If you’re feeling bamboozled by the events of the last two years or so, you’re not alone.
Even those who do keep pace with our evolving digital reality can’t juggle all the balls at once, and there’s an increasing widespread uncertainty about the future in commerce and industry.
“Adapt or die” is the silent yet unanimous acceptance by business, as market disruptions of the last few years are assumed to be precursors to more of the same. The future is uncertain, and that’s the only certainty business today can bank on.
Be ready, that’s the motto.
However, there are a few prominent technologies that are currently the behemoths on stage, and which will define whatever content the future holds.
Talk to IT insiders like Mustard IT and you’ll get solid confirmation that tech tools are changing the face of human society. From infrequent innovations that allowed the new generation to adopt faster and smarter tools, the tech arena has become a bubbling cauldron, seemingly defining our future completely. We look to tech for tomorrow’s “wow factor” – but that’s going to be a problem, because there’s so much more to life than “wow”.
The one thing we can be certain of is that humans will build their projects the way humans do, allowing for some surety around what the current technologies will grow to become over the next ten years or so.
That’s more bad news than good, because – beneath the toys tech throws out and with which we beguile ourselves – lie uncomfortable truths.
Social media will have to fight to survive
At the fundamental level of human connection, social media is causing decay.
The studies to date that have shown us the dark side of big tech’s idea of social gathering will need to change. Companies like Facebook and Twitter will be fighting to maintain their hegemony, while regulators and citizens will be fighting to regain their humanity on social media.
New platforms are likely to emerge, and those alternative platforms will all rise on the back of their promise to eliminate the alienation and anxiety we currently experience on social media. That promise will inevitably fail, however, since humans can’t “gather” remotely.
That’s just not how human congregation works, sorry for digital life－ but it’s likely to be a back and forth for decades… and starting soon enough.
The pop psychology underpinning social media platforms today is flawed, but big money has never been good at admitting its mistakes and going back to the drawing board.
Hence, it appears most likely that new platforms will have to emerge (to try the same old tricks in a different way) before we simply get into our driverless cars and visit the people we want to socialize with – and ‘social media’ gets resigned to the scrapheap.
This all assumes people will push for principled living online (or otherwise) with all their hearts－the emergence of an internet morality－something else that’s unlikely to happen.
Unfortunately, morality doesn’t seem high on the agenda in our digital future.
Big shifts are coming to social media, but we’re unlikely to put down the poison.
Workers of the world unite… in unemployment
The workers of the world are in for a reshuffle, to use the euphemism so often employed to describe that a machine is taking your job.
What no one has had the guts to point out as an obvious truth, is that new big business has been shredding workers’ basic pay and workplace benefits for decades now.
Any decent chess player could tell you that as soon as the purchase price and long-term maintenance and replacement costs of a skilled robot dip below those of a human being, workers are toast.
Because tech was young and cool, it got away with foisting new models of employment on an entire generation, but those models look very similar to the old work-obediently-until-you-die model that made the industrial revolution so great, while also shortening humans’ lifespans in industrializing countries at the time.
You could afford nice new wallpaper for your home… until you died prematurely from inhaling poisonous fumes all day long.
Didn’t we get so much better than that early raw deal?
It seems not.
The old model has donned digital gear and it’s more brazen about big money staying at the top than ever before.
Smart robots aren’t just for manual labor, either
The largest (and most obvious) interface for smart robotics lies in making smart robots do what we do.
It’s a fair litmus test for robotics’ advancement; it’s easy to recognize intelligence at work when we ask that intelligence to match our skills and practices. In fact, AI housed in an alloy skeleton will eventually replace everyone currently performing manual labor, no matter the cautionary reassurances from various quarters.
If we think about how our innovations have evolved over the last 100 years, we can acknowledge that we’re not simply going to apply tech “just enough” to maintain a happy balance of ease of living and gainful employment for the masses.
The smart money is betting on one or two billion humans becoming obsolete within the next 50 years…
… and manual workers doing menial tasks aren’t the only ones at risk, either.
When cars drive themselves, planes fly themselves, and every linguistic and number function we employ in our human world is best done by a machine, a lot of people are going to have time on their hands.
It’s not all doom and gloom, just mostly
It’s being said that two trends will define our near future－automation and the customer experience.
When you consider how many people will no longer be customers since they’ll have no money – having been rendered jobless by AI and robots – that’s going to be an interesting scenario to follow.
It does make sense that those who somehow manage to remain active consumers in the disruption that lies ahead will indeed be fawned over, and their experience will be a high priority… likely because actively shopping customers are set to dwindle by a billion or two.
However, the problem with predicting what the future will look like is that it’s currently all owned by big tech. When you own half the world, you can pretty much predict the future because you’re going to make it that way.
On the plus side?
New tools can work for everyone.
If there’s a resistance to big business interests defining our future, it too can employ the tools of big business against it.
For every production line worker replaced by a robot, perhaps there will be some other hitherto unimagined upgrade available for that worker, a better future of more pleasant work, or perhaps zero work and all play.
Current tech is mapping out our future
Perhaps it will become trendy to “ditch big tech”, and market forces will humble current giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others.
Perhaps.
But if we look at what current tech is doing to prepare for its future, it seems likely we will be passengers – at best – taken along for the ride.
That might not be so bad as an outcome, because – at worst – we could be taken along as cargo.
