Everything is happening before our very eyes…

50 years from now, when historians will review the past, our time here will be seen as an amazing moment. This is the time when almost all the inhabitants of this planet are linked together into one large “thing”. In the next years, the large “thing” will become even larger, but we are alive at the moment when it first awoke. Future people will envy us, wishing they could have witnessed the birth we are seeing (and that we are nurturing). These are the years when humans began connecting and animating inert objects/pieces of knowledge by inter-weaving them through a digital continuum spanning the tiniest piece of artifact to the entire planet and ‘connecting the dots’ through artificial intelligence (AI) running on a computational cloud to provide actionable information to billions of minds.

About what the future may be like

There is much talk about what it will be like in the future, the things that will be available to us and what we will invent. We talk about the trends that we see today that will shape the future. What is rare is a discussion about the forces that create innovation and drive trends. What is rarer still, is clarity of thinking around those forces that are moving us forward into the future. A quick comparison between what is the now and what will be the future is

Assumptions

• Because the cycle of obsolescence is accelerating, nobody will have time to master anything before it is displaced/replaced by something new.
  • All of us will be endless newbies in the future simply trying to keep up with new technologies.
  • The things that we are doing/making today will be constantly, relentlessly becoming something else.
  • The availability of a powerful, ubiquitous digital continuum accelerates all other disruptions.

• Most of the important technologies that will dominate life 20 years from now have not yet been invented.
  • Innovations will come from think-out-of-the-box visionaries, (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos), not from big institutions
  • Everything we make today, will be made better by adding inter-connections with other things.
  • Our appetite for the instant satisfaction of our needs is insatiable (Shows, Youtube, Uber, weather forecast, train and aeroplane timetables).

Facts

• Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles.
• Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner,
  creates no content.
• Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory.
• AirBnB, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”
• The volume of creative work in the next decade will dwarf the volume of the last 50 years. Every 12 months we produce eight million new songs, two million new books, 16,000 new films, 30 billion blog posts, 182 billion tweaks, 400,000 new products. (https://publicism.info/science/inevitable/7.html) Wikipedia has created 35,000,000 articles in 288 languages. Every year, humans ask the internet 2 trillion questions.

An intrepid new world

• Powerful, ubiquitous tools based on the digital continuum will be for free in the future.
• Knowledge/insight will not be birthed in a standalone supercomputer but in small devices and then refined further on a billion computer chips in the cloud
• Digital twins will be dynamically built as needed for anything
• Artificial Intelligence will have a major role in our daily life, but it will be transparently pervasive to us:
  • AI will not be like the HAL 9000 of science fiction but like
    Amazon web services: cheap, reliable, industrial grade digital service transparently running behind everything and almost invisible except when it is not available.
  • AI-powered robots will take human and non-human form. They don’t think better, they think different.
• The job market will change

• Jobs that humans can do but AI can do even better: driving cars, flying airplanes, medical diagnostics, checking our home when we are away, managing production machines, automatic theorem proving, and so on.
• Jobs that only a human being can do: conceptualize, think strategically, ask “what if”, think outside the box
• The services will make the use of any asset more important than its ownership.

Predictions

• Individual visionaries will drive innovation (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Larry Page…)
• The largest, fastest growing, most profitable companies will be companies that will have figured out how to harness the work of the visionaries to deliver services addressing different aspects of sharing –including thoughts, emotions, money, health, time — that are invisible and unappreciated today.
• Anything that is shared today will be shared better, faster, easier, longer, and in a million more ways than we currently realize.
• Our hand-held or wearable devices will be equipped with sensors so that they will interact in real-time with other’s devices. They will
  not only know we are there, but they will also know who is there and whether that person is in a good mood.
• Digital continuum-enabled wearable virtual reality and augmented reality will allow living within a technologically created world (multiverse).
• The things that will happen will come from the emergence of new level of organizations/collaborations (e.g massive virtual social interacting which in turn is enabled by omnipresent instant connection between billions of people at a planetary scale) that did not exist before.

Conclusions

Everything we make/design/use in these days will be made/designed/used better by adding the insight we will gain from such a digital continuum and by improving and combining everything that has come before. This convergence will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet up until this time.