New Week #64
A special end of year instalment: seven glimpses of our shared future in 2022.
Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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The year is winding down; here in London the days are short, and cold!
This is the penultimate NWSH email of 2021. I’ll be back on Sunday to look briefly across an amazing year for our community, and to sign off for the break.
In the meantime I couldn’t resist one final, and special, edition of New Week.
I’ve chosen a selection of stories from across the last seven days. They’re far more than just ephemeral, or interesting. Taken together, they form seven powerful signals: of emerging trends, macro-shifts, or social tensions that we’ll be hearing much more about in 2022.
In these seven signals, then, catch a glimpse of the coming 12 months.
Let’s get into it.
👟 Millions will enter a whole new consumer arena
Creative agency RTFKT, best known for their virtual sneakers, announced that they’ve been acquired by Nike for an undisclosed sum. The startup recently partnered with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami on a range of NFT avatars; since launch three weeks ago trading volume has surpassed $65 million.
Meanwhile the founder of Twitch, Justin Kan, launched Fractal: a new open trading platform for gaming NFTs. Kan hopes the platform will become the centre of the exploding market for in-game devices, cars, clothes, and more.
⚡ NEXT: Yes, NFT was a 2021 buzzword, and that pushed some to label the phenomenon a passing fad. But by allowing unique ownership of virtual entities, NFTs are doing something remarkable: establishing an entire new arena for consumerism, and unlocking new ways to for millions to collaborate, create, and display status. A tsunami of innovation is coming; we’ve only seen the start. Expect much more in 2022.
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🌎 Scientists will hack the planet
Elon Musk tweeted that SpaceX will start work on initiatives to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into rocket fuel. Musk says the technologies will be ‘important for Mars’.
⚡ NEXT: Back in NWSH #60, I wrote a plan, hatched by Harvard University scientists and sponsored by Bill Gates, to cool the planet by throwing reflective chalk dust high into the atmosphere. An experiment along those lines was cancelled in the face of local opposition. But there’s a growing conviction among some in the scientific community that we can geoengineer novel climate change solutions. As the climate crisis manifests in yet more severe storms, floods, and fires next year, expect new and even more daring experiments, plus a whole lot of debate over the ethics.
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👨🎤 You’ll meet your first virtual human
South Korean presidential candidate Yoon Suk-yeol launched an AI-fuelled avatar of himself, inventively named AI Yoon Suk-yeol. Yoon is the candidate for the main opposition People Power Party, and says the avatar will campaign on his behalf in parts of the country he can’t visit. AI Yoon Suk-yeol sports a photorealistic rendering of Yoon’s face, and a deepfake version of his voice.
⚡ NEXT: The virtual humans are coming; I wrote about their rise back way back in November 2020 in Kim Kardashian, Virtual Humans, and How Weird Becomes Mainstream. This year, the story has only accelerated. See Unreal Engine’s MetaHuman Creator, a tool that allows anyone to make their own photorealistic avatar; meanwhile, New Zealand-based virtual humans startup Soul Machines – tagline ‘say hello to digital people’ – recently announced a new partnership with Microsoft. If you haven’t yet had your first interaction with an AI-fuelled almost human, then expect it to happen next year. Uncanny is the word.
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👁 A values war will engulf another massive business
Former Apple employee Cher Scarlett said she’ll continue with her complaint to the US National Labor Relations Board. Scarlett was a leader of this year’s #AppleToo movement, which saw staff campaign for pay transparency and an end to gender and race discrimination inside the company.
⚡ NEXT: Apple is notoriously secretive. But that was blown apart, this year, by #AppleToo. The underlying lesson here? The trigger inside Apple was a lockdown move to the online team messaging tool Slack, which emboldened employees to connect, share stories, and air grievances. Remote and hybrid work are here to stay. In consequence, the same transparency dynamics that saw #MeToo sweep across the globe a few years back are now set to rewrite the internal cultures of many leading businesses. Value systems will collide, just as they did this year at Apple and, infamously, at software company Basecamp. In 2022, yet more businesses will be engulfed.
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🦾 Automation will remodel the economy
US-based Tyson Foods said they’ll invest over $1.3 billion across the next three years to increase automation at their meat plants. CEO Donnie King says a lack of workers means the company currently can’t fulfil booming demand.
⚡ NEXT: It’s not often that this newsletter collides with the world of meat processing. But Tyson Foods is a $31 billion company, and this story is informed by deep technological and economic shifts that will do much to shape our shared future. Triggered by the pandemic, a labour shortage is afflicting much of the Global North. In response, employers – including those in food service, agriculture, and manufacturing – are turning to automation in record numbers; see McDonald’s, for example, experimenting with the automation of drive-thrus. Will robots lead us to a world of leisured abundance? Or will we face rising inequality, diminished career options for millions, and strange new forms of depersonalisation? These questions have been looming for years, but in 2022 they’ll become impossible to ignore.
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👩⚕️ We’ll figure out the pandemic’s lifestyle legacy
In further news from South Korea, the Guardian this week reported on the country’s drive to create an untact society. A society, that is, that minimises in-person social interaction to protect health and promote efficiency. Think staffless stores, and virtual GP visits. The city of Seoul has even announced plans to build a virtual world in which citizens can remotely interact with public officials.
⚡ NEXT: Does an untact society sound a bit dystopian? Yes; yes, it does. When it comes to reshaping lifestyles in the wake of the pandemic, most countries won’t go this far. Still, what’s happening in South Korea is a reminder that so much of what we liked in 2020 to call the new normal remains unfixed. How often should knowledge workers traipse into the office? Should we stop kissing friends on the cheeks when we meet? Are pre-pandemic business travel habits ever coming back? Across 2022, we’ll keep obsessing over these questions; we may even settle a few.
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🤖 Machine minds will see the world their way
The Megatron Transformer, an AI developed by the Applied Deep Research team at at Nvidia, was invited to a debate on AI ethics at the Oxford Union. The team behind it say it was trained on all of Wikipedia, 64 million English news articles, and 38 gigabytes worth of Reddit threads. Asked to offer its opinion on ethical AI, the Megatron said: AI will never be ethical. It is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for good and bad. There is no such thing as a good AI, only good and bad humans.
⚡ NEXT: Wise words indeed. Sure, this is something of a stunt, intended to promote Nvidia’s AI research. But the events of 2021 – from OpenAI’s incredible natural language model GPT-3, to DeepMind’s solution to the protein folding problem – left no room for doubt: machine intelligence is set to transform our lives, and multiple industries, in the years ahead. In 2022 the underlying philosophical debate will only intensify: can machines ever be said to think? But via repeated exposure, millions will become more accustomed to the idea that while AIs are not conscious, and certainly not human, they are developing new ways of seeing the world that are all their own. For centuries, we have watched our machines; now, they’ll start looking back.
The only time is now
Thanks for reading this week.
None of us can see the future. As with all legitimate futures thinking, the seven signals above are founded in a structured observation of what’s happening now. Still, I look forward to revisiting these at the end of next year, when we can compare them to the reality as it unfolded.
That’s almost a WRAP for New World Same Humans. I’ll be back on Sunday for one final hurrah.
In the meantime, if this instalment resonated with you why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us!
Until we meet again, be well,
David.
P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.