2030 - An experiment in thinking about the future

Online events (sports, music, religious services) will be the site of most innovation, but work and education will also be impacted greatly. This in turn has repercussions for lots of other domains.

In 2026, learning, accreditation, and task completion will be vastly improved by agile provision of resources just in time. The data on us will be very fine grained. We will feel we have control over privacy, but not justifiably so. A private company SafID will challenge nation states in managing identity online, and it will be headquartered in a new jurisdiction, managed by Singapore.

Predicting 2026 (as opposed to 2023) means moving away from solid ground, from prediction towards fiction. Here goes: A new jurisdiction will be created by 2026 to serve the interests of the largest companies in data management, straddling East and West. Also, in 2026, there will be a widespread sense that it is worth experimenting with new, de-centralized ways of political decision-making, with more accountability to the populace – and pilot projects will be carried out in many places.

Ordinary citizens in China have experienced many obstacles to peacefully planning their lives. But since the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government has provided ever more structures within which to plan for the future. It's not rule of law - Western Style - but it provides some of the same features. Developing countries could provide similar avenues to the goal-directed life. 

Planning is ubiquitous - for individuals, companies, and governments. Planning is easier in societies facilitating predictability. In the Western world this is done through the rule of law. The Chinese Communist Party is attempting to provide the same by ruling in conformity with legal provisions. The goal-directed life satisfies humans deeply.

#thinkingaboutthefuture falls somewhere between two poles, the ordinary quotidian experience of planning, and the extraordinary experience of awe.

The ability to distinguish between the enduring and the transient is vital to any realistic program of social action in the present, John Tosh, in "The Pursuit of History"

We are going through something like a paradigm shift in models, from centralized to decentralized. And not too soon. Decentralized models would help us in #thinkingaboutthefuture

Decision-making is increasingly guided by data science. One needs good data, and a good way of combining data into a view of the world, a model of how things work. A "good" model that is fed "good" data yields "good" thinking about the future - and requires adaptation to that model in the now.

Identifying the most common argument (which I use myself): there is this pattern in the past, continue it into the future ... and that's what the future will look like.

There is value in knowing what will happen in advance - if that is possible. But that's not the only value.

We are going through a transition from the 20C energy system (fossil fuels, centralized) to a 21C system (renewables, decentralized). Such changes take decades, say from 1990 to 2040, just like the transition from steam engines to the electrical grid took 50 years: 1890-1940. The transition involves tens of thousands of actors in science and engineering, finance, politics, management, accounting etc.

We're locked into categories defined and maintained by administrations. As categories and administrations change, so do our opinions of people around us, and so does even our sense of ourselves.

The changes (and lack thereof) of companies, government, and international organizations. All according to the adage: institutions only ever change in order to avoid even greater change.

A whirlwind view of finance and politics predicted for 2023 (in 9 minutes).

Softening up of the employer-employee relationship, softening up of the school(in a building)-student relationship, slight decrease in commuting, substantial decrease in flying.

The term "content provider" will sound old-fashioned. The exciting new experimentation will be on the emotional registers of the active creator-consumer in an omni-medium where content and money circulate in new ways.

IT in 2023: better connections, AI, digital ledger technologies, and VR. Also: personal identity and avatars. And as usual: while trying hard to predict, the purpose is elsewhere, namely in exploring what the activity of thinking about the future does.

IT in 2023 part 1, but also the main insight prompted by David Rich: the object of this experiment is to explore the value in thinking about the future BEYOND guessing correctly or incorrectly. This value could indeed be in the realm of therapy, piece of mind, stimulation, premonition, or pleasure.

This episode is not an 8-minute monologue but a 20-minute conversation. David Rich, who has spent many years in marketing and strategy for high-tech, talks about the practice of planning and predicting, both professionally and privately. 

What might the impact of non-health historical strands be on on health by 2023?

In this episode I argue that we need clear terminology for thinking about the future. I use McAfee & Brynjolfsson's Machine, Platform, Crowd to tease out the difference between prediction and thinking about the future. Clarifying our terms could actually help (which I will attempt in a future episode).

Weaving the 24 other strands into the food strand. What might food look like in 2023?

My choice of 25 categories that are useful for thinking about the future. What would you choose?CatastrophesEconomic cyclesDemographicsPoliticsMedia: hardwareMedia: business modelsMedia: gamingEducationInstitutionsIndividualsFoodHealthWorkTransportationSupply chains including retailFinanceClimate changeMaterial inputsEnergyIT infrastructureAI (decision science)VirtualityAccounting and ledgersFunding of innovationThe periphery

The last of 5 episodes on history with a view to picking 25 appropriate categories for thinking about the future. Tech, bodies, hospitals, business models, workflows, regulation. Erratum: Machinery had been ALIEN to hospitals in 1896 - I said akin :(

Continuing to examine history as a heuristic for choosing 25 good categories for thinking about the future, we focus on tech driving industrial and political change, in turn driving educational change - as examples of interweaving strands.

In which we examine the history of electricity from the perspective of what one might want to pay attention to when thinking about the future. In particular, we discuss platforms and the seeming momentum that some technologies have, but also the perspective of the consumer, where the emphasis may not be on the virtues of the product itself but rather how it can improve particular customers' social relations.

Another look at the history of the internet with a focus on platforms as a heuristic for thinking about the future.

This episode is the first of two on the history of the internet. The aim is to think about the main strands of this history as a heuristic for thinking about the future.

Explores the point of the podcast and why it will number about 30 episodes of some 8 minutes each. It also gives an outline of future episodes:- appr. 5 episodes on 3 histories of technologies (internet, electricity, x-rays)- appr.3 episodes for picking the main areas that we need to keep an eye on for developing a future (eg. government, media, finance, food and health)- appr. 3 episodes for "predicting" 2023- appr. 3 episodes for "predicting" 2026- appr. 3 episodes for "predicting" 2030- appr. 10 episodes for writing stories that describe the future, most likely 10 obituaries written from the perspective of 2030- appr. 5 episodes for discussing meta-questions - these will likely be sprinkled throughout the podcast