By Steve Wells, Rohit Talwar, April Koury, Maria Romero, and Alexandra Whittington

How might AI enhance the quality of our friendships and relationships?

Popular films like Her and TV series such as Black Mirror depict a future of intimate relationships in a high-tech world: Man falls in love with operating system, woman loves person she meets in virtual reality. The rise of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) may play a huge role in the future of our interpersonal relationships. One example of what this AI could look like is hardware that we could touch and feel, such as robots; another would be software, or algorithms that take on a persona like Alexa or Siri and can seemingly interact with us.

Beyond overused sci-fi clichés, there’s great potential for AI to increase the authenticity and value of real human relationships. Below are some scenarios of how AI might enhance the quality of friendship, romantic, and professional relationships.

Dating

Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but AI can be programmed to translate, helping circumvent missteps in love. Algorithms—as key matchmakers in the future of dating—might provide the support and information people need to extend the connection beyond the first date. For example, an AI personal assistant may give insights on how to approach someone for a second date based on information culled from the first meeting, the internet, and various digital databases. Soon, one’s tweets, Facebook “likes,” and circle of friends could be used to build our dating profile and then compile a fool-proof user guide to dating the other person.

Imagine a Netflix for dates, informing you of the right restaurants to suggest for a certain someone based on their biological profiles, DNA tests, or other obtainable digital data about them. How about narrowing down your choice of bars and cafes based on the probability of meeting singles with a certain Myers-Briggs profile? Whilst on a date, our AI assistant could be interpreting micro-facial expressions and suggesting underlying meanings and desires in what the other person is saying. The technology could also relay real-time video to our inner circle of friends—collating and prioritizing advice from them and dating guides across the web. We need never be lost for words or misinterpret a cue again.

Family

Robots used in caring for the elderly is a no-brainer in places like Japan where the population is aging rapidly and there is a shortage of caregivers. However, it is possible that AI will one day help us communicate and relate better with our elderly friends, relatives, and neighbors. Hearing and speech enhancement is a major area that AI will impact—in fact, teaching robots to listen and respond to human speech is an essential aspect of moving AI into our homes and workplaces. Facial recognition and reading body language are among some of the cutting-edge capabilities of AI that could enhance elder care.

It is possible that future AI programs will help us not just care for the older people in our lives in a superficial way; today we are familiar with the ability to harness technology for medication reminders, virtual doctor visits, and obtaining information used for at-home care. In the near future, AI might keep older people company in the absence of a caring adult, or help caregivers understand illness and injury with more empathy. In a more distant future, the ability to upload memories to the cloud could make the impacts of Alzheimer’s obsolete—AI could help patients recall past events and make sense of the present. Combined with virtual reality and augmented reality, we may reach breakthroughs with AI when it comes to understanding the aging experience and avoiding its pitfalls, such as loneliness, communication problems, and memory loss.

Friendships

In the age of social media, one can have hundreds of online connections with no real friends in sight in the “real world.” Loneliness is an epidemic, and surveys have reported that people believe the number of flesh-and-blood “friends” they can count on in times of need is decreasing compared to past samples. Technology does not have to alienate us from each other, though, hence the growing societal emphasis on the role of technology in enhancing humanity, not diminishing it.

So how could AI help us in our friendships? First of all, guarding special relationships takes tact and care that can be difficult for some people and at certain times during life. Various uses of AI, like voice detection, could help us learn how to treat a friend who calls to casually “say hi,” but whose voice holds fear or anxiety undetectable to the human ear. Friendships might be less private, but more authentic with such a technology. On the other hand, the art of the “little white lie” could be perfected by some device which could let us know when bending the truth might preserve a relationship. Conversely, how many friendships would survive a lie detector test enabled on every conversation?

Career

Could AI help you ask for a raise one day? It’s possible our digital twins, our futuristic personal assistants that mirror our thoughts, actions, and activities, might make appropriate suggestions along our career paths which help us get ahead. Digital twins might look out for us by comparing salary data in our fields, for example, providing both moral and evidential support to the big ask. Furthermore, AI-powered services could suggest, provide, and track professional development training to help instill confidence and overcome weaknesses.

As a job coach, AI might provide valuable assistance to job seekers as well as support people on the job to maintain credentials. Competition in the job market will be fierce once automation takes hold of a range of white-collar jobs. Artificial intelligence working to advance humanity in the workplace would be a win-win for organizations and employees alike. Career support is one application for technology that would enhance the human role in the workplace, while positioning AI in a manner which is not overpowering or threatening.

Ultimately the role of AI in the future of society is still to be deter- mined. Whilst futurists and other early adopters are busy talking  up the benefits of AI, new risks are exposed every day. For example, self-driving cars could reduce the number of lives lost in car accidents, and force repair garages and auto insurance firms to find a new purpose or go out of business. Algorithms that can predict start-up success rates are handy, but could they ultimately quash innovation? It’s fascinating to see the artwork created by a robot, but what about human creativity—and preserving those qualities that make us human? Given the profit motive, AI is already out of the bag. But how we use it and whether it is harnessed to enhance human potential are ultimately choices that we as humans have to make.

• What unexpected consequences could emerge from the application of AI to dating and relationships?
• How might the nature of family dynamics change with AI?
• Could AI level the playing field in the workplace if everyone is using it for career advice?

This article is excerpted from Beyond Genuine Stupidity – Ensuring AI Serves Humanity. You can order the book here.

Image: https://pixabay.com/images/id-4234828/ by geralt

By Steve Wells, Rohit Talwar, Alexandra Whittington, April Koury, and Maria Romero

How might the next wave of disruptive technologies change our notions of everyday life and “normal”?

Harnessing Tomorrow’s Technology in Service of Humanity

In our two most recent books, Beyond Genuine Stupidity and The Future Reinvented—Reimagining Life, Society, and Business, we explored how we can harness the potential of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and a growing range of other increasingly powerful technologies in service of humanity. Here we highlight examples of how robotics and connected devices in particular could change a range of life experiences—hopefully for the better.

If we could time travel 5, 15, or 20 years into the future, what would we see? It doesn’t take a team of futurists to imagine a continuing evolution of intelligent, robotic, connected, digital, and social technology innovations persisting for decades to come. Design qualities such as automated, smart, digitized, and autonomous are likely to define the future tools we’ll see across key societal domains such as business, manufacturing, retail, service, agriculture, military, healthcare, leisure, entertainment, homecare, and even sexbots. At the same time, we have to be concerned that constant surveillance, “technological omniscience,” and “control at a distance” are some of the key features of the coming waves of gadgetry that could put seemingly god-like powers into the hands of mere mortals.

In practice, reality is never as mythical or perfect as we might imagine or desire. While exciting hyper-efficient and near magical macro images of the high-tech future captivate us, it is essential to stay grounded about the future as it might be experienced by the individual. Indeed, something that is less readily explored among most future predictions is a depiction of the way that disruptive technologies may actually affect daily life in the future, for example once they become normalized and somewhat taken for granted.

Across all our work at Fast Future, in our books, articles, and speeches, we have focused on a core theme of how we can and should retain humanity in the face of disruptive technology. This chapter explores the various ways that robotic and connected devices could disrupt the future of day-to-day life for the better. In our view, envisioning the possible products and services of the future means standing in the shoes of the people who would use them—not as fictional characters, but as real people with similar problems, dilemmas, emotions, relationships, and challenges to those we have today.

Understanding and seeing hypothetical future customers and employees as people experiencing some of the same universal human dramas that we do today, the future feels a little more relatable. Below is an excerpt from one of our futurist mind melds exploring 20 possible robotic and connected devices that might impact our lives between today and 2040.

Robotics

1. Personal Drone Security—Small drones may fly around a person’s property, constantly monitoring and guarding against security threats like trespassers or burglars. Additionally, they would alert owners of their guests’ arrivals, and be able to confirm the guests’ identities through video and facial recognition software.

2 . Autonomous Cars—Self-owning independent taxis will earn fares for each ride, sharing revenue with those who manufacture, service, and refuel them. The cars would work in self-managing, self-insuring networks—covering each other in the event of increasingly rare incidents. As autonomous technology grows ever smarter, accidents will only tend to arise when human-driven vehicles are in collision with autonomous cars.

3. Rescue Drones—Drones are already available that can target individuals in need of emergency assistance, and either airlift them to safety or provide them with vital life-saving equipment. These drones will become ever-more sophisticated and capable, with the ability to undertake more complex search and rescue missions and perform a growing range of medical procedures on the spot.

4. Autonomous Drones Monitoring and Repairing Infrastructure—Constant status monitoring via connected sensors and use of autonomous repair-bots may allow for continuous and pre-emptive upkeep of physical infrastructure. As soon as a sensor detects a pothole or crack in a bridge, the appropriately skilled fleet of autonomous maintenance drones and robots could be dispatched to repair the bridge before further damage can occur. A step on from pre-planned maintenance routines could be fully autonomous inspection drones. Equipped with AI-enabled technology, they would observe and report back on the target infrastructure: power lines, railway lines, hyperloop evacuated tubes, tunnels, and bridges. Links to automated or manual repair and maintenance teams would provide information to enable timely deployment of the correct repair assets.

5. Autonomous Drones for Crowd Control and Border Security—Autonomous drones with AI-enabled behavior recognition and infrared capabilities could patrol border areas and other sensitive security situations when there are risks to safety and the potential for social unrest. On identification of security breaches or potential anti-social behavior, the appropriate human or automated resources could be mobilized and deployed to counter the risk.

6. Digital Twins—After collecting massive amounts of data about a person through connected devices, robots would be able to replicate this person’s behavior and responses. In fact, your digital twin could attend a meeting for you and comment on your behalf. You twin could also capture and summarize the entire conversation including analysis of the body language and micro-facial expressions of the other participants and then report back.

7. Robo-Mummy—Continuous monitoring of health indicators would allow your devices to order what you need to prevent you getting sick. Your devices would try to nudge your decision-making toward a healthier lifestyle and what’s best for you.

8. “No Strings Attached” Sex—Future personal pleasure offerings could include customized multi-sensory virtual reality (VR) experiences coupled with sophisticated sex toys to enhance the range of multi-sensory sensations for the user. Over time the technology will advance such that the AI personality of your digital partners could be transferable between different sex robots and devices. Hence, your settings will be up to date in whatever interface you would like to use.

9. Personal Robo-Delivery—Small autonomous robots are already delivering fast food and mail—soon they could run daily errands while their owners work. As our grocery order or dry cleaning becomes ready, the robot is alerted and sets out through the town to pick up the orders from the local shops.

10, Droneloo—Single user droneloos could be summoned on demand—dropping into the midst of a crowd at an open-air festival, concert, public rally, or sporting event to enable those caught short to relieve themselves in privacy.

11. Self-Filling Vertical Farmer’s Market Bag—Smart, self-filling, self-unloading, reusable bags could communicate with smart homes and smart appliances to fulfill new orders from a local vertical farm or supermarket. The bag would fill itself with groceries at the point of origin, be delivered via autonomous vehicle or drone, unload on arrival, and be returned empty on the next delivery run. This could save time for shoppers, support local produce, and discourage food waste.

12. A Robotic New Year’s Eve in Trafalgar Square—Autonomous ambulances with in-vehicle robots could provide immediate first aid, carrying out more complex tasks under the guidance of remote video-linked doctors. Personal drones would extract injured parties from the crowd and transport them to the ambulance. Autonomous food trucks would use drones to deliver the food to the individual wherever they stand without having to leave their spot.

13. Robotic Farming—Our farms may become entirely automated. Intelligent robots would plan, plant, water, weed, fertilize, and harvest entire crops at the perfect time based on a continuous feed of connected sensor information. An apple at a grocery store may never have been touched by a human hand until the moment a customer picks it from the shelf or eats what their robo-assistant has selected.

Connected Devices

14. Life Automation—Connected devices and “life automation” apps could share your agenda and habits to plan the flow of your day. Music from your surround system would automatically keep playing in your headphones after you leave your home and switch to the in-car system when you get behind the wheel. The home heating system would turn on when you are ten minutes away. Food would be delivered or ready to eat minutes after you walk in the front door.

15. Never Alone—The days when you could get off the grid are coming to an end. Although you could be physically alone, your digital footprint, assembled through all the connected devices and sensors on and in your body and around you, could reveal your whereabouts in a microsecond. While this might seem an invasion of privacy it could reassure worried parents and help rescue workers find everyone present at the time of a fire or building collapse.

16. Automated Sharing—Sensors in devices and objects would identify opportunities to participate in the sharing economy, i.e. rent or loan out your stapler, motorcycle, hammock, or home for a day. Local internets and intranets could provide neighbor-to-neighbor sharing for free or via a charge included in local taxes or building fees. Robots would undertake deliveries and ensure building safety.

17. Environmental Monitoring—As more and more sensors are deployed, we can expect environmental monitoring to reach a new high. A person or their autonomous car may receive tailored alerts to avoid certain streets when pollution levels are slightly elevated in those areas. Walkers might receive personalized alerts to avoid specific parks as weather conditions have caused weeds to bloom that may trigger their allergies.

18. Unisex Utility Jacket—This totally safe and secure everyday fashion item would keep mobile devices connected using built-in chargers and a personal private data network. The jacket might also collect, convert, store, and distribute kinetic and heat energy from the wearer’s body and the sun to sell back to the local power grid.

19. Bathroom Blocker—This personal sensor detector and signal blocker would prevent smart toilets from testing urine samples for illegal and/or enhancement drugs. It would also detect and defend against bathroom hackers looking to steal our medical identity.

20. AI HR—Artificial intelligence is already changing the way HR operates. Perhaps we are edging toward humanless HR with AI-powered recruitment, selection, appointment, onboarding, performance monitoring, payment (employees, contractors, gig-bots), and offboarding based on automated needs and skills matching. The smart HR could also monitor us via all our devices and detect factors such as stress levels, distraction, the extent of social conversation we engage in, and when we are performing at our peak.

Conclusion

If we could interview our future selves, we would have many questions: What is the benefit of having a digital twin? What are the advantages (or disadvantages) of drone security? How do autonomous devices in our midst change the quality of life? What does the day-to-day implementation of biometrics feel like? Do robots do everything to feed us from farm to table? What do you consider “smart”? Does technology make life better? How is the trade-off between protecting privacy and trading it for access to smart goods and services playing out? We can only imagine what they would say.

• How would you design a robotic or connected device with the purpose of creating positive changes in society?
• How can technology developers and product designers understand the future needs of people for whom they are designing?
• What are the most useful or useless future products you can imagine? What new or innovative features might be in demand?

This article is excerpted from A Very Human Future – Enriching Humanity in a Digitized World. You can order the book here.

Image: https://pixabay.com/images/id-18510/ by Public Domain Pictures

Rohit Talwar and Alexandra Whittington

What are the critical themes that leaders in automotive and road transport management must wrestle with as they develop future strategies?

Developing Future-Aware and Connected Leaders

Tomorrow’s leaders in the automotive sector will face an unprecedented range of changes and challenges to navigate as they steer the organization’s path into the future. When those in road transport management look to leaders in the automotive sector for answers, we realize that they are so deep in the “I don’t know” stage of industry evolution that they cannot offer the clarity the former are seeking. Hence both sets of leaders need to be deeply connected to the world around them to ensure they are truly aware of potentially disruptive current and emerging developments taking place across the sectors and in the broader environment.

However, as we look to 2040 and beyond, there are few facts about what has yet to happen. In many cases, it is far too early to distinguish between what could turn out to be temporary fads and the more substantive ideas and developments that could turn into significant trends that will have a meaningful impact on the sector.

With an accelerating pace of change, developments can emerge, grow exponentially, and have a significant disruptive impact in a very short space of time. We cannot simply sit back and wait to see what might happen. As industry leaders, we need to ensure we are developing our anticipatory skills, scanning the horizon for signs of future change, and building the ability to act fast in evaluating and responding to the resulting future insights.

Good foresight has become a critical tool for conscious leaders. It equips us to make our own choices about how best to take advantage of emerging opportunities and protect against potential threats. Across every part of the automotive and road transport infrastructure value chains, we are witnessing a number of these developments and emerging ideas which need to be understood.

In the absence of hard facts, we have explored the ambiguous nature of these six forces to outline possible scenarios that, while low on certainty, would have a large impact on the automotive industry and, in turn, the highways management sector. These address the themes of:

• Concept to Production
• Digital and Connected
• Autonomous Vehicles
• Evolution of Business Models
• Societal Shifts, and
• Rapidly Evolving Markets.

Here’s a glimpse of the future of automobiles: What we might see, why we might see it, and when.

From Concept to Production

Nanotechnology, smart materials, and a range of new and emerging design and manufacturing approaches are starting to enter the automotive and road maintenance sectors. These could have a significant potential impact on the value chain from concept creation and vehicle design through to manufacturing, maintenance, and repair by 2020. These will offer super-aerodynamic automobile designs from highly flexible, cost-efficient, and easy to maintain new materials.

Boeing has introduced a new metal that’s touted as being “light as air,” for example. Lighter vehicles can be more efficient, and stronger—in this case, thanks to a design made of tubes thinner than a hair that mimics human bone structure. The material can absorb tremendous shock despite its delicate composition. Superior strength and efficiency could deliver cost savings across the entire value chain.

The car industry is accelerating the use of 3D printing as a strategy for saving time and money in producing prototypes, components, and entire cars. For example, Local Motors is using 3D printing to develop entirely new vehicle lines such as the Strati which has just 50 components. This also offers the potential to reduce transportation costs and repair time by 3D printing spare parts on site. There may come a time when it is cheaper to print, rather than fix, a part or vehicle.

3D printing could also allow us to reintroduce iconic vehicle designs of the past and manufacture them economically in very small quantities. In the medium to longer term, 4D printing could enable us to produce objects that can change their shape and properties over time. To avoid junkyards full of 3D printed scrap, the car industry is also increasingly focused on reusable or recyclable materials.

Digital and Connected

Digital transformation, the Internet of things (IoT), and advances in smart technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) are blurring the boundary between the physical and virtual world. In fact, by 2025, we can anticipate vehicles using these and other cutting edge technologies such as hyperconnectivity, blockchain, cloud computing, and drones to help drivers accomplish goals other than driving. Collectively, they could turn our cars into always on, highly connected, self-monitoring, self-managing technology platforms that can be updated as frequently as the app library on a mobile phone, so much so that more than 80% of the value of vehicles is expected to lie in their digital components by 2040.

Not only are vehicles becoming smart, autonomous, and communicative, but they are starting to combine multiple emerging technologies. Could automobiles become new spaces for conducting other business besides transportation? For example, manufacturers and resellers are looking at adding constantly updated flexible external display panels to cars to generate advertising revenues for the owners.

Ford is using drones to guide self-driving cars, so these vehicles can operate when there’s no internet service—taking autonomous vehicles beyond the city limits. Similarly, Local Motors has a car design equipped to launch a drone, which provides the driver with a bird’s-eye view of the landscape. Indeed, many of the advances coming into our cars will help recreate the automobile’s heyday when a Sunday drive might provide a few hours’ entertainment.

Autonomous Vehicles

A growing number of manufacturers are building fully or partially autonomous vehicles. Dramatic claims are being made about their potential to cut accident rates, improve fuel management, increase traffic flows, and reduce the number of taxis required in a city. As we move from partially to fully autonomous vehicles, by 2040 we could reach a point where all new vehicles and existing stock must be retrofitted with a self-driving mode. This could see human drivers criminalized, ostracized, or otherwise considered deviant members of society with driving becoming an anachronism.

Every manufacturer and a range of new entrants are pursuing the autonomous dream. Uber is planning a fleet of self-driving cars, with live trials in Pittsburgh and another recently halted in California, while its Otto subsidiary has powered the first autonomous truck. There’s already a self-driving minivan, a self-steering cruise ship, and self-flying planes. There are also self-flying cars and single person drones. Key goals here are lower accident rates, more efficient traffic flows, lower emissions, reduced car parking requirements, and shorter journey times.

The most drastic possible expression of the autonomous vehicle revolution sees a world in which human drivers are considered too dangerous, unpredictable, distractible, and probably uninsurable. A shift to completely self-driving vehicles would require a campaign to recast driving as the new smoking or the new drunk driving. However, while this likely to be unpopular with many drivers, like those other campaigns, such changes might ultimately be a good thing for society as a whole.

Yet, nostalgia is a difficult obstacle to overcome. The rise of the automobile played a large part in creating specialty facets of modern culture: car hobbyists, suburban communities, and road trips, to name a few, and these would not be possible without automobiles. Some people alive today grew up during this automobile revolution, and it plays a role in their personal identity. Now, some of those same Baby Boomers and GenXers may experience the emergence of a diametrically opposite worldview: humanity unfit to operate a car. Ultimately, it is possible that driving could become little more than a sentimental artefact of the post-World War II era.

Evolution of Business Models

There is gradual shift taking place from focusing on a vehicle as a one-off product sale to viewing it as a digital service platform, information center, and commercial portal with recurring revenue streams. At the same time, consumers are embracing concepts like the sharing economy with a growing interest in “usership” over ownership. Hence, a number of manufacturers now offer shared ownership schemes. Car sharing is possibly the most widespread new model with anywhere from 6 to 40 people sharing ownership of a single vehicle. This clearly has an impact on automotive sales revenues and maintenance costs as each vehicle is used anywhere from 5 to 50 times more than under single ownership.

For many, the rise of taxi services like Uber has enabled them to see their car as a revenue earning asset, not a cost center. This creates opportunities for manufacturers to explore the potential of sharing risks and rewards with the vehicle owner. Some are going so far as to suggest that by 2030 we could see the emergence of “self-owning” autonomous vehicles operating as taxis 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The idea is that those involved in producing the vehicle, supplying the components, refueling it, and servicing it would receive a continuous stream of revenues from the earnings of the vehicle over its lifetime.

Consumers also see opportunities for vehicle ownership to increase their income as well. By 2020, it could be common for vehicles to produce a paycheck rather than eat into it. Uber and Airbnb have normalized the idea of using personal possessions to make money, and that’s exactly what future car consumers might also sense: What they drive is not just a car, but an underutilized ATM. Peer-to-peer car lending via Turo, FlightCar, and other such platforms already started moving beyond the fringe in 2017. The idea of renting out your car when not driving it may mesh well with the gig economy, as a way to enhance income—or to simply justify vehicle ownership at all.

Within the industry, BMW and Toyota have introduced technologies that are enabling the re-use of electric vehicle batteries to charge the home. Elsewhere researchers have tested cars that charge while driving on specialized “smart” roads. These developments are budget-friendly, but are also bringing drivers one step closer to becoming energy producers rather than just consumers. Any vehicular advances that promote off-grid use, or generate and capture solar, kinetic, or any type of energy, are potential money-makers. Fascinating new business models could share the revenue from the energy generated from smart roads between all the players in the ecosystem by 2040.

Societal Shifts

A number of broader societal trends are also beginning to touch on the automotive world. Again, their long-term impact is very difficult to predict, and so we have to prepare for a range of possibilities. For example, we are experiencing radical changes in public thinking about the need for more integrated planning of the future of mobility and the value of smart infrastructures. The expectation is that transport systems and city infrastructures can be managed far better with lower ecological impact once the fully connected vehicle is communicating continuously with its external environment.

At the same time, a variety of “open source” car design projects such as OSVehicle, coupled with the reduced complexity of 3D printed cars and electric vehicles, are bringing down the cost and time to develop new designs. There is also growing societal acceptance of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter for innovation and Crowd Cube for raising equity.

Collectively, these societal shifts are enabling new vehicle manufacturers to test the market for new product concepts and raise seed funding without making major initial investments. The crowdfunding platforms are proving an effective route to raise finance and build brand awareness amongst a target market. A growing societal emphasis on environmental sustainability is also spurring the development of green vehicles and encouraging manufacturers to think about recycling and the “cradle-to-cradle” lifecycle of a vehicle.

We are experiencing radical changes in public thinking about the need for more integrated planning of future mobility with lower ecological impacts. By 2040 specific, regional, and local needs could displace “Big Automotive’s” monopoly, with cars designed locally using open source platforms such as OSCar—targeted at local residents based on usage patterns made evident via big data.

A major driver of future infrastructure is the smart city. All over the world, cities see the advantage of capturing data from every corner to run the city more efficiently and safely. Alongside these benefits there are also many risks, such as loss of individual free will and privacy. A major consideration in smart city planning is the balance between housing, industry, parking, and transportation, and that’s where cars come in.

By 2040, it’s possible to imagine that future smart cities will adopt very specific types of transportation technologies and approaches that best suit their specialized needs. Some will rely on autonomous cars while others may prioritize renewable fuel vehicles instead. Some may opt for both. Behavior modification around congestion, traffic, and driving in general are among a smart city’s key strategies.

Localized solutions to transportation may be preferred in some cases, particularly if there are ecological, political, or cultural reasons for a smart city choosing, say, large-scale public transportation over individual cars. Because big data is the key here, future smart cities will be automated to the hilt, and all decisions will be made based on what needs their particular data reveals.

Rapidly Evolving Markets

The rapid development and sizeable populations of many emerging countries are creating new vehicle markets, and several million new car buyers enter the market each year. From ultra-lost cost vehicles such as the Tata Nano through to extreme luxury, demand is growing. Competition is also likely to increase as local manufacturers continue to emerge in more populous countries such as China, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Today, in contrast to the developed world, emerging economies largely reject car sharing or self-driving vehicles and fully embrace the idea of individual car ownership. However, by 2030, advanced technologies should make it possible to leapfrog toward sustainable transportation, thus electric vehicles (EVs), renewables, and biofuels could well be prioritized. The demand for ecologically sound cars could reach a frenzy.

Whether BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China), MINTs (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey), or TICKs (Taiwan, India, China, Korea), the emerging world economies are where it’s at for all kinds of consumer goods, from refrigerators to air conditioners. However, the emerging economies of today can learn from the mistakes more industrialized countries have made. Many are gradually embracing the sustainable option—with some seeing the commercial potential. In fact, the developing world leads in the consumption of renewable energy, with Bangladesh, for example, being one of the worlds’ biggest markets for solar home systems.

Developing countries able to implement the right financial incentives may find that EVs ride the demand explosion for renewable energy. Currently, Renault has plans to roll out an inexpensive EV for China, which is where demand for EVs is expected to grow most. On the other end of the consumer spectrum, Jaguar Land Rover wants to station an EV hub in the UK. In the future, the leading economies—new and old—might need alternatives to fossil fuels, and the EV is one of the leading adaptations maturing societies have to choose from when it comes to using resources efficiently and cost effectively.

The Broader Global Context

These industry-level forces are also at play in the broader economy, where they are combining with a general thrust towards increased globalization, rapidly evolving economies, digital transformation, shorter and faster business cycles, and the rise of cyber currencies. In this broader context, questions are being raised about major issues such as:

• The role and purpose of business in tomorrow’s society,
• The importance of brands, design, and culture,
• The impact of automation on future employment opportunities,
• How to educate tomorrow’s workers and citizens? and,
• The implications of global markets and disruptive technological shifts on national identity, values, and governance.

A Future-Conscious Approach to Leadership Development

So, collectively, these forces of change are driving uncertainty—and fueling disruption, renewal, and transformation in every sector. In response to this “perfect storm” of change on the horizon, the automotive sector is being challenged to think hard about future strategies and how to respond to these forces both individually and through their collective impact. For both the automotive and Smart Highway sectors, the first priority has to be developing an effective “horizon scanning” function to identify and analyze the emerging changes and explore the alternative possible scenarios and their implications. Whilst the sectors may be able to influence each other’s decision making, a more reliable approach would be to prepare for a range of possible scenarios as hope is not a strategy.

For both sectors, new “conscious leadership” perspectives are required on how to deal with disruptive news entrants, how to innovate in design, manufacturing, and distribution, how to evolve business models and organization designs, and how to ensure effective stakeholder engagement in a fast changing world.

These transformative challenges are in turn raising fundamental questions on the future nature and capabilities required of leadership, and how to attract, develop, and retain the type of talent needed across the organization to ensure future relevance and growth. Our experience is that the best managed organizations are aiming to develop leaders who are prepared for a broad range of possible developments, opportunities, and challenges, and who are conscious of the different possible scenarios through which they may play out. We find that this deep sense of future orientation helps unlock the leadership drive, imagination, and personal capacity required to create a positive future for the organization.

Next generation leadership programs will need to explore a range of these emerging developments and the questions they will raise for tomorrow’s leaders. They should examine possible scenarios for how these developments might combine and play out. Finally, they need to generate and prioritize ideas on practical next steps to exploring the horizon and embedding future awareness in the toolkit of tomorrow’s conscious leader.

• How might automakers, smart city leaders, transport planners, and citizens work together to develop workable solutions for the autonomous era?
• What could the redefinition of driving and cars mean to the everyday family and its dynamics?
• How might these forces of change impact related sectors like the automotive aftermarket?

This article is excerpted from The Future Reinvented – Reimagining Life, Society, and Business. You can order the book here.

Versions of this article were originally published in GQ Magazine and Smart Highways Magazine.

Image: https://pixabay.com/images/id-4343636/ by Julientromeur

By Steve Wells, Rohit Talwar, and Alexandra Whittington

How can we raise the capabilities of business leaders to operate effectively in an AI-enabled environment?

The AI Leadership Challenge

As artificial intelligence (AI) enters the workplace, it is becoming increasingly clear that business leaders need new skills to rise to the challenges and opportunities presented by this disruptive new technology. Here we explore the nature of the new challenges and some of the key capabilities that might be required to respond effectively in a world where the old rules no longer apply.

Automation, Humans, and Brands

Firstly, let’s consider the changing nature of work itself. Right now, task automation is a key area for AI applications. Roles traditionally thought of as requiring a high-level human intellect are now being automated. For example, AI is now undertaking the work of share analysts and fund managers and doing the bulk of the scanning of medical research and past cases to determine the potential causes of a patient’s symptoms. Similarly, the legal profession is starting to see disruption through AI: automating searches for legal precedents and case reviews, creating and adapting contracts, predicting litigation outcomes, and organizing workloads.

While AI can boost efficiency, decision makers must be mindful of how this may impact brand identity and user experience—and where it is still critical to maintain human involvement. As similar approaches to smart automation are deployed by competing businesses, there’s a risk of us all looking the same, which in turn leads to commoditization. How firms stand out and maintain personality will be a critical consideration; the real pay-off comes from deploying the technology to unleash human potential and take our businesses to the next level—rather than simply automating what we have in order to reduce costs.

Although the technology is potentially complex, the critical success factor for business leaders and managers is to focus on the human dimension. How will staff respond when their jobs are changed drastically or eliminated? How will we mitigate the worries or stress that the introduction of AI may cause? What new skills might employees need? What responsibilities do employers have for those displaced by technology—some analysts predict that 80% of current jobs could disappear within 20 years, and the OECD estimates that for each job created in new firms and sectors, three or more will be eliminated elsewhere.

Defining and Learning into Leadership’s New Role

So, what do leaders need to understand and pay attention to as their organization embarks on the AI journey? What training may they need to make the most of the opportunities without ignoring the human factor? And who should lead the implementation of AI within the business?

It may be natural to think that the IT department should be the driving force behind business adoption of AI. However, the increasingly strategic nature of the decisions embedded in the choice to deploy AI may be seen as sitting more in the realm of the COO, CEO, or heads of business units and functions. Importantly, the learning to support these leadership decisions can be drawn from a multitude of different places. Attendance at industry associations, public conferences, and specialist events, can all facilitate learning and networking opportunities, and vendors can share their experience and advice.

Discussions with other organizations who’ve experimented with AI can allow us to tap into their knowledge and experience. The internet is also a rich source of short videos and explanatory content that can accelerate our understanding of AI and its potential impact on our sector and our customers. Finally, science and technology graduates can intern to bring technical expertise, create a resource to run rapid AI application experiments, and provide fresh perspectives to a firm in exchange for business experience.

By gaining a better understanding of AI and its implications it will be easier to make decisions about how narrowly or how deeply to deploy AI within the business. Today, AI can be used narrowly to automate a single task or apply rule-based thinking to a process or outcome, or it may be used to automate entire functions, e.g. customer service. How deep to take AI will depend on the goals, priorities, resources, and values of the firm and where leaders see the place of humans in service, innovation, and sales.

Driving Transformation

In an increasingly turbulent and uncertain landscape, individuals are naturally becoming increasingly concerned about their own prospects. There is a growing risk that firms will become over-reliant on technology and ignore the value of humans. In this environment, leaders need heightened levels of compassion, emotional intelligence, and social awareness. Honesty about potential workforce impacts is critical here if we want to engage staff in the transformation process. People want to know how they will be assisted through the transition, what will happen to their jobs, and how they will be supported if they are made redundant.

Smart technology will increasingly replace even complex roles; however, it will be some time before it can outperform humans in problem solving, creativity, negotiation, collaborative design, conflict resolution, and crisis response. Digital transformation initiatives typically fail as a result of paying too little attention to the human and cultural aspects of change and their place in the future solution. Hence, we need to think about how to invest in staff to maximize their potential with technology as an enabler, and how to care for those whose roles and departments are being disrupted by AI. Critically we need to focus on how to raise everyone’s digital literacy, so they understand the nature of the technology that is bringing about such change in their world and the possibilities it enables.

Training may be necessary to facilitate the transition to working in an AI-centric firm; something akin to cultural or sensitivity training to allow employees to become accustomed to working with, or being managed by, the new technology. HR may have a greater role to play in professional development; for example, a senior manager whose job is being fundamentally disrupted for the first time in their career may need a degree of retraining and emotional support. Hence, soft skill training may become more and more important as leaders and their teams will need to hone skills like sensitivity, creativity, verbal reasoning and communication, empathy, and spontaneity. HR or a new Department of Humanity can facilitate this aspect of personal development to ensure that businesses make the most of the interplay between human and artificial intelligence.

Overall, finding a balance between AI and the human workforce in their organizations will be key for every leader. In order to preserve the human element of your business in an automated climate, what will act as a key differentiator? Careful decisions about which roles and functions to automate should guide AI strategy—a simple “bottom line” approach will compromise the human element and could erode the firm’s uniqueness over time. It will also be important to show compassion and support to employees displaced by new technology.

Harnessing AI’s Gifts for All Humanity

The gifts from AI to society include smarter decision-making, the capacity to draw new insights from vast arrays of data, the potential for cost-saving replacement of humans, and efficiency-oriented high-volume applications which are simply beyond human capacity to execute in a meaningful time frame, for example scanning literally millions of websites in an information search. However, a sweeping implementation of AI without regard for the impact on employees would be bad internal PR at the least and could actually have devastating consequences in terms of customer appeal and local reputation for a business.

Ultimately the future of work and the future of society are deeply entwined. Our sense of place in society, our worth, our contribution, and our legacy are often predicated around our work. Anything that starts to disrupt that relationship between work and individual identity is going to have far-reaching impacts. On the plus side, humans have proved themselves to be remarkably adaptable. So, while the idea of working side by side with a robot, or being supervised by it, may at first be unsettling, a small step back reminds us that we already work and relate with AI and “smart” machines every day. For example, predictive text is a form of AI software which most smartphone users have adjusted to. When sending emails or texts on devices, or running an internet search, we expect, to some extent, that our intention will be perceived.

The AI companions that will join us in the workforce will be preoccupied with learning about us to try to make our lives better. Just as the predictive text on your phone doesn’t (normally) send runaway messages, and the internet search bar sometimes knows you better than you know yourself, we as a society should anticipate AI’s helpful (if sometimes at first clunky) role in the workplace over the coming decade.

• What is your organization doing to support leaders operating in an AI-rich environment?
• What leadership issues can you anticipate around the introduction of AI?
• What does determining the right human-technology balance mean in practice, and how can we determine what that should look like?

This article is excerpted from A Very Human Future – Enriching Humanity in a Digitized World. You can order the book here.

Image: https://pixabay.com/images/id-4427460/ by geralt

By Steve Wells, Rohit Talwar, and Alexandra Whittington

How can individuals, governments, and businesses prepare for the inevitable technological disruptions of the next twenty years?

Technology and the ways we use it promise to disrupt society and business in dramatic ways. Should we wait for future shocks before we respond—or are there practical steps we can take to prepare us for a range of possible outcomes and increase our resilience in the face of uncertainty? This article explores practical steps we can take now to prepare for the inevitable surprises.

Fundamental changes are taking place in the way organizations are using technology. Many are embarking on radical digital overhauls to enable them to deliver new offerings, enhance service, improve efficiency, and increase cost competitiveness. The process of digital transformation is likely to spread across the business world, and the harsh reality is that wide-scale automation will inevitably lead to job reductions across everything from mining and retail to education and the accounting sector.

In parallel, new sectors are of course emerging and creating opportunities—but no one yet knows if they will generate enough jobs to replace those displaced by technology. Some estimates suggest that over the next 20 years up to 80% of all current jobs could be digitized; others estimate that for every new job created, three to four could be eliminated elsewhere. The truth is that it’s impossible to know how the situation will play out in the next two to three years let alone with the waves of change shaping the next 20. A good example of this is the uncertainty over Brexit for the United Kingdom (UK) and European Union (EU). The situation is changing literally by the day and so it becomes almost impossible to think about what the longer term outcome might be.

The future could be a very exciting place where we tackle a lot  of current challenges in society and create new opportunities. New industry sectors such as laboratory grown food, vertical farming, autonomous vehicles, clean water technologies, renewable energy, and synthetic materials all hold out great possibilities for humanity. However, these businesses will be highly automated from the outset, and will require very different capabilities and a highly skilled work- force. The transition to these new roles will not be smooth for the production worker, shift manager, warehouse assistant, sales person, truck driver, or even lawyer whose jobs are at risk.

While there might be a temptation and tendency to “wait and see” because the challenges seem so immense—this could be calamitously risky. The change, when it happens, will cascade and accelerate rapidly, leaving unprepared governments, businesses, societies, and individuals overwhelmed and paralyzed. We believe it is far better to anticipate impending shocks and risks and act now to start putting society on a more sustainable footing, thus ensuring it is resilient enough to cope with the risk of large-scale technological unemployment.

We believe there are five fundamental actions that forward-looking governments should be taking right now.

1. Experimenting with Guaranteed Basic Incomes and Services – The firms undertaking job automation need customers to buy their goods and services. Hence, we see many in Silicon Valley arguing for some form of automation tax to fund the provision of universal guaranteed basic incomes (UBI) and services (UBS) to everyone in society. Some governments refuse to countenance the idea on ideo- logical grounds because they think it reeks of communism. However, others are recognizing that something needs to be done to avoid large-scale social decline and potential citizen unrest. Hence, many countries including Finland, Germany, and Canada are undertaking UBI experiments to understand the concept, assess the social impact, measure the costs, and prepare themselves while they still have time.

2. A Massive Expansion of Support for Start-Up – Creation People will inevitably have to take more control of their own destiny. One way is to create their own job or small business that is far more immune to risks of technology replacing humans. A massive expansion of support for start-up creation would both generate jobs for the mentors and accelerate the rate at which people can build new businesses and create new jobs.

3. Research and Development in Key Knowledge Sectors – A competitive economy demands cutting edge innovation. A safe society requires research and development on the materials and processes that will enable that innovation to happen without adverse social consequences. Not all R&D lends itself to assessment based on the return on investment—some just has to be undertaken for the betterment of society. Hence, expanding research funding and the number of research institutions and posts are important enablers of tomorrow’s job creation.

4. Rethinking Education at Every Level – Success in the future will require a smart, adaptable, and highly educated workforce. Indeed, many commentators and some governments anticipate that within a decade, most new jobs will require a graduate level of education as a minimum. How that is acquired may well look very different to today.

To survive and thrive we think and believe everyone will need to understand both the technologies and the mindsets shaping the future. There are lots of technological competitors to Uber and Airbnb: For the latter, their true point of difference is their mindset, a radically different way of thinking about how you deliver on customer desires without owning any assets or employing any of the service delivery staff. We also need to help people develop higher-level skills that will help them learn rapidly and transition into and between jobs that don’t even exist today. These skills include collaboration, problem solving, navigating complexity, scenario thinking, and accelerated learning.

Therefore, we believe we need a massive increase in the provision of free adult education using existing facilities at schools and higher education institutions for delivery—most of the teaching spaces are unused in the evening. We also need to reduce pupil-teacher ratios at school level to help with personalized support because the evidence is clear on the impact. This also means looking at the charges imposed on students pursuing higher education: We need a well-educated workforce to propel the country forward. Many other nations are providing free degree level education—globally, we need sustainable solutions that don’t leave future generations demotivated, disillusioned, and saddled with debts that they cannot repay.

5. Addressing the Mental Health Challeng – Across society, the scale and severity of mental health issues is rising. Large-scale job displacement will only increase that. An enlightened approach would be to provide far richer workplace support for those suffering mental health challenges, and to fund people to train as therapists while still working today so that they will be ready to help when the challenge becomes a major problem in two to four years’ time.

There’s clearly a cost associated with enabling all these activities, but we have to ask ourselves what the risks and potential costs of inaction might be. A short term saving on costs could lead to a very long-term increase in the cost of funding unemployment benefits and policing a society that feels let down.

•  What could be the long term societal and economic impacts of near term inaction?
• How should we prioritize what needs to be done? Where should we start?
• How can we shift the prevailing paradigm from return on investment to betterment of society?

This article is excerpted from Beyond Genuine Stupidity – Ensuring AI Serves Humanity. You can order the book here.

Image: https://pixabay.com/images/id-4344632/ by kellepics

By Steve Wells, Rohit Talwar, April Koury, Alexandra Whittington, and Maria Romero

With regular warnings that technologies such as artificial intelligence will replace most of the workforce, what could this mean for the future of employee retention, engagement, and productivity?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest manifestation of a techno- logical revolution that started over a century ago. Each phase of workplace revolution has stirred things up and disrupted jobs and the way they are rewarded. This time round is no exception, and the smart machines of this Fourth Industrial Revolution open up new possibilities for how we employ, engage, motivate, retain, and reward people.

Where Do We See AI Going?

As a result of AI and related exponentially advancing technologies such as cloud computing, new industry sectors are emerging, old ones are being disrupted, business models are being upturned, and workplaces and the nature of work are being reinvented. As a result, jobs, professional roles, management, motivation, and rewards are all being revisited to ensure they are relevant to the next world of work. Whilst disruption creates threats, there are also significant opportunities emerging in relation to employee retention, engagement, and productivity.

Employee Retention

With a life expectancy of 110 or more for today’s 11-year-olds, the idea of lifelong employment becomes more mythical by the day. Indeed, the definition of a job as one’s sole source of financial security might become obsolete sooner than we’d hope. Over time, and possibly quite rapidly, the proportion receiving universal basic income (UBI) might rise in comparison to those on salaries. We may rely increasingly on a governmental or corporate-sponsored fund that provides—potentially unconditional—cash payments to all. As employees become more sensitized to the job risks posed by automation, they could increasingly evaluate employers based on what provisions they will offer to those displaced by technology. This might include physical and mental health support, skills retraining, and assistance with small business creation.

As salaries and pensions come under threat, employees might use new criteria to size up their job prospects. For example, employers might offer to help create and maintain individuals’ social media profiles and show them how to monetize their networks and generate additional income streams—for example securing advertisers for the digital screen on the back of your jacket. Employers could also aggregate the personal data of those employees who have opted in, selling it on and sharing the revenues with those employees.

One emerging possibility is that employees would get paid extra for sharing their own cognitive assets. Uploading thoughts to a digital AI cloud, even authorizing company ownership of their mind, might become one path to a raise or job security. In this sense, AI offers new ways for organizations to commit to a code of ethics; some companies might have policies against such practices, whereas others might exploit employees or practice “thought slavery,” or reward such employee commitment generously. The company ethics guiding the use of AI in the workplace could determine the attractiveness of a place to work or invest in.

Employee Engagement

We’ve all seen the comedy caricatures of tech firms where the employee literally gives their soul to the firm—available 24/7, participating in firm-sponsored social activities, and being a total “brand ambassador.” With AI, this becomes more of a reality, with the technology in the workplace and on our phones monitoring every aspect of our engagement from the words we use to our purchase of rival brands.

The use of AI also means the future of employment may involve benefits unlike anything available today.

In this potentially disturbing future, insurance companies might look at a person’s data and digital assets as commodities; with so much transparency being provided by AI and the vast data it can amass and analyze, risk could become obsolete. We could literally predict every activity, choice, and outcome down to the most likely time, cause, and place of death. Health benefit providers would think differently since they could proactively monitor health and other behavioral factors. Furthermore, in the absence of cash from a steady life-long job, people could trade their own data to extract value from it, like borrowing from a pension. With AI, employee benefits should become more personalized—for example taking rewards in the form of discount vouchers and personal services.

Employee Productivity

With AI, some expect economic productivity to skyrocket. This is the main appeal to companies, of course, in the sense that it is much cheaper to write one algorithm than to support an office full of employees. So, will humans seek to enhance their minds and bodies to be able to compete with robots? One rather strange outcome might include enhanced employees using bionic, pharmaceutical, or digital augmentation to perform their job. Some companies might offer human augmentations, support groups, or inclusivity trainings.

Others might come up with “Augmentationships” or “Enhancementships” where candidates could try enhancements for a limited time. Augmentation could be an employment benefit and an attractive quality in a potential employee.

The Gifts of AI

The gifts from AI to society include smarter decision making, the capacity to draw new insights from vast arrays of data, the potential for cost-saving replacement of humans, and efficiency beyond human capacity. However, a sweeping implementation of AI without regard for the impact on employees could have devastating consequences. In the here and now, organizations might explore radical concepts like a pension designed around the phased automation of jobs, knowing certain work will be performed by AI in five to ten years. The best- case scenario is the future where AI emerges as a benefit to workers, organizations, and society; however, this requires careful planning as hope is not a strategy.

• What sort of approach should governments and companies take towards regulating or mandating the use of human augmentations?
• What might a company reasonably be expected to provide as a “safety net” for its employees?
• How can we best teach people about the value of their data and the potential commercial uses and misuses of what they share?

This article is excerpted from The Future Reinvented – Reimagining Life, Society, and Business. You can order the book here.

Image: https://pixabay.com/images/id-1588167/ by geralt

By Steve Wells, Rohit Talwar, and Alexandra Whittington

How might our workplaces and working environments evolve over the next 20 years?

A Healthy Workplace

A healthy workplace makes good use of the latest insights on human behaviors, wellness, and achieving sustainable performance, and deploys the cutting-edge work tools of the times. A wide array of ever-more powerful technologies is becoming part of the core design of organizations—from artificial intelligence (AI) to 3D printing, we now assume they will be part of the fabric of work and the workplace. So, what might these factors mean for the different possible futures of the workplace?

The Boundaries Between Us and Our Devices

The workplace of the future could potentially manifest many of the technological possibilities being developed today. Hence, there are a range of views about how the boundaries between us and our devices might play out in a world of super computing power, particularly in the world of work. Many future visions of work depict an entirely evolved workplace with smart buildings, natural spaces, and advanced architectural elements.

One perspective is that computing will disappear into our environment, and we will command everything by voice, gesture, and thought control. We won’t know where the images we are seeing are being projected from and we won’t know if the computing is being done by the table, the walls, or the photo frame on the desk. Computing in this scenario becomes ubiquitous, all-pervasive, and highly intelligent. It would be managed by our personal AI assistant to deliver what we want, when we need it, and will continually learn from and adapt to our behaviors and needs.

Another view is that most of what happens will be done in the cloud and then we’ll have small chip inserts that provide the local functionality, image projection, voice interface, and connection to the god-like system in the cloud. In many future of work scenarios, the notion is that information will be distributed and managed over the cloud via super secure intelligent blockchains. The whole environment we operate in is likely to be supervised by multiple layers of AI from our personal assistant through to the all-powerful, all-seeing global AIs that manage everything, protect against misuse of our data, and are on the constant lookout for other AIs displaying rogue behaviors.

AI and the Built Environment

In general, the coming wave of AI in business and society could impact the future design, use, and management of buildings in dramatic ways. Key design features, including construction, security, monitoring, and maintenance, could become coordinated by highly automated AI neural networks.

Will the future workspace be a central hub containing key people and activities that all parts of the organization need to tap into, for example advanced meeting facilities, resource libraries, perhaps a foresight center? In these tech-centric work scenarios, how much space might we need for these core functions? With the rise of artificial intelligence, some parts of the organization might run on algorithms alone with literally no human staff. Back office functions could be a prime focus for such an approach. For example, there could be deep automation of HR roles—particularly the management and execution of the recruitment process. Similarly, smart contracts might replace most manual contract creation and administration tasks (e.g. invoice payment), thus reducing the requirement for staff in such roles.

With so many viable visions of the future workplace in the social imagination, how do we plan and rehearse the future effectively? Rather than predict the way future offices will look or feel, let’s look at two different time horizons—five to ten and ten to twenty years hence—to examine how the futures could play out.

The Next Ten Years

Cybersecurity—How might our cybersecurity challenges evolve as work becomes increasingly automated? Cybersecurity risks will continue to grow as our reliance on technology deepens ever further. Integrating all our input streams into a single flow has huge elegance and efficiency advantages—it also makes us far more susceptible to be rendered cut off from the digital world by cyberattacks. Despite the ever-growing investment in cybersecurity protection, the hackers and cyberattackers will always be ahead of us because they can move faster, don’t care about failure, and are super clear on their goals—which can’t always be said about those they are attacking.

Future buildings and workspaces may need to place the need for a constantly evolving cybersecurity infrastructure at the heart of the design process and every aspect of the design of smart environments will need to be parsed through a cybersecurity filter before being approved. Architects working with AI experts, Internet of Things (IoT) specialists, and white-hat hackers might become an increasingly common design team model.

Artificial intelligence, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Tomorrow’s Workplace—Our expectation is that AI will be embedded in every aspect of our world—it already governs domains such as internet searches, smartphone applications, navigation systems, automated share trading, airline autopilots, and mortgage and loan processing. Augmented and virtual reality will play a part but will only go truly mainstream when the devices become unobtrusive and the applications become faster and cheaper to develop. Virtual reality/augmented reality might be built into the environment of certain spaces as an educational/collaboration resource. Walking VR tours might help with orientation, creativity, and relaxation—helping people explore labs, discovery processes, and nature trails from an enhanced VR space in the building.

A Living Building—The future workspace could become a “living building” with flexibility at its core. We don’t know all the intended uses or how they might evolve. Today we might need office space and an incubator for new ventures. Tomorrow we might want a freer flow of people through the space with no requirement to group by function or project. We may also want the capacity to mock up physical environments for the projects we are working on—from a retail street store to a classroom of the future.

Flexibility implies starting to think of buildings as large tents where the activities within can change over time. While we might start with relatively fixed structures, over the longer term we might start to see more use of pop-up 3D printed internal walls and offices, with 3D printing on site of permanent and temporary (project/experiment related) buildings and other facilities. In such an environment IoT sensors and information sources could increasingly be built into the building’s components.

Visual Technologies—We can anticipate increasing use of visualization such as on-demand imagery and holography. Facial recognition and smart glasses/contact lenses could, for instance, help us identify everyone we pass in the building and be used as an access control mechanism.

Green Space—Access to nature and natural light within our buildings is likely to remain a design priority. Internal garden and community work areas, use of renewable energy sources (wind, new generation solar paneling), and electric vehicle charging could all be integrated into the design. Integrated vertical farming might maximize use of natural processes and be located in public spaces and atriums in buildings. Vegetation could actually feed the occupiers plus provide a “green” working environment.

Individualized Work Environments—Light, temperature, sound, and imagery all impact how we work. The future workspace could have a strong focus on natural and environmentally friendly workspaces with adaptive personalized light and temperature control, freedom of movement, and spaces for multifunctional collaboration. Individualized flexibility could extend to sit-stand desks, movable walls, and support for seamless integration with remote workers, be that via the desktop or mobile robots.

A combination of IoT connected devices, sensors, and tools could monitor every aspect of employee productivity including keystrokes, time away from the desk, and social interactions. The technology could then intelligently nudge us in personalized ways that encourage productivity based on our performance history. The use of building interior design to evoke certain feelings and enhance moods and creativity, and the use of behavioral insights to motivate the workforce, could provide an important advantage in the new “cobot” normal of humans working alongside intelligent robots.

The Next Ten to Twenty Years

Creativity—In the highly automated future vision of work that many envisage, we could find workers largely doing highly creative tasks with a potentially greater sense of purpose and connection. In this future, the work environment would become the ultimate enabler of cross-boundary working and a place of inspiring beauty. There could be a focus on inclusivity in terms of breaking down boundaries of industries, organizations, and teams, combining digital and physical spaces seamlessly for hassle-free collaboration, creativity, and innovation.

Intelligence in Action—Over this time frame, we can expect even existing technology environments to be retrofitted at relatively low cost to enable on-demand provision of the capabilities required to do whatever the task may be, or to configure the technology solution from a range of plug and play models. Some firms might see the benefit of sharing their IT systems infrastructure with their local community as a support initiative and with their wider business ecosystem to enhance spontaneous collaborations. For larger businesses, conference rooms and support staff could even be shared with guest tenants, which could include technology start-ups, graphic designers, and consulting firms. When not being used as office space, buildings could be used for pop-up adult education courses, retail shops, and civic meetings. This strategy could help build a presence in the community, giving a local feel to a global firm.

Responsivity—We could see growing use of neuro-architecture to build work environments that incorporate biometrics to monitor employee well-beingJuly1960, read moods, and respond to people’s needs. Entirely personalized and adaptive control would help maintain people’s productivity in the organization by varying lighting, temperature, background music, ambient smells, and digital wallpaper displays according to the changing needs of each individual.

Should current promise be fulfilled, then next generation 4D printed smart materials would allow us to create structures that can change their shape and properties over time—such as space dividers tailored to the needs of each individual. Over this time frame we might also see sufficient advances in genomics to enable us to grow building structures. At the same time, DNA computing could see the fabric of the building storing data and performing computing tasks.

Autonomy—To manage all of these diverse elements, we can envisage the spread of AI-enabled buildings management systems, drone and robotic internal transport, and AI managing energy usage and optimizing consumption. Increasingly, autonomous building environments might also incorporate energy harvesting (e.g. piezoelectricity), kinetic energy capture from motion around the building, and intelligent, adaptive, “robotic” infrastructure components such as walls, windows, and cabling infrastructure. Collectively, these developments may remove humans from the facility management equation altogether.

As reality catches up with science fiction, many changes are in store for tomorrow’s workplace. Smart, human-centric, sustainable, healthy, autonomous, anticipatory, and even intuitive might be some of the terms which will be used to describe the future of workspaces and buildings. While the technological advances in particular may eliminate many jobs entirely, they will also enable a far more personalized, personable, and conducive work environment. As in every field of development, we have to make sure the trade-offs are always serving the best overall interests of humanity. We can help a maintenance worker retrain and find a new job. It is much harder to help someone recover from the impacts of a stressful or unhealthy workspace.

• What are the key workplace changes that would contribute to a very human future for you?
• What impact will—or might—smarter work tools have on daily work activities in your job or organization?
• How can the focus on smarter and healthier workplaces be sustained in the facing of increasing cost and competitive pressures on organizations?

This article is excerpted from A Very Human Future – Enriching Humanity in a Digitized World. You can order the book here.

Image: https://pixabay.com/images/id-329574/ by geralt

By Rohit Talwar

How can we make sense of the waves of change coming towards us and map a future path for our organization?

The Future of Business – a Response Framework

This article sets out a framework to help leaders respond to the ideas and questions presented in The Future of Business and then use the resulting insights to shape future strategy.

Trying to respond to every force, trend, development, and idea individually would be next to impossible. Instead, it may be more appropriate to use a framework through which to filter and interpret the myriad “future factors” of change and map out the preferred direction and operational strategy for the organization. There are ten key elements of this framework that help us analyze these future factors that will shape our business choices. Each of these elements is summarized below along with key questions we need to ask ourselves and our organizations.

Five of the elements focus on market facing decisions and behav­iors – mission, markets, magic, models, and message. The second five elements address internal choices we need to make – myths, mastery, muscle, mindset, and management.

Market facing decisions and behaviors

Mission. We are entering a world where everything we know and understand about the purposes of business and the mission of our own organization will be challenged. In the face of relentless change we need real clarity about what role we believe business should play in society and the mission of our own organization.

• What are the needs or opportunities we should be addressing in tomorrow’s emerging economic, societal, and business landscape?
• Who are the core stakeholders we should be serving?
• What are our ambitions and what would success look like?

Markets. Developing a viable business proposition will require a clear understanding of the potential evolution of current and potential markets (products, services, geographies) and how customers might respond to these changes. It also requires a sense of how the evolution of adjacent and emerging sectors might impact our core offerings. We also need scenarios of how the market for talent could play out in the locations where we most need the brightest minds and most capable leaders, managers, and operational staff.

• How might the key future factors shape the behavior of current markets and customers?
• What new market opportunities could open up – how would customer needs differ in these emerging sectors?
• How might the needs, expectations and availability of talent change over the short, medium, and longer term?

Magic. As we automate our products and services, the risk of commoditization increases. The challenge is to ensure our offerings and service experience stand out from the crowd and create a “wow factor” for customers.

• What stands out about the brands that deliver us the biggest “wow factor” today – what makes their offerings and experi­ences noteworthy?
• How can we differentiate customers’ experience of our brand in tomorrow’s increasingly commoditized markets?
• Where might the biggest potential opportunities be to inject magic into our future product and service offerings?

Models. Profit-making can no longer be assumed as the prime objec­tive for every enterprise. Even the very need for profits and money are being challenged in emerging economic paradigms. Business models are changing – for example, greater emphasis is being placed on user­ship over ownership. Firms are looking to market-based solutions such as crowdfunding to validate and finance new product ideas. Greater experimentation is taking place in how we charge for goods and services with freemium pricing models, aggregated buying, auctions, pay with a tweet, and a range of other options becoming more common.

• What are the trade-offs between usership (rental) and owner­ship (purchase) in the design of tomorrow’s company?
• How might the adoption of crowdsourcing to test new ideas impact our approach to the development and marketing of future offerings?
• What experimentation are we doing around alternative approaches to charging for products and services?

Message. The internet and social media provide instant rewards for brands that back marketing promises with operational action. Customers are keen to see us deliver on our commitments in terms of product and service quality, customer experience, business ethics, innovation, employee welfare, operational processes, contribution to society, and the management of environmental impacts. An ever-more transparent future with increasing levels of scrutiny will reinforce the importance of alignment between promise and delivery.

• What are the critical values and beliefs we want our brand to be synonymous with?
• How can we ensure constant alignment between our innova­tion agenda and marketing messages?
• What role could our broader social commitment play in determining our “license to trade” in the eyes of tomorrow’s customer?

Internal choices

Myths. Every organization has a set of myths that are essential to its effective functioning. They enable us to make sense of the world and provide the stories that help simplify complex systems and influence the core operational decisions that guide our every action. These stories, worldviews, assumptions, metaphors, and mental models shape the way we do things internally. They also define how we view the operating environment and determine our marketplace behaviors.

• What are the core stories, worldviews, assumptions, metaphors, and mental models that underpin our current strategies and operating models?
• What new models and metaphors could help us make sense of the emerging environment?
• How should we evolve our current organizational mythology to help us reframe strategy, drive the resulting organizational changes, and navigate the emerging landscape?

Mastery. For the last 20 to 30 years, business schools and strategy consultants have emphasized the importance of developing the firm’s critical capabilities. A fast changing environment places even greater emphasis on ensuring excellence in the core activities that help the firm stand out against its competition. However, with ever-shorter and faster business cycles and unruly new competitors, the lifespan of our capabilities is declining. We have to reassess what it takes to win and act to ensure mastery on a more frequent basis. This implies that change management becomes a capability where being average could be mission-threatening. Given the central role of information and communications technology (ICT), effective management of ICT and the associated data assets also rise to the fore as areas where firms have to pursue excellence or risk being left behind.

• Which existing capabilities will we require mastery of to deliver our strategy in the markets we plan to serve in the future?
• What actions can we take to close any gaps between our current and desired strength in these capabilities?
• How will we decide on the capabilities to retain and develop in-house and those we should procure from external providers?

Muscle. Alongside refining internal capabilities, the most agile firms will act to identify and acquire new capabilities quickly. As the shape of next economy starts to reveal itself, many firms are already focusing on identifying and developing key new muscles. In a fast-changing world, such capabilities will include accelerated decision making, rapid execution, and ever-faster resourcing approaches to match talent to short-lived opportunities at speed.

• Where is the organization beginning to experience pain due to a lack of capability?
• What are the capabilities you most admire in the firms that seem to be navigating change most effectively?
• What steps can be taken to accelerate the acquisition and embedding of critical new capabilities?

Mindset. Throughout this book, the authors have emphasized the need for mindset change to embrace digital and exponential ways of viewing the world in traditionally linear thinking organizations. Leaders and managers in particular are being encouraged to develop the capacity to look ahead, see round corners, embrace uncertainty and complexity, and abandon long-cherished assumptions in the face of change. Seeing ourselves as players not victims, and learners rather than knowers, are becoming essential traits of organizations that are willing to embrace the future.

• How is the organization planning to facilitate the shift to more digital and exponential ways of viewing future possibilities?
• What frameworks are in place to explore, interpret, and act on the future factors that could impact the organization over key timeframes? (Twelve months, one to three years, four to ten years)
• How is the need for foresight, future sensing, and scenario plan­ning being embedded in training and development programs?

Management. Leading the organization into an unknown and potentially unknowable future will require fundamental shifts in how we lead and manage. An entirely new set of skills will be required to help deliver on our goals. These will include scenario planning, complexity management, cross-cultural awareness, collaboration, systems understanding, design thinking and extreme creativity. Understanding and responding to change will also require us to free up time and space for people across the enterprise to engage in serious research, analysis and choice-making about our preferred futures. These in turn require us to prune our currently overloaded “To-Do” lists. In their place we need “To-Stop” lists – encouraging “orgies of elimination” to tackle unnecessary complexity and kill off the reports, meetings, and processes that no longer add value.

• How is the corporate learning agenda being updated to reflect the skills required of tomorrow’s workforce, management and leadership?
• What is being done to drive the simplification of current activ­ities to reduce workloads and enable the business to respond faster to external stimuli?
• What new management and leadership models are being evalu­ated to help steer the enterprise on the next stage of its journey?

A point of departure

This book provides a range of potentially conflicting views, forecasts, visions and ideas of how the future could unfold for society and the businesses that serve it. We have deliberately avoided trying to package up a neat set of recipes and seven-step plans for creating your future. They simply can’t and won’t work in the complex and fast-changing environment that will unfold over the next twenty years.

The authors have deliberately sought to provoke, inspire, enthuse, and challenge our readers. We believe the most valuable role of these provocations is to stimulate the reader to explore the issues raised and resolve them in the context of their own organizations. The ques­tions posed at the end of each chapter and here in this conclusion will hopefully encourage and stretch you to think broadly about the emerging future and how your organization can survive and thrive in a rapidly changing reality.

This article is excerpted from The Future of Business. You can order the book here.

Image: https://pixabay.com/images/id-2945514/ by kellepics

Image Source: https://i.imgur.com/7UFHt4U.jpg. https://claudeai.wiki/category/ai-blog/

By Steve Wells, Rohit Talwar, Alexandra Whittington, and Helena Calle

From Watson to Sophia, who are the artificially intelligent robot personas of today, and what can they tell us about the future of gendered technology?

Gendered Technology—Humanizing or Stereotyping?

The potential loss of our humanity to soulless machines is one of the biggest concerns around the exponentially advancing technologies that are entering every aspect of human activity. The technology sector has tried to sweeten the pill with attempts to humanize the applications, chatbots, and devices they want us to embed into our daily lives. The issue here is that we may be seeing the replication of gender stereotypes and unconscious biases in the design of these systems, which could have massively damaging consequences for society if the process continues unchecked. A review of the current range of developments reveals the scale of the challenge ahead.

Siri. Alexa. Cortana. These familiar names are the modern-day Girl Fridays making everyone’s life easier. These virtual assistants powered by artificial intelligence (AI) bring to life the digital tools of the information age. One of the subtle strategies designers use to make it easier for us to integrate AI into our lives is “anthropomorphism”—the attribution of human-like traits to non-human objects. However, the rise of AI with distinct personalities, voices, and physical forms is not as benign as it might seem. As futurists who are interested in the impacts of technology on society, we wonder what role human-like technologies play in achieving human-centered futures.

For example, do anthropomorphized machines enable a future wherein humanity can thrive? Or, do human-like AIs foreshadow a darker prognosis, particularly in relation to gender roles and work? This article looks at a continuum of human-like personas that give a face to AI technology. As you read the examples below, we ask you to consider two questions: What could it mean for our collective future if technology is increasingly human-like and gendered? And, what does it tell us about our capacity to create a very equal, inclusive, and gender-balanced human future?

The Women of AI

One of the most important observations we want to convey is that the typical consumer-facing AI persona is highly feminine and feminized. There are several robots and AIs that take a female form. The examples below show the sheer breadth of applications where a feminine persona and voice are deliberately used to help us feel comfortable with increasingly invasive technology:

Emma: Brain Corp’s autonomous floor cleaner Emma (Enabling Mobile Machine Automation) is no chatty fembot. She is designed to clean large spaces like schools and hospitals. Currently, Emma is being piloted at various Wal-Mart locations, where the human cleaning crew is being asked to embrace a robot-supporting role—even though it may ultimately replace some of them. Emma washes floors independently using a combination of AI, the lidar light-based remote sensing method, and smart sensors.

Alexa: Amazon’s Alexa is the disembodied feminine AI that lives inside a smart device. As a personal assistant, Alexa does it all. There are versions of Alexa for hotels, some that act as your DJ, and those that provide medical advice. There is another side to Alexa, however; one that secretly records your private conversations. This is a great example of how companion AIs embody the surveillance of Big Brother with the compassion of Big Mother rolled into one.

Siri: Like Alexa, Apple’s Siri is an AI-powered woman’s voice. The iPhone assistant is helpful and direct. You can find information, get where you need to go, and organize your schedule. Lately, Siri is attempting to learn jokes and develop more of a natural rapport with users. Can brushing up on social skills help virtual assistant AIs shed their reputation for being both nosy and dull?

Cara: In the legal industry, Casetext’s Cara (Case Analysis Research Assistant) is an algorithmic legal assistant that uses machine learning to conduct research. Cara is widely available to attorneys and judges, a great example of AI replacing professional jobs with a powerfully smart feminine figure. With Cara, we have to wonder if there are too many outdated assumptions about gender involved—why is Cara a legal assistant, and not an attorney like Ross, the world’s first robot lawyer?

Kate: This specialized travel robot from SITA, is an AI mobile passenger check-in kiosk. Kate uses big data related to airport passenger flows to move autonomously about the airport, going where she is most needed to reduce lines and wait times. Kate, like many AI programs, uses big data predictively, perhaps displaying something similar to women’s intuition.

Sophia: This humanoid robot from Hanson Robotics gained notoriety as the first robot to claim a form of citizenship. Debuted in 2017, Sophia is a recognized citizen of the nation of Saudi Arabia, and the first robot with legal personhood. Sophia can carry on conversations and answer interesting questions. But with her quirky personality and exaggerated female features, some might categorize Sophia as a great example of AI as hype over substance.

Ava: As one of the newest female AIs, Autodesk’s Ava seems to take extreme feminization a step further. A “digital human,” Ava is a beautiful and helpful AI chatbot avatar that can read people’s body language. Ava is programmed to be emotionally expressive. Her customer service job is to support engineering and architectural software product users in real time. Being able to detect emotions puts Ava in an entirely new league of female virtual assistants. So do her looks: Ava’s appearance is literally based on a stunning actress from New Zealand.

The Men of AI

What about the male personas? Probably the most well-known AI is Watson, the IBM machine that’s matched its immense wits against human opponents at chess and the trivia game show Jeopardy. Watson has also been used in cancer diagnosis and has a regular role in many more industries, including transportation, financial services, and education. When it comes to the masculine, it seems both brain and brawn are required. In many cases, male robots do the literal heavy lifting. Here are some examples of the jobs male-personified AIs currently do:

• Botler: A chatbot called Botler seems enlightened. He provides legal information and services for immigrants and victims of sexual harassment. Botler wears a smile and tuxedo with bowtie, appearing to be a helpful proto-butler-like gentleman.
• Stan: Stanley Robotics’ robotic valet Stan parks your car. An autonomous forklift, Stan is able to strategically fill parking garages to capacity. Does Stan reinforce gender-based stereotypes about cars and driving?
• FRAnky: At Frankfurt Airport you can meet FRAnky, a Facebook Messenger-based chatbot that can search for flights and give information about restaurants, shops, and the airport Wi-Fi service.
• Leo: Another travel pro, SITA’s Leo is a luggage-drop robot who prints a bag tag, checks your suitcase, then prints a baggage receipt. The curbside helper is strong and smart.
• Ross: The world’s first robo-lawyer. The phenomenal computational power Ross uses for legal research saves attorneys time, effort, and mistakes. The proliferation of data is the main rationale for the rise of the robo-lawyer. Human attorneys are expensive and time-consuming when it comes to the drudge work of digging up information; proponents of Ross say the AI saves 20-30 hours research time per case.
• DaVinci: Intuitive Surgical’s DaVinci surgical assistant is one of the most established names in the robotics field. Named after the artist Leonardo DaVinci, this robot is reported to be cutting hospital stay times, improving patient outcomes, and reducing medical mistakes. Like Ross, DaVinci suggests a future where even highly skilled professional roles could be at risk from robots, which could impact the large proportion of men in these jobs.

Technology’s Transformative Potential

These examples raise the question of how much does technology shape reality. The personal computer and the mobile phone, for instance, have had immeasurable impacts across society and changed everything from work and healthcare to politics and education. Think about all the things that didn’t exist before the rise of the iPhone: texting and driving, selfies, online dating, Uber and Twitter, these are just some of the new normal. The way we work, live, and play have all been transformed by the rise of the information age. Hence, as we scan the next horizon, there is a strong sense that AI will form the basis of the near-future evolution of society.

Overall, we find it interesting to ponder the human-like manifestations among AI companions. A close look at the people of AI raises many questions: What is the role of human intelligence in an AI world? What will the relationship between robots and people be like in the workplace and in the home? How might humanity be redefined as more AI computers gain citizenship, emotional intelligence, and possibly even legal rights? How can we avoid reinforcing unhealthy gender stereotypes through technology?

We don’t expect to get straight to the answers. Rather, we use these questions to start meaningful conversations about how to construct a very human future.

• What are the possible societal implications of AI personas reinforcing gender stereotypes?
• What are the characteristics of the AI incarnations you choose to interact with or avoid?
• Can organizations embrace the technology and at the same time question the underlying gender-based design assumptions in off-the-shelf AI tools?

This article is excerpted from A Very Human Future – Enriching Humanity in a Digitized World. You can order the book here.

A version of this chapter was originally published in Relocate Global.

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By Rohit Talwar and Alexandra Whittington

How might the evolution of blockchain technology transform business, society and government?

The Blockchain – laying the groundwork for a decentralization revolution

In recent years, the term “Bitcoin” has entered the popular lexicon and is already seen as many things. It is considered a currency, a cryptocurrency, an alternative currency, and even a social movement. But above all, bitcoin has been a vehicle for a technology that demonstrates how technological invention mirrors cultural change. Although finance, wealth, and commerce sit on the surface of the discussion, the more powerful subtext is the notion of the decentralization of everything. The underlying technology system known as the “blockchain”, has the potential to disrupt the middlemen, authorities, owners, and arbiters of judgment (bankers, judges, attorneys) who make the business and economic world tick. This chapter explores the nuts and bolts of blockchain technology and discusses its potential impacts for society, business and economies.

An uneven distribution of awareness

While some technologists, journalists, financiers, business people, and governments around the world are exploring and embracing the future potential of the blockchain, others remain blissfully unaware of its existence or potential. According to Forbes, the blockchain and Bitcoin were the subject of hundreds of new books in 2014, each promising to make a complex topic understandable and profitable. Yet a recent survey found that a majority (65 percent) of Americans has no idea what Bitcoin is, and of 500 U.S. retailers surveyed, none accept Bitcoin payment. Bad PR has not helped. As a currency, Bitcoin has been linked to underworld players like ISIS and organized crime rings, tainting the reputation of digital currency.

There is a growing understanding that the really valuable part of the story is not the digital currency but the underlying blockchain technology. Blockchain is regarded as important—very important—because it could bring about a similar scale of change as the internet itself. Blockchain’s potential extends beyond currency, money, accounting or anything financial. At its core, blockchain provides a public ledger maintained by the collective activity of its users – with no central servers or clearing authorities required.

Advocates are convinced that applying blockchain to a wide range of transactions and non-financial activities could lead to the formation of an entirely new economic system. They argue that the blockchain offers an incorruptible technology that serves truth and transparency while discarding oppressive centralized authority.

Defining the core components

To clarify, Bitcoin (capital B) can be considered as a communications protocol, while bitcoin (small b) is the unit of account. The blockchain is the general ledger of transactions. Despite the growing excitement and hype, the level of understanding of the basics of the blockchain, bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general is limited. There are several key terms that need to be clarified before we go deeper in the discussion on the future of blockchain and its potential applications and implications:

• Bitcoin (capital B) refers to overall system of digital currency exchange and the mobile apps and computer program that provide the wallet through which users buy and receive bitcoins.
• bitcoin (small b) is the actual currency which people exchange when buying and selling goods and services with bitcoins.

The Blockchain is a shared public ledger which maintains the record of all confirmed transactions. It enables user wallets to calculate their bitcoin balances and verifies that the purchaser in a transaction owns the bitcoins they are spending. The integrity and the chronological order of the blockchain are enforced with cryptography. Transactions are packed (encoded) in a block formatted to very strict cryptographic rules that are then verified by the network. These rules prevent modification of previous blocks (for example transactions), which would invalidate all subsequent blocks. The general ledger or blockchain is updated constantly with each new block of transactions and this list is shared with everyone who participates – giving very high levels of transparency.

Mining – The miner’s role is to ensure that blocks are not tampered with and the blockchain stays intact. Miners use a hashtag process that applies a mathematical formula to the information in each new block of transactions. This process creates a hash – a much shorter, seemingly random sequence of letters and numbers that is stored along with the block at the end of the blockchain. Each hash is unique and changing even one character in a bitcoin block will change the hash completely. Hence, it should be almost impossible to work out the underlying data from just looking at the hash. Each new hash also includes the hash of the previous block on the blockchain.

The hashtag process should also make it impossible to alter a block as that would change the block’s hash and every subsequent hash further down the chain. This would be visible to a miner who tried to run a hashtag verification on the altered block or those that follow it. The hash would be different to the stored one and instantly spotted as a fake. There is competition between miners to create the hash and effectively “seal off” a block. They earn 25 bitcoins each time they do so. This competition effectively keeps the network operating efficiently. The bitcoin network introduces additional steps in the hash verification process to prevent all of the bitcoins being mined almost instantaneously by the miners.

Smart Contracts – These are effectively computer programs which can automatically execute the terms of a contract. They eliminate the need for contractual clauses or people to get involved in their execution. Contracts could be made partially or fully self-executing and self-enforcing – giving higher levels of security to the parties involved than traditional contract law and potentially reducing the transaction costs. Smart contracts effectively monitor that the terms of a contract have been upheld and then process the payment. The can offer a range of other benefits such as identity and asset verification – proving who an asset belongs too and eliminating many potential legal disputes.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) / Decentralized Autonomous Corporations (DACs) / Corporations as Technology / Fully Automated Business Entity – These are effectively completely automated organizations which are governed by a tight set of business rules laying out exactly how things should be done, whether by humans or software programs. Decentralized autonomous agents (weak AI) would perform the core tasks of the organization – co-coordinating with each other in hierarchy free manner. “Instead of a hierarchical structure managed by a set of humans interacting in person and controlling property via the legal system, a decentralized organization involves a set of humans interacting with each other according to a protocol specified in code, and enforced on the blockchain.”

A DAC’s ruleset would typically be publicly auditable, written in open-source software and distributed across the stakeholders’ computers. Individuals or other DAC’s could becomes stakeholders by buying shares in the DAC or being paid in the company’s shares in return for providing services. Share ownership might entitle stakeholders to a profit share and further work opportunities. Ownership might also give you a say in how the DAC is run and the design of the operating rules.

Ethereum is a community-driven start-up project that uses the blockchain as platform for building decentralized applications and enabling the exchange of binding smart contracts – eliminating the requirements for trust and a central controlling authority. It aims to decentralize and democratize the internet. It could be considered a platform for DAOs.

Bitcoin: an origins story

Although the blockchain and bitcoin are promoted as transparent, there is also an enticingly concealed, secretive side to the story. Significant controversy surrounds the existence and identity of the actual bitcoin “inventor,” Satoshi Nakamoto. Argentine researcher Sergio Demian Lerner estimates that Nakamoto owns nearly one million bitcoins – an asset worth between US$150-300 billion depending on the prevailing price. Nakamoto has apparently not been seen or heard from in years. In 2014, there was a Newsweek scoop that claimed he was an unemployed Los Angeles-based engineer in his 60’s – but this was widely regarded as inaccurate. Several rumors and theories have been floated including the idea that Nakamoto is a pseudonym for a group of people, another person, or a conspiracy of the illuminati. A university study using analysis of Nakamoto’s writing concluded that the real bitcoin inventor was actually Nick Szabo, who developed bit gold – a predecessor cryptocurrency. A May 2015 New York Times article reports that many of those most deeply involved with Bitcoin still believe Szabo to be the key man. Without conclusive proof or a credible claimant, his identity may remain anonymous.

The rise of a social movement

As Vigna and Casey, the authors of The Age of Cryptocurrency, so aptly put it: “Nakamoto gave bitcoin its creation myth.” This myth, enhanced by the cult-like bitcoiner saying “we are all Satoshi,” allows bitcoin to be expressed as not just a technology, but a social movement that favors the deconstruction of Big Brother’s critical institutions of control—banks and governments. A Chinese pop economist and conspiracy theorist argues bitcoin is a means to prevent greed. In fact, bitcoin is programmed to stop generating new coins around 2140. The Bitcoin site explains, “The last block that will generate coins will be block #6,929,999 which should be generated at or near the year 2140. The total number of coins in circulation will then remain static at 20,999,999.9769 BTC (bitcoins). Total BTC in circulation will always be slightly below 21 million.” However, this is somewhat of a misconception since it is predicted that the profit created from transaction fees leading to this 21 million will drive a push to create new blocks that will become more valuable than the new coins being created. There may actually be no practical limit to the number of blocks that could be mined.

Blockchain’s rules-driven structure makes it particularly good at “if this-then-that” scenarios. For example, it is deployed within the central nervous system of ADEPT, an IBM-Samsung venture for the Internet of Things IoT. This is designed to enable scenarios where smart devices such as shelves can monitor stock levels, requisition goods from the stock room, and then notify staff to collect them. Through scenarios like this the blockchain has the potential to power a revolution of interactions between humans and things.

Images of the blockchain future

There are clearly several obvious practical present-day applications, and the inevitable range of future possibilities, being posited ranging from the apocalyptic to utopian. We will have to learn to co-exist with tomorrow’s DAO’s – which will be populated by distributed networks of intelligent agents or what some refer to as “Blockchain Thinkers”.

These agents will execute their rules in much the same way as program trading systems do today. Clearly there are inherent risks of such systems continuing to execute a fixed rule set irrespective of how the situation around them is changing. The more sophisticated AI and robot technology become, the wider the range of scenarios these agents could handle – and the greater the risk that they might reprogram themselves in unintended and potentially undesirable ways.

Blockchain brings to life the concept of the DAO / DAC as featured in Daniel Suarez’s 2006 novel Daemon. In the book, Daemon is a program which covertly gains control of hundreds of companies’ computers and “provides financial and computing resources for recruiting real world agents. . . ” Clearly the Decentralized Autonomous notion could be broadened out to encompass Applications (DAPPs), Societies (DASs), Government Agencies (DAAs), and Governments at the City (DACGs) and National (DANGs) level.

One concern today is that automation of current and future industries could render many jobs obsolete over the next two decades and lead to technological unemployment. But how will we be able to afford to buy the goods and services being produced by these DACs populated by robots and intelligent agents? One view is that governments and citizens might become automatic shareholders in these firms and receive profit shares. Governments might in turn use the dividend income and / or higher taxes on DAC profits to fund some form of universal basic income. More broadly, it is already being acknowledged that the DAO / DAC concept will pose huge social, ethical, legal, and regulatory challenges as we try to adjust to a world in which companies are becoming technology platforms.

The greatest impact on day-to-day life is most likely to happen in combination with other “smart” technologies such as AI, machine learning systems, robotics, and driverless vehicles. This would enable the intelligent automated end-to-end execution of decentralized commerce transactions and smart, dynamic management of public records and information in general. It would also enable the machine-to-machine (M2M) communication that will characterize the Internet of Things – covering the cycle from stock checking, through to ordering, picking, packing, and delivery.

Envisage the “smart” washing machines that orders more detergent, pays for it, organizes delivery and accepts the replenishment without any human intervention. There is a growing consensus amongst the blockchain innovators and analysts that this metamorphosis will become the norm in highly personal ways, with, “….Bitcoin/blockchain technology as the economic overlay to what is increasingly becoming a seamlessly connected world of multi-device computing including wearables, Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors, smartphones, tablets, laptops, Quantified Self-Tracking devices (i.e.; Fitbit), smarthome, smartcar, and smartcity.”This could revolutionize how human beings interact with objects in the future. Like electricity and telecommunications, blockchain’s role as a “backbone” for smart data transfer will be subtle, but essential. Should they succeed in their ambitions, platforms like Ethereum – and those that will inevitably follow it – could truly revolutionize the functioning of many systems in society from healthcare and aviation to commerce and banking. Indeed, they may even lead to the emergence of an alternative, more transparent and democratic internet.

Emerging issues

The emergence of blockchain and the platforms that enable it will also raise a series of fundamental questions, for example:

• What will replace the current models of governance that control commerce and the internet? Will we need them in a totally transparent environment?
• Where might new sources of unexpected risk emerge in a “blockchain world” that is still in its infancy and so poorly understood by all but a small group of pioneers and enthusiasts?
• What are the implications for the way in which systems are developed and the approaches to educating and training tomorrow’s software engineers?
• How might these technologies reshape our relationship to reality?
• How is privacy defined within these applications and in an M2M environment?
• What are the incentives for participants within such an ecosystem?”

Ethereum and smart contracts

Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin believes the technology challenges our old notions of control, arguing that “blockchains are not about bringing to the world any one particular ruleset … rather; they’re about creating the freedom to create a new mechanism with a new ruleset extremely quickly and pushing it out.” Ethereum combines both a form of currency and a platform for programming new types of transactional contracts. Ethereum’s cryptocurrency is called Ether and is considered a medium of exchange rather than a form of investment like Bitcoin. While Bitcoin allows the sending and receipt of money outside the formal banking system, the goal of the platform is go further by “. . . making it possible to set up binding contracts outside of the legal system.” Essentially, Ethereum provides a backbone network similar to Bitcoin, with a programming language that enables users to create their own tools. These tools can interact, create self-executing contracts and conduct the resulting transactions using Ether. Unlike Bitcoin, there is no limit to the growth of Ether as a currency. The currency was sold to raise funds for the platform and could be mined in a similar manner to Bitcoin. Already, companies are beginning to integrate Ether into their systems. For example, IBM’s ADEPT smart washing machine program uses Ethereum.Views differ as to whether Ethereum could replace Bitcoin – it is far too early in its development to assess its full potential.

The decentralization agenda

We are effectively seeing the birth of a completely new technology industry and one forecast predicts exponential growth in blockchain developers, rising from 40 in 2015, to 400 in 2016, and 4,000 by 2017. The decentralization revolution has been labeled with different names: “Cryptocurrency 2.0,” “Bitcoin 2.0,” “a Web 3.0 platform”. In addition to Ethereum, there are already multiple players with differing agendas pursuing decentralized solutions including:

• BitTorrent – offering decentralized file sharing
• BitShares – enabling decentralized currency exchange
• Blockstream – creating “sidechains”—i.e. smaller secondary blockchains
• Truthcoin – a form of blockchain for prediction markets
• Telehash – a decentralized encryption tool
• Maidsafe – providing distributed data management, including self-encrypting data

Perhaps the most disruptive impact will come if Ethereum delivers its goal to “. . . allow multiple organizations to build side blockchains with their own cryptocurrency and feed back into the main Ethereum chain”. This would effectively create a decentralized network of monetary systems all falling outside the control of central banking and legal frameworks – a concept that may be hard to imagine and a truly game changing moment in the information age.

Block chain applications – goodbye middlemen?

A range of potential uses of the blockchain have been identified including health care apps, medical records management and the retention of personal memories. The laundry list of ideas for blockchain includes crop insurance, gambling, reputation systems, decentralized social networks — and even an all-seeing, all knowing Skynet. In the next few years, blockchain technology could disrupt and eliminate a range of parties involved in almost every type of commercial transaction. From contract attorneys to retailers charging credit card transaction fees – the game could soon be up. A range of historically necessary business functions could cease to exist, while others will evolve into new roles entirely. Sectors affected could include:

Banks – Major financial institutions could be the players facing the biggest disruptions. The sector is already wrestling with the unsettling arrival of Bitcoin and a range of over 500 alternative currencies. At the same time Ecuador has launched its own digital currency and some suggest cybercurrency could eliminate paper cash within a decade. A range of blockchain-based FinTech (financial technology) ventures are now emerging which seek to remove banks from a range of financial transactions – speeding up the process and reducing the cost for the parties involved. In many cases these start-ups are receiving funding from the very banks they are seeking to disrupt.

Records Management – Anyone whose job revolves around checking and maintaining records is at risk of being replaced by a blockchain ledger that could do the work cheaper, faster, and error free. For example, blockchain could be used to coordinate public land databases, which would cut red tape when local governments are involved with real estate transactions. As we move towards the DAO model, blockchain could perform a range of administrative tasks. How big a threat could blockchain pose to human workers whose roles can be automated away as excess “middle men”?

Supply Chain, Inventory and Warehouse Management – Blockchain would enable the automation of transactions across the supply chain from ordering to delivery. The counterfeiting and theft of goods would also be much less feasible, and property ownership transactions would become more transparent and incorruptible. Blockchain is a technology that offers the potential to make fraud impossible. It would also provide accurate management of inventory records and reduce the spread of black-market goods.

Lawyers, Mediators, Arbitrators – Third-party objectivity could lose its edge as a service or product. In the legal system, “smart” contracts would reduce the caseload, while law practices would bill for fewer wills and legal agreements in general. Evidence-gathering may be seriously impacted by the decentralization and encryption of data that goes hand-in-hand with blockchain. Future blockchain-related categories of crime might include tampering with transactions, theft of cybercurrency and hash fraud.

Judges – The judiciary and other legal professionals will no longer be needed for a number of situations such as property and payment disputes, the execution of contracts, and the determination of measurable outcomes (like bets/wagers). One of the startups experimenting with applying blockchain to legal property issues deals with counterfeiting. Couple this with data from the internet of things – where the objects in a room could give evidence, and we are laying the foundations for a fundamental reworking of the legal system

Notaries – Documents and contracts, deeds, and other formal paperwork would no longer need to be notarized, since the blockchain could be used to authenticate them. A blockchain app called Proof of Existence is already certifying documents.

Policing – There are several Dapps (“decentralized apps”) in development which will see blockchain serve the citizen. For example, Sidekik is a mobile Dapp designed to end abuse of police power by gathering information during a brush with the law (for example GPS, audio, video) and preserving the evidence securely on a decentralized platform (Maidsafe). Even if the officer confiscates the suspect’s phone, the data would already be in safe storage that only the app user can access even if the device is destroyed. The advantage of Dapps might well be to “liberate us from the tyranny of large online operators,” but it could also serve a greater good of protecting citizens from unjust treatment by law enforcement with a form of undeniable proof safeguarded in the blockchain.

Electoral Governance – If public issues around trust of such new technology can be overcome, blockchain could pave the road for more effective and transparent democracy. Voting and consensus monitoring could become simpler and more dependable using blockchains – giving greater power to the citizen. It would also bring down the cost and complexity of running an election. In the words of one commenter, “the blockchain does not lie, cannot lie and will never lie” – this sounds like the perfect election monitor. One of the major “losers” in the blockchain technology future is anyone who wants to rig an election.

To suggest the extinction of the “authenticating” occupations like attorneys and bankers assumes a huge leap of faith by the public is possible. How likely is society to hand over entrusted roles to machines? One of blockchain’s biggest selling points is that it serves the greater good and higher purpose, “The blockchain turns the entire network into its source of truth. It’s a mechanism for us to collectively confer legitimacy on one another.” This, perhaps, is why Ethereum’s Stephan Tual calls blockchain’s potential a “decentralization singularity.” Truth is possible when no individual lays claim to it exclusively.

Conclusion

One of the few constants in 21st century life is rapid technological change. Nevertheless, the World Wide Web has been the dominant model of connectivity for twenty years. Now, the decentralized blockchain is upending that old “truth” with a new one—that centralized control authorities and their servers are not necessary for the next generation information society to function. In fact, Ethereum and their peers view blockchain as “the key to fixing deep-rooted problems that have plagued our online lives for decades,” one of which is the problem of authenticity and verification; another is that all information is centralized.

The anticipated potential for blockchain to revolutionize almost everything seems unlikely in the short term given the facts stated at the introduction to this chapter – including that most people don’t know what bitcoin is, nor have ever used it. It seems highly unlikely that a society with no understanding of the most popular cryptocurrency would suddenly be ready to allow all its banking, legal, and political systems begin to run on the same protocol. Yet futurists, developers, and blockchain converts the world over are betting big on the future of Ethereum and the other blockchain players to change the world – soon.

The fact that investment interest has spread from Silicon Valley to Wall Street suggests that we could see a growth in experimentation and uptake. However, turkeys rarely lobby for an early Christmas. Change is likely to be resisted in a variety of ways by those in power, those who run the threatened middlemen functions, and those who simply fear handing control to a technology they don’t understand.

The blockchain, the underlying thinking and the technologies that support it, are all in their infancy and the industry is taking its first tentative steps. Inevitably – as with any development with such wide-ranging potential impact – there are a number of issues to be resolved before blockchain can prove itself to the mainstream. One concern is the increasing fracturing within the upper echelon of blockchain decision makers over the question of whether the solution is one currency or many smaller, competing currencies. Some suggest this should be among the key topics for an independent research center devoted to blockchain. As with many emerging technologies, we may find that the entrance of bigger well-funded technology players will drive the development of standards and a solution that best fits their view of the world. However this would run counter to the democratic and decentralized ethos of the blockchain.

The success of blockchain depends on the ability to move and store large amounts of data. There are concerns here over the creation of a potentially massive blockchain. Every participant is effectively operating off the same blockchain central ledger – populated with thousands of addresses, this represents a lot of data. The key issue centres on the capability of the technology to manage large blockchains efficiently and process transactions quickly.

The risks coexist with hopes for a range of positive applications as discussed earlier. One analyst smartly observed, “Bitcoin’s blockchain was designed to handle the exchange of money, and retrofitting it to other uses requires some programming jujitsu and has inherent technical limitations.” This retrofitting will be a key indicator to watch as players such as Ethereum and others, seek to deploy blockchain to redesign the information age. Ultimately, there is no question that blockchain will push the commercial and political boundaries of the World Wide Web.

• What are the potential applications of blockchain technology in your industry?
• How could blockchain disrupt or transform your partner/competitor/supplier/customer operations?
• What might push blockchain and cryptocurrencies in general, into the mainstream? What’s the “tipping point”?

This article is excerpted from The Future of Business. You can order the book here.

Image: https://pixabay.com/images/id-2007355/ by geralt