And so, this is Christmas...

Another year over and a new one just begun. Well, about to begin. What happened? And what does the new year hold?

Grieving for Christmas

I couldn’t write this post until I had finished grieving for Christmas. I know that sounds melodramatic but Christmas is a big thing for me. I haven’t missed a family Christmas in my entire life. Though we’re very close, we don’t actually see each other that much. We live a couple of hours apart. We all have busy lives. But every year without fail, we gather for Christmas. Drink too much bubbly. Eat too much of my aunt’s amazing trifle. Dance around the kitchen to Springsteen. Catch up with the neighbours and extended family. It’s just all the normal Christmas stuff, but it means a huge amount to me.The thought of missing Christmas has been hurting me for weeks. And my wife. So much so that we put off discussing it over and over again because when we tried, we both just got a bit teary. But eventually, we had to have the conversation. Make the decision. And get over it. In my case, with the aid of half a bottle of red. OK, three quarters.I know it’s the right decision, logically. One that perhaps should have been enforced, given the way the figures are going. And I recognise how lucky I am for this to be the sort of thing I have to grieve over. Many have faced much worse this year. Nonetheless, it hurt me.So, now that crappy cap has been sat on the head of what has been - some notable personal high points notwithstanding - a fairly crappy year all round, what can we expect from the year ahead?

Intersections

2020 was a powerful validation of my theory of change/foresight methodology, Intersections (find it in my book!). This theory says that the starting point for future change can usually be found by uncovering existing pressure points. Dramatic, disruptive change tends to come from the widening of cracks that already exist, rather than completely new fissures in an enterprise, organisation, or culture. Find those cracks and understand the pressures that might widen them, and you can see what’s coming.And so it was in 2020. Take retail: 47% of retailers were already facing financial difficulties according to the Grimsey review at the start of the year. Trends towards digital goods and ecommerce were already widening that crack. It was no surprise when COVID-19 stuck a crowbar in that crack and cleaved the industry apart.Or care: we knew our system was creaking. Understaffed. Underfunded. Under pressure from an ageing population. The cracks were there for all to see. They were already widening. COVID-19 just accelerated the process and brought about an early end for many as a result.

The COVID catalyst

This is the catalysing effect that so many experts have talked of this year. It does add a layer of complexity to the Intersections model. As I have written about before, the challenge with futurism is often not seeing what will happen, but when. Accelerants like a global pandemic can bring about years of expected change in a matter of months.But this is why I preach agility. If you can see what’s coming but not when, your only choice is to be ready to move when it arrives.

Trends and pressures 2021

So what can we expect next year? In many ways, more of the same. We have not yet seen the full effects of the acceleration of trends on pressures in business or society. We’re clearly going into a period of financial turmoil. But what else? These are some of the talking points I’ve been using with clients and for media interviews:

Timeshifted lives

I’ve been talking about extended adolescence for a while now. In the last 20 years, many of the key markers of adulthood have been pushed later and later. We now don't learn to drive until about 27 on average. We find partners, get married and have kids well into our 30s. Likewise with buying a home. Thanks to COVID-19, in 2021 we'll likely see all these things pushed back by a year, meaning people start careers later, live at home later, and have an even longer adolescence. This might be visible in the birth rate with maybe 100,000 fewer children born next year (based on some *very* simple maths extrapolating from a US study).

Robots rise (ahead of schedule)

While I’ve long believed that automation presents a material risk to employment across many categories, I’ve also believed its effects would be slower than many feared. But the pandemic has created an increased incentive for robots in a number of contexts. We may see more automation sooner rather than later.Co-op recently increased its use of delivery drones, adding Northampton to the area covered by the Starship rolling drone. Retailers and logistics firms now have an increased incentive to shift to 'dark warehouses', replacing human workers with machines. And in the office, lots of companies are being forced to document and systematise things that used to be invisible when workers were just sat next to each other - a great opportunity to automate a lot of the drudgery of work. Lots of professional services firms (for example) are likely to stick with lower levels of staff as a result.It doesn't create a pretty picture for employment overall. But...

A nation of freelancers

In the last recession we saw a 10% jump in the numbers of self-employed. Over the last 20 years there has been a 50% increase in the total numbers of people working for themselves (it's now around 15%). I think we're going to see another big spike in 2021. A combination of people seeking work after redundancy, and people using the time they've gained from working at home to start up a 'side hustle' that goes on to become their career.Some of these new ventures might be acts of desperation. But I do think there are new markets opening up to be served. Changes to our lifestyles accelerated by the pandemic will shift our needs. Efforts to jumpstart the economy should make both space and capital available. And with so much of our lives spent online, I think there will be a huge market for things that break us out of that digital life and give us a real, physical world experience. Everything from crafts and personalised goods to holidays and adrenalin sports.

Merry Christmas

Whatever you are doing this Christmas, I do hope you get to have a proper rest. I think we all need some time to reflect and recharge. And prepare ourselves to enter 2021 afresh.Merry Christmas. And here's to a happy new year.

We're still human

There is a trope in science fiction that sees the human consciousness divorced from the physical form. Our essence is extracted and allowed to roam free across the net or re-embodied in a robot form. It's a fascinating but flawed idea.So much about who we are is connected to our physical form. Our identities are not just software that can run on any hardware. Our brains, isolated from the chemical and electrical processing and information streams from the rest of our bodies, would not still hold the same person.The separation of body and mind is such a cliche of science fiction - and fantasy, and spirituality before that - that I think we often forget this. We think we are the voice in our own heads and that voice can be freed from the shackles of humanity and exist without the experiences and infrastructure of life around it.

The bandwidth of being there

I think this is part of the reason behind the current over-confidence in the possibilities for remote working. And the recognition of it is behind some of the backlash.There is something different about being there, in person, with all of your senses engaged. It's what I called a few years ago, 'the unbeatable bandwidth of being there'. What gets transmitted and received through the screen and headset, mediated by a million miles of fibre optic cable, is not the full experience of meeting.Nor does it allow for all the things that happen around those meetings. I've talked at length about the need for peer support, the subtler parts of staff training, and the mutual inspiration that happens when you're sharing a physical space. But what about all the other stuff?

Human behaviour

In light of (ongoing) harassment at work, office romance is a complex topic and one that many HR departments would probably like to ignore. Nonetheless, nearly a fifth of couples in the UK met their partners through work. Romance (almost) inevitably leads to sex, and this is something that also isn't going away.Sex is just one of the many human experiences for which there is not, and will not be, replaceable by a digital alternative in the foreseeable future. Yes there is all sorts of sextech. But that's no more a replacement for human contact than a postcard is for a walk on the beach.When we are thinking about the future, particularly in light of the ongoing lockdown, we need to remember this.

Christmas cheer

For me, the starkest loss on the horizon is that of Christmas. I realise this puts me in the deeply privileged camp, when compared to those who have lost friends and relatives, or who are facing the next few months without work. When compared to those who have been isolated alone for much of the last six months.Christmas is a big thing for me. I don't see my parents and sibling that frequently. There's a couple of hours travel between us and we all lead busy lives. But at Christmas we all get together. Like most families, it's a time for feasting and drinking, lots of chat and plenty of hugs.The prospect that we might not be able to do that this year has really brought home just how vital that period is to me. And how pale a digital chat is in comparison.

Live culture

Christmas, eating out, live music, dating, competitive sport, going to the pub, school sportsday. These things are important. They are core to the human experience. Whatever we do to tackle this virus, and the next virus, we need to remember that. We can give them up for a while but eventually, we need them in our lives. Without them, we are like the brain removed from the body. Conscious, perhaps. But not human.

A race between the four horsemen

In a recent post for for Locus Magazine, Cory Doctorow laid out his scepticism about general AI in a piece entitled 'Full Employment'. He argued that there is no sign that a general AI - one that can replicate human adaptability in tasks - is on the horizon. And that the work required to address climate change is so great that we are much more likely to see full employment than the AI-driven unemployment that many have predicted.I disagree with Doctorow's analysis of AI. Right now, I don't believe that we are close to a general AI. I am more open minded than Doctorow about the idea that current AI systems have the capability to 'evolve' into something more generally capable, but the gap remains large.My criticism is that I just don't think AI has to be very sophisticated in order to replace humans in the workplace. It's an argument that I have made many times on this blog, so I won't repeat it in too much detail here. Suffice to say that if you break any job down into its component tasks, today's machines are eminently capable of handling many of them. If you accept that machines take work - tasks, rather than jobs - then you can see that the remaining work can be redistributed among a smaller number of humans.Where I don't disagree with Doctorow is on the scale of the challenge presented by climate change. I have little doubt that large portions of humanity will be involved with the mitigation response. But the idea that this will offset any job losses due to automation brings me back to one of the most difficult parts of futurism: seeing not what, but when.

Four horsemen

Even before the pandemic, I was concerned about our prospects for the next 20-30 years. While it's not quite the apocalypse, there are four modern horsemen of disaster racing to cause us problems.

• Climate: In this period, directly or indirectly, climate change will start to affect the more moderate climates. Changes in weather patterns, disruption to agriculture, sea level rises. Until this point climate change has been something most people could ignore, should they so choose. This choice is going away in the next few decades.
• Technology: The prospect of technological disruption to employment and the economy is another major issue. Whether you want to generously call it AI, or prefer the perhaps more accurate 'machine learning and robotics', there is the potential for swathes of workers to be displaced by machines in the next three decades, from administrative, customer service, logistics and manual roles.
• Politics: We are in a rancorous period of global relations. Violence so far has been primarily inside borders rather than between them. But our international trading relationships are collapsing and our diplomatic ties being strained.  And domestic leaders in many countries seem to be incompetent, mad, corrupt, vicious, or some combination of all of these.
• Disease: The latest addition to the line-up is the global pandemic, spreading effortlessly through our international connections, strained as they are. It's unlikely to end quickly and we are likely to see more of its type.

The horsemen analogy falls down when it comes to timing. This isn't about which of these potential challenges will win a race to reach us. All four are here already. The question is the speed and scale at which their effects will be felt.

A race to the finish

Doctorow might be right. Our climate mitigation efforts might start well before we adopt robotics and ML technologies to a level that severely disrupts the labour market. Or he might not. The scale of job losses in the retail sector right now are pretty dramatic. We could attribute these to the pandemic, but really this is just the acceleration a trend towards automation and self-service that has been rolling for years. The pandemic may accelerate the adoption of automation technologies in the retail supply chain and logistics. It might also accelerate their adoption in other fields - administration, customer service, finance, law... Once people are out of the office, perhaps we will be less squeamish about replacing them with machines?Even if you ignore the technological effects, the pandemic has clearly had a terrible effect on our economy. Many are bracing themselves for  job losses in the coming months. During lockdown almost 150,000 people have been made redundant and over 9m have been furloughed. This doesn't even include the many self-employed who sit outside the support schemes or many not be counted as having lost their jobs, despite their income having collapsed. Full employment feels like a long way from here.This is especially true in the current turbulent political environment where it is hard to see coordinated efforts to restore global prosperity. Or for that matter, a coherent effort to address climate change. If we were to start that process now, I can see the creation of an enormous number of jobs that might redress the losses currently being experienced. But it feels more likely to me that these efforts won't start until the effects really start to bite. That is the nature of our politics right now: always focused on today not tomorrow.In the meantime, it is going to be a difficult few years, whichever of the horsemen is leading the race.

The self-preservation society

Does self-preservation and the propagation of our genes drive selfish or collective behaviour?Twice in recent days I have found myself stuck behind vehicles belching thick black smoke. The first vehicle was an ageing van in desperate need of a service. The second was a newer hatchback, tuned to extract the maximum performance from its diesel engine. The effect from both was the same, bathing every pedestrian, cyclist, and trailing vehicle in a dangerous fog.What struck me about this was the irresponsibility. The lack of empathy from the drivers for their fellow citizens.If I was being generous, I'd suggest the van was owned by a self-employed delivery driver. As this review of a role as a self-employed delivery driver on Indeed.com says:"Recommended if you are single and in shared housing as you do not earn enough to help cover family costs."Given this, maintaining the van properly may be challenging. But what about the boy racer? I can understand the desire to have a fast car. I can't understand the moral arithmetic that says my desire for a fast car is more important than the health of the people in my community.

Acting beyond self-interest

Richard Dawkins might have an explanation for this. Maybe the Boy Racer's selfish genes have the best chance of propagation if he has a fast car? Or maybe he thinks it does. It feels like a somewhat dated symbol of virility and success now. Though that isn't stopping me from spending money to polish up my own ageing sports car. Did someone whisper "mid-life crisis"?The idea of the selfish gene though doesn't rule out apparently altruistic behaviour, or contribution to the collective good. If it did, we wouldn't have the roads on which to drive in the first place. As David Sloan Wilson pointed out in a talk for the RSA about his book, "This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution", there may be no conflict between ideas of evolution focused on the individual and those focused on the survival of the collective. What we know is that over hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years, our branch of the primate tree has been different because we have co-operated more than we competed.

The shrug

It is this simple evidence of the success of the world we have created through co-operation that makes me such a sceptic about more radical ideas of individualism. Like those of Ayn Rand, whom a friend told me they have been reading a lot recently.Rand's Objectivist philosophy has a few appealing parts for me. It is fundamentally materialist for a start. That doesn't mean she advocated that we all own lots of stuff, but rather that we are all just stuff. Consciousness emerges from physics and biology, not the other way around. In line with this belief, Rand also rejected faith, and her followers have campaigned against the role of organised religion in government. For Rand, reason was the most important human quality. All of that, I could be on board with.Where I start to have trouble with Rand's philosophy is her extension of this idea into the need for absolute freedom. Rand advocated a form of laissez-faire capitalism that restricted any state interference in individual or corporate behaviour. That means no child labour laws, no minimum wage, and no clean air legislation.

Carrot and stick

As my experience on the road shows, voluntary co-operation is not enough to ensure 'good' behaviour by everyone in our expanded society. Unrestricted freedom may have worked when we lived in small tribes. Those who chose to act against the best interests of the tribe could do so, and the tribe might choose to shun them. As an individual there might have been little they could do to affect the well being of the rest of the tribe, and they might not have survived for long without its support. But that was their choice.In a high tech metropolis of millions of people, this thinking doesn't work so well. One person exercising their unrestricted freedom can cause enormous harm to others. A corporation even more so. Sometimes there will be people who, for whatever reason, are willing to operate to their own benefit and at the expense of others. The price of the continuing progress of society is that we work as a collective to reign those people and organisations in. I'm willing to accept some constraints on my freedom as a price worth paying.

Propagating Self-Preservation

Where this falls down is when large parts of society work against their own self-interest, and that of their children. One of the aspects of the Brexit debate that I struggled most with, is the propensity for people to vote to leave the European Union when it is so nakedly against the interests of their children. I know that many people may not agree with or accept this argument, and that's their prerogative. But I know of cases where people, having been told by their adult children just how negatively Brexit will affect them, and been well-informed enough to see the argument, went on to vote for it anyway.Likewise, some of the reactions to the COVID-19 lockdown. Some people's outright refusal to accept the advice to the detriment of themselves and their children is hard to comprehend. It baffles me because it goes against everything I understand about evolved human behaviour. The only explanation I can find is one of disconnection.Many of us seem to feel like we have given up too much freedom and control. This is why the Brexit message to 'take back control' was so powerful. Never mind that the Brexiteers were trying to reclaim power from the wrong people and the wrong institutions.

Hyper-centralisation

The UK is famously hyper-centralised, with vast amounts of power wielded from London. This power has often been expressed through a range of universal standards, be it for education, or healthcare. The effect is to try to make everyone in the UK part of the same tribe. The EU by contrast is inherently a tribe of tribes: the recognition of difference is built into its constitution. That reality has only been evidenced by the individual approaches taken by each country to respond to the coronavirus, including shutting their own borders.I don't think you can build a single tribe of 70m people. I think there are things that will bring us all together. There are shared beliefs, rules and needs that connect us. But I also think there is a lot of difference, and some of that difference is geographical. Try to collect us into a single tribe with its centre in London and we naturally feel disconnected. We are more likely to strain against laws and powers that are distant and faceless, be that by voting for disruptive choices, driving vehicles that poison the air, or ignoring guidelines to protect ourselves, our families, and our communities from infection.If we bring the size of our groups down, connect those powers back to communities, people might feel a little more responsible for conforming to and indeed, reinforcing them.