Feature
The Gist
- Event highlights. Mobile World Congress in Las Vegas focuses on 5G, AI and enterprise mobility from Sept. 26-28.
- AI concerns. Carmen Fontana of IEEE emphasizes the need for responsible and transparent AI practices.
- Future focus. The event explores how 5G and 6G can improve user experiences beyond just faster streaming.
Editor's note: This article was updated Thursday, Sept. 28, to reflect takeaways from the three-day Mobile World Congress event.
Mobile World Congress takes its roadshow to Las Vegas this week at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The show kicks off Sept. 26 and lasts through Sept. 28.
Mobile World Congress is expected to feature 300-plus speakers talking about 5G Acceleration, the Age of AI, Enterprise Mobility and Digital Everything, according to Mobile World Congress officials.
Mobile World Congress Las Vegas: What’s Coming?
Meanwhile, we checked in with an attendee of the conference to discuss things coming down the pike that affect marketers and customer experience professionals at Mobile World Congress: Carmen Fontana, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) member and director of operations at Augment Therapy.
Mobile World Congress Themes
But first, here’s how the Mobile World Congress team is grouping content into its four major themes:
5G Acceleration
5G now accounts for almost two thirds of total mobile connections across North America, according to Mobile World Congress officials. “5G is unlocking untapped value for all players across the entire ecosystem. We are redefining how the world connects,” officials said. “Our evolutionary path is accelerating technology towards 6G, quantum computing, green networks and an Open API marketplace that will seamlessly connect virtual cloud universes and physical mobile networks. This is a path with unimagined growth opportunities.”
Age of AI
Mobile World Congress officials noted, “ChatGPT and Bard’s success in reaching the consumer market has created huge excitement — and concern — as to what this could mean in our everyday lives.”
AI’s intrinsic value is in how it interacts with other technologies and user data. Mobile World Congress will attempt to answer this question: As we enter an unprecedented new Age of AI, how far will its technology and applications go?
“As the exploration of extended reality and metaverse continues, 5G will be key to enabling the latest innovations in the physical, digital and virtual worlds,” Mobile World Congress officials said. “The customer experience in the next five years will be completely transformed — and now is the time to start exploring how we can unlock this virtual vision and bring people closer together.”
Digital Everything
What does Mobile World Congress mean by “digital everything?” The industrial and enterprise world is facing rapidly moving challenges due to the expansion of digital technologies, according to Mobile World Congress officials.
“Our resources are finite and we all need to do more, with less,” they said. "Digitalization, IoT and the combination of the real and the digital worlds are game changers for meeting these challenges, as we continue our evolution to Industry 4.0 and beyond.”
Enterprise Mobility
5G in the enterprise is well under way with carriers combining edge and cloud capabilities with public sector innovations and enterprise use cases, according to Mobile World Congress officials.
“5G is powering business transformations with private networks improving efficiency, innovation and security,” Mobile World Congress officials said. “As rollouts become more prominent, more devices, machines, and systems will become better and more intelligently connected. And in today’s business climate, smart connectivity is critical for a digital-first world.”
Responsible and Transparent Artificial Intelligence
AI is the current belle of the ball. But what happens when the clock strikes midnight? Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly be the topic du jour at MWC Las Vegas, according to IEEE's Fontana. Thanks to the universal usefulness of generative AI, the public is becoming dialed into how quickly AI has advanced in recent years, Fontana added.
“Future possibilities are endless, but so are potential limitations,” Fontana said. “I am expecting lots of discussions around responsible AI, including representative data collection, transparent algorithms, and responsible implementation.”
Related Article: Mobile World Congress 2023 Kicks off With Keynotes, Kinetic Sculptures and APIs
Will Mobile World Congress Answer: Is the Metaverse Still Hot?
When Fontana attended MWC Barcelona earlier this year, generative AI was just coming into the common lexicon. While there was certainly chatter about ChatGPT then, the real buzz at the conference was around the fun AR/VR products coming to market.
“I am curious to see if the excitement factor is still there for all things metaverse, or if AI has sucked up all the energy,” Fontana said. “Particularly, I will be seeking out new innovations around ‘practical AR/VR’ as I believe the metaverse will finally find its legs once there are more applications for manufacturing, healthcare, retail etc.”
Related Article: 6 Takeaways From Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2022
5G, 6G ... How Can We Improve User Experiences?
5G now accounts for almost two-thirds of North American mobile connections, which means the dialogue around 6G is heating up, according to Fontana. With all this newfound connectivity, how can we use connected devices to improve our day-to-day lives?
“Being able to stream movies faster is, of course, nice,” Fontana said, “but I am looking forward to seeing how companies are leveraging 5G (and eventually 6G) to make our consumer experiences more efficient and impactful — from how we access healthcare to how we drive our smart cars to how we shop at our local corner store.”
Mobile World Congress Las Vegas: A Glimpse into the Future
As the Mobile World Congress (MWC) roadshow descends upon Las Vegas, the tech world eagerly anticipates the insights and innovations that will shape our digital future. With a focus on 5G acceleration, the burgeoning Age of AI, the promise of Digital Everything and the evolution of Enterprise Mobility, MWC promises to be a melting pot of ideas and discussions.
Fontana's insights remind us of the rapid advancements in AI and the potential of the metaverse, emphasizing the need for responsible and transparent AI practices.
Stay tuned for more updates as the event unfolds.
Update: Adding Safeguards for Trustworthy Output
This year's show talked a lot about AI and whether we are moving too fast, according to Gloria Washington, IEEE member and associate professor of Computer Science at Howard University, who caught up with CMSWire on the final day of the show Thursday, Sept. 28.
"From my perspective, pausing new AI innovation and technology will certainly help already marginalized groups working in AI research get a handle on how to properly protect themselves and others," Washington said. "However, we can't pause AI because we as researchers can create new AI technologies that guard against nefarious AI technologies."
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Deep fake technologies and generative AI approaches that mimic human behavior, sound, and written speech, we agree are bad, Washington said. "But what if, in the very near future, generative AI approaches can learn from human-in-the-loop responses to determine when the AI output has gone too far?" Washington asked.
She cited two example:
- A deep fake technology is actively using a person's voice data to mimic their speech, but the AI intentionally embeds deficiencies or errors in the speech patterns to guard against audio that is too human.
- A chatting software every so often tells us that it is a chatting software and not human. Things like "I'm just an AI," and "I don't know. I'm an AI trained on imperfect data and I can be wrong" are tools to help us mortal humans know when to trust AI output, Washington added.
Essential AI Policy and User-Friendly Guidelines
Another theme at Mobile World Congress in Las Vegas this week? Policy surrounding AI is needed.
"We need to create laws that outline what happens if a technology or AI unintentionally or intentionally harms a real person," Washington said. "The software companies should be liable to understand how a person's life is affected by software that can and does make bad decisions resulting from deep learning technology."
Hybrid AI Reduces Generative AI Hallucinations#AIhallucinations – #AI models saying something false 🤥
— Glen Gilmore #MWC23 (@GlenGilmore) September 23, 2023
New study by Tidio: 86% of users surveyed have experienced AI hallucinations when using #genAI like #ChatGPT #Bard https://t.co/m5qSRDH4xC #GenerativeAI #HybridAI #MWC23 pic.twitter.com/CuFw4CFqV9
A Final Takeaway: Artificial Intelligence Is Complicated
As software companies create more and more realistic technology that mimics humans, there should be accessible, understandable and easily digestible guidelines around fair usage of that software, Washington said, highlighting another takeaway from Mobile World Congress. No more long software agreements that users only click through to download the latest app, she added.
"A software agreement should have sections on Fairness, Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability," Washington said. "Each section would use icons and eighth-grade language to communicate about each of these sections relevant to the purpose of the software. The legal mumble jumbo would be included in its entirety at the end, but only after the most important parts are communicated through icons, pictures and easy-to-understand roadmaps and signage."
So, as Washington concluded from her time at Mobile World Congress, in a nutshell, it's complicated. "But," she added, "if we pause AI technology it's clear that that would only hurt us as no one really pauses innovation. We have work to do on creating adversarial generative AI approaches."
