You might have thought by reading the title that this text would be about the moral choices our society might face with the arrival of high technology. However, I must disappoint you: this time I really want to talk about the prices of the various technologies of our time and their return on investment in the industry. In this context, the technologies that concern us in our everyday lives and are aimed at the end user are particularly interesting, which is what I want to reflect on in this article.
To begin with, it is important to talk about the profitability of products, and for this it is important to know its definition and how it is calculated: The profitability helps to determine the return on investment of a product in relation to the value of the investment. In its simplest form, the return on a product is calculated quite simply: the product’s profit should be divided by the capital invested in it, so you get the right percentage. Now that we’ve got the calculations figured out, we can move on to practice: What exactly does this mean for high tech companies? According to Forbes, it’s the return on investment that will drive the tech startup market in the coming years. The author writes that the crises of recent years have changed the market dramatically and investments will be harder to come by and younger companies will have to wait longer to bring their products to market. However, according to the same article, cloud services will continue to be popular despite the recession and are therefore a worthwhile investment when it comes to product returns.
But the casual reader might ask: but what about the meta-universe and neural networks? They, and not cloud services, are now being talked about all over social networks, the biggest businessmen like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg are taking them so seriously that they are not afraid to make big announcements about the future of such technologies, are they not paying off, is it all a trick? This is not the easiest question to answer. On the one hand such technologies from entertainment industries create a lot of hype around them, thus attracting attention and investors, on the other hand it must be understood that many statements by celebrities rather describe a utopia associated with them or a higher idea that is far from being realized and has little to do with payback at the moment, usually when it comes to innovation. Take for example the meta-universe that Mark Zuckerberg so often talks about in 2021:
“Metaverse isn’t a thing a company builds. It’s the next chapter of the internet overall.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta. (Carlson, 2022).
According to experts, the idea of a meta-universe is 8 or even 10 years away from being realised. Further growth of the idea, the author writes, will depend on both clarity of the product’s return on investment, and the readiness of industry and technology talent. And despite predictions that the meta-universe could already be used in some industry sectors by 2030, at this point it’s hard to talk about a payback for the next few years because it’s at the minimal viable product stage.
While many people fear losing their jobs because of the abilities of neural networks and nervously check willrobotstakemyjob.com, the situation around artificial intelligence is not much different from the one in which the meta-universe is: according to the latest McKinsey data, adoption of such processes has doubled since 2017, but a rather small number of companies (10%) report a payback in business. Experts attribute this to the fact that neural networks require careful and voluminous data work, which some firms lack the resources to do. This is why industry giants such as Google and Amazon are likely to offer their solutions and services to small businesses going forward. This is why artificial intelligence is still at an early stage of development and needs to identify applications.
What conclusions can be drawn from the above? Technology Payback is not always about press coverage or innovation, much more often it’s just about what a technology can (probably) pay for itself in a decade or so. Far more often the payback technologies are not in the limelight but in niche areas that do not come to the mind of the average person to begin with, such as cloud services, which, mind you, just enjoyed immense popularity in the press 10 years ago.
References:
Raynovich, S. R. (2023, January 25). Inside the Trends Driving Top Cloud Startups In 2023. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rscottraynovich/2023/01/25/inside-the-trends-driving-top-cloud-startups-in-2023/
Carlson K., Austin American-Statesman. (2022, March 16). At SXSW, Mark Zuckerberg says metaverse is “Holy Grail” of social experience. Austin American-Statesman. https://eu.statesman.com/story/business/2022/03/16/sxsw-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-says-metaverse-future-internet/7051230001/
Desk, T. (2023, January 25). Widespread metaverse adoption still years away, despite strong early signals: NASSCOM. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/metaverse-adoption-nasscom-report-8402349
Author, G. (2023, January 7). AI goes mainstream, but return on investment remains elusive. SiliconANGLE. https://siliconangle.com/2022/12/29/ai-goes-mainstream-return-investment-remains-elusive/
