Let’s look at Most Dangerous Technology trends of 2021, i will help You to look into the future and understand some of the key trends.

Usually we look at the positive sides of Technology trends. But there are also lots of technologies that could be used for Dangerous and nefarious purposes.

7. Swarm Intelligence Drones

Basically, what we are seeing now is that militaries like the US and the UK, are now starting to test Drone Swarms, basically a collection of autonomous Drones that can cooperate with each other, and coordinate an attack potentially, so they could be armed.

And the US has recently tested some of these, over the desert where basically about 70 Drones work together to attack a target.

I’ve recently seen another test where a Swarm of Drones were dropped out of a fighter jet. So basically release over an area.

And those Drones are then autonomously operating trying to find a target and eliminating this target. And for me, this is worrying, I find this really futuristic, if you could imagine, how do you protect yourself from this?

How do you control this, especially if they are autonomously flying, making decisions by decisions by themselves on potentially who to kill. So this is something that lots of people have major concerns about these autonomously.

Autonomous weapons, driven by artificial intelligence. So at the moment, the convention is that we need a human in the loop to make a decision before someone is potentially killed.

But this is Drone Swarms is  frightening, especially when you think about how this Technology is evolving.

Drones are getting smaller, you know, even have insect size Drones. So can you imagine thousands of those insect size Drones, potentially attacking someone. So this is my first concern.

6. Spying Smart home devices

So we now have devices like nected cameras, we have smart speakers, we have smart TVs, and increasingly an increasing array of smart product in our house.

The challenge is that they also learn a lot about us. So if you think about this, if you have a nest thermostat in your house, it knows when you’re in and when you’re not.

If you have an Alexa, smart speaker in your house, it listens to your conversations. And recently, there were some there were some issues in the press where Amazon and companies like Microsoft got into trouble,

because they basically had to admit that human beings were listening to private conversations that you would have with your smart speaker.

But even if we take the humans out of the loop, which is happening at the moment, machines are still learning a lot about us.

So the one of the scariest scenario was a patent filed by Verizon, the American network company. And this is not a product they’re using at the moment, but a patent that potentially portrays the danger of all of this.

And what they were saying is, the patent was for a set top box that has a microphone in it. And the microphone would basically listen to the conversation in front of the TV. So the setup box would stream the TV, show it then listen to the conversation, it could potentially pick up that you are having an argument with your partner.

They can then use this information to automatically put this on an auction online advertising platform where a marriage counseling service could bid to and this can be automated to bid for an advertising slot in the next ad break because they know that you arguing and for me, this is a major concern.

We need to think about what all of this means we’re inviting this Technology into our houses. But how much of our freedom are we giving away with this?

So this is my second big, scary Technology trend we need to be aware of.

5. Face recognition Technology

There are lots of positive sides of face recognition. Technology gives us security allows us to look into our iPhones without touching them. It allows us to walk through the dubai airport without showing our passports, there are lots of good things.

But they’re also Dangerous, especially when you think about how this Technology could potentially be used by non elected governments.

Think about China, China is being accused at the moment to use face recognition Technology to control some of the ethnic minority. So the weekers, they are a Muslim minority in China.

There have been some Uighur attacks, terrorist attacks, and the government in China wants to clamp down on this. But the way they went about this is to install face recognition cameras anywhere.

So if you now think about how, what could happen, a government could look at social media profiles, and look at your activities online and realize actually, you are not in line with party politics, or the government or politics, they can then take the picture from your social media profile, and then use the face recognition cameras that they have all across the cities to detect you anywhere.

So for me, this has, if you think about what this Technology could have done if people like adult Hitler had this Technology available to them.

So for me, we have to be very careful with this. And I have seen this recently in California, where actually the the state passed a law preventing police forces from using this Technology.

So this debate has to carry on, we need to think about the implications of these technologies, and some of the limitations that we put ,in place to make sure they can’t be used for these really Dangerous purposes.

4. Artificially intelligent enabled cloning

This basically means that we now have artificial intelligence tools that can clone our voices, and even ourselves in videos and video footage and pictures.

We’ve recently seen some cool examples where someone took simply a photograph of the famous MonaLisa painting, and then brought this to life using artificial intelligence, where Mona Lisa would basically talk, This is interesting.

But he can also see how this could be used for really Dangerous purposes. So you not only need a small footage of me on a video to clone me, you only need 3.5 seconds of my audio to clone my voice.

So this has security implications. If you think that now, voice recognition is used for lots of banks in terms of their security.

But this goes much more beyond any of this. Because if you could take a photo or video of someone, and then use an app, there’s a deep fake app.

That allows you to take a short video or photograph someone and then have a fully close person. And then the AI would create a naked version of this person.

And he could then put this out on social media. And these are getting very, very realistic. We’ve seen deep fakes of Barack Obama, of President Trump, Making announcement and again,

if you think someone could theoretically clone you as an individual, in putting it out on social media, if you then clone messages from President, again, this has potential national security implications.

So we need to be aware that this Technology exists, and actually educate everyone, including our kids to really think about where this where social media video comes from, could this be real, and some of the Technology that sits behind this that can no facilitate that?

3. Intelligent hacking

So we now have artificial intelligence. And if you combine this with hacking, and things like Ransom attacks, you get a very Dangerous combination.

So in the past, we needed to rely on humans to find faults in computer security. What you now have is you have bots, intelligent robots that will scan the entire internet, and they will find any tiny flaw in any security system and potentially hack that.

The other thing we have is we have no automated blackmailing attacks. So if someone let’s say, stole some data from a bank that has a has password in it, this data is then sold on the darkweb someone can buy this information, so they now have your password, and they can then start blackmailing you.

And this is all being automated using using artificial intelligence, where they say, Okay, this person is easy to target, we send them a message saying, I know your password, and you’ve done this, and please pay me so many bitcoins to have all your information removed.

And this is happening more and more. And these are getting more sophisticated, more personal, you’re much more likely to think, okay, I’m really being Blackberry, someone actually has a secret password of yours.

But all of this data is now traded on the dark web, combining this with AI makes all of this really Dangerous. So hacking, and blackmailing enabled by AI is, for me a really important, Dangerous tech trend for 2021.

 2. Smart dust

Basically, I alluded to this when I talked about Drone Swarms, what we’re now seeing with smart dust is that devices are getting so small, tiny little pieces that have sensors in them that have processing power in them, 

Or as I said early on, you have no insect like robots. So there was a insect mosquito recently that had this ability of injecting someone with something.

So you could have a robot AI enabled mosquito flying around, and potentially potentially poisoning, also being used positively could immunize people using this Technology.

But this is something we need to be aware of their Technology is now getting so small that we could have, we could be surrounded by smart devices that take our record our voices that take our images that record our videos, and so on.

So this is for me a trend, we have to watch this whole idea of having smart dust, everything getting smaller and more intelligent.

1. Fake News Bot

My last Dangerous Technology trend for this year is a fake news bot, This is again, combining some of the things I’ve talked about before. But we now have the ability of machine learning enabled writing engines, so they were, we can now give a machine a topic.

And it would then generate new stories and articles that seem as they were written by a journalist. So if you wanted to potentially have an impact on elections, you could use some of those bots, to just bombard the internet with articles that basically reinforce your point is cook is an automated propaganda machine.

The Russian state has been accused to use this Technology when President Trump was elected during the Brexit campaign here in the UK. So this is something we need to be aware of.

And again, very similar to deep fakes, which I talked about earlier, we need to be aware of when news comes from, what were the sources, we need to be a bit more critical about all of this, especially on social media, where lots of this can happen under the radar.

Conclusion

So those were my Those are my seven Dangerous Technology trends for 2021. They are all things we need to start thinking about if your business you need to consider them in your strategies. And if you’re an individual, you need to think about what potential implications this has for you in the future.