Amidst everything from the living on Mars to all the global concerns in the Middle East, China, & Russia, CNN included these paragraphs as significant impact to the coming year.

“The Internet of Things

It’s a prosaic description of a complex and powerful phenomenon that is about to land on us — a massive surge in the data showing what we do, when and where. None of this happens in a calendar year of course, but by 2020 according to IT industry analysts Gartner there will be 26 billion connected devices generating and consuming data, assisted by the explosion in wearable technology such as smart glasses and watches.

So businesses will invest heavily in 2015 (and beyond) in data storage, analysis and retrieval. Knowing how to classify the data, what to keep and what to discard, what to hold locally and what to store in the cloud, will all be critical to smart use of this insane amount of information.

Susan Hauser of Microsoft expects businesses to “make use of big data services in the cloud and we expect machine learning to grow exponentially across the retail, manufacturing and health care sectors.”

“Deep learning” will be a big part of this process — whereby computers are designed to behave more like the human brain thanks to “deep neural networks” enabling them to learn through observation. We are getting close to the point where machines will make better decisions than us.

As Anthony Wing Kosner writes in Forbes: “This will not be the year that 80% of the developed world loses their jobs to intelligent machines, but it is not too soon to start figuring out what to do about that eventuality.”

Maybe one of them will be writing this column next year.”

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/31/world/lister-2015-predictions/index.html