Trends In Information Technology Law: Looking Ahead To 2020

Trends in information technology law: looking ahead to 2020

This piece looks ahead to what we might expect as IT law developments in 2020.

As we hit the new decade from deep inside the fourth industrial revolution, we're witnessing stunning transformation in the areas of cloud + artificial intelligence ('AI') + mixed reality. In 2020, the direction of travel of these technology developments will be easier to chart than the regulatory responses to them (seeking to balance security + convenience + privacy) and the gyrations in the business environment that are driving all this change (including trade + Brexit + Trump + cycle).

The gathering cloud

Research consultancy Gartner is forecasting the global public cloud market to grow by 17% in 2020, from $228bn to $266bn.1 Tighter integration that combines the cloud's economies of scale, demand flexibility, utility pricing and geographical dispersion with the 'intelligent edge' - data from local datacentres, people's devices and the huge rise in Internet of Things ('IOT') sensors - is behind this growth as digital transformation gathers pace and the flow of computing workloads off premises into the cloud becomes a flood.

AI 2.0?

AI algorithm capabilities have now reached or exceeded human parity in speech recognition, image recognition, machine translation and machine comprehension.2 Couple this with the scale and efficiencies of cloud-based AI as a Service ('AIaaS') (for example, Microsoft's deep learning Project Brainwave reduced AI training dataset costs to $0.20 per million images in early 20193) and the rise of AIaaS looks set to be a key feature of 2020. We are seeing this already as enterprise customers and large AIaaS providers grapple in contract discussions with novel questions of IP ownership of the various layers of AI data (training, testing, operational, insights), what happens to customer data once ingested into the AI and aligning both sides' AI ethics policies and best practices.

Mixed reality and digital twinning

The third stunning IT transformation we're seeing is mixed reality: a shift in the way we interface with computing, from individual device responding to keyboard, mouse and fingertip towards connected devices responding to voice, gaze and gesture. This expanding of the human-computer interface is also behind the convergence of the physical and digital worlds, where people, things and spaces in the 'real' world will increasingly have a twin or representation in the digital world. These developments are happening in the business world today and are set to jump species to the consumer world, perhaps in 2020, where the big change will come...