Technology will challenge the laws of physics as explained by Erik Ekudden, chief technology officer at Ericsson, Ekudden was referring to positive signs from a joint research project between his company and the King’s College Research Center related to transmitting touch and feeling over the Internet.

It is a bizarre idea, closer to imagination than science, but experts quoted by Ekudden believe that it is possible, and it is just a matter of time until it becomes a reality. At some point in the foreseeable future, we will be able to transmit our emotions online, and we will be able to activate the sense of touch in cyberspace. The secret of this lies in the combination of human and machine intelligence, while leveraging the prospects of 5G.

The latest joint project report reflected that “we have to go beyond the traditional laws of physics because even the speed of light itself will not be sufficient to enable such applications”. Such words may be difficult to comprehend, but science today has another logic, a logic that requires efforts and deep thinking to understand and keep pace. Quantum computing supported by 5G refers to the simultaneous transmission of data in almost no time.

Are these scientific expectations or supernatural fantasies? No matter how strange these future scenarios are, experts, including Aram Galstyan, research director for ISI’s Data Science and Machine Learning group and Research Associate Professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Computer Science Department, believes that future expectations are not the product of magic or supernatural measures, they are science and knowledge above all. For those in charge of institutions in general, the purpose of future foresight is not to raise eyebrows, but rather to provide inputs for actual and proactive planning.

Future expectations are many, and every day, research centers produce dozens of them. Some of these expectations happen with surprising accuracy, while others deviate from reality. But what really matters is that they are part of the necessary data for future planning, or so it should be.

Foresights in today’s world are the outcome of analysing massive amounts of both historical and objective data. From here, data was described as the gold of the current era, and the advantage of this gold is that it is available to everyone in the world, but the key in uncovering its real value is “analysis”.