoin in an attic somewhere, it can never be said to be truly over. But the price of bitcoin has been falling for months and now stands at a fifth of its all-time high.
5. PHOTOGRAPHY BLURS WITH ILLUSTRATION
10. Smartphone innovation has stagnated in recent years; screens have got as good
as they’re going to get, battery life is hitting the limits of physics and processors have become so fast that developers are already struggling to use all the power at their fingertips.
11. But one of the last areas of competition is in the camera on the back of the phones. For Apple, that has meant moving to two lenses on the back of its top-end phones, investing in sapphire glass to minimise scratching and putting a hardware “neural engine” inside the phone to handle some of the more complicated elements of “computational photography” – using machine learning to manipulate images. 12. Google, like Apple, has focused heavily on computational photography, but it has taken it further than anyone else. Nowhere is this more evident than the stunning “night sight” feature released towards the end of 2018, which uses a neural network to brighten low-light shots, turning grainy, grey stills into stunningly bright and clear images. But what’s most interesting about night sight is that the feature doesn’t just brighten images and reduce grain. It adds in detail that was never captured by the sensor in the first place, effectively “guessing” what the image would have looked like if it were better lit. It’s less photography and more computeraided illustration, creating an artificial image based on reality that is more real than real.