Gartner's Emerging Technology Trends for 2016

What do neuromorphic machines, affective computing, smart dust, brain-computer interfaces and blockchain have in common?

They're all on Gartner's 2016 list of emerging technologies. Gartner's 3 macro emerging technology trend areas are:

1. Transparently immersive experiences

2. Perceptual smart machine age

3. Platform revolution

Regular readers know we love new buzzwords and buzzwords in general here at Small Business Labs.

But even we're bit overwhelmed by the plethora of buzzwords used by Gartner. So we will refer you to the article for the descriptions of these trend areas the technologies behind them.

But since we like affective computing and neuromorphic machines we will define these.

• Affective computing refers to machines that can recognize and respond appropriately to human emotions. It's also been referred to as "emotional computing". The Telegraph has a good article that explains affective computing in more detail. 
• Neuromorphic machines use brain-inspired computer chips. These chips are designed to process sensory data such as images and sound and to respond to changes in that data in ways similar to how human and animal brains do. Neuromorphic machines was on MIT Technology Review's 2014 list of breakthrough technologies and they have a good description.  

These two are obviously linked in that neuromorphic computer chips make it easier to create affective computing systems.

Gartner's summary chart (click to enlarge) on their 3 emerging trend areas is below.