The Machine Economy offers us a tantalizing future, says Till Wendler, co-founder of peaq. Like when you are driving your electric car, the vehicle will not only find you a free space, but pay with its own wallet, ready for when you roll up. From tiny devices to robots and drones, machines will drive 70% of GDP growth in the global economy between now and 2030, according to PwC. The number of connected devices, known collectively as the Internet of Things (IoT), is quickly growing. Interconnected machines are taking over more functions across industries and in our daily lives.

Looking back, 2017 was a significant year for technology. Consider that at the beginning of 2017, Bitcoin was virtually unknown to most people, and Artificial Intelligence was something that they had perhaps heard of once or twice, but was still a concept confined to science fiction. Cloud computing was still untested to many people, and hardly anyone would realise how prevalent Bots would become a mere 12 months later. As you can see, if we have a similarly fruitful "rollercoaster" in 2018, we shall certainly be living in a more interesting world at the end of it! Previously on my blog, I used to make a few predictions at the beginning of every year, trying to figure out what the tech world would do over the next 12 months. It was more light hearted than anything else, and it's always funny to go back and see how wrong you were. On occasion though, I did manage to get a few right……So lets try and do the same for 2018.

At the beginning of this year, an IT system called "Libratus", based on artificial intelligence, beat four world-class players at poker. Long before this, chess-playing machines have already proven themselves superior to their human opponents. But it is not only the domain of games that is being taken over by artificial intelligence. In other facets of our lives, too, intelligent machines are making headway. Robots vacuum the house and mow the lawn by themselves.

In Texas, a child asks an Amazon Echo to "play dollhouse with me and get me a dollhouse?" In England, the words "OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?" in a Burger King advertisement trigger Google Home smart speakers to start spouting descriptions of the burgers. And sometime soon, your car may choose the best price for maintenance or an electric charge, as well as driving itself to the appointment. Welcome to the new world where intelligent machines, rather than people, make more and more decisions about what to buy, at what price, and complete the transactions without a middleman over a blockchain distributed ledger. This will mean massive new markets for everything from home supplies ordered via "smart speakers" such as Amazon Echo to electricity ordered by smart thermostats to replacement parts and raw materials purchased by manufacturing robots or optimisation algorithms for cyber physical systems of machines.