This morning I appeared on the Australian national breakfast TV program Sunrise in their ‘Ask an Expert’ segment, talking about the year ahead. Here is the 4 minute clip.
In the brief segment I draw on a number of the 12 Themes for 2012 I recently released. The key topics we discussed were:
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We recently launched our 12 Themes for 2012, shown below, in which the third of the 12 themes is ‘Privacy vanishes’.
One of the drivers of privacy vanishing is the rise of facial recognition. As the 2012 themes document notes, while Facebook has prominently launched its facial recognition technology, Apple and Google have facial recognition capabilities that they have not yet launched. The landscape is now changing.
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Towards the end of each year I share some thoughts on what awaits in the year ahead.
It is actually a lot easier to look years into the future than just a single year, as while we can readily discern broad trends, the major events in a year are usually unforeseeable, though they may express the longer-term directions. However as the pace of change accelerates, it is becoming a little easier to see the themes, if not the specifics, of the year ahead. My Map of the Decade shows the 14 ExaTrends that are shaping this 10-year period. Today I launch my 12 Themes for 2012, in conjunction with Future Exploration Network.
Below is the text for the 12 themes, though they are better viewed in the slides above, as the images used are an intrinsic part of the themes. Alternatively download the pdf of 12 Themes for 2012 (10.6MB)
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In Chapter 1 of my 2002 book Living Networks I wrote:
When did you last say or hear someone say “what a small world”? People have an unquenchable fascination with how richly we are connected, never ceasing to be amazed by the seeming coincidences of how one friend knows another through a completely different route. Yes, it is a small world, and growing smaller all the time. The well-known phrase “six degrees of separation” suggests that we are connected to every person on the planet by no more than six steps.
After explaining the concept, its origin, and how ‘small world theory’ is helping us to understand the nature of social networks, I continued:
From six degrees, we are moving closer to four degrees of separation from anyone on in the world, with the possible exception of a few isolated tribespeople. We live embedded in an intensely connected world.
That prediction is being borne out today. A paper just submitted to arXiv titled Four Degrees of Separation, says that a study of the entire network of 721 million Facebook users with 69 billion relationship links shows an average distance of 4.74 degrees of separation.
Source: Four Degrees of Separation. Note: it = Italy; se = Sweden; itse = combination of Italy and Sweden; us = USA; fb = all Facebook.
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A nice video titled On the Brink of a Networked Society, shown below, has just been launched by Ericsson. It includes a series of excellent interviews exploring some of the many implications and directions of a connected world, including health, industry structure, how we socialize, and far more. It’s well worth watching.
The single quote in the video that struck me the most was:
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I have recently done a number of interviews on the implications of Apple’s voice assistant Siri. To me, it’s looking very much like Apple has once again brought a technology to market precisely when it is sufficiently mature to impress. Voice control and ‘intelligent assistants’ are far from new, but haven’t been widely used to date simply because they haven’t been good enough.
The launch of Siri a year after the company was acquired by Apple has allowed them to develop what was already excellent technology to the point of being ready for the mass market. As with a number of other Apple releases over the last years, Siri’s launch is changing people’s perceptions of what technology can do, and opening many minds to new possibilities. We always knew we would eventually be able to tell our machines what we wanted them to do and have them respond. That era has begun. Though of course it still has a long way to go.
Today’s Sydney Morning Herald features is a nice article titled Siri: can you help make my company better?. It runs through some interesting insights on the state of predictive modelling, and closes with some quotes from me:
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I caught up with fellow futurist Kristin Alford last week, yet another first time face-to-face meeting after a long time interacting online. It seems most of the people I meet these days are people I know from Twitter.
Kristin pointed me to some of what her company Bridge8 is doing in creating animated videos about the future. I believe the primary intended audience is secondary school students, but they are excellent videos, well-paced, well-thought-out, educational, all in all very nicely done.
Here is their video on the implications of Utility Fog, starting with a segment on how to think about the future, introducing the idea of utility fog, and running through some of the possible implications. It’s a great study in futures thinking, and well worth watching.
The Smithsonian Institute and Pew Research Center recently did a survey of Americans on what they thought would happen by the year 2050.
Good created a nice infographic, below, summarizing some of the data. Click on the image for the full size version.
Image source: Good
The Smithsonian magazine has also created a nice animation from the results.
Here are some of what the American people believe will (or is likely to) happen by 2050:
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Arthur C. Clarke was certainly one of the most prescient people of the last century, anticipating many developments and in fact inventing the geo-stationary satellite on which much of the early media and communication revolution was based.
In this fantastic segment from a BBC broadcast in 1964 he confidently makes two predictions, one absolutely accurate, one completely wrong.
He says (from 1:45 to 3:13):
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I saw Connected: The Film by Tiffany Shlain last night at its Australian premiere, organized by Annalie Killian.
The first thing I have to say is that the film is absolutely fantastic. It nails how we as humans live an intensely interdependent world, and how our recognition of and response to that will determine our future. I think the more people that see it the better, so I dearly hope it will get a healthy – or even massive – audience.
I have to say I am not an independent reviewer, and that in itself is a highly relevant story.
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