The world is undergoing a cycle of change. Ever since the dawn of personal computing and the Internet in the 1990s, technology has been reshaping everything from business to politics, economics, society, and relationships. The process is far from over. There are major advances that are either just becoming popular now or are a few years away which promise to bring even more change.

Self-Driving Cars

With each passing year, there are more and more automated features making their way into car designs They first appear in luxury models, but then they work down into mass-appeal vehicles. Some become required inclusions. For example, rear cameras started out as a nice extra, but now they must be installed on all new cars as a necessary safety feature. As time goes on, more and more of these features will become standard parts of car design. Luxury cars now include heavily-automated highway driving, automatic braking and lane changing, parking, and the ability to sense obstacles and warn the driver.

Eventually, so much of the driving experience will be automated that there simply won't be much of a role for human drivers left. On the one hand, this should improve highway safety and eliminate problems like drunk or distracted driving. On the other, it will radically transform logistics and transportation, potentially leaving millions of taxi drivers, truck drivers, and bus drivers out of work. Balancing out the benefits and costs of automated driving is an issue that will come to a head within the next several years.

Decentralized Education

Online courses are not new. Many colleges have been offering classes, programs, and even whole degrees online for years. But platforms like Coursera and Udemy are showing what the Internet can really do for education. Sequences of classes in high-demand fields like data science, app development, and design don't need to come from a university. Students can acquire those skills by themselves at their own pace and at a lower price. Colleges still have the complete package, a broad array of services that an online course sequence can't fully replicate.

But educators of the future will need to come to terms with the idea that there is now a whole new way to learn skills in a structured and rewarding way that doesn't depend on the traditional education system. If students can pull up a class on a new math concept or programming language, schools will need to focus on other things. The educational format of the future doesn't look like online classes bankrupting all college degree programs. Instead, it will consist of the new and old systems working in parallel, serving different packages to different students who vary in their available time, their budget, their goals, and their needs.

Chatbots

If there's one new piece of tech that really speaks to the digital transformation of society, it's the chatbot. Internet-based messaging is several decades old, and chatbots aren't brand-new in concept. However, it is recent developments in AI, natural language processing, and machine learning that have created the contemporary chatbot. Chatbots used to be little more than amusements, but now they can help a visitor shop at an online store, schedule meetings and appointments between several groups of people, act as a first layer of customer support, and act as a general intermediary between people and businesses.

Like the self-driving car, a chatbot threatens to put a lot of people out of work if it can replace, for example, call centers. On a deeper level, this also hints at a significant change in how people and computers interact. Chatbots offer the possibility that the relationship can start to feel closer than just a user and a tool. Sci Fi-style AI with consciousness and awareness remains fictional, but chatbots start to raise questions about how people will interact with machines.