Chances are, I can name five tech devices that are in your home ? or pocket ? right now. That’s because about half of all U.S. households today own at least one television, smartphone, tablet and laptop/desktop.

Collectively, these five consumer technology product categories have represented more than 40 percent of industry revenue since 2011 ? and more than 50 percent in the past four years.

But the products we own and the ways we use them are changing.

According to the latest forecast from the Consumer Technology Association, the piece of the industry pie occupied by these product categories ? TVs, smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops ? is shrinking as ownership rates peak and product life cycles lengthen.

And while their growth over the past decade has largely defined the consumer tech industry, their revenue growth is slowing ? a shift that points to the future of consumer tech.

While only 63 percent of U.S. households own their own home, two-thirds own a smartphone, 9 out of 10 own a computer, and almost every one ? 98 percent ? owns a television. We spend almost 11 hours a day engaging with a screen in one form or another.

Our use of these devices is not only changing the ways we live and relate to one another, they are fundamentally changing our identity. Take smartphones, which have transformed not only how we communicate, but also how we commute (Uber and Lyft), choose restaurants (Yelp), grocery shop (Instacart), listen to music (Pandora) and connect with one another (Facebook).

The inflection point suggested by industry forecasts isn’t just one of growth and decline, but a substantial change in how we infuse technology into our core existence. The list of original, innovative, digitally connected products is growing, thanks to emerging tech categories such as wearables, virtual and augmented reality, digital personal assistants and a slew of internet-connected objects showing up in smart-home technologies.

Next year will mark the first year the “Big Five” consumer tech products represent less than 50 percent of consumer technology industry revenue. But, to be clear, this isn’t a sign of decline; rather, it’s an indication of opportunity and growth and adoption as consumers turn to an increasingly broader array of digital devices to redefine how we live our lives.

The installed base for these large categories has spawned remarkably diverse innovation. For example, smartwatches are today primarily extensions of the smartphone. With that comes a massive period of experimentation, as we try to make sense of how we want to integrate these devices into our daily lives.

As new-use cases evolve, smartwatches will do much more than simply complement our smartphones. It’s part of the reason we project continued smartwatch growth, with more than 12 million units sold in the U.S. this year.

Growth in stand-alone digital assistance devices such as Amazon’s Echo (“Hi, Alexa!”) or Google’s forthcoming Home will build in the years to come. CTA projects more than 1 million digital assistant units will sell this year ? about one-third more units than last year.

While the smartphone morphed into the hub for a number of connected devices, your voice is becoming the new interface as growing areas of tech integrate into these platforms.

Over the past two years, consumers are focusing more on monitoring and tracking the metrics of their daily activity levels. Today, 20 percent of households have an activity tracker, and our forecast predicts 60 percent growth in 2016.

The desire to measure data that is already there but not currently being captured is now beginning to emerge in other areas of our lives, too. For example, pet tech is expected to blossom into a $250 million segment by 2020 ? and this category was essentially nonexistent just a few years ago.

Technology is constantly, continuously reinventing itself, cannibalizing its own growth before something else can. We are now entering the next phase of growth, as we transition from the stalwarts that grew consumer technology into a $287 billion industry in the U.S. to the emerging categories that will propel us forward.

We’ve spent the past 15 years replacing analog technology devices with their digital counterparts. We are now turning to an even bigger endeavor. We are beginning to adopt digital devices where no analog corollary existed.

Herein lies the great opportunity and challenge for consumer tech. Digitizing elements of our lives that thus far have been completely untouched by technology is a tremendous opportunity with diverse, real-world problems to solve.

To drive adoption within this emerging tech paradigm, consumers need to clearly see the value propositions and the use case scenarios. And this is just the start. In the decades to come, consumer tech, such as autonomous vehicles and virtual reality will push us even further along an innovation frontier.

The opportunity is thrilling. The challenge is real. And the potential disruption to how we define ourselves and live our lives will be phenomenal.

Shawn DuBravac is chief economist of the Consumer Technology Association and the author of Digital Destiny: How the New Age of Data Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Communicate. Follow him on Twitter @shawndubravac.

Facebook Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to dedicate 99 percent of his Facebook stock towards improving the world was met with strong praise this holiday season. The resources will be used to promote programs related to “personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities.”

Everyone’s talking about “why” this donation is important: namely, helping future generations live in a better world than we live in now. But fewer people are focusing on “how.” The Facebook proceeds will be channeled through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, LLC ? a for-profit company with philanthropic ambitions.

As a business rather than a non-profit, the Initiative will have more freedom to put the power of private sector innovation to work in the non-profit world, such as making private investments, and promoting public policy issues. This is not the first time social good was driven by private sector innovation. Digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are changing how we interact, driving fundraising and donations for large charitable projects, and enabling us to coordinate efforts and produce social change. We saw these macro effects throughout the Arab Spring, in places as distant as Tunisia and Egypt.

The innovation cycle is also impacting forward progress on the micro level, whether it’s a solar-powered well that’s being installed in a small, rural, mountainous community in Chile, a mobile phone in Africa that helps rural farmers know what prices they should expect for their goods at market or the anytime/anywhere connectivity that can keep a fisherman safe from storms he wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise. What’s born in a lab in Silicon Valley can have a life-altering impact on people half the world away in the Jordan Valley.

That could help explain why multibillionaire Google co-founder Larry Page has said he wants to leave his fortune to Elon Musk, the forward-thinking innovator and CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. Leaving his billions to Musk would presumably ensure that research into “moonshot” projects akin to those of Google’s new parent company Alphabet ? robots, nanoparticles, self-driving cars, wind-energy-capturing kites, balloon-based WiFi and more ? would continue after he’s gone.

Musk is redefining the parameters of innovation. With Tesla, he’s changing the whole structure of the car, which allows us to do other things in the car besides focus on the road. And by redesigning the car’s power supply, he’s changing the physical layout of the car, too ? where we sit, where we store luggage. Musk refuses to allow the status quo to dictate the trajectory of tomorrow’s innovation.

Yes, Musk is making $100,000 cars that may seem worlds away from the extreme poverty that pocket the earth, but innovation doesn’t exist in a silo. Innovation permeates every facet of our life. In chaos theory, Edward Lorenz’s “butterfly effect” describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can produce very different outcomes in later states of that system. Musk and countless other private-sector innovators, are today introducing massive change into our world which in turn are powering and empowering massive change in the world that lays before us and before the billions of underserved among us.

The tangible examples of innovation’s near-universal influence are numerous. Mobile payments aren’t just for paying rent in Washington, D.C., or splitting lunch in San Francisco. They grow economic development in remote parts of the world by accelerating transactions, and improve safety by reducing the need to travel with large sums of money in dangerous locals. Booz Allen Hamilton estimates digitization of emerging markets could drive respective economic growth by $4.1 trillion dollars among the most underserved 3.9 billion consumers. The UN recently endorsed goals to eradicate extreme poverty over the next 15 years. Connecting the last billion people to the Internet will help end marginalization through banking, identification and the broad dissemination of information.

Our reliance on technological innovation for social change may be more important now than ever. Philanthropic giving has yet to rebound to pre-Great Recession levels, even as community needs expand, according to a report from the National Council of Nonprofits. This makes it hard for non-profits to keep up with demand, or upgrade and invest in their own technology and capabilities.

While there’s certainly a continued need and role for charity, innovations and technologies are lifting one person at a time, and in the aggregate, they’re lifting entire nations to a higher plane. Innovation isn’t helping just the most desolate among us; it’s improving the quality of life for all of us.

What may look on the surface like another business transaction ? just another company out for profit ? has the potential to do tremendous good. The great promise of innovation encompasses not only the predetermined outcomes or reasons for investment, but also all of the opportunity that is unleashed as a result of those investments and decisions.

Shawn DuBravac is chief economist of the Consumer Electronics Association and the author of “Digital Destiny: How the New Age of Data Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Communicate.” Follow him on Twitter @shawndubravac.

What started as a quiet evening one recent Saturday ended with a multi-hour visit to my local emergency room.

It was a relatively “vanilla” visit for a suburban ER ? I walked away with multiple stitches and a bruised ego. But I received one service I probably didn’t need, reminding me we still have a long way to go before the great potential of digitized medical data is realized.

I received a tetanus shot that I’m almost certain was unnecessary. However, all the evidence against getting the shot lay only in my memory. While there are likely several records of my last tetanus shot in multiple, siloed databases, not a single one was within my reach when I needed it most.

Of all people, given my career and the passion I have for the tech sector, I should have been ready for this. In an era when health and medical data are increasingly digitized, my information shortfall that night was easily and entirely avoidable.

“When was your last tetanus shot?” the ER doctor asked me. As I fumbled to recall with exactness the particular date, time and place, he jumped in, “Sounds like it was tonight.” Moments later, the nurse strolled in and administered the shot.

I’m almost certain I got a tetanus shot before I went to Nigeria in 2014…or was it when I went to Ethiopia in 2013? Despite my inability to recall the date with precision ? surely, it’s been in the past 10 years, hasn’t it ? that information is available somewhere.

My insurance company knows. The clinic or doctor’s office where I received the shot surely digitized the details. But that Saturday evening, we weren’t able to access any of this digitized information. I’m looking forward to the day, fast-approaching, when that changes.

We’re in the midst of a revolution in personal health, thanks in large part to consumers’ enthusiasm for wearable fitness activity trackers. Sales of health and fitness trackers continue to rise with an ever-expanding suite of wearables. Health and fitness apps and devices let us capture, collect, manage and better understand our own medical data in unprecedented ways. And when we can control our own health records, we are better informed when we go to the doctor’s office or the pharmacy or, in my case, the emergency room.

Technology also enables us to share diagnoses and test results, seek second opinions and shop for less-expensive care. The more information patients have, the more invested we are in our own care ? and the better we can serve as a “safety net” for our doctors’ potential oversights or lack of information.

Consider the extraordinary case of the woman who served as her family’s caregiver when her father was admitted to the hospital unexpectedly. Doctors wanted to give him a blood-thinner drug that their outdated records indicated he was taking. The woman pulled up her father’s medical records using an app, BlueButton, which showed that he had been off the blood thinner for two years, so none was administered. Shortly after being discharged from the hospital, the man cut himself badly in a fall. Had he been on that blood thinner, that fall might have resulted in much more serious injuries.

Digital data allows us to take an active role in our health?not just by delivering us the right information, but by allowing us to see where our lifestyle choices influence our health. For example, by tracking the number of steps I take in a day, my sleep and other measures of activity, I can see how going to bed thirty minutes later than normal impacts my activity level on the following day.

And data will fundamentally change doctor-patient relationship, too. Today’s doctor assessment largely relies on the same approach that has been used for hundreds of years ? the doctor asks the patient questions in an attempt to pinpoint the problem by intersecting the answers with her or his own knowledge and experience.

Of course, this type of discovery is fraught with imperfections ? our brains are analog and we forget the particulars of our health history. But good digital data never lies. As more of our health data is captured, stored and shared, doctors will become more efficient, our health care system will get better and we will be healthier.

In the ER down the street, with me sitting on a sterilized bed in a sterilized room on an otherwise quiet Saturday night, a doctor, a nurse and a patient could have changed analog behavior ? if only we had had access to digitized information.

Shawn DuBravac is chief economist of the Consumer Electronics Association and the author of “Digital Destiny: How the New Age of Data Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Communicate.” Follow him on Twitter @shawndubravac.

If you’ve spent any time on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, you can appreciate the hazards of the digital jungle. And even if you can fend for yourself out there, what about your kids? As well as I know the jungle’s safe paths, I constantly worry about my three sons as they begin to navigate social platforms.

The alternate world of our social media identities ? profiles, handles, accounts, “friends” ? has ruined reputations and ended careers, even lives. Adolescents and teenagers see this daily in the form of online bullying. For adults, the harassment usually comes from the anonymous vitriol spewed across the web. The question becomes then: Will it get better? Or is this simply the new normal of our increasingly all-digital world?

The Supreme Court recently heard arguments in the case of a man convicted of threatening on Facebook to kill his wife. The defendant argues that he never meant what he wrote online. The prosecution argues, in effect, that intent is not the issue. Rather, a reasonable person would have felt threatened and that should be standard for a crime committed. What would you ? or did you ? think if someone dropped a death threat on your profile page?

How the Court decides Elonis v. United States could lead the way toward stemming online abuse. The Justices may uphold the conviction, but as Justice Sonia Sotomayor said during oral arguments, “We’ve been loathe to create more exceptions to the First Amendment.” It’s a comment that might leave the floodgates wide open for online abuse, granting online bullies and trolls even greater latitude under the cover of the First Amendment.

No matter what the Court decides, it still would be exceedingly hard to prosecute online offenders whose abuse doesn’t include physical threats. Ask any teenager or adolescent if online attacks like, “You’re so ugly; you should kill yourself,” hurt any less than verbal assaults. The Court’s decision won’t stem the online harassment of adult victims either, whose tweets, posts or pictures done in poor taste can cause serious digital backlash.

The fact is social networks have changed the way we see ourselves, just as email once changed the way we communicated. Whether it’s bullying or harassment, there still exists a sense of comfortable anonymity in the digital-social world. We have our “offline” selves, who would never say such things to someone’s face, and our “online” selves, who can’t stop from piling on our targets. In many ways, it’s no different than the violent mobs of yesteryear ? people in a mob find themselves doing things they would never contemplate on their own.

But Court cases like Elonis are helping to erode this digital wall between our online and offline identities. Since its foundation, the Internet has revealed its unique place in society ? a place where people are free to be whoever they want. As the classic New Yorker cartoon featuring two canines puts it, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” This freedom has found its purest expression in social network sites. Yet the nature of the Internet is changing. We hardly even talk about “being online” anymore, because we’re always online through our smartphones and mobile devices.

And today, more and more of our cars are online. Our televisions are online. Even our clock radios are online. There will be a time in the not-so-distance future when most of our household appliances will be connected to the web ? and not in the way we now know them: using the Internet for one application, such as navigation for cars. They will be “communicating” with other connected devices, constantly gathering data through sensors on us, the users, and on our surroundings.

As the Internet evolves, so too will the way in which we see ourselves. Social networks will no longer be confined to our screens ? laptops, tablets or smartphones. They will be as seamlessly integrated into our daily lives as the Internet itself. In this digital future, it will be much harder to cyberbully and torment people online, because the anonymity of the Internet will give way as we circle back to a world of singular identity ? online and off.

The chasm that once existed between our online selves and our offline selves is shrinking. Given the trends of digital devices and the ubiquity of the Internet we see today, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks will no longer be separate places where our actions live without consequence. They will be as real as our brick-and-mortar reality, where civility and restraint still govern. “Welcome to the jungle” will no longer be a dire warning, but a digital whisper.

Shawn DuBravac, Ph.D., is the chief economist at the Consumer Electronics Association and the author of the forthcoming book, “Digital Destiny: How the New Age of Data Will Transform the Way We Work, Live, and Communicate” (Regnery, 2015). Follow Shawn on Twitter @ShawnDuBravac

What’s the secret behind the most successful tech startups? No, it’s not having founders with perfect SAT scores or sealing a dozen coders in a room with cases of Red Bull. The answer often has more to do with refining and capitalizing on an established idea, than with conjuring up something new out of thin air. Or, as Isaac Newton quipped in 1676, “Success is standing on the shoulders of giants.”

More than a dozen search engines were already online by the time Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page debuted their hypertextual search algorithm, redefining the browser landscape. Netflix reimagined the DVD rental market ? and upended an entrenched business with disruptive technology ? by cutting out the brick-and-mortar rental barrier. And Pandora found a way to let listeners customize their own radio stations, with or without advertisements, while still paying artists royalties to play their music.

So why, in a culture that praises disruptive technology and innovation, do policymakers keep looking for ways to regulate promising new startups into oblivion?

Over time, incumbent business models build protectionist walls to help stave off competition ? walls like regulatory hurdles that new competitive businesses have to clear before they can operate. We see this tension at play today as a number of innovative startups run into protectionist barriers supported by industry giants. Uber, for example, is fighting through one roadblock after another from the taxicab industry as the company struggles to gain market share in new cities. And as Airbnb offers travelers new options when they’re on the road, it’s in the crosshairs of city regulators and hotel lobbyists across the country.

When the costs of regulatory policies are diffused and the benefits are concentrated, the interests of the incumbents often begin to stray from the interests of consumers. Consider the 1984 Sony Betamax Supreme Court case, which pitted the behemoth movie industry against the emerging video recording device market. In that case, the court ruled that time shifting did not infringe on copyright law, and today the thriving home movie market rivals the box office, ultimately giving us more options for our Saturday night entertainment.

Often, benefactors have strong incentives to support protectionist policies, so they push for both greater regulation and enforcement. They seek to exclude new business approaches even when they provide consumers benefits like lower prices and more options. Just look at how TV broadcasters reacted to streaming-TV service Aereo ? entangling the innovative startup in a lengthy legal battle that also made its way to the Supreme Court. Ruling in favor of the broadcasters, the court’s decision ultimately hurts consumers, providing them with fewer choices for pay-TV service.

How do industry mainstays fair in highly-regulated economies? You don’t need to be an economist to predict what happens next. Research suggests businesses of all sizes operating in strictly-regulated environments are often less productive. A report published this year by the Mercatus Center found over a four year period the most regulated industries experienced 33 percent growth in output per person, and a 20 percent increase in unit labor costs. Does that sounds like good growth to you? Before you answer, consider that over the same period the least regulated industries experienced 63 percent growth in output per person and a four percent decline in unit labor costs ? yes, the cost of labor dropped with less regulation ? which almost always translates into lower prices for consumers.

Any time new businesses pose even a perceived threat to the current profitability of existing incumbents there is a strong urge to sweep these new businesses into the existing regulatory framework, often at the expense of consumers’ best interests. But it’s time for legacy businesses to stand up for themselves and look for ways to adapt and innovate, rather than cower behind over-regulation. A closer look at disruptive innovation over the last decade reveals a strong tradition of industries cropping up next to preexisting industries and bolstering the overall market ? for industry vets and startups alike.

There are dozens of examples of how industries have figured out how to pivot and adapt in order to compete with emerging technologies. Look at Makerbot’s 3D printer, which is disrupting traditional manufacturing while providing innovative solutions for producing items that are otherwise hard to get. In response, traditional manufacturers are finding ways to incorporate 3D printing technology into their own practices for product development and testing. Apple’s iPod changed the way we listen to and buy music, breathing new life into an industry plagued by piracy. And Amazon’s Kindle has changed the book publishing industry by revolutionizing the way content is brought to consumers.

If the research holds, these markets ? when not hindered by large regulatory burdens ? should show strong productivity gains and broadly benefit consumers. Technology can be used to make markets more efficient by getting products into the hands of those who will use them the most and gain the most from their use. In other words, it helps balance otherwise lopsided markets, where suppliers and buyers weren’t matching for any number of reasons.

The most successful startups haven’t stumbled upon an entirely new service offering ? they’ve simply found a better way to do something that’s already being done. Rather than fighting a tsunami of change and potentially drowning the disruptors that strive to improve consumer choice, incumbent businesses should find ways co-opt technological solutions and in turn produce change themselves.

Shawn DuBravac is the chief economist of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the U.S. trade association representing more than 2,000 consumer electronics companies. Follow him at @Twoopinions.

Advocates of digital privacy scored a major victory when the Supreme Court recently ruled that police need a warrant to search cellphones. In Riley v. California and United States v. Wurie, two cases that pivot on the legality of searching personal computing devices, what is becoming a tech-centric high court recognized not only the pervasive role technology is playing in modern society, but also the growing personal data that exists as we digitize larger swaths of our everyday lives.

With this decision, the court confirmed what most of us have known for some time: modern cellphones are more than just a technological convenience or device for making phone calls, they’re sophisticated “minicomputers” that hold for many of us “the privacies of life.” The risks of harm to arresting officers or destruction of evidence do not exist when digital data is concerned. Rather, the justices said, searching the “vast quantities of personal information” on a smartphone is an invasion of privacy that far exceeds the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches of a person’s physical property upon an arrest. Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts noted, “a cell phone search would typically expose to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house: A phone not only contains in digital form many sensitive records previously found in the home; it also contains a broad array of private information never found in a home in any form.”

Fittingly, the opinion comes in a year when, according to Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) research, smartphone sales will eclipse 1 billion units for the first time ever. Today, nearly two-thirds of U.S. households own at least one smartphone, and that figure is projected to climb to 71 percent by 2017 as new manufacturers like Amazon and Blackphone enter the market. For many of us, our smartphones have become extensions of ourselves. They hold our favorite songs, house our favorite pictures and are home to the names and addresses of just about everyone we love — even your background picture has a personal story to tell about you. Roberts was even more direct, noting cellphones are “such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.”

The court’s opinion reveals an unwillingness, in this realm at least, to simply extend pre-digital precedents to new technologies — especially when those extensions encroach on the fundamentals of our founders’ views on liberty. The ruling follows the unanimous 2012 opinion in United States v. Jones that law enforcement’s use of GPS-enabled devices to track suspects’ vehicles is considered a search. In that case, the concurring opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor held that police needed a warrant in order to attach a GPS device to monitor movements by a suspect’s car. The Court recognizes that the many capabilities of today’s technological innovations continue to unfold. More, the technologically-infused life is still in its infancy. Smartphones that double as GPS devices are just the beginning. Soon, wearable technologies like activity trackers and health monitors could provide the government with our most personal data.

Traditionally, the court has held that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding information they show to third parties, so no warrant is required to obtain that information. But today’s technology is eroding pragmatic limits on law enforcement’s ability to track and trace us. Legal scholars believe that case planted a seed that could transform Fourth Amendment rights in light of modern technology.

In his opinion concurring with the court’s decision on cellphone searches, Justice Samuel Alito noted the court is not in a position to evaluate the implications on privacy posed by searching cellphones, considering the amount of information about the lives of Americans that can be gleaned by the government and private entities, and the fact that many Americans are choosing to make so much information available to the public. He suggests that lawmakers are “in a better position? to assess and respond to the changes that have already occurred and those that almost certainly will take place in the future” with legislation to govern the scope and limits of privacy rules involving modern technology. Regulators must take note of the vast ways in which technology will touch our lives in the future.

As technology enables the digitization of more elements of our lives, private information is becoming one of the key components in the market for developing devices that increase connectivity. The court’s opinion is perhaps the strongest legal defense of privacy in a world dominated by technology. And it comes at just the right time, because it’s not just our phones that are getting smart.

Soon, just about everything we touch will capture data about us. Our cars. Our watches. Our clothing. The fundamental privacies at stake in this ruling transcend far beyond phones. The Supreme Court needed to write its decision with the bigger picture in mind, and it did.

Ultimately, this ruling can arguably apply to the millions — and eventually billions — of physical objects that are being connected at an increasing clip to the Internet of Things. And whether the justices realized it or not, this court has now provided important privacy protections that will foster the continued, rapid technological growth our innovation economy demands.

Shawn DuBravac is the chief economist of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the U.S. trade association representing more than 2,000 consumer electronics companies. Follow Shawn on Twitter @Twoopinions.