The announcement that Google’s DeepMind has won the Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction challenge is important in a number of ways.
Being able to predict a protein’s shape from its amino acid sequence could massively accelerate the development of new medicines. Speaking to Nature:
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The phrase “customer journey” has become part of everyday business vernacular, bringing a customer-centered and design thinking perspective to the mainstream.
Customer engagement and intelligent automation company Pega uses the phrase “microjourney” to focus on the elements that comprise the customer journey. This is useful both in being able to design a better experience for customers, but also in optimizing each of those elements so they can be woven together effectively across situations existing and new.
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MIT’s Taskforce on the Work of the Future provides some of the most well-researched insights we have on the future landscape of work.
It has just released two very interesting reports: The Work of the Future: Shaping Technology and Institutions and The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines.
The latter report in particular provides deep insights and updated research on key factors driving the future landscape of work, culminating in a series of policy recommendations that should be required reading for politicians and government leaders.
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In healthcare the biggest – and very long overdue – shift is from reactive to proactive healthcare: instead of fixing people when they get sick, helping to keep them healthy.
This idea of shifting from reactive to proactive is also being applied to customer service by the very interesting enterprise technology vendor Pega , which pushes it further to frame “preemptive” customer service, avoiding any need for customers to seek assistance.
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I recently spoke at Tech: The New Era conference, which was part of London Tech Week, in a conversation with Kriti Sharma on the ethics of AI.
I had previously interviewed Kriti as part of the OFX/BBC Storyworks Where the world is moving podcast series I hosted in a very interesting episode on AI ethics, so I was delighted to have the chance for another fascinating conversation with her.
My core message was that we have critical decisions to make in how we use and implement AI. We must start by thinking through the ethical issues and potential implications of AI, and from that designing the future organizations that will in turn shape all of society and the role of humans in creating value.
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I was delighted to be a guest on Zanele Njapha‘s Future-fit Fridays podcast, with her dynamic style helping bring out some of my strongest-held beliefs.
You can listen to the interview on Apple or Spotify, or the full transcript is below.
Zanele opened by asking me about my practice of keeping a journal, following up by asking me if this was particularly relevant today. I agreed.
These are very challenging times for almost all of us and so this is a time when we can get value in reflecting, by writing and capturing our own thoughts
Yesterday the Sunrise national breakfast TV program featured brief excerpts from an interview with me highlighting two related key trends: Physical retail is going contactless, avoiding touch where possible, and online retail is using haptics to enable touch and feel at a distance.
In Jose Luis Borges’ exquisite story The Garden of Forking Paths he beautifully evokes the many different paths that our lives could take.
Every day we make choices small and large that lead our lives down a particular path, collapsing the infinite possible directions into the one reality we actually live.
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I often say that a trend-watcher and a futurist are very different things.
Trend-watchers see what has happened and implicitly assume that it will continue into the future.
Futurists uncover trends and consider the impacts of and responses to those trends, that could sustain, accelerarate, slow, or potentially reverse them.
In fact one of the most pertinent questions when observing a powerful trend is what could stop or reverse it.
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Fellow futurist Mark Pesce is an old friend. We first actually connected when he spoke at my Future of Media Summit 2008, but I had long before being inspired by his work, writing about Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), which Mark co-developed, in my first book.
We happened to live 100 meters from each other in Sydney’s Surry Hills for a few years, and for many years now our work and positioning as futurists and keynote speakers has been highly aligned.
I obviously had to interview Mark for The Virtual Excellence Show, and it was indeed a highly stimulating conversation. Watch the video, and see below for some summary points.
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