Rather than a dystopian future, in the UK were clapped in the street during Coronavirus. Source: Damien Walmsley on Flickr
When my children were younger, if they heard bad news I would reassure them that there are many more good people in the world than bad people. This is one of the reasons we have so few police compared to the population.
Human Kind, written by Rutger Bregman in Dutch and then translated to English, takes this view a few steps further.
The book explains, in lavish and often repetitive detail, how we are naturally a good-natured species, and it’s the media that makes everything sound bad.
Although we are good natured in our actions, it seems there’s a part of our brain that is attracted to and remembers bad news over good news.
Home video camera sales have increased over 18,500% this month. Why?? And what will happen in December 2021?
Every year I write an article to predict technology changes in the coming year. The article is one of the most read pages of this blog.
Thanks to Jonathan who came up with an idea to write an updated version due to the Coronavirus situation.
When thinking about and writing these types of articles, there are two easy traps:
“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten”. Well said Bill Gates.
When thinking of the future, we base it on history. No one (except Bill Gates again) would have factored in Coronavirus when planning 2020. Richard Watson, a futurist author who I’ve mentioned several times on this site, calls these unthinkable unknowns “critical uncertainties”. In February 2020 we thought 2020 would be a great year, with a great economy and record UK employment. In April 2020 it’s easy to fall into the trap of 2020 & 21 being REALLY bad years.
So here goes…
Bob. In December 2021.
Bob’s alarm clock woke him up for work.
“Good morning Bob, it’s Friday 10th December 2021 and this is your morning briefing”.
This new, 5am alarm was still taking some getting used to.
“Here’s your appointments for today” his alarm continued.
Keep looking at the image and repeating “This person doesn’t exist.”
ThisPersonDoesNotExist is my favourite site of the year so far. It’s mesmerising.
Each time you look at the site, it generates a face from a very clever Machine Learning algorithm. And the algorithm, well the learning, only gets better with time.
The more you look at the site, you then start wondering:
If the facial components on ThisPersonDoesNotExist are from real people, who owns those parts? (E.g. my chin)
It’s time for my annual blog/ RSS feed clean up, and to share my preferred thought-provoking digital news feeds:
1. Chris Matts (The IT Risk Manager). Chris regularly updates his blog with practical advice for technology teams and senior managers such as “executives and transparency”, and he focusses his agile transformation articles on business managers rather than technology teams. That said, there are also a fair number of more technical articles about automated testing and development. https://theitriskmanager.wordpress.com
2. Doc Searls. Doc has several interests, mainly in privacy, photography and technology. Whilst I don’t agree with his extreme views on privacy and anti-advertising, his blogs and other feeds are very interesting to read occasionally. http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/
3. Google Webmaster Blog. there are several skills everyone in the digital industry should have, and one of them is an overview of search engines and how they work. The search engines are the key footfall, entry point, gateway and provider of revenue to almost every digital company. Stay up to date with Google on this blog. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/Continue reading Top 10 favourite digital blogs→
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There’s lots of publicity from technology companies like Google, Apple and Tesla about their vision of the self-driving cars. Time for some research on what traditional car manufacturers are looking at…
I’ve looked at the manufacturers’ websites and YouTube channels to get their official view – rather than a sneak preview clip from a cunning motoring magazine.
Technology in the car industry seemed to stagnate for a few decades until Google and Apple shook up the existing manufacturers. We can now see a range of innovative ideas and themes across the industry.
“Two, three or four years ago we could not have imagined building such a complex vehicle which is capable of doing so much.
“We are driving backwards. Absolutely incredible driving because it’s now like sitting in a train or a private Learjet.
I think that’s a good comparison.”
BMW – the 7 series
Not a concept car here… the latest BMW 7 series with remote control parking… it can drive into and out of a garage without anyone inside. Plus gesture control (i.e. touch-less) for the dashboard. Not sure about the fragrance control though.
The cover doesn’t exactly scream out “interesting stuff inside”
The latest Deloitte TMT Predictions 2016 event today was as good as previous years. The author of the report, and Deloitte partner, David Lee, is an excellent presenter (a sense of humour and perspective helps with publishing predictions).
Although the full report is available on Deloitte’s website, I wait until David’s event each year – he highlights the most interesting ones, and only then do I read the report. This year David chose to focus on 6 specific predictions for 2016:
The Future of Mobile at MobOS. It probably won’t be like an iPhone 4
I’m in Romania this week presenting a variety of speeches, including the keynote of MobOS entitled The future of mobile. It’s been a challenging speech to prepare for – and was considerably harder than I originally thought. Not least because in technology terms, “the future” means different things to different organisations. One organisation might think some future of mobile concept is way-out-there while another may have already been using it for a year.
I promised the audience to post the script of the keynote here…
I’m going to talk about four areas on the future of mobile – context, the number of devices we use, mobile user interfaces and the central hub concept. That will set some foundation for some ‘left field’ concepts that we have for the longer term future of mobile. Continue reading The future of mobile→
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Craig Polley from Digital Risk Services discussing Insurance and IoT at TechUK
This morning I attended a TechUK seminar “Insurance and the Internet of Things”.
There were some good speakers who raised quite a few points which I hadn’t heard or thought of until today. Clearly there are some leaders in the space, who are not insurers and are gearing up for a battle for new types of insurance products.
On stage at ITC 2015, and I look like I’m performing some sort of card trick
Earlier this week I was on a panel at the ITC (Insurance Technology Congress) 2015 event. My panel was dealing specifically with Internet of Things in the insurance industry.
The event was aimed at CIOs of large, mainly commercial insurance companies. The CTO and CIOs in the room spend their time and budget keeping the lights on – i.e. keeping their systems in tip-top shape.
These CIOs and CTOs are rightly proud of their systems’ stability and availability, and until now innovation is a distant second priority. However, new technologies and technology companies are entering the market, and this conference was a joining of minds to create a plan for the future.
