A digital life after death

It is perhaps not surprising that during a pandemic, we find ourselves thinking more than usual about death and what lies beyond. So the news that Microsoft has filed to patent the process of building chat bots from dead people's social media histories, seems somewhat timely.Microsoft's patent covers chatbots built from anyone's digital history, not just the dead. But it is there that your mind immediately goes. Especially if you have been reading Neal Stephenson's latest novel Fall, as I have. Fall is about the creation of a virtual world into which human bodies can be scanned at the point of death. The newly created 'souls' retain some aspects of their personality, albeit not their full memories.

We can rebuild him

Microsoft's proposal is to delve through the digital archives of an individual and recreate their personality in digital form. The system would apparently draw on “images, voice data, social media posts and electronic messages” to build a profile. It might even use a ‘voice font’ assembled from recordings to make it sound like them, or recreate their image in 2 or 3D. Of course, with current levels of technology, we can't actually replicate human thought processes or capability. But call centre systems can already assemble original conversations from stores of data. A conversation with a chatbot such as Microsoft may seem fairly true to the original. It may even be able to say completely original things, if it can process news media through the lens of what it understands about a person's views.

Do not resuscitate

For me the main problem with this is about consent. Do you want a digital puppet based on your personality existing in the world after you are gone? Could you stop someone creating one if you wanted to? After all, many of us have sufficient digital footprints to support the creation of basic deepfakes today. It's not a massive leap to think someone could create a virtual clone of us today without our consent. The only reason I have a blue tick on Twitter is that someone - maliciously - created a digital identity pretending to be me, so some people are clearly motivated to do this. Imagine if that digital clone had been autonomous rather than human-controlled. Imagine if they could have spawned hundreds of virtual Toms, each time one was shut down.These are extremes. But we are already having to face issues of consent around digital resurrection. From holographic performances by Tupac or Elvis, to Kanye's holographic gift to Kim Kardashian: a speaking representation of her father with a message from beyond the grave. Who has the right to resurrect us?

The big conversations

These are questions to which we don't have answers today. Like so many technologies, this possibility creates questions for society about ethics, etiquette and law. And as is so often the case, we feel ill-equipped to address the range of questions at the speed required. Facebook may have abandoned its mantra of 'move fast and break things', but our approach to dealing with new technologies remains to break things first, then work out how to fix them.The prospect of a digital afterlife in one form or another is already moving from science fiction to reality. If you want to live forever, or want to ensure that your end is a true end, it may be time to update your will. 

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.

The brain in the jar

I took a course this year which included large elements of philosophy. It is not something I have ever studied formally. Unless you count reading Sophie's World as a teenager, or dozing off to In Our Time. As a result, I found it pretty challenging at times.Many of the ideas we discussed were sort of familiar, like songs you've only heard playing in a shop, or the back of cab, but never really listened to. Once you sit down and listen, you discover the depth to the orchestration, or that the lyrics weren't at all what you thought they were. It challenged some of my deeply held (though little-considered) ideas about reason. And particularly about transhumanism.

A science fiction education

The idea that we can supersede human biology, our minds escaping the limitations of the flesh, is an old and important one in science fiction. And I have devoured science fiction as long as I can remember, from Terrahawks and Star Wars, to Iain M Banks and Charles Stross. So many times in these stories, we see the separation of mind and body. Humans continuing their lives with their brains transplanted into alternate bodies, or their minds ported into the digital realm. It's an appealing idea in many ways. Digital superpowers and immortality, rolled into one.The brain in a jar is an idea that has very old roots. A modern expression of Cartesian dualism, where the consciousness and its container are two separate and entirely divisible things. It was a foundational myth of religions and ghost stories, long before the first science fiction.It is also a very important idea to many in Silicon Valley, where transhumanist ideals have very much taken root.It's an idea I have always bought into. Until recently.

Software/Hardware

It turns out that the human mind is not like a piece of software that could be run on a different piece of hardware. Instead, the software and the hardware are deeply entwined. Over the last few decades, a variety of studies((This blog post is worth a read to start with: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/a-brief-guide-to-embodied-cognition-why-you-are-not-your-brain/)) have shown that our whole mental model of the world is shaped by our physicality. The exact relationships are still to be fully understood, but the conception of the mind as driver and body as vehicle seem to be fundamentally incorrect. We think with our bodies not just our brains, from the sensory signals in our skin, to the chemicals washing through us from our glands, to the spatial model created by our senses. The picture is complex but my reading of the evidence so far is that you cannot have a mind distinct from the body.

Emulating the body

Could we recreate all of the biological elements that make up ourselves, as we do when we build emulators to run old software? Maybe. But the point remains that it is much more complicated than we have imagined: you can't transplant or digitise the brain. You have to digitise the whole embodied experience, and then put it into a virtual environment that can present information in a way that the embodied human can interpret. And you have to get it right: if you make fundamental changes to the body, you are changing the person.This would rather mess with transhumanist ideas of immortality: something might live on but will it be you?

A political dimension

There is a clear political aspect to belief in this division of mind and body. It devalues the physical, turning our bodies and indeed, everyone else's, into resources. This is why feminists frequently((Frequently, but not by any means always. Feminism is an incredibly broad field with a huge range of different perspectives, as you might expect from a philosophical discipline and political campaign representing half the population. Feminism also has a strong transhumanist tradition - for example, Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fictionnownarrativemediaandtheoryinthe21stcentury/manifestly_haraway_----_a_cyborg_manifesto_science_technology_and_socialist-feminism_in_the_....pdf)) have an issue with this mode of thought, since ending the treatment of women as reproductive resources is at the very core of the feminist movement.By divorcing us from our bodies, the transhumanist ideology also questions the link between us and our planet. If our consciousness can be immortal, we can be more cavalier with our environment. ((https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/an-eco-social-perspective-on-transhumanism/))I don't mean to say that all transhumanists are patriarchal hyper-capitalists (see footnote on feminism and transhumanism, for a start). But there is undoubtedly that streak. Indeed, one of the things I like about so much about some science fiction is that it doesn't ignore this. Whether it is Battle Angel Alita or Altered Carbon, these stories show that even if we could transplant our brains or minds into new forms, the society that this technology creates wouldn't necessarily be a kind or egalitarian one.

We're still human

Throughout the pandemic I have been briefing clients and audiences on its likely ramifications. And I keep getting the same piece of feedback. People really like hearing about the human traits that persist and even dominate in the face of change and disruption. In many ways, the pandemic has reminded us just how human and fragile we still are. How bound to our bodies, and to our environment. Despite all the digital luxuries of our age, we have been forcibly reminded that there is no substitute for pubs and hugs, colleagues and kisses. And for the most part, we have shown real humanity. One Public Health England study showed that nearly 2/3 of us checked on our neighbours. Over a third of us shopped for neighbours in need.We are still human. Ours is still an embodied experience. We still need our planet and the people around us. However powerful the potential of technologies to take us beyond our limitations, we need to remember that.

Long read: 5G and Mixed Reality

I am taking part in two roundtable discussions this week, each focused on a specific technology or set of technologies that stands to have a major impact on our world over the next few years. Though I now spend more time talking about business and culture than I do technology, I remain convinced that it has been one of the biggest drivers of change in our world over recent years and will continue to play a primary role in shifting our future. Understanding the potential impact of these technologies – positive and negative – is therefore critical.Here then – in part as an exercise to organise my own thoughts in advance of these discussions – are my thoughts on two questions:

• What is the role of 5G in the future economic success (or otherwise) of the UK?
• What is the potential of AR and VR technologies, particularly in the property realm, and how/when will this potential be realised?

5G: poor marketing

I doubt I am the first to make this analogy, but 5G is a lot like HS2. OK, no-one mistakenly believes that 5G is responsible for causing pandemics. But each is a large-scale infrastructure project, the motivations for which are widely misunderstood.The naming of HS2 is one of the worst marketing decisions ever. Because HS2 is not about speed. It is about capacity. We just do not have the tracks available to move enough trains up and down the country – or across it for that matter. HS2 does not greatly accelerate the journey from London to Manchester (the most pertinent route to me). But it does put high speed trains on a separate track from local stopping services, allowing more of those to operate at a more consistent rhythm. It adds capacity.Most of the headlines about 5G have been about speed of one form or another. How fast you can download a film. The low latency connections that will apparently be critical to self-driving cars (something about which I am a little sceptical). It is understandable that this has been the message as this is what might sell it to individual users keen to be ahead of the curve. But really, 5G is also about capacity of one kind or another.

Increasing efficiency

The first kind of efficiency that matters, is spectral efficiency. There are only so many frequencies on which you can usefully carry information from point A to point B. A subset of these are suitable for mobile devices. With demand for connectivity growing constantly((OpenReach recorded 10 PetaBytes per hour flowing over its network in May, a large leap in a constantly growing figure driven by lockdown - https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/05/openreach-records-10-petabyte-peak-in-uk-internet-traffic.html)), the challenge is on to carry more and more data over the available spectrum. 5G uses new spectrum but it also makes much better use of it, topping out at 30 bits per second (bps) per Hertz (Hz) according to the CTIA ((https://www.telecompetitor.com/ctia-5g-will-provide-big-spectral-efficiency-gains/#:~:text=5G%20networks%20will%20provide%20major,%2DAdvanced%20technology%2C%20CTIA%20said.)) versus the 15 bps/Hz limit of 4G.This is closely connected to the second kind of efficiency: simultaneous connections. We keep adding more and more devices to the network. The compound annual growth rate of the number of smartphones averaged 93% from the early 80s through 2017. There are now an estimated 22bn connected devices – predicted to be 50bn by 2030. 4G is seriously limited in the number of devices it can connect in a given area, its so-called connection density. While 4G networks can connect around 2000 devices per square kilometre, 5G devices can theoretically connect up to a million. If we want to add more smart devices to the network (and some examples of where we might are below), then we need a more efficient network.Of course, all this data must go somewhere once it reaches the base station from your devices. This is called backhaul. As part of the 5G rollout, operators will be looking at how they deal with your data, introducing more computing at the edge of networks for example, and caching copies of popular content so your request doesn’t need to flow across the network.

Too much juice

Then there is the issue of energy efficiency. 4G networks consume a *lot* of juice. Speaking to LightReading((https://www.lightreading.com/asia-pacific/operators-starting-to-face-up-to-5g-power-cost-/d/d-id/755255)), Jake Saunders, the managing director at ABI Research, said a typical 4G cell might draw six kilowatts in power, rising to perhaps nine kilowatts at peak periods. Multiply that by the roughly 23,000 base stations in the UK((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_towers_in_the_United_Kingdom)) and you get a draw on the grid somewhere between 138 and 207 megawatts.Huawei estimates a 5G base station might consume 300% to 350% of a 4G base station, once operating across all the available frequencies. This sounds bad, until you consider the alternative. Even if 4G could support the continuing growth in demand, its power consumption would be orders of magnitude greater than 5G. According to Orange((https://hellofuture.orange.com/en/5g-energy-efficiency-by-design/)), more efficient 5G technologies are expected to divide the energy consumption per gigabit transported by a factor of 10 compared to 4G once they reach maturity by 2025, and then by a factor of 20 by 2030 .So, if we want to keep expanding the number of devices on the network, and the richness of the media we consume, we need to move to 5G.

Slowing progress

The obvious rejoinder from some will be: do we really need these increases? Or should we stick with 4G? While I think there are technological avenues we ought to avoid (for example, some geo-engineering responses to climate change, certain weapons technologies), I don’t think there is a very strong argument for suppressing the development of general purpose technologies like networks. Just like roads and rail before them, networks are not without their risks and challenges. But they are the platform for other forms of progress: scientific, economic, medical and social. Stopping our move to 5G would not only undermine these efforts, it would place us at a global disadvantage.

Delays on the line

Which leads neatly to one of the issues under discussion at the roundtable event: the delay in our 5G rollout caused by the UK government’s decision to prevent Huawei supplying new equipment, and forcing operators to remove what they had already deployed.Personally, I have always been deeply sceptical about the specific threat presented by Huawei’s technology. The telecoms equipment industry, like all high-tech industries, has long and complex supply chains. There are many opportunities for hostile entities to try to interfere with the equipment before or when it is in place. And it is so complex that maintaining security is a constant battle. Do I believe that Chinese government agencies would try to access UK networks through Huawei’s technology? It seems likely. That’s what spies do. But is there any greater risk from us using Huawei’s technology to anyone else’s? That, I find hard to believe.I have been saying this publicly for a couple of years now, though until the last few months have had no actual relationship with Huawei aside from going to a phone launch about five years ago where I walked away with a free device (as did everyone else in the room). Huawei are paying me to be part of this roundtable event, as any other company would have to. But my opinions are fairly well documented long before this point and haven’t changed at all.

GDP impact

Whether or not you believe Huawei’s equipment presents a material risk to our network security, we now have another issue to contend with. Back in 2017, the UK government predicted that once rolled out, 5G would play a key role in 5-6% of UK GDP((https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/582640/FCCG_Interim_Report.pdf)). If its rollout is delayed, what effect will that have on the economy?Research commissioned by Huawei from Assembly Research has attempted to quantify that effect. It suggests the economic hit will be around £18.2bn. The delay could also “jeopardise £108bn of economic benefit to the UK and the creation of 350,000 jobs in regions outside London and the South-East over the next decade, putting at risk the Government's 'levelling up' agenda.”If you want to understand where those figures come from, then I recommend reading the research (not available to link to as I write this). But I have my own take on this, particularly with regards to where the economic benefits of 5G come from. For me there are two distinct drivers to look at, one of productivity, one of growth.

Hello? Can you hear me?

While our broadband providers have coped admirably through lockdown, I think most people would acknowledge now that our connectivity problems are far from solved. How many calls have you been on over the last few months where people’s video and audio were disrupted, or they dropped in and out of the conversation because of poor connectivity? People are still wandering around their houses trying to get a better signal or working from strange locations because their Wi-Fi or 4G just does not give them a reliable connection elsewhere.Lots of people have tried to quantify the cost of this poor connectivity. In January, Zen Internet suggested SMEs could be losing 72 minutes per day((https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252476441/Poor-UK-internet-connectivity-and-technology-cited-as-hampering-UK-SME-productivity)). Clearly, Zen has something to gain from such statements. But I do not think they are probably that far out. Even if Zen’s estimate is out by a factor of ten, that is half an hour of lost productivity each week, for each employee. That adds up.We need connectivity that stops being a question. You should never, ever, need to think about whether you are connected, only about the application.

Tech-driven growth

The question of growth is more interesting perhaps, but also more speculative. What future applications does 5G support that we do not have today? The simplest answer is just more: as noted above there are hard limits on the number of things we can connect via 4G. But the more fun answer comes from thinking about how you might use the specific characteristics of 5G: ubiquity, latency, bandwidth as required.The first obvious answer is things. Right now, connecting things to the network – particularly remote or mobile things – is still a bit fiddly. Imagine if you could take a thing out of its box and it just worked, with no configuration, for maybe five years before it needed recharging. Think of the applications in manufacturing, fitness, care, logistics, security, entertainment, toys. 5G combined with new battery technologies, passive energy harvesting, and low energy computing should finally open up the potential of the so-called Internet of Things market by stripping away the hassle and fuss and making it easier to deploy connected stuff in the field((Note, early 5G devices have been very power hungry because they are maintaining simultaneous connections to 3 and 4G networks to sustain coverage. This situation will improve dramatically with future generations of the technology and improved 5G coverage.)).The second answer is mixed reality. I have long argued that it is likely we will make a shift from smart phones to smart glasses or headsets. These devices will need ubiquitous rich connectivity, and low latency. Which makes for a neat segue to the second part of this very long blog post.

Living in mixed reality

Right now, we live in two discrete worlds: physical and digital. They touch in various places, like crossing points between dimensions. But they are fundamentally separate. We interact in different ways with these two worlds, one directly and the other indirectly, mediated by a mouse, keyboard, games controller or touchscreen. Or perhaps a voice assistant. We behave differently, communicating online sentiments and in styles we would not dream of replicating in the physical world.These two worlds are separate and distinct, but they are moving closer together. Sixty years ago, the digital world was alien, unintuitive, and required deep expertise to navigate. Those who visited the digital realm were like astronauts exploring an alien space. Today, we can feel our way through the digital world, a space that is more and more familiar. Tomorrow, I think the two worlds begin to truly merge.

Alternatives to dystopia

There are many dystopian visions for this future. Of humans separated from each other by screens spread across their field of vision. Of flashing pop-ups and garish neon interruptions to our field of vision. Notifications pinging endlessly in our ears. But while I think this is a risk in the interim stage, ultimately I can see a much more positive vision for our future cyborg selves.Human senses are incredibly plastic. We can learn to process all sorts of data coming through as sound, touch, taste, sight and smell. You can see this in the work on sensory substitution of the celebrity neuroscientist David Eagleman((https://www.eagleman.com/www/www/research/sensory-substitution)). Or you can see it in the way we learn not just to drive cars, but to sense them. After a while driving a car you stop being conscious of most of your actions. They become automatic. But for them to become automatic, your brain must be unconsciously processing sensory inputs: it’s the tone of the engine and the change in acceleration that tells you when to change up a gear, not the numbers on the rev counter.As we start to live in a permanent mixed reality environment, I think the same thing will happen. We’ll start to ignore the dashboard analogue: the pop-ups, notifications and formal interfaces, and start to rely on more subtle signals. I think the future of mixed reality is like having super powers, or what the original Book of the Future called ‘Extra Sensory Perception’.Imagine all the rich information to which a smart headset might have access translated into streams of sensory information that your brain can interpret subconsciously. Subtle hues of colour, vibrations, sounds, temperatures, electrical stimulation perhaps. A sixth sense for what is happening in your social circle or the stock market. Subtle indicators to point out bargains, risks, or potential dates.The digital world in this scenario becomes translucent: something that colours our interactions with the physical world but does not block them. I think it has the potential to make us more human, not less.There is a huge amount of technological development and interaction design to be done here. But I see this as a more likely outcome than the dystopian futures so often presented.VR, by contrast, will always be an escape from reality. Or at the least, a vehicle into other realities: someone else’s or perhaps our own future. In lockdown, all of those options sound more appealing than ever. But as an escape, they are only somewhere we could, or should, spend a small amount of time. Most of the time we have to face reality, however moderated.So, bringing this back to today and the topic of the roundtable event: how will these technologies, VR and AR, affect the property sector.Right now, I still think the advantage conferred by VR in exploring a property is marginal. It is a very solitary experience, which buying a property rarely is. That is not to say it cannot add value – particularly when the property is not yet built. But the core of the decision making is still likely to be made based on data, photographs, discussion, and a good measure of gut feel.AR has a much greater role to play, though perhaps less immediately. AR will be a critical tool for everyone in the property value chain. It will be used to capture images and plans of land, overlay existing properties with virtual remodels, highlight critical information from utilities to crime, inform contractors etc. We are just not there yet with the hardware, the interaction design, or frankly, the network.It is perhaps fitting that it is in a property industry context – a business that deals specifically with the built environment – that we have this conversation. But tomorrow’s world is one where physical and digital are largely indistinguishable.

Replacing the car

Do you remember your first car? More specifically, do you remember what came with it? The car brought responsibility: you were being placed in charge of this lethal weapon, capable of killing you and anyone around it. It was terrifying. But it also brought freedom: you could now go anywhere, unbound by the limitations of public transport.In the first few months after I passed my test, I experienced both things. I promptly crashed into another car after taking a corner a little too enthusiastically. But I also got to drive my friends on trips, down to Cardiff to get a taste of university life, and out to the countryside for some extreme sledging (Beetles are surprisingly good in the snow). I drove up to Manchester to see my then girlfriend (who promptly dumped me, but that’s a different story).

Expanding horizons

The first car I bought myself a few years after graduating holds perhaps my greatest memories of the freedom a car brings. I had been living in Reading and working in Maidenhead for two or three years when I finally decided it was time to buy a car. Until that point, I had been getting public transport everywhere and that worked fine for me. I bought a car more because I liked cars than because I thought I really needed one. Though I was reaching the stage in my career where I was starting to go to meetings on my own and many of the meeting locations were on business parks outside nearby towns and cities. Hard to access by public transport.Once I got the car though, I realised how much I had been missing. I stumbled across a local lake where you could water-ski and wakeboard – something I had grown up doing. Without a car this facility would have been utterly inaccessible to me. Now I could stick my wakeboard on the passenger seat (not much space in my BMW Coupe) in the morning and detour on the way back from work to the lake. What freedom!

LTN battles

This all came to mind because my neighbourhood is in the middle of an intense debate about traffic and cars. There is a planned scheme, of which I am very much in favour, to trial a low traffic neighbourhood or LTN. The scheme is controversial. Some people don’t like the idea of limiting where cars can go. Some have concerns that the main roads and those bordering the scheme will be negatively affected.I have some sympathy with the latter concerns, which speak to a larger issue of class divides in developing neighbourhoods. The leafy backstreets tend to benefit first from LTNs, with traffic displaced onto main roads that tend to have more flats and fewer private homes. But ultimately, we have to do something about congestion, road deaths, and pollution. And LTNs are what’s on the table.The evidence supporting LTNs is thin, but growing. They have an immediate and very positive impact on the streets where measures are added. In the trial, my street will no longer be a rat-run for cars trying to escape clogged main roads or cut between them. This, I hope, will prevent the street being used as a drag strip: cars frequently top 40 miles an hour (by my estimate – I don’t have a speed camera) down this narrow 20 limit. Over time there is some evidence emerging that LTNs reduce car use overall.

Reducing ownership

What many LTN proponents really want though is to reduce car ownership. They make sound points about the impact cars have on our streets even when they aren’t moving. Parked cars take up a lot of our shared spaces. They make it less safe for pedestrians and cyclists. They frequently block pavements. And they make it harder for kids to use the streets for play.I don’t disagree with any of this. And yet, we currently own three cars. Well, two and a half: two are parked on the street while my EV project takes up our small driveway. One of those cars is practical. It’s the 10-year-old MPV in my wife’s name that carries us (in non-lockdown times) to family gatherings, walks in the countryside, to the shops and to the tip.The others…are not.My little Alfa, ultimately to be replaced by the EV when that is complete, is used for practical purposes once a week, on the rare occasion we need two cars so that I can run one child to dance classes. This is one of those journeys that is notionally do-able by public transport. But doing so would mean writing off my afternoon (I couldn’t get there back before having to turn around again), and be very costly. The bus fares are absurd (£6.80 for me and my daughter), and since there is no waiting room, I would need to spend two hours in a rather expensive café nearby.People say owning a car is expensive, but the Alfa currently costs me less than £50 a month to own. It only cost me £1200 to buy and with prices on the rise, I will probably sell it for that or more. That £10 a month over the cost of public transport and coffee buys me eight hours a month of free time and an object that gives me great joy. For all the issues, that still feels like a good deal.For the rest of the week, my Alfa is largely an ornament. It’s not an expensive car, but it is beautiful. Having it there reminds me of that first sense of freedom I felt when I first got my Beetle or my BMW.

The car's the star

The problem for those seeking to reduce car ownership is that we have built our world around cars for the last hundred years or so. Because this is how we have structured our world, cars don’t just bring a sense of freedom, they bring actual freedom over and above what is achievable via public transport or cycling – especially for families. Is there a public cost to that freedom? Absolutely. But a lot of people will feel they are giving up something very significant if they gave up their car. Purging the streets of cars will only serve to further restrict those freedoms to the wealthy, who can afford to store their cars off the street.In the long term, I think we can achieve these ends without disproportionate effects on the less wealthy. Though they are further away than many think, we will, eventually, have self-driving cars. These will make point-to-point travel in relative luxury more affordable than car ownership. They will park and charge themselves in out of town warehouses rather than on streets. They’re not an ideal solution for everything: mass transit still makes more sense for busy routes and intercity travel. But they should offer the freedom we crave with less of the downsides.We can’t wait thirty years to tackle this problem though. We need to find ways to give people the freedom a car brings without its consequences. That means trialling schemes like the LTNs. And it means finding alternatives to car ownership that work today, investing in public transport and cycling infrastructure, minimising the car’s impact on other road users. Car lovers like me might have to make some sacrifices or at the least pay more for keeping a second (or even third) car on the street.But the only way we make rapid progress on issues of congestion and indeed wider environmental issues is to make change a net luxury. Right now, the loss of the car feels too painful to too many people. And any threat to it will continue to be met with anger.

Disrupting housebuilding

Every year, everyone seems to agree that we need to build more homes. But while the number was growing up until the end of last year (we shall see what impact COVID has had), we're still a way from the government's target of 300,000 a year. And even at current levels (around 240,000 built or converted last year), house prices continue to soar. The average house price is now over 10 times the average household income.So how do we build more homes? More importantly, how do we build more homes in the places people want them? Homes that fulfil people's changing needs? And whose construction and use has a minimal, or even positive impact on the environment?I think the answer might come from some of the most successful businesses of the last few years. Businesses that build scale through networks of small operations, like Uber and AirBnB. These businesses have their ethical issues, and their operational issues too. But the principle of scaling small things is a powerful one.This is an essay. It's not something anyone has paid me to research. And hence I'm not going to get everything right here. But hear me out. I'd love to hear your feedback. This is my recipe for a disruptive housebuilder.

Three principles

My disruptive housebuilder would operate on three simple principles:

1. Make it easier to build than buy
2. Make it cheaper to build than rent
3. Give people security and sustainability

How would you do this?

Deeply digital

Imagine aggregating all of the small plots of land around the UK into a single, liquid marketplace. Imagine wrapping around them a layer of digital services for surveying and planning, creating a low friction pipeline for acquiring and developing sites. LandInsight has already done most of the work here, with its award-winning platform (I was one of the judges a few years ago when it won the PlaceTech Prize for Innovation). Take its API and build from there.Now people can search for parcels of land near them and begin to progress them. A truly liquid market for land with some of the complexity of planning and utilisation removed will attract more people wanting to sell their land, increasing the size of the market.This somewhat glosses over the complexities of the planning space. But many, small scale projects should be much easier to progress than large scale projects that attract a lot of attention. Especially if you standardise some of the homes.

Open Source Design

I'm not talking about ticky-tacky boxes on a hillside here. I think the starting point for this housebuilder should be WikiHouse, an open, modular system of house design with a relatively low carbon footprint and a huge degree of flexibility. Imagine being able to design your house in an app like the IKEA kitchen configurator. Once you have picked your plot, the system pulls in 3D scans of the area and allows you to overlay the footprint and a 3D render of your house, with a range of design options and interior fittings from its catalogue. Or you can choose a bare shell with utilities and fit it out yourself.The great thing about WikiHouse is that it is largely manufactured off-site in small, local workshops. You don't need to own these as the developer, just have access to a network of them and monitor standards. Over time this will get easier as individual housebuilders start to contribute reviews.Once the design is approved, customer can select a local manufacturer to produce their panels and frame. You will also need local contractors to assemble the home. But the nature of WikiHouse means it requires a lot less skilled labour - an issue already and one that will grow as we go through Brexit. You could either plug into an existing network of contractors, like RatedPeople. Or build one up. And as the business grows, you are likely to develop a class of freelance contractor that specialises in assembly.

Funding

This all sounds well and good. But it's not that radical. Mostly just plugging together existing networks with some nice front end design. What makes this housebuilder really disruptive is the funding. Imagine if you could take great gobs of investment, from pension funds, venture capital, or even government, and use it to do home financing differently. After all, based on the business described above, you wouldn't need to spend that much actually building anything. You're leveraging existing assets. And there is a lot of cash around at the moment, seeking reliable returns. Where better to invest than in property? Even with the population set to start declining in the second half of the century, it doesn't look like demand for quality homes will shrink any time soon.Use that funding to make deposits small. Not much bigger than you might put down on a rental. But base it on smarter credit checks that overcome some of the weaknesses inherent in current systems - like the ones that would deny me a mortgage because I'm self-employed even though I haven't missed a payment in 15 years. Though there are arguably issues with privacy, banks in China have been making heavy use of alternative data sources. Not just "have you paid your credit card bill in the past" but who you are based on social media and more. This has allowed them to process loans automatically, and incredibly quickly, with very low rates of non-repayment.Offer people a truly flexible mortgage. Shared ownership options from 10% up to 100%. Make it variable over time. When times are good, increase your payments to buy more of the equity. When they're bad, trade equity for a payment holiday or switch seamlessly to interest only. The aim is to keep people covering the cost of the financing, but also to keep them in their home as long as it is viable.Make it easy for groups to buy together and trade equity between them. With our extended adolescence, it should be much less work for groups of friends to club together to build than it is right now. And the scale of their expenditure on rents should make mortgages eminently viable, were it not for the barrier of the big deposit.

Options for Everyone

Combining a tailored approach to construction, low-friction operations, distributed manufacturing and the utilisation of small plots, it should be possible to open up home ownership to a much larger group of people. People with the cashflow to fund it but who are priced out by the lack of supply and the scale of the up front investment. This should be an ideal investment opportunity for those seeking long term returns. And there is an enormous market to address, with people hungry for alternatives.

Review: A New History of the Future in 100 Objects

The interplay between science fiction and reality is a constant one. Fiction pushes the boundaries of possibility. It opens the minds of many thinkers who go on to turn some fraction of that dream into reality, through science, policy, or activism. But science also inspires the writer to take a glimpse of the future and flesh it out into a full-blown virtual reality.Adrian Hon’s New History of the Future in 100 Objects plays back and forth constantly along that line between fantasy and reality. The book is exactly as the title describes. 100, sometimes interconnected vignettes of the future, centred around particular objects, memes or movements. Written from the perspective of a museum curator in 2082, it never stretches the bounds of scientific or societal change beyond the plausible. Though in some ways that makes it all the more terrifying.

Projecting our trajectory

The book was originally published in 2013, but this new edition from MIT Press brings it bang up to date, with 20 new or heavily-updated objects and edits to connect the stories to our current times.Unlike a science fiction novel, the stories in this book are not pegged to a single period. Rather they have been gathered by the fictional future curator from our next sixty years. This starts in the current period – brave for any futurist – and unfolds in time order towards the curator’s present day.The topics addressed are broad: food and faith, earth and space, love and crime. But all are anchored in an understanding of both humanity and technology that gives them that scary believability.The stories are anchored too, in the prevailing technologist obsessions of our times. Transhumanism, universal basic income, and planetary terraforming feature strongly. It is presented as ultimately optimistic but not everyone would have a positive interpretation of such ideas. There are strong feminist critiques of the ‘brain in a jar’ basis of much transhumanism. UBI can be argued to be extended life support for consumerist culture. And many would argue our right to begin transforming the solar system having wrecked our corner of it.But as I frequently have to explain, the role of a futurist is not necessarily to describe the world we want to see, but the world that we do see. This book is an exploration of our current trajectory, more than an attempt to define an alternative.

Sketching the boundaries

As someone who spends their professional life engaged with futuristic ideas, both in fiction and in fact, many of the ideas described here are familiar. But most will find this a book packed with novelty. As a vehicle for expanding your thinking, pulling off the blinkers and opening your mind to the possible, it has incredible power. It should be required reading for anyone struggling to imagine a social, technological, and political landscape beyond these times. And for anyone who wants to understand the potential consequences of our current path.Order Now from Amazon

When half our money is spent online

In May 2020, online retail sales in the UK peaked at 32.8% of all transactions. The number has since dropped off to 26.6%, as shoppers returned to stores. But the direction of travel is clear. The percentage of retail sales happening online has tripled in a decade. A year ago, The Guardian covered a report by Retail Economics that suggested that 53% of sales could be online by 2029. With the trend-accelerating effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, this seems more likely than ever. So what happens when half of all sales are online?

Jobs

According to the Centre for Retail Research, 125,000 retail jobs were lost in the first eight months of 2020. It seems unlikely to me that this number will stay under 200,000 for the full year - and the CRR concurs. Lots of retailers were already weak going into the crisis (47% at significant risk of failure according to the 2020 Grimsey Review). With GDP dropping 20%, it's clear we are in a financial crisis of 2008 levels or beyond. Any serious weakness is likely to be terminal, with major names like Oasis, TM Lewin, and Victoria's Secret falling into administration.Of course, the growth in online retail creates jobs as well. But the type of jobs it creates are rather different and very polarised. At one end, there are warehouse and logistics jobs for deliveries. These tend to be jobs with little security, either short term or long term. Warehouse automation, drones, and self-driving delivery vehicles will likely eliminate most of these jobs in the next 30-40 years. At the other end there are office-based design, technology, buying and marketing jobs, that tend to be highly skilled and well paid. These jobs are much more secure, but there are many fewer of them. One central team can serve a whole nation, if not the whole world, rather than requiring representatives in each store.Today, roughly 3m people are employed in the retail industry in the UK. Back in 2016, the British Retail Consortium predicted that would be down to 2m by 2025. That certainly seems likely, with perhaps another 500,000 going in the following five years as the transition to online continues.

Shops

Vacancy rates are at their highest for 6 years, with 11 of stores vacant in July 2020. In April, not long before it collapsed into insolvency, shopping centre operator Intu said that it received just 29% of rent due in the previous quarter. The new operators of Intu's locations are full of optimism about the prospect of bringing in smaller, local retailers. But rents will undoubtedly have to fall to attract them in. The same is true on the high street, where small retailers who have historically felt priced out by the combination of rent and rates are now seeing opportunities. But long term rates reform is clearly needed, with many calling for changes to the way rates and calculated and reviewed, and some suggesting more radical changes such as a local sales tax.No level of rent or rates cuts is going to conjure up new product categories though, or change buyer behaviour. The simple reality is that many of the product categories that used to fill the high street no longer exist. Media is now mostly digital. Rent and rate cuts might bring independent book and record stores into the main strip, but that only leaves vacancies elsewhere. The convergence of electronics into the phone has undermined gadget retailers. Gaming's future looks to be streamed or at least downloaded.Fashion remains the category with the greatest apparent potential, with the social factor of clothes shopping and the practical reality of trying things on. But online is still taking a big bite (around a fifth pre-lockdown). And at some point consumer trends are likely to turn against fast fashion, whether over its water consumption, climate impact, labour ethics, or just raw consumerism. Big brands may find themselves sharing space and wallets with charity and vintage stores.Most of all though, they will find themselves sharing high streets and shopping centres with other classes of tenant: schools, housing, health centres, and much, much more.

Cities

Apart from pure geography, what makes a city centre? What differentiates it from other districts or suburbs? In megacities (more than 10 million inhabitants) and those approaching this scale (like London), there are already multiple centres with different characters and specialisms. As retail becomes less of a feature of the city core, will the differentiation between centre and suburb start to decline? It seems likely to me that as more space in centres currently devoted to offices and retail gets turned over to housing and amenities, the unique character of the city centre is diminished. While its assets in terms of transport access and location will continue to differentiate it from the suburbs, we might see cities become more of an ensemble cast rather than having a single star.This could start to change the flows of people around the city, reducing peak volumes, and changing routes. It might have an impact on property prices, and planning.

Creative destruction

Lots of people are clearly aware that the crisis in retail is ongoing. But it also feels like much of the conversation about restoring town and city centres was based on an idea that the damage has already been done. That the one third vacancy rates in some places after the 2008 crash was as bad as it would get. In fact, it looks like it might get much worse. There are years of disruption still to come for the offline retail sector.  And the effects will require continued intervention from government both local and national. They will need to deal with the (structural) job losses, the property vacancies, and the resulting losses in business rates. It will take time to bring new visions for town and city centres to fruition.There is a glimmer of light here. The vision presented by the potential to reshape cities away from a single core presents some potential benefits. But for retail there is a long dark tunnel ahead. 

Jack of all trades

"Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one"This is not, as many have suggested, the original saying. It started with the first couplet, a positive description of a talented generalist. This was then turned into a criticism of those without focus with the addition of the second couplet. Most recently, in a move very appropriate to our times, the last addition of the last couplet turned it into a criticism of experts.Across a series of conversations this week, this phrase kept coming to mind. I think it says a lot about our confusion around what mix of skills is important for the future. And where those skills ought to be learned. Do we need to be Jacks of all trades in the future? Or do we want instead deep expertise. Is there even a conflict between these goals?

Master of one?

On Monday, I recorded a conversation with Carl Wiese, Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer for Poly. I collaborated with Poly recently on a report on the future of work and particularly hybrid working.Carl and I discussed skills for the future. We talked about the relative merits of deep expertise vs what are perceived as more generalist skills, particularly communication. Carl made the point that it is possible to be an expert in communication. And he's right. Even just within the relatively narrow realm of public speaking, there is a lot to learn about the differences between a good after-dinner talk, and a good conference speech. This is a skill that can be endlessly honed, and those that do it well are readily identifiable from those who don't.On Wednesday I had a live-streamed chat with Simon Squibb, who is on a mission to help a million people start their own business. Again, we talked about skills and particularly the critical skills of entrepreneurship. I referred Simon to my idea of the 'Three Cs' - curation, creation, and communication, all of which are highly relevant when starting your own business. But I also realised that being generally good at these things is only going to get you so far. One of my big lessons from my current business is just how powerful it is when you can engage experts whose ability goes well beyond your own. I outsource everything I can now to people who can do it better than I can. Or at least, I usually do...

Competence is a preference

The exception to this rule recently has been the audio version of High Frequency Change. The production of this got held up due to various publishing wrangles, but eventually my publisher and I agreed that I would record and produce it and they would release it. My plan originally had been to record it in a studio, but COVID-19 put paid to all that. So instead I decided to do it at home, converting my wardrobe (clothes are good for sound deadening) into a temporary recording studio. "How hard could it be?" I thought, somewhat naively.The answer is 'hard'. Between finding times to record when the house is quiet and your neighbour isn't having building work done, and learning about the mastering requirements for audible, this process has taken much longer than I hoped or expected. Having started months ago, albeit with a lot of distractions in between, I might finally finish it this week. It has been a painful process. But, the end result I am pretty happy with. And I have learned some new skills.Am I now good at audio editing and mastering? No. Certainly a long, long way from expert. But am I competent enough to produce something that sounds good to the untrained ear? I think so. And while it feels like it has taken a very long time to me, in reality, three months is not a long time to learn a new competency.

Ts, Os, and charms

With the right foundation in learning, it is easy these days to rapidly acquire competencies. The best courses on the online learning platforms like Skillshare are truly brilliant, and there is a wealth of guidance out there on blog posts and forums (on which I am heavily reliant for my EV project). Collect a few of these competencies and it starts to feel like the popular 'T-shaped' model for skills doesn't fit so well anymore.The T-shaped employee is an idea originally from the 1980s, where it was used to describe people (still then 'men') with a single deep expertise but strong supporting skills that made them good collaborators. I wonder if a different shape isn't now a more appropriate model. The O of the 'charm bracelet' is possibly most appropriate.Back when these were all the rage, you would typically buy someone the charm bracelet with a few charms on it that you thought best represented them. Over time they could add more charms.Think of skills in the same way. There are undoubtedly some core competencies that are critical for future success. I would argue those are the Three Cs that I laid out here, and in High Frequency Change. Everyone should leave school with these charms on their skill bracelet. But everyone will have others, based on their own interests and passions or upbringing.Over time we all add more charms. Some of them might be big and expensive. A trade, a degree, or a depth of experience. Some of them might be small and cheap: basic competencies collected through online courses to allow you to complete a particular task, or just because you wanted to learn.The people we want for a particular role or task might need to have collected particular charms, as well as having kept those core charms polished. But perhaps the most important thing we will be looking for is not what charms are on their bracelet, but whether they are keen to add more.

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.

Future working: what does the company of the future look like?

Following on from my speech at Boston’s Smashfly conference in 2016 on the future of recruitment, I’m discussing the topic once again. There is a lot to unpack when we consider the future of workforce management, and indeed, the company of the future.There are lots of articles out there about the future of recruitment. Many of the ones that I read tended to focus on how we will hire people in the future. The end of the CV/resume, for example, and AI-assisted selection. But I thought I would focus on why we will hire people, what sort of business we will be bringing them in to, and how we will see workers change as a result.

The future of workforce management

The starting point for this is understanding that the rules of success are changing. What defines a successful company in the future is not the ability to optimise, it is the ability to adapt. In short, being the best at what you do is only useful while what you do is something people want. In an age of high frequency change, what people want is subject to frequent and rapid disruption.Future-ready organisations are constructed as networks of loosely coupled smaller units, not deeply integrated monoliths. Each of these smaller units might have a unique culture and operating processes. They will need to be ethically compatible and aligned to the wider organisation’s over-all goals. But if their interfaces match up to the interfaces of other parts of the organisation, and they continue to deliver, there is little need for rigid control.

Building for remote

Some companies have already ‘built for remote’. GitLab has documented in great detail its approach to an all-remote workforce, including the challenge of onboarding people and overcoming loneliness.As well as having a continuing fear of infection, lots of people – and their employers – have now recognised these benefits of working remotely. They have found a better way of working for many of the things they need to do. Once you have found this better way, why on earth would you want to go back?

Migrating to Cyberworld

You can see the move to the cyber realm as similar to relocating to a different country, with a new language, culture and rules. Why shouldn’t it be possible? After all, we had to build up the now familiar processes of the office environment. Why shouldn’t we just create a whole new set of behaviours for the remote world?This would be true even if most organisations currently run in a slick, transparent and deliberate manner. I think most of us know that is not the case for most organisations, which tend to rely on the good will and hard work of lots of people to keep them running in spite of – rather than because of – sound processes. Should we address this? Absolutely. Can it be done fast? Absolutely not.People will need to be both retrained and re-equipped. In giving up the office, large organisations will need to start thinking much more about the home or remote working environment of their staff and spend accordingly, if they want to avoid risks of physical or mental harm. The change this will require in budgets alone is colossal for a large employer.The question for organisations who have recognised the potential for more remote or hybrid working, is when to begin the radical interventions that will begin their real transformation and allow them to reap the benefits.

High value hires

That might sound bad for recruiters but that would be to ignore the critical corollary to falling worker numbers: each worker becomes more valuable as a result. Just look at the earnings per employee of some of the world-leading companies right now. Companies like Apple make over two million dollars in revenue and hundreds of thousands in profit for every single employee. That means the value that they have to place on selecting and developing the right people is much higher.Networked organisations created in response to high frequency change are designed to be adaptable. Sometimes that adaptation will be organic within each node on the network. Small, agile teams should be able to evolve faster. But sometimes more radical excisions and acquisitions will be required. Whole units may need to be added quickly, sometimes through outsourcing to third parties, sometimes through acquisition. Sometimes, whole units will be dropped. Recruiters will be expected to fill critical positions at speed.

Constant evolution

For workers, high frequency change means constantly evolving your skill set to remain relevant. This too presents challenges to recruiters. The best candidates will be advancing their skills at an accelerated rate. The ability to learn and develop becomes one of the most critical factors in candidate selection, much more than established skills and experience. Companies are building the ability to be great tomorrow, not just seeking more of the same to expand their current output.

Embracing the ‘lazy’ mindset

I say all this as someone who has worked remotely for much of the last fifteen years. It’s good to be lazy. I am lucky enough to have a good setup at home to allow me to be productive. And my periods of working in offices and collaborating with others have shown me when it makes most sense to isolate myself, and when it is best to come together. I recognise that working remotely I can be a lot more productive in many tasks. And not only that, I don’t waste large parts of my day travelling.It’s good to be lazy because people with the right type of lazy mindset do things better. They are less likely to be busy fools. They are more likely to be the type of ‘essentialist’ described in Greg McKeown’s popular book: focused on the things that matter.We shouldn’t be calling out the ‘lazy’ people staying away from the office. We should be celebrating their better instincts. And at the same time, working out how we support those for home remote working just doesn’t work.

What will jobs look like in the company of the future?

So, we know that hiring processes will change and organisational structures will evolve. But what will future jobs look like? Let’s take a look at a future job: the Algorithm Archaeologist.

Future Job: Algorithm Archaeologist

Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ll know by now that algorithms – a sequence of steps to process some information and return a result – are responsible for a lot of things in our lives.But how do we know what those algorithms are doing? How do we know we can trust them? How do we know they are not biased against us, because of our age, sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation?Algorithms have been around for a long time. They rarely operate in isolation in such a virgin environment. They are compounded and integrated, fed skewed data sets. Their outputs get twisted from the intention.Who do you call when this happens? The Algorithm Archaeologists. Data professionals who can spelunk down through the chained processes to understand the complete sequence, and audit and identify any bias or breakdown.As we build up more and more layers of technology, one on top of the other in opaque strata of complexity, we will need more people with these skills to help us maintain our faith in the systems that support us, and ensure that they are not exacerbating existing inequalities, or creating new ones.

Hypertribalism

After another week of debate about 'culture wars' and 'cancel culture', I decided to write something about it this morning. Then I realised I already had.I wrote most of the post below back in January, but never quite finished it. It's very much a provocation without too much evidence behind it. But reading through it today, it certainly felt like an accurate representation of what I have continued to witness this year in politics and culture.By the way, I note that the term 'hypertribalism' has been used by a few different people from conspiracy-theorist forum posts to Catholic ministers. But I use it here in a slightly different sense.##High frequency change has disrupted the foundations of our identity. These foundations include familial political affiliations, sporting allegiances, religious affiliations, and shared economic and cultural experiences. These things have been persistent between generations and across age cohorts in the same communities for decades. But now they are being disrupted by the explosion of choice, the more global communities created by always-on digital communication, and the globalised supply chain for media, products and politics.These shared foundations of identity were what connected us to a sense of place, and what bonded us into coherent movements. Into tribes. In the digital age, our sense of place is undermined, and old tribes are fractured. We share less with our geographic and historical peers than we did in the past, whether those peers are family members, school friends, or colleagues.What has replaced these old tribes is a new hypertribalism.I would characterise hypertribalism as having three traits:

1. As tribes get smaller, the adherence to core tenets gets stronger. Any diversion from those tenets sees rapid expulsion
2. 'Opposing' tribes and their members are demonised for even slight divergence from the tribes' core tenets
3. Transient leaders, structures, and sometimes principles

You could argue that these are all traits of tribes throughout history. But I use the term hypertribalism to highlight the fact that each one of these core traits is amped up in this current age. The extreme reach and accessibility of global communications platforms being the primary catalyst for this change.

Adherence to core tenets

"One Trot faction, sitting in a hall,One Trot faction, sitting in a hall,And if one Trot faction, should have a nasty squall,There'll be two Trot factions, sitting in a hall."This rhyme is related in Christopher Brookmyre's (excellent) Country of the Blind, but I remember it first from my time in student politics in the late 90s. Trot, for the uninitiated, is short for Trotskyist/Trotskyite, an adherent of Leon Trotsky's branch of Marxism. The story the rhyme tells is that of the endless rifts in the political left, particularly in the emotion-drenched realms of student politics, over issues of principle.Today those rifts are more evident than ever, on both ends of the political spectrum. On the left, it is not just Corbynites vs Blairites, but fractional groups aligning around different priorities, whether it is the achievement of power, the rolling back of austerity, or the rejection (or pursuit) of one of the many possible forms of Brexit. On the right, the rise and subsequent implosion of UKIP and then the Brexit Party has torn apart the broad church of conservatism, leaving a loose and deeply unhappy coalition of europhile moderates, disenfranchised working classes, hedge fund managers, and frankly, racists.Though Boris Johnson successfully attracted enough of this coalition to his cause (namely, his own power) in the recent general election, this base feels highly unstable and very open to disruption, either by a resurgent and more appealing Labour or just as likely by a new force on the right. As Moises Naim said a few years ago, power is now harder to win, harder to use, and easier to lose.While each faction defines itself by hard adherence to some key tenets, and rejects anyone who does not share that adherence, the fracturing of each group into smaller groups will continue. This is a phenomenon particularly amplified by social media, where it is hard to express nuanced views and anything except full-blooded commitment to the cause is often met with opprobrium. Given the driver for the existence of tribes - as much about our need to belong as any real connection to a cause - people are incentivised to keep their views blunt in order to secure social approval.

Demonisation of others

Tribes have always defined themselves in opposition to others. They are as much about what they are not, as about what they are. As tribes fracture and become smaller, and to the outsider, their differences appear perhaps smaller, so each tribe has to express its differences more strongly. Particularly by highlighting the apparent failings of the other. Five minutes on Twitter and you will see incredible levels of hate directed between groups who might be expected to be natural allies, were there not a single issue of principle separating them.This phenomenon can be incredibly damaging to those who become the target of a particular group. Particularly when they were part of that group but have been ousted from it for some apparent breach of its rules. But it reaches its most disturbing peak in the use of language like 'traitors' and 'enemies of the people' by national media.

Unstable leadership and structures

What the various interests coalesced around the Brexit agenda have shown over the last few years is that a complete lack of structure and stability is no longer an obstacle to achieving your ends. Whether it is the 'strong and stable' party of power, or the endlessly reforming and leader-shifting UKIP/Brexit Party, if your narrative connects with the public it can continue in spite of the machinery failing.This power of a story to exist beyond its teller feels like it too has been augmented in this age of low friction communication. Stories - and conspiracy theories for that matter - can rapidly take on a life of their own.Of course, this instability is apparent in organisations with a less successful story as well. Anyone remember TIG?###This is as far as I got with the post (in fact the last sentence is a new addition just to round out that last point). But I think it gets the key points across. And it raises some important questions. Is this a new or growing phenomenon? Or is this just another case of a digital age observer seeing age-old patterns of behaviour through an new medium? I am more convinced now than I was in January that this is not necessarily something new, but something that has been incredibly amplified by the communications capabilities unique to this digital age.I have written before - here in 2017 and here in 2018 - about my concerns for the way that technology can fragment society. This post is really just documenting that effect and its emergent effects in a little more detail. But these facets, or symptoms of the phenomenon seem important if we believe it is something that needs tackling.I certainly think there is an argument for tackling the bullying elements of this phenomenon. And the way that it allows, or even encourages, the spread and use of  - even deep belief in - false information. These things do serious harm both at the individual and the societal scale.But I also see this commons as a positive and powerful thing. A place where ideas can be shared, debated, demolished or enhanced. This is a society working out its differences primarily through language not violence.How do we keep these positives while addressing the negatives has been a big debate for the last few years. Where does responsibility lie? With the social networks? Police? Or society? Personally, I don't think we can or should ask corporations to police our speech. But they can give society the tools to do so, whether that's fact checking, abuse blocking, or providing information to law enforcement - subject to appropriate judicial oversight.The rest, I think, remains up to us. The improvement of this commons is only likely to come from the commons itself.

The future holiday: long but costly

A few months ago, the PR agency for holiday home maker Willerby approached me for my thoughts on the future holiday. They were working on a campaign with TV GP Dr Hilary Jones and wanted to extend the thinking out: what might the future holiday look like?It's not the first time I have tackled this topic but I decided to take a fresh look this time, considering all the pressure points and trends that might drive change in the future holiday. The results certainly caught people's attention with the report immediately getting covered in the Daily Mirror when it launched.The fundamentals of my foresight process are simple. I look at the big pressures already facing a particular issue. In this case that included climate change, demographic change, the economy, and mental health. Then I look at the trends: changes in technology, ways of working and living, consumer cravings, new forms of transport. I believe that you can get a real sense of the future when you see where these trends connect with the existing pressures.The result in this case? Longer but more expensive holidays, as changing working and living practices intersect with the pressures of climate change. A craving for more physical experiences as we seek escape from our increasingly digital environment. And a few eye-catching things, like 3D printed homes that blend seamlessly into nature, giving us both comfort and the sense of the wild that we desire.You can download and read the full report from the Willerby website here.

The city is dead. Long live the city.

I appeared on Radio 4's Moral Maze this week as one of the witnesses giving evidence to the panel of guests. I confess I struggle to listen to this programme as it gives air time to some panellists who...[seeks polite way to say this]...whose moral frameworks do not align with my own. I'll leave it at that. But this time they all reigned it in a little and appearing on the show was good fun.The topic was the future of the city. In light of the current pandemic, the death of the high street, and the acceleration of remote working, should we all be abandoning cities for smaller towns and countryside living? My answer was a resounding 'no'. In fact, quite the opposite. I argued that if we are to address some of the major crises of our time: climate change, the ageing population, economic disruption, then we need more of us to be living in cities, not fewer.

Cities against Climate Change

This may sound counter-intuitive but you are likely to have a much lower carbon footprint living in Central London than you would living in the middle of the countryside. One might be literally greener but the city is far and away the more environmentally friendly choice.Why? For a start, your home is likely to be newer and better insulated - not least because there are likely to be other homes above and below it. The infrastructure and the tarmac around you stores heat, keeping temperatures in cities 1-3° warmer than the countryside, further reducing your investment in heating.When you travel in a city, the amenities are much closer by and you have a much greater chance of being able to travel by public transport. Getting to work, the shops, the pub, or a museum, you will expend a lot less energy.

Cities against ageing

The collapse in our birth rate means that our population is ageing even faster than we thought. In the UK we have been offsetting some of this trend through immigration. That is going to be a challenge in the face of Brexit and a weak economy. We need to find solutions to caring for our ageing population with a declining tax base. One of the ways to do that is to keep people self-sufficient for longer, and when they do need care, enable us to care for them more cost-effectively.Cities are the ideal place to do this. In a city, all the amenities can be close by. Public transport should enable people to get to whatever they need without access to a car or private transport service. If they do need door to door travel, taxis are relatively cheap.When people do need care, having them grouped in a city means care workers can get to them more easily and emit less carbon in the process.

Cities for the Economy

Cities are the cheapest place to serve citizens with utilities. The closer together people are, the more cost effective it is to provide water, waste services, electricity and connectivity. This is why many rural parts of the country still run on oil deliveries and septic tanks and have crap broadband.Cities are also cheaper places to provide a wider variety of public services, at least on a per-capita basis.  Put a park or museum in and it might immediately be accessible by hundreds of thousands of people. Likewise schools and hospitals.In tough times for the economy, as we are facing now, this becomes important.If we are to escape the economic doldrums, the dense nature of a city is also important. Densely-packed cities have higher economic productivity - especially when they are well connected with public transport. The bandwidth of being there, face to face, has value. As does the proximity of other creative souls, suppliers, partners and entrepreneurs.

Change the city to save it

None if this is to say that we should preserve cities as they are. Cities thrive on change and our cities need radical change if they are to be the vehicle to address the economic, ageing, and environmental crises facing us. They need new housing. They need better infrastructure for transport, energy, and water. We need to radically rethink our high streets as places of convergence not a retail monoculture.We need to adapt our cities to changing working patterns, building for a steady flow of people around the city not artificial peaks in morning and evening. We need to begin turning parking spaces over to living as we invest in car alternatives and (eventually) autonomous vehicles make city-centre parking largely unnecessary. We need to think about other ways to re-use space that might formerly have been offices, factories, or shops. Like farming, perhaps.We need to think about affordability, ensuring that city centres don't become a monoculture of another kind. We need to bring people of all ages back to the city centre to live, and we need to make it attractive and affordable for them to do so. City centres need to be clean, green, and safe.

Not just cities

I am not advocating for everyone to live in a city. Nor am I arguing for any type of coerced relocation as we may have seen in the past. We are going to need and want people living and working across the country for the foreseeable future.I am also not arguing for further economic centralisation around London. The UK's other great cities all have roles to play in tackling the challenges we face and we will fail to tackle them if we don't focus investment there as much as anywhere.But cities, and specifically large, densely-populated cities, evolved to meet today's needs, are a critical part of the answer to today's crises.

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 population implosion

The human race is facing a population implosion, faster and sooner than we previously understood. What does this mean for us?Every year, the UN updates its forecasts for the global population. In 2019, the median prediction saw us hitting a peak of around 11 billion humans at the end of this century before our numbers start to decline.11 billion is a lot of humans. The planet could easily support that many, if we all adopted certain lifestyles and policies. But not if everyone wants to live like people do in Britain or America. And there's a good argument that says "Why shouldn't they?" After all, we have spent decades squandering the planet's resources to feed ourselves and our economies. So 11 billion people on the planet was going to be tough. Not only would it accelerate climate change, feeding that many people would be made harder by the effects of climate change. But at least we could see the population peaking. And we could begin to plan for its decline.

Shrink to save the planet

The problem with a declining population is that global disasters aside, it generally means a fall in the birth rate. That means that the population is ageing as it shrinks. Which in turn means fewer young and working age people are available to support the older members of the population, either through taxes or through direct support.Nonetheless, given the pressures of climate change, and the reasons *why* the population was peaking - rising global wealth and the emancipation and education of women - it was clearly a good thing. And while some countries where the birth rate is already low were already starting to struggle with an ageing population, at a global scale it was something we had decades to learn how to deal with.Then came a new report.

Population implosion

The report from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation shows the global population peaking lower and sooner. Instead of 2100 it will peak in 2064. And instead of 11 billion it will peak at 9.7 billion. The global fertility rate will be down to 1.7 by the end of the century.What does this mean? Let's start with the good news. It means women around the world have more power and control over reproduction. And while this is probably too little, too late to have any real impact on catastrophic climate change, it will reduce the scale of the mitigation challenge - a rather euphemistic way of talking about the feeding and rehousing of millions of people.Bad news? This population implosion is happening much faster than we thought at a global scale. Here in the UK, the effects aren't predicted to be that dramatic in terms of total population but some countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal, are predicted to see their populations halve by 2100. This will see a collapse in the tax base and workforce while the cost of caring for an ageing population rises and rises. And it starts now.

Policy response

So what do we do? The first response to this population implosion must be to shore up programmes that support women's education, work, and reproductive rights. As the economic consequences of this population decline become clear, there are bound to be those whose solution is to drive women back to a role as mother and home maker. Setting the policy tone now by addressing the remaining imbalances will make the coming battles much easier.Then we need to look at relatively short term measures to our ageing population. Immigration is the most obvious solution, politically unpopular as it is in many places right now. Populations in India and Nigeria are going to continue to grow through the end of the century. Rather than closing our doors we should be opening them and inviting people in. Based on this report it seems many countries are likely to incentivise immigration within a few decades.Technology will play a huge role. There is a lot of squeamishness about robots and automation in care and health contexts, as I have written about before. But technology can alleviate the burden of some routine and unskilled tasks from care workers, giving them more time to offer personal contact and companionship.Public health campaigns will also be critical. If we can help people to look after their own health, and extend people's healthy, productive years by one, two, or even five on average, then we can drastically reduce costs to the state.This is likely to be married to an extension to the working age. Don't expecting your pension before 70 or even 75, so staying healthy as long as possible will be critical.

The turnaround

The longer term question becomes one of species survival. With a birth rate at 1.7, the population will continue to shrink. Will we see it return to more sustainable levels, around 2.1? I think we will.There is an element of techno-optimism in this view, but I do believe that perhaps in the next century we will reach a level of global health and wealth where most of us are living much longer, healthier lives, with average lifespans rising over 100. If you think that is overly optimistic, just look at the changes in the last century.Investments in women's medicine should see the trauma and risk of childbirth reduced over this period. Greater political equalisation at home and in the workplace, should make it easier for women to have children without damaging their careers. And with better medicine and extended lifespans, having children later in life will be more common.The population is likely to decline a long way before any of this happens. We may find we settle in the 5-6 billion range before it does. And post-climate change, the world will look very different then.

Will Strictly go on forever? #AskAFuturist

We all need a little light in the current times of pandemic and political betrayal. So I thought I'd tackle this tongue-in-cheek question from Fiona on my #AskAFuturist thread on Twitter: "Will Strictly go on forever?"Fiona is referring to Strictly Come Dancing, the somewhat oddly named BBC TV series, now at 17 seasons and named the most successful reality TV format by Guinness World Records. In a world of on-demand entertainment it remains appointment viewing, attracting on average over ten million viewers per episode in the last few seasons. Can it continue this run of success?The answer to that question brings in the subject that is most obsessing me at the moment: choice. And it raises the most challenging issue for futurists in making predictions: the unpredictability of human taste and behaviour.

The choice explosion

Today we have more choice about what we watch and when we watch it than ever before. Not only that, we have more choice about how we spend our leisure time than ever, albeit arguably with more leisure time to spend as well. The natural assumption from this is that each form of entertainment might take a smaller share of our total time. And this largely appears to be true. As the internet rose, so linear (broadcast) TV consumption declined around the world. But what's fascinating as someone who watches and listens to very little real-time/broadcast content* is just how dominant broadcast media remains in the UK. According to the 2019 Ofcom report, 89.4% of us listen to the radio and spend an average of almost three hours a day listening. 88.5% of us watch television, and spend an average of over three hours in front of the gogglebox. 71% of that viewing is still accounted for by the primary five broadcast channels and their subsidiaries.Compare these figures to those for Netflix consumption and you see just how dominant the old forms of media remain. The average Netflix subscriber (about 40% of UK households) consumes about 7 hours of content per week.What can we take from this? Strictly has achieved an incredible feat by growing its audience over the seasons to the level it is at today. But it has done so in the context of a choice explosion that is only just beginning. We are at, as the saying goes, the b of the bang. While there are many more options out there, most people have yet to migrate their tastes away from the dominant broadcasters, if they ever will. Though the trend is most pronounced amongst the youngest viewers, as ever. If they maintain their behaviour as they age, consuming more short-form and on-demand content, the strictly could suffer.

Tomorrow's celebrities

This said, it's hard to discount the idea of continued success for Strictly. After all, part of its appeal comes from the stars who they attract to appear on it. The careful curation of these celebrities ensures that the show attracts a broad demographic. If that successful curation were to continue, and new generations of stars continue to value an appearance there, then it's possible that the show could sustain its success. But, I think this is where the show may struggle.The media through which the new generation of celebrities are emerging are very detached from the traditional world of carefully curated linear programming, or even reality TV. The style is very different and so is the audience. Creators are often auteurs with complete control of their output and image. Their audience comes from all across the world. Appearing on a show like Strictly might be a big leap for them, and one that doesn't necessarily hold that much appeal. If you have ever watched YouTube stars appear on 'normal' television then you will know what I mean. Even the most famous and polished frequently look awkward and out of place. It's just a different discipline. Learning it may not hold sufficient reward unless the financial prize is very large and the crossover with your own audience is significant.

Format shift

Strictly and other popular linear programming is likely to face another challenge in the next decade as we go through another format shift and mixed reality becomes more accessible. Exactly how and when this happens is unclear, but as I have written about in the past, the physical and digital worlds have been coming closer together for decades. Blending them in a form of augmented reality interface seems like a very obvious next step.This creates enormous possibilities for programming that is somewhere between television and computer gaming. People have demonstrated systems where you can be the director of your own show, for example, using the huge amounts of raw footage captured by the falling cost and rising pixel count of cameras. That's a very different experience from the passive consumption of television, but it might appeal to some.Whatever happens, there will be a new dimension of choice and competition for established formats in the future.

Re-use and recycle

If I were to be forced to bet on what will happen with Strictly, I would guess it follows a fairly traditional TV arc. Ratings start to decline, and after a couple of years of them falling the BBC decides to stick the idea back in the vault to resurrect at a later date when the time seems right - much as it already did with Come Dancing when it added the 'Strictly'. When will that happen? Well, the numbers are still strong. I would guess we have at least another three to five seasons of Strictly yet before they decide to pull the plug.##*Apart from all the shows I appear on. Clearly I listen to/watch you all, every week, without fail...

Your next new car might be a new brand, and a new shape

Your next new car might not look like your old one. And it might come from a brand you've never heard of.In 2019, I wrote a report for Auto Trader about the future car and the changes you could expect to see in the coming decades. I based the report on my Intersections process, where I examine the pressures facing and market and how they intersect (hence the name) with global change trends.One of those trends is about choice. Technology has compressed the world, bringing us all closer together. And it has cut friction from the innovation process, opening up access to the tools of creativity to many more people and lowering the cost of manufacturing. The result is that we have more choice now in a huge number of domains. The automotive space is the next one to be affected.

Han solo? Unlikely

I was inspired to write this piece by the announcement that BYD is coming to Europe. BYD is the biggest car maker you've never heard of. A Chinese giant responsible for building everything from passenger cars to utility vehicles - many of them battery powered.BYD's Han looks like a serious Tesla competitor: 376 mile range, 0-60 in 3.9 seconds. And it won't be the last new brand we see.Electric vehicles are likely to go through the same process as mobile phones in the next few years. Where once their incredible complexity meant only a handful of companies could design and build them, as the technology matures and becomes more accessible, more brands enter the market. Most will rely on third party integrators and manufacturers. But some will be design shops who have third parties build their more original designs. And some will assemble their own vehicles from a library of off-the-shelf parts.

DIY EV

I'm experimenting with how accessible the technology behind electric vehicles is myself right now. As I often do to understand the big tech trends, I have taken on a project to get under the skin of the technology. So, I'm trying to build an electric vehicle using recycled and open source parts. If you are interested in that sort of thing, I'm logging my progress over on my new projects site (very much a work in progress - both site and project).What I have learned so far is just how large the electric vehicle supply chain has become. There is a huge diversity in the array of motors, motors, batteries and electronics driving these vehicles. And there is much more to come as the likes of BYD enter the market. With scale comes possibility: more new entrants, white-label manufacture (expect to see luxury, fashion and technology brands launch cars in the future), and more new designs.

Horses for courses

Most of the cars on the road are poorly shaped for the jobs they do. How often do they actually carry four or five people? Or a full load of luggage? How often are they actually in motion? You can use the answers to any of these questions to argue that we should move away from cars, and I think that's a very valid argument. But placed in the context of our 100-year-plus love affair with the car, and the fact that most of our cities (and even countries), are designed around the car, this seems unlikely to happen fast. Instead I think we might belatedly see more variety in the design of vehicles.Right now, single or two-seater pods like the Twizy look pretty quirky and are mostly used as promotional vehicles. But as their cost falls, and the variety of them rises, we might see more and more such vehicles on the roads. In fact, I think we'll see a huge spectrum of different types of electric transport from single-wheelers, to electric juggernauts and every possibility in between. Machines that are more fit for the purpose for which they are typically used. Machines that are affordable to buy (or lease), take up less space, and cost less to run, but that fulfil 90% of the customer's need.The other 10% can be fulfilled by ride sharing services or short-term loans. Your lease might even include access to alternative vehicles for when you need something a bit bigger. Your two-seater covers the commute but you can borrow the 4x4 for the weekend trip to the countryside.

The future for dealers

This presents an interesting future for dealerships, which are usually located within easy reach of suburbs. If we are using a variety of vehicles for different purposes, where might these vehicles live when they are not in use? Dealers might still sell some cars, but they might also start to use their lots as storage space for flexible lease-and-loan schemes that give people access to a broader range of vehicles. With modular parts and continuous software upgrades, dealers might also find themselves keeping fleets on the road for longer. Maintaining, upgrading and customising the customer fleet might continue to be a big part of the business.

Will nuclear energy replace fossil fuels? #AskAFuturist

Tim Panton (@steely_glint) asks: “Will nuclear energy replace fossil fuels? If so, will it be fission or fusion?”This is one of those questions that is hard to answer accurately without sounding like you are trying to fudge it. Because the answers are ‘yes, but only some’ and ‘both, but not at the same time’. And also, ‘it depends what application you’re talking about’, and ‘over what time frame?’

One of many

The first challenge in answering this question comes back to one of the five major trends I track that I see popping up in every domain I examine: choice. We live in an age of low-friction innovation, where building novel solutions to problems is easier than it ever has been. That does not mean it is easy, but it does mean that the turnover of new technologies is faster, and that the variety of technological solutions is wider.The adoption of these technologies is also easier and cheaper. With lower barriers to entry, people can afford to experiment more. And with lower innovation and production costs, suppliers can afford to support smaller niches.The result is that there is rarely one answer to any problem. It is impossible to say that nuclear will replace fossil fuels because LOTS of things will replace fossil fuels. Indeed, they already are. Check out this chart from the IEA’s 2019 World Energy Outlook report: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/installed-power-generation-capacity-by-source-in-the-stated-policies-scenario-2000-2040This is specifically for the power generation market – electricity, in other words. What it shows is that coal consumption has flattened, and oil is down, while gas continues to grow. Meanwhile, solar and wind are on incredible growth trajectories. Hydro and other renewables are also growing. In the IEA’s projections, nuclear is fairly flat. This is all over a 20-year time frame with projected global energy consumption continuing to rise.

Fission flat

These projections seem plausible to me. We might hope to see a faster decline in gas and coal offset by even more dramatic shifts to solar and battery storage. This is possible with large infrastructure investment in those countries with highly centralised grids. Given the noises about economic stimulus investment in the UK and elsewhere, we might just see some of this. But it is hard to see the nuclear picture being anything other than (largely) flat.This is not because there will not be new nuclear. But lots of reactors in places like the UK and France are ageing and well beyond their original design life. So even large-scale development will only hit replacement levels. There is some hope for smaller scale nuclear systems that might fit well into a more distributed grid infrastructure as a back up to primarily renewable generation, or that could be clustered to replace coal or ageing nuclear plants. Certainly, lots of investors, including governments, think this idea has strong prospects. But it is hard to see it growing at a rate that makes it a serious candidate for replacing the majority of fossil fuel consumption, even just for energy generation.

Commercial fusion?

Meanwhile, fusion research continues to make slow progress. It is hard to see it hitting commercialisation at any real scale in the 20-year IEA time frame. Even if the model is proven, it is unlikely anyone in the west would be able to build out a reactor within another decade. China is a different matter and there, practical fusion power might be a valuable alternative to the country’s enormous reliance on coal. But still, it is hard to see it making a serious impact in the next twenty years.

Renewables

Meanwhile, solar, wind, hydro and tidal power advance apace. As does the storage technology to offset their intermittent feed. Done at very large scale, these projects require very large investment – the sort that takes years to assemble or that has to be underwritten by governments. But done at smaller scale, they can be rolled out relatively quickly and cheaply. This feels like the best bet for a lot of fossil fuel replacement.Roughly two thirds of grid energy consumption in the UK is in residential and commercial venues, where small scale renewables and storage might present an opportunity to shift away from grid power for at least a proportion of usage. The shift to electric vehicles means that these sources might also power a lot of our transport. Only in large scale industry like steel manufacturing does small scale renewables and storage feel less practical – though I would be delighted to be proven wrong on this. Perhaps here is the opportunity for small scale nuclear? Single or clustered plants could be used to provide consistent, clean(er) energy to major consumers and the surround areas.

Looking beyond

In the longer term, fission feels like a dead technology. It is cleaner than coal but still leaves a lot of radioactive mess behind that we don’t have a good solution for. I do believe we will one day crack the fusion challenge, allowing us to generate a lot of energy in a small space. But remember: however sophisticated the heat source, nuclear fusion would still be used to make steam to spin a turbine. This is the same way we have been generating power for 140 years or so. Even the Romans were using steam to make stuff spin. It feels a little old fashioned. The sci-fi nerd in me wants something solid-state, more like Iron Man’s arc reactor. But sadly no-one outside of the fictional universe knows how that might work.So, will nuclear energy replace fossil fuels? Yes, but only some.

COVID-19: When we rebuild, we need a new blueprint

The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined a number of issues with the design of our organisations in both public and private sector. We have been shown to be ill prepared and slow to adapt in the face of such a challenge. There will never be a perfect response. These challenges are unprecedented. But organisations that had prepared for dramatic but much narrower changes in their own sectors will have fared much better than those that were optimised for the status quo. Because though the scale and breadth of the challenge might be different, the fundamentals of the response are the same.At the core of any new model must be this principle: build for adaptation, not optimisation. Whether the change that disrupts your world is affecting just you, or everyone, it is going to come. And as I argued in High Frequency Change, our hyper-connected, low friction world, means the challenges that come may be many and varied. They will only be visible on the near horizon before they arrive and turn your world upside down. You have to be ready to respond.So the question becomes about your objective: are you here to make hay while the sun shines? Or are you preparing for the inevitable rainy day? Do you want maximum profit today? Or do you want to build sustainable success?If you want to build sustainable success, then you need to change the way you think about your business.

A new blueprint

In Future-proof Your Business, I make the argument, and offer the tools, for three fundamental changes in the way we design and operate our organisations. It is focused on a business audience but the lessons are just as valid for the public and third sectors.

Focus on the future

Most organisations are terrible at planning. It is true of their annual budget, frequently a drawn-out and rancorous affair that does little to inform business operations. It is true of their strategy documents, often disconnected from the budget that supposedly backs them. For the most part, outside of some critical moment's in the business life cycle, we only do real strategic planning under duress. I prescribe that every leader should spend 1% of their time focused on the future. This isn't a day of dreaming, but the use of structured tools to scan the near and far horizons and reset the direction accordingly.

Accelerate decisions

We move too slowly in response to even the most powerful stimulus. We need to accelerate business decision-making if we are to be truly resilient. That means speeding the flow of information to the core decision-makers. But more importantly it means distributing the decision-making more widely. Future-ready businesses give their people the autonomy, the responsibility and the tools to react to changes in the environment.

Structure for agility

Giant monolithic operations, directed from the centre, have little hope of responding at speed, or of ensuring the right response for every one of their stakeholders. Distributed organisations, networks of semi-autonomous components, can react much faster. Like a box of self-assembling Lego bricks they can reorganise to meet each challenge.

Future-proof Your Business

Given the relevance of these tools and messages at this challenging time, my publishers and I have decided to bring forward the launch of Future-proof Your Business in its digital form. Rather than launching at the end of July, it is available from today on the Kindle store. An audio version will be following as soon as we can make it happen.I will be doing a series of digital seminars around the launch with partner organisations. Already in the diary is a talk and Q+A hosted by Herb Kim for BIMA at 6:30 pm on the 23rd April. And a session with Downtown in Business at 2pm on the 24th. Watch my social media for more details and joining instructions.Future-proof Your Business is available now on the Kindle store. Download your copy.