Technology Tsunami Alert

Your guide to future technological change and how to emerge a winner

Eelco Lodewijks

• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781528985185
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Forecasting
• Index: Business

A glimpse of just how dramatically our rapidly changing future will impact our children, family, business and society, including how we can avoid pitfalls and choose a better future.
Change is now 'accelerating' so rapidly that experts estimate the world will probably see more change in the next 20 years than we saw in the past 2, 000 years. This book reveals, in easily readable form, the full breadth, depth and rate of technological change that we can expect to see in the next decade. Essentially, 'absolutely everything' in our lives is going to change so radically that we will hardly recognise our world by 2030–2035.
We all urgently need to grasp and understand the dramatic impact accelerating change, disruptive technologies and countless other trends will have on our children, families, lifestyles, businesses, customers, wealth, society and countries. This book reveals all this using the art of futurism.
The winners of the future will be those who choose to embrace change and adopt a new approach to life sooner rather than later. This book will help you with that process.
Futurism is the art/science of evaluating actual and emerging trends in all spheres of life, including the disruptive consequences of the convergence of countless technologies and trends for the next 10, 20, even 30 years, evaluating all the risks and opportunities, and then choosing a better future.

Chapter 1
Our Rapidly Changing World

Futurism is the art/science of evaluating actual and emerging trends in all spheres of life, including the disruptive consequences of the convergence of many technologies and trends, for the next 10, 20, even 30 years, evaluating all the risks and opportunities, and then choosing a better future.

Ideally, everyone needs to urgently embrace Futurism as you need to understand the impact accelerating change, disruptive technologies and other trends will have on your children, family, lifestyle, wealth, society, business, customers and country. The winners of the future will be those who choose to embrace change and adopt a new approach to life now, or by the latest 2025. I picked that date because 2030 could be too late. Regardless of the date, the longer we wait, the greater the risk that our future will be mediocre or even relatively regressive.

Technology Tsunami Alert will help you become “antifragile” so that you may prosper into the future. Nicholas Taleb coined this very important concept. Something that is fragile, breaks when things go wrong. Contrarily, if you are antifragile, you not only survive crises, you emerge stronger than before, which is the essence of “survival of the fittest in nature”. For example: If you adopt the right strategies you can make money during the next stock market crash, instead of losing it. This book will make you aware of the coming disruption and enable you to adopt strategies that will help you and yours prosper rather than suffer disruption.

Exponential Change

Few realise how fast our world is changing, but it is “critical” that you understand this. To put the “sheer power” of exponentially accelerating change in perspective, let us use an illustration. We can all imagine how far “30 steps” would take us. Now try to imagine how far “30 exponential steps” would take you, where each step you take is twice as big as the previous step, namely 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 paces and so on. By the time you complete the 30^th step, you will have taken more than a billion paces and have circumnavigated the world about 20 times, or 25 times if your steps were 1metre. This is why the world was fearful when the Coronavirus cases were doubling daily and weekly, because that suggested it was spreading exponentially and that a billion cases were not far off. It also explains why some modern tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk were so successful. The biggest factor is probably that they understand the power of exponential growth. I can already hear you say, “What do you mean?” Well, instead of competing with other companies, they create or exploit new technologies that will a) make their competitors’ products obsolete, and b) enable them to exploit the power of exponential growth.

Now apply this “incremental steps” concept to annual leaps in technology, that are constantly becoming bigger and happening faster, as performance efficiencies and/or capabilities tend to double every two years. If our innovation and knowledge is doubling every 2 years, think where we will be in 15 years. Both humans and businesses will increasingly struggle to keep up with accelerating change. I cannot stress enough how quickly all this change is going to be upon us and how radical it will be, something I try to convey in the rest of this book.

The chart below and the following explanation will help to put this in perspective.

During the agricultural and industrial revolutions, shown above, change was slow enough that we could predict the future and adapt generation by generation. During the IT revolution, change was faster, but we could adapt over a period of a few years. During this early stage of the multi-tech revolution, change is happening so rapidly that we can barely keep up. The last “Singularity” phase has been defined by experts as the point at which Artificial Intelligence equals humans. Currently, it is estimated that Artificial Intelligence will overtake most of our human abilities between 2035 and 2045 – yes within your lifetime. At that point, computers will do everything we do, but a billion times faster, and it will become increasingly difficult to keep up, as technology will advance faster than people or industry can adapt.

Time Compression

The exponential curve also illustrates that we are entering a time compression phase where change is happening faster and faster. In business today, the time between conceptualisation and commercialisation keeps shrinking to the point where it now often takes less than a year to conceptualise, design and launch a radically new product. Soon knowledge, products and services will double every few months, or weeks. At some point in the near future, it will be impossible for us to keep abreast of change and assimilate the growing body of knowledge. This suggests that we will need coping tools that present the right information as and when we need it.

In the “production” environment, time will become progressively less important. This is because tasks that initially appear to be too slow or complicated to be commercially viable will eventually be accelerated by way of Algorithms, Automation, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We saw this with computer chip production, which is now done rapidly at near atomic scale. These technologies also allow for parallel production on a massive scale as 1 robot can make 2, 2 can make 4, 4 can make 8, and so we go exponential again until we have 4 billion robots after 32 cycles.

Growing Future Uncertainty

One of the difficulties associated with this accelerating rate of change is that it will also become increasingly difficult to predict the future. You can often see where technology is going, but it is difficult to predict how quickly it will be adopted, how many industries will find it useful or how it will metamorphose during its development. For example, in 1985, AT&T asked McKinsey to predict how big the “then bulky” mobile phone market would be in the year 2000. The answer was 900,000 and the reality was 109 million. Getting the numbers so wrong was one thing, but who could have predicted that this humble telephonic device would shrink and then evolve into a “Smartphone” with unlimited applications and powers. Bottom line, almost everything is happening faster than we anticipate and the change is more radical.

Inevitable Choice

For the majority, it is a human failing that we resist change, mostly because the thought of being out of control is terrifying. This is counterintuitive, as change is constant in this world of ours. Furthermore, there is no “end point” to continuous accelerating technological change and so we need to accept that we will continually be off balance and seeking a new elusive equilibrium point. Considering the accelerating rate of change of technology, “uncertainty” and “being out of our depth” are a future given. Therefore, we should embrace these. Accordingly, “adaptability”, which equates to learning to embrace and love the adventure promised by uncertainty, change and being out of control, will be a future asset. Think about it like this: resisting change is about trying to maintain the boring status quo, which equates to “merely existing”, whereas embracing change equates to the continuous adrenalin rush of “living life to the full and on the edge”.

We will spend the rest of our lives in this rapidly changing and increasingly unpredictable future, which is why it is pertinent, and why we should take all this seriously. Essentially, it is presenting you with one of two choices, as illustrated in the graphic below. If you choose to resist change and stick with the red line, you will experience increasing stress brought on by disruption. Alternatively, if you choose to adapt, embrace change and stick with the yellow line, you will have far less stress and more opportunities.

Disruption

So, now that we grasp the power of exponential change and the need to take it seriously, the next important concept to grasp is that of “Disruption”, because Disruption is about to become the norm. Please note that Innovation is more about doing the same things better, whereas disruption is about creating completely new things or ways of doing things, that make old things obsolete. In fact, disruption has two faces. It disrupts on the one hand, but that disruption is only made possible because we have embraced that which made our lives easier or better. i.e. we facilitated/encouraged it. Tony Seba, world renowned speaker and prolific writer of books on technological change, suggests that disruption occurs every time multiple technologies and/or trends, coupled with business model innovation, converge to create new products, services, markets or industries, that were mostly not possible before and/or change/transform the way we do things.

Disruption presents both threats, as we saw with Nokia and Kodak, and opportunities, as is evidenced by countless IT millionaires and billionaires. We will see more of this, because by 2030, most predictable, logical, repetitive, and boring jobs will be replaced by disruptions in countless industries. These will arise from the convergence of technologies such as Automation and Robotics coupled with Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, to name but a few. I illustrate this by way of example in the next chapter, where I elaborate on the full extent of technological disruption in only one industry.

This does not mean that we will be out of work, as future technologies need people to implement them, but those who are about to lose their jobs are mostly not skilled for the jobs of the future. While this brings opportunities in education, the exploding list of new technologies, coupled with the accelerating rate of change, also suggests that our children urgently need a revised curriculum that teaches new skills. Furthermore, we need an education system that can be adapted almost continuously, which will make it difficult, or virtually impossible, for teachers to keep up – more about this in a later chapter.

Currently, there are about 30 massively disruptive technological forces on the horizon, each of which is still in its infancy and will reach maturity in the next 5–10 years. In fact, by then there will probably be more. Each of these will disrupt our lives, various industry sectors, economic models, economic statistics, tax revenues and the employment arena, to name but a few.

Digitalisation, Dematerialisation and Demonetisation

Three important concepts facilitating disruption that we need to grasp are those of the Digitalisation, Dematerialisation and Demonetisation of almost everything. Digitalisation and Dematerialisation are happening as everything goes digital. Think of how books, music, movies, encyclopaedias, healthcare, banking and the like have mostly moved onto your Smartphone or Smartwatch. Demonetisation is happening as everything becomes cheaper or free. Think of the above list, and of apps like WhatsApp, Netflix, Airbnb and Uber. All this is very disruptive for business.

Moving Towards a Better Future

It is important to realise that the future is probably going to be better than the past as we will not be trapped in boring and repetitive jobs, which means we will be free to pursue more challenging careers. Most likely, this era will also be one of “Abundance”, the title of a book by Peter Diamandis, where the poor in particular will have affordable access to clean water, more food and better sanitation, health care, connectivity, communication and education, by about 2030/35. I am not suggesting they will no longer be poor, merely that their plight will no longer be quite as desperate and that they will be able to shift their focus from survival to self-betterment. How...