Thank you so much to each and every one of you who have been reading Digit in the form of this magazine, or online at digit.in, or have subscribed to our channel on YouTube to watch our videos or even those of you who have liked and followed us on social media. It’s you, our readers, who have allowed this brand, and through it, our vision to shine. We exist to make technology easier for you to understand, to tell you what products you should consider buying, and to impart our hard-earned expertise to you, our readers.
Looking forward two decades to make predictions is no easy task, and yet, apart from Team Digit playing soothsayer, we have 34 industry heads and experts sticking their necks out to help us celebrate our twentieth anniversary by giving you a glimpse of the future through their eyes. I’d like to thank them for their contributions.
Now, coming back to the topic, what will Digit be like in 2041, and how will we change?
There’s a really easy way out for me here, which is to say that Digit will take on the exact form that you want. If you choose to suddenly start preferring your dose of information in audio, then we will find a way to do that for you. Someone develops a brain-computer interface, and you start preferring that knowledge be beamed directly into your brain, who are we to argue?
The harder way to answer that same question is to look at the obvious ways in which things will change. For instance, video and VR content is going to rule over the others and vie for your attention much more. 5G promises each one of us, on a mobile device, higher bandwidth and lower latency than most companies and universities had 20 years ago! Imagine the sheer amount of possibilities that open up?
The Internet of Things (IoT) is something you will hear a lot of people talk about in the pages that follow, and for good reason. By 2041, it’s expected that there will be trillions of tiny connected devices, all talking to one another, and the cloud, gathering data that will help improve your lives. Can this print magazine still exist in such a futuristic world of gadgets? We don’t know, but maybe it will because some of you will care enough about your privacy, and still want unbiased opinions that are not chosen by an algorithm, or based on sheer popularity and virality. That is, after all, how content is distributed online these days. Whether in physical print or not, there’s sure to be ways to subscribe to us and get our content delivered to you, and you will be the ones who choose what that platform and format are.
For us, extended reality (XR) is the promise of the next few decades, once the kinks are ironed out with the technology, and it becomes as conveniently portable as a smartphone is today. So many young people spend so much time every day gaming and looking at heads-up displays (HUDs) inside their games. By 2041, we expect HUDs to just be a part of everyday life. Look at something and squint to turn on information about it. Want to ask Digit about something? Just pull up a virtual chat box and message us while you commute, and even if you don’t have a question, just sit back and enjoy our content, sifting through it all with imperceptible twitches of your fingers – gesture control and XR working together.
AI and robots will take care of all mundane tasks for you, and you won’t own them the way you own a smartphone. Instead, you will merely own data on the cloud, which is available to you wherever you are. Want to pull up your social feed (whatever that might look like 20 years from now), and you could choose to do it just about anywhere because screens themselves are obsolete.
Just as you would have most of your work done by AI or robots, so would we! I fully expect to welcome the first artificial member of Digit into the team, well before 2041. This could be a limited AI version trained by all of Digit’s editors, or a full-fledged artificial intelligence of its own!
And if not that, then maybe we all become part cyborg, and all of Digit’s editors will have enhanced senses that they can use when they’re testing various gadgets and gizmos that you want to buy. And let’s face it, we’re already well on our way to becoming cyborgs. The only difference between a cyborg and us is that the technology is on the inside of them, and the outside of us.
We look forward to testing cyborg enhancements for you so that you won’t have to…
By- Vikas Gupta, Publisher, Digit
To read what other industry leaders and experts have to say about the future in their respective fields, visit our 20th Anniversary Microsite.