Future Fast: Next big things coming now

There was a time when we could expect it to take decades for big shifts, while the near future remained one of steady, imperceptible change. Now, every year sees massive shifts in the foundations of society as the social, technological and geopolitical environment is continually shaken up.

What are the biggest shifts we can say in technology this decade? We asked Max Peterson, Amazon Web Services vice president for global public sector, to predict three big developments. But first, we talked science fiction.

Q: Do you believe that we are in an era of science fiction becoming reality in terms of the most grandiose visions that we saw 50 years ago? 

I started with AWS in December of 2012. And I was certain that we were on the cusp of all that sort of new capability and imagining new ways that government or education or space could be used for the benefit of mankind, the planet. What we’re really seeing now is sometimes you need a really difficult challenge, to break through old thinking. The Covid pandemic was one of those urgent challenges that was global in scope. That really forced us to massively think differently. So, we have done lots of great incremental stuff. But when I looked around the world with all of our customers, they’re now coming out post-pandemic, and they’re taking a look at remarkable achievements that they did. Sometimes they’re stunned, because they had to give themselves permission, sometimes legal permission. 

In the case of Ukraine, for instance, we had the deputy prime minister from Ukraine, who’s also the digital minister, on stage with me (at the AWS Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas in December) And it was interesting that, while they were trying to get all the technical pieces right leading up to Russia’s invasion, they also had to get the policy pieces right. This was fortuitously, literally five days before the invasion commenced. They changed the law that permitted them to operate national systems, not just on premise in the country, but in the cloud, wherever was necessary. 

That’s such a small thing, but that fortuitous change allowed them to move quickly, to protect the digital assets of the country, and to undertake humanitarian efforts like training. The world’s largest K12 education technology company is a Ukrainian company called Optima. Because they immediately had to move all of what they had into a virtual and online environment and that’s what the small little bits of change were about, enabling and removing blockers to a tremendous amount of work. 

But the same thing happened in Covid. Governments gave themselves permission to innovate by taking policies that had been blocking innovation and putting a waiver in place. Let’s use GovChat in Africa as an example. I met with the (former) CEO Eldrid Jordaan not too long ago, when we had a delegation in town from South Africa. We talked about how GovChat was purpose-built initially, before the virus test result management used it, as a chat bot designed to scale up very rapidly. Folks recognised that the platform is extensible. It could be used for a number of different electronic citizen communication channels in the same cost-effective way. 

Q: The big challenge facing South Africa is energy and one of the big problems is policy towards energy. What do you see coming here from an innovation point of view and a policy point of view? 

At AWS we made a firm commitment to powering all of our cloud infrastructure with new renewable energy. The initial target was to have it all powered by renewable energy by 2030. We’re now on track to have it all powered by renewable energy by 2025. You’ve got to set firm goals and then go after it, whether you’re government or industry or anybody else, because that’s the only way you’re actually going to make that pivot. And it’s not just about power at AWS or the Amazon cloud. When we started that commitment in 2019 to be net carbon neutral, that was across a very big fleet of traditionally carbon consuming stuff. 

We’ve now got 300-plus organisations signed on to the climate climate pledge, which has an objective of being net carbon neutral by 2040, where the Paris Accord is 2050. We believe that governments and organisations should set you big goals, and then they’ve got to work to achieve them.

Q: What are the biggest innovations, three big ones that you see coming this decade, and what impact will they have on development in Africa and benefits to the people of Africa? 

One is commercial space operations and space opportunities. We’re just seeing a dramatic increase in the number of startups with innovative ideas from all over the world who now, because of things like AWS cloud services, AWS Ground Station, are able to access opportunities in space.

The next one is health. Health has been a challenging thing to work with, in so many ways in the past, and yet now with the many of the advancements born out of the fire of the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re able to reach populations with telehealth consultation at far greater scale. In India we developed a system (that was) able to initially handle thousands of telehealth consultations a day there, now well up into the tens of 1housands, hundreds of thousands, of telehealth consultations a day. Imagine populations around the world that have difficult access to health and the capabilities now that you’ve got leveraging Amazon Cloud to improve population health.

A third one that’s very important, it’s critical to all of our long term survival, is to focus on sustainability. Take a look at what AWS and Amazon are doing in the area of renewable energies. All our AWS cloud computing centers will be powered by renewable energy by 2025. If you look at what’s being done to address current net carbon neutrality, we’ve set goals for ourselves and the 300 other organisations, including governments, to be net carbon neutral by 2040, a full 10 years ahead of the Paris Accord.

Of course, water is a scarce resource in many places around the world. So, we’re taking action now on how to be water positive, AWS has declared it will be water positive by 2023. 

And I think the final thing I would say is back to space. The opportunities to improve life on Earth from space using Earth observation is just unlimited. Whether it is improving farming, whether it is faster action for natural disasters and disaster relief, whether it is maritime operations and making ports and supply chains more effective. There’s just tremendous applications from space that are going to help us in terms of life right here on Earth. 

* Watch the highlights of Arthur Goldstuck’s interview with Max Peterson here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3QMhgSSEvw