Chinese technology giant Alibaba has identified what it believes are the top 10 tech trends for the next three to five years, as we emerge, hopefully, from the pandemic.

The company’s DAMO research academy has analysed what it describes as “millions of public papers and patent filings over the past three years” and conducted interviews with nearly 100 scientists.

On the back of this research, Alibaba has identified the following ten tech and tech usage trends to watch, which – given the internal focus of the group – seem likely to map against Alibaba’s own strategic plans this decade.

Cloud-network-device convergence

Convergence will drive new applications that fulfil demanding tasks, such as high-precision industrial simulation, real-time industrial quality inspection, and mixed reality.

AI for science

The advancement of AI is making new scientific paradigms possible, while machine learning can process massive amounts of multidimensional and multimodal data and solve complex scientific problems.

All this will allow scientific exploration to flourish in areas previously thought impossible, says the company.

“AI will not only accelerate scientific research, but also help discover new scientific laws. In the next three years, we expect that AI will be broadly applied in the research area of applied science and be used as a production tool in some basic sciences.”

AI for renewable energy

The application of AI will also be pivotal in improving the efficiency and automation of energy systems, maximising resource usage and stability, says Alibaba.

“This will be conducive to achieving carbon neutrality. In the next three years, AI is expected to pave the way for the integration of renewable energy sources into the power grid and contribute to its safe, efficient, and reliable operation.”

Privacy-preserving computing

As integrated technologies emerge, such as dedicated chips, cryptographic algorithms, white-box implementations, and data trusts, privacy-preserving computation will emerge alongside them.

They will increasingly be adopted in scenarios such as processing massive amounts of data and integrating data from different domains.

“In the next three years, we will witness ground-breaking improvements in the performance and interpretability of privacy-preserving computation, and the emergence of data trust entities that provide data-sharing services based on the technology,” says Alibaba.

Moves are certainly afoot elsewhere in the industry. The Web’s prime mover Sir Tim Berners-Lee made similar predictions last week at Fujitsu’s ActivateNow Technology Summit 2022.

Giving a keynote interview with Fujitsu CTO Vivek Mahajan, Sir Tim emphasised the need to adopt decentralised technologies, such as the open-source Solid protocol that he has been developing.

This is a means of giving users control over where their own data is stored – in virtual ‘Solid pods’ – rather than relying on the locked-in, siloed storage provided by most major platforms.

Silicon photonic chips

A new generation of chips will use photons instead of electrons to transmit data. Photons are massless and do not interact directly with each other. They travel faster and over longer distances. Therefore, silicon photonic chips can provide higher computing density and greater energy efficiency, says Alibaba.

High-precision medicine

The convergence of AI and precision medicine is expected to not only boost healthcare, but also create new diagnostic technologies, thus serving as a “high-precision compass for clinical medicine”, says the company.

“In the next three years, we expect to see people-centric precision medicine become a major trend that will span multiple fields of healthcare, including disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.

“AI will become synonymous with a highly precise compass that allows us to pinpoint diseases and their treatments.”

Extended reality (XR)

Edge computing, high-speed network communications, and digital twins will help bring what Alibaba terms ‘XR’ into bloom, via dedicated glasses and immersive reality.

These developments are broadly analogous to augmented reality (AR), plus the metaverse being talked up by the likes of Meta/Facebook and Microsoft.

“In the next three years, we expect to see a new generation of XR glasses that have an indistinguishable look and feel from ordinary glasses, entering the market and serving as a key entry point to the next generation of the internet.”

Yet despite Alibaba’s support, it is far from clear that the concept of smart glasses that are indistinguishable from normal spectacles will be acceptable to consumers. Many people are uncomfortable at the idea that strangers might be recording them in public spaces or looking them up online: previous attempts at introducing smart glasses have failed for this reason.

As the technology emerges it is likely that a resistance movement will emerge alongside it too, with safe real-world spaces and restrictions on the technology’s use.

Perceptive soft robotics

Unlike conventional robots, perceptive soft robots are robots that have flexible bodies and enhanced perception of pressure, vision, and sound, says Alibaba.

Such robots will take advantage of technologies such as flexible electronics, pressure-adaptive materials, and AI, which allows them to perform specialised, complex tasks and deform to adapt to different physical environments.

This will “change the course of the manufacturing industry, from the mass-production of standardised products towards specialised, small-batch products,” says Alibaba.

A bold claim, but outside of accepted robotic applications such as large-scale manufacturing, logistics, medicine, and extreme environments (such as space, subsea engineering, mining and nuclear decommissioning), the utility of robots has yet to be proven – especially in areas such as personal service robots, which Alibaba identifies as a key growth market.

Meanwhile, companies have for some years been pushing the concept of using collaborative robots – cobots – in localised, short-run manufacturing. However, many of these initiatives have failed to catch on, despite the apparent promise of the idea.

Integrated satellite-terrestrial computing

In the next five years, satellites and terrestrial systems will work together as single computing nodes and constitute an integrated network system providing ubiquitous connectivity, says Alibaba.

Co-evolution of large- and small-scale AI models

Future AI is shifting from a race towards the scalability of foundation models to the co-evolution of large- and small-scale models, via the cloud, plus edge services and devices. These will be “more useful in practice”, says the company.