The Nature of The Future, Dispatches from the Socialstructed World, by Marina Gorbis, Free Press 2013 It’s not difficult to list the “time-honored” institutions – currencies, healthcare, education, manufacturing – whose futures are being written right now as we speak. But since we’ve all been through the Dot.com fiasco, and the 90s boom followed by the latest bust, The Mill Girl would have to say that the most prevalent emotion describing the Future is confusion. Research might identify trends, and specific events, like Cyprus, may illuminate paths being outlined, but the idea of putting all these events and numbers and social media moves together is…. Well, daunting. Not impossible, but daunting. It’s too easy to jump on a specific, limiting idea and ride it until it, like Dot.com did, implodes.
But Marina Gorbis, Executive Director of the Institute for the Future, does a great job of leading us through what she envisions for our future. For finance, education, health and business she points us what this futurists believes are the markers, the determinants of our future lives.
For example, in finance, she sees social networks and the web leading to funding platforms – crow-funding – that will all entrepreneurs, like in Kickstart.com, to appeal directly to their broad global web audience for start-up funding, as well as on-going product orders. What does this do to our traditional new product development protocols? Well, it changes the odds and the pay-offs for venture capital institutions. Like self-publishing, an idea that has become so attractive to authors, the new approach cuts out the middle-man making big percentages, with huge risk, and promises to pay creators higher percentages. Marketing and publicity, traditional advertising etc., is replaced by web-sources individual audiences that self-align like chaos theory robots, into specific interest groups. The smart producers mine those groups and build their own marketing and new product development responses based on what the web tells them. It takes Big Data and sometimes sensitive algorithms to do this, but as Proctor and Gamble proved, with the web anybody can do it.
In education, again, the examples of institutionalized product and delivery methods, are being modified – not necessarily 100% replaced – by web-based offerings, including what Gorbis sites as a very innovative approach, the Khan Academy.
In the healthcare business, the author sees a lot more activity coming on the high end web information gathering and structuring approach, as patients can discover and formulate their own personalized IT solutions. At the other extreme, however, with the financials on certain segments of the healthcare industry going south, it’s hard to understand where it will all resolve, in the US at least, with costs rising faster than revenues.
Gorbis’ Gordon Bell example illustrates how, given enough data bits and sensors, one can construct an entire image of a body’s daily activities, its interactions, feelings, struggles, in such detail that most Primary Care physicians would feel overwhelmed with data. Bell is a computer pioneer whose latest activities remind The Mill Girl of the work of photo realist painter Chuck Close. Bell and his buddies started a project dubbed MyLifeBits, in which he has digitized and saved his whole world – all his personal possessions – and his daily activities, thereby constructing a big and deep detailed archive describing Gordon Bell’s world. To continue to feed the machine, Bell wears a SenseCam around his neck that captures even more descriptive data. Bell expanded this approach by wrapping more psychological and health data captured through wearable devices such as BodyMedia to measure heart rate, energy use, and sleep patterns. Bell’s system supposedly sorts these piles of data bits into cohesive messages. That’s a huge advance because without powerful sorting mechanisms the data becomes either overwhelming, or it’s ignored.
Finally, in business Gorbis cites the kind of manufacturing anywhere, anytime approach that Morley and The Mill Girl predicted some 15 + years ago in The Technology Machine. Starting with electronics, but now moving into plastics and pharmaceuticals, we can drop a manufacturing box anywhere on the planet that has access to power – generator or solar produced – and crank out usable devices and products that push regionalized methods to the limit. As soon as Additive Manufacturing has solved the metals challenges, we’ll be 100% into the box-drop manufacturing era. We’re not there yet, but it’s close.
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