Peer to Peer Magazine

WWW.ILTANET.ORG 51 CRITICAL INSIGHTS ABOUT THE EMERGING TECHNOLOGY TIMELINE • IT Architecture: The emerging landscape will be increasingly mobile, decentralized cloud-based, social and end-user-driven — individuals will wear their IT infrastructure. • Data Is the New Oil: Dramatic shis are occurring in the scale, nature and complexity of the structured and unstructured data being managed. We are shiing from static to dynamic analytics and to using advanced scientific methods to extract predictive insights from big data. • Up Next: With embedded technologies, the Internet of Things, and augmented reality, the built environment will sense us, talk back, and track our activities — and tell us all about it in real time. • AI on the Horizon: In the medium term, artificial intelligence (AI) could have dramatic impacts across legal activities. Telepresence robots and immersive telepresence will further divorce action from location, and intelligent robotic assistants could become difficult to distinguish from robotically telepresent co-workers. • Human Enhancement: Emerging forms of augmentation, whether mechanical, digital, chemical or genetic, offer the prospect of raised productivity and reduced staff costs. Electronic augmentation may be the only way people can keep pace with accelerating IT and information flow. • The Far Horizons: In the longer term, digital pioneers will embed assistive computing directly into their brains; AI could automate all but the most complex and subtle legal tasks; and IT may need to be fed, not rebooted, in the age of biological computing. Mark believes the technologies listed in the First Horizon are now, or are becoming, commodities in the Second Horizon. These include bring your own devices, clouds everywhere and gamification — many of the technologies applicable to legal. Data gathering tools for legal use, for example, are available from companies like Google and Microso. In the Second Horizon, Mark highlights several emerging technologies he believes will have enormous impact as time goes on. These include digital currency, which he predicts is here to stay once the bugs are worked out (Mark, an economist by training, believes strongly in its science but not so much in the current execution); 3-D printing and scanning, which he suspects will have some impact in the area of intellectual property; and, when it becomes more miniaturized and more fashionable, wearable technology. As for technologies listed on the chart's Third Horizon, Mark notes some of them are "pretty far out" (iCyborg lawyers, for one), but others are already in development or feasible in the future. Mark praises the imagination and vision of the Third Horizon and reminds us that many of today's technologies were yesterday's sci-fi staples. We asked Mark Manoukian, Director of Information Technology at Kegler Brown Hill + Ritter, to share his thoughts about the three horizons timeline that emerged from ILTA's Legal Technology Future Horizons project. Mark Manoukian, former Vice President of ILTA's Emerging Technologies Peer Group and avid sci-fi fan, took a close look at the Three Horizons graphic to see how closely the research aligned with his own thoughts about the future of technology in the legal arena. A VIEW ON THE HORIZONS

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