New World Same Humans #29
These three trends will shape the strange new world that lies ahead.
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The world around us tends towards chaos. Meanwhile, we seek constantly to impose our structures on it.
This week is all about a structured way of thinking about the future. More specifically, it’s about three trends.
Trends allow us to make sense of change. They do that by asking us to see that change through the lens of fundamental and unchanging human needs.
Specifically, trends ask us to look at how change is unlocking new ways to serve those needs: security, value, social connection, and others. When that happens – when change unlocks new ways to serve basic human needs – new behaviours, habits and expectations are sure to follow.
Below are three emerging trends that I’ve been tracking recently. I think each is powerful, and will help shape the new world that lies ahead:
🔎 Truth Verticals: An ecosystem of new armies in the information war
🤖 The Represented Self: Live your best life – because the machines are always watching
🎓 Silicon Schools: Big Tech companies become the new Ivy League
Along with a brief explanation of each trend, I’ve included two thought-starter sections.
🤔 Implications are to help us think through the impact of this trend on the collective – our society and ways of life – in the years ahead. Warning: not all the implications are good!
💥 Opportunities are to help you think about how you can apply the trend to innovate and serve others. Often, that means stepping back from the trend itself and thinking about how to serve the underlying expectation.
Trends are interesting, but they’re also meant to be useful. So read, absorb, and then get to work!
🔎 Truth Verticals
An ecosystem of new armies in the information war
🙋♀️ Human need: Information
Trend: Amid the white noise of 2020, it’s easy to forget that there’s never been a time when truth was a simple matter. Disinformation, propaganda, fake news: they’re eternal.
Still, something is changing. For a precious while liberal democracies were able to maintain a shared set of baseline values and expectations – policed by elites and gatekeepers – that ensured a relatively high standard of truthfulness in our public space. No doubt: that system is now diminished. A democratised media is great in many ways; but it means a million new voices, many of them willing to lie, some of them just plain crazy.
Meanwhile, the most powerful nation in the world will soon be China, a country whose leaders want to impose an alternate reality on their own citizens. Much journalism in western countries is enfeebled by a broken ‘both sides’ approach to balanced reporting. And deepfakes are set to make the truth even more slippery.
So where next?
In the 2020s, part of the answer will be a rearguard action among those determined to reinvigorate a shared culture of truth and evidence. Expect communities to form around subject-specific Truth Verticals, where people will come together to fight disinformation and find new and compelling ways to disseminate the truth.
Those communities will take inspiration from the dreams of the early internet pioneers: for a cyberspace outside the bounds of corporate control, truly democratic and mutually empowering. Wikipedia – the last remaining internet giant that can claim to have emerged out of that dream – has proven the power of volunteer information warriors.
The new Truth Verticals will put emerging tech to use to identify deepfakes. And they’ll find compelling new stories to tell that make the truth shareable – inspired by projects such as the long-established Our World in Data.
In recent months the UN has sought to build its own volunteer Truth Vertical around the coronavirus.
But expect an ecosystem of peer-led, decentralized communities to bloom in the years ahead.
🤔 Implications: /Pros What’s not to like about a set of peer-led communities vigorously advocating for the truth? /Cons Who funds these Truth Verticals (maybe they run on donations, like Wikipedia)? Who ensures they really are telling the truth? If people increasingly look to peer-led communities for accurate information, what happens to traditional journalism?
💥 Opportunities: The information chaos is real, and only set to intensify. People will embrace platforms, tools and communities that help them find a way through it. What issues are you and your organisation trusted on? Could you bring a Truth Vertical together and empower them to do their work? Or partner with one that’s already growing?
🤖 The Represented Self
Live your best life – because the machines are always watching
🙋♀️ Human needs: Security, Personalisation, Value
Trend: We live in a set of overlapping spaces: social, economic, creative. And we’ve become accustomed to the idea that many of those spaces are shaped by algorithms.
But this is still day zero. In the years ahead algorithms will proliferate through our societies in new ways, making decisions that impact our lives and shaping our experience of the physical environments we inhabit.
One important consequence? We’ll become expert in the practice of the Represented Self: modifying our behaviours to present our best, most authentic self to our machine observers – or to hide from them.
Right now it’s the hiding – or cloaking – that’s getting most attention. See new tools such as Fawkes, which allows users to cloak their pictures against online facial recognition algorithms. Or the physical world equivalent: these tee-shirts that make wearers invisible to facial recognition on the street.
What next? Across the last decade we’ve been schooled in a strange new behaviour: the presentation of our best selves – the self we feel is most authentically us – to online algorithms, which judge us mercilessly. Think how you aim to create photos that will please the Instagram algorithm. Or how you teach Spotify about your taste in music. Now, just as we’ve seen cloaking move from online to real world, so too will this form of the Represented Self.
New forms of real-world algorithmic judgement will mean new motivations to continually present and re-present our best selves to the machines we know are watching. Think about how Amazon is now rolling out AI to monitor staff behaviour in its fulfilment centres. Or how cars will soon make continual judgements of driver mood and attention, and change the interior conditions accordingly.
Your car, workplace, or local mall could be next. Sounds creepy? At the logical conclusion of this trend lies China’s emerging social credit rating system, which will leverage facial recognition and AI to continually judge and rate the trustworthiness of all citizens.
🤔 Implications: /Pros Amazing new kinds of algorithmic personalisation. Value judgements that are more fair, because they are not made by a single, flawed, biased human. /Cons How long have you got? Who owns all the data, and what do they do with it? What happens to privacy? AIs are also biased. Continually presenting our best selves to algorithms will be exhausting.
💥 Opportunities: This trend will deepen expectations for services and real-world experiences that are personalised and responsive. What do those expectations mean when they bump up against what you do? How can you offer new forms of personalisation? It doesn’t have to be algorithmic!
🎓 Silicon Schools
Big Tech companies become the new Ivy League
🙋♀️ Human need: Self-improvement
Trend: Last week in NWSH #28 I wrote about the coming apart at the seams of higher education.
For years now a whole range of forces – cost and information abundance the most important among them – have been tearing traditional universities apart. The pandemic has set that mixture on fire.
A connected world had already turned information into the air we breathe, and assembled the world’s best lecturers inside the YouTube app. Now, Harvard wants to charge full fees next academic year even though all classes will be online. That’s $50,000+ for Zoom classes. Some people aren’t going to buy it (literally); 20% of this year’s freshman class has deferred.
The future is open. But the fundamental human impulse towards self-improvement means that education will always be a highly valued good.
One part of what’s next? Iconic tech corporations will move in on territory currently owned by prestigious universities. They’ll do that by offering degree-equivalent education experiences, delivered by superstar teachers, at a lower cost to the student.
This week Google launched a range of new courses that its recruiters will consider equivalent to a four-year degree; subjects include data science, project management, and UX design.
Will Apple and Facebook be next? Both corporations already have secretive ‘universities’ dedicated to educating their own employees. Big Tech companies have the money, the intellectual depth, and the need: they are engaged against one another in an endless war for talented young people. That means it’s hard to see the other FAANG companies sitting back and let Google ride this alone. If Apple, for example, deploys part of its vast cash store – $192 billion at last count – to create a university, it can compete in the talent war and spin a great story to the world about social responsibility.
A host of startups are also playing in this space, including the Lambda School for coders, and On Deck, which styles itself as an MBA-alternative for founders.
But as those startups grow, the FAANG will seek to crush them and move in on the talent. Should we let it happen?
🤔 Implications: /Pros A more diverse higher education eco-system is probably a good thing. Lower-cost programmes could mean improved access to higher education. /Cons Big Tech companies such as Google and Facebook now wield a new form of socio-corporate power that we don’t really understand. Do we really want them to eat more of the public sphere? If they and other new players increasingly focus on STEM and vocational training, what happens to the humanities?
💥 Opportunities: If you’re the CEO of a FAANG, you know what to do. For the rest of us, the underlying forces at work here – that is, the disruption of education – still present opportunities. What knowledge, skills and expertise do others seek that you and your organisation can share? Build a powerful community around content, courses, and hands-on contact.
Time to build
There we have it: three powerful trends that I think will help shape the strange decade that lies ahead of us.
Remember, trends mean little if you don’t use them; how can you apply these trends to create something of value to others?
Last, take with you the underlying framework that informs all trends: a changing world and basic human needs. Look for changes – and that often means new technologies – that are unlocking new ways to serve fundamental needs, and you’ll start to spot trends of your own.
I’d love to hear what you think of these trends. Which feels most likely to you? Which offers the most opportunity? Email me and let me know! Or you can always catch me on Twitter.
Let’s start trending
Thanks for reading this week.
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I’ll be back next Sunday; until then, be well.
David.