Charles Humble and Wes Reisz Take a Look Back at 2018 and Speculate on What 2019 Might Have in Store

In this podcast Charles Humble and Wes Reisz talk about autonomous vehicles, GDPR, quantum computing, microservices, AR/VR and more. * Waymo vehicles are now allowed to be on the road in California running fully autonomous; they seem to be a long way ahead in terms of the number of autonomous miles they’ve driven, but there are something like 60 other companies in California approved to test autonomous vehicles. * It seems reasonable to assume that considerably more regulation around privacy will appear over the next few years, as governments and regulators grapple with not only social media but also who owns the data from technology like AR glasses or self-driving cars. * We’ve seen a huge amount of interest in the ethical implications of technology this year, with Uber getting into some regulatory trouble, and Facebook being co-opted by foreign governments for nefarious purposes. As software becomes more and more pervasive in people's lives the ethical impact of what we all do becomes more and more profound. * Researchers from IBM, the University of Waterloo, Canada, and the Technical University of Munich, Germany, have proved theoretically that quantum computers can solve certain problems faster than classical computers. * We’re also seeing a lot of interest around human computer interaction - AR, VR, voice, neural interfaces. We had a presentation at QCon San Francisco from CTRL-labs, who are working on neural interfaces - in this case interpreting nerve signals - and they have working prototypes. Much like touch this could open up computing to another whole group of people.