The world feels like it has been irrevocably changed in the past few months, but that may be just the warmup act. Before long, new disruptions in key areas such as finance, media and global communications could soon take center stage.

Disruption was very much on the minds of speakers this week at EmTech Next, a three-day virtual conference organized by MIT Technology Review magazine. Even before the global pandemic affected much of the world, the speed of digital transformation was accelerating change in a number of important arenas.

“We’ve entered this period of exponential transformation,” Amy Webb, chief executive officer of the Future Today Institute, said during a presentation Monday. “My concern is that we have so many crises happening at once right now, we’re not allowing ourselves the time to think through next-order impacts.”

Banking system disruption

A few of those next-order impacts could be significant and one on the horizon involves the future of money. Several nations have plans to issue central bank-backed digital currencies that could push other countries, including the U.S., to follow suit and create significant disruption for the world’s banking system.

The movement behind digitizing national currencies has grown out of the burgeoning world of crypto assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Although cryptocurrencies have proven to be volatile and controversial, they have also fueled a much wider discussion around the viability of digital cash. That has gained momentum in recent months as the COVID-19 pandemic made millions of people wary of handling paper money.

Digital currency would exist entirely online, backed by a nation’s central banking system. China has implemented a trial payment system for its digital yuan in four major cities. Sweden, Japan and Norway are also in differing stages on plans for digitizing national currencies.

In the U.S., the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia released a white paper this month that examined the impact of letting consumers hold a central bank account directly. The Fed’s researchers echoed concerns raised by the International Monetary Fund that digital currencies could trigger a mass withdrawal of funds from commercial banks.

“It’s going to require a lot of careful thought on how to regulate this,” said Neha Narula, director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative. “Central banks don’t want to run an app and they aren’t really built to have customers. So they will want to outsource that to the private sector.”

5G’s major impact

The private sector’s attention is also focused on the deployment of 5G as the new wireless standard. 5G represents a major upgrade in the global communications infrastructure and a number of EmTech presenters were direct about its future impact: The change will be big.

“It’s almost impossible to figure out all the use cases that will get enabled as part of 5G,” said Durga Malladi, senior vice president and general manager of 5G at Qualcomm Inc. “With 5G, our goal is to go way beyond cellphones. Look at it as a connectivity fabric for everything.”

One of the use cases cited by several EmTech speakers involved telemedicine, an area very much on the minds of consumers when visits to a doctor were significantly disrupted. The future of telemedicine will extend beyond videoconferencing to include remote sensors monitoring a patient’s vital signs and transferring data in real time to physicians for remote evaluation. That will take 5G and advances in edge computing.

“When all of those converge, you actually get real telemedicine that we haven’t built yet,” John Roese, global chief technology officer at Dell Technologies Inc., said Tuesday. “We see 5G as the first instantiation where we can build our global-scale edges.”

For the moment, major deployment of 5G is being directed by the large telecommunications carriers. Last month, Verizon Communications announced that it would switch uploads from 4G to 5G in 34 U.S. cities.

“We’re not only hoping to lead 5G, we are leading 5G,” said Hans Vestberg, chairman and CEO of Verizon. “It’s designed for industries really as much as consumers. We are continuing to push the envelope with this.”

Software-defined wireless

However, enterprise interest in 5G is fueling a growing debate around following the lead of the telecom community, as was previously done with other wireless standards, or pursuing a different path based on an information technology-centered approach. If 5G will indeed extend cloud technologies to the mobile edge, the cloud players expect to have a say in that as well.

“Now we have a really important technology that’s definitely needed and there’s lots of demand, but we also have a debate about how to do it,” Dell’s Roese explained. “We have real 5G deployments, but largely they’re just delivering enhanced mobile broadband. The way we might move faster isn’t to do what we’ve always done with more effort, but maybe to change it and use the principles that we’ve learned about agility, software definition and elasticity out of the cloud and IT world and incorporate those into these architectures.”

Dell sits in the middle of this debate, according to Roese, but it is by no means a placid bystander. The company has been working with Vodafone Group Plc., AT&T Inc. and Orange Inc. to virtualize their traditional packet cores, reformatting them into software which runs on data center architectures.

Not to be forgotten is the purchase of Uhana by Dell’s VMware Inc. Uhana builds a deep learning engine to optimize carrier network operations.

“We expect that the way people will experience 5G from an enterprise and IT perspective is not from a phone call to an operator, but by deploying an application in their cloud orchestration model in VMware or a Kubernetes cluster,” Roese said. He added that the technology can now be orchestrated because it’s based on software-defined principles.

Robust 5G bandwidth promises to transform the communications medium which is undergoing significant change on its own. Advances in artificial intelligence and compute power have given rise to synthetic media, the artificial manipulation of data to produce highly realistic and completely fabricated content.

It can be deepfake videos, computer-generated writing or vocal cloning, but it has generated a number of new business opportunities for a number of entrepreneurs and established players, including Apple Inc. One man tokenized himself into an avatar on Ethereum and charged interested users $99 to decide what words should come out of his mouth.

“Imagine being able to edit someone’s spoken voice the way you would a Word document,” said Webb, who noted that these new technologies also present potential risks during times of unrest. “It would not be difficult to edit someone into a video and make it look like they were creating problems.”

Live video interaction is well on its way to becoming a major societal force as well. In an EmTech interview today, Zoom Inc. CEO Eric Yuan noted that two months ago, the state of New York legalized marriages using his livestreaming platform.

“I was so excited for several days after I saw that,” Yuan said. “This is the best time to show our vision. The world owns Zoom.”

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