What If Even Our Fantasy Gets Disrupted
WHAT IF EVEN OUR FANTASY GETS
DISRUPTED
Publication by Magnus Brehmer
910 Words | 4 min
The iPhone is now 10 years old and the smartphone as such perhaps 15 years old. The Internet has been publicly available for some 22 years. Social media really established for some 10 years. The digital interface, its vehical and its content generator if you want, and content generator in the meaning of Big Data! The Digital Profiling of the world and all its inhabitants have already surpassed George Orwell's predictions from 1949, in his book 1984, even if it took 30 years longer for it to arrive.
Now there seem to be a lot more to come, and we are struggling to keep up with abbreviations like IoT, AR, VR, AI, Nano, Bio, 3D-printing and new materials such as Graphene! What if each of these will have the same impact as the mobile phone have had on the society and our lives? Or even more? What would it mean?
The TELEX system was unknown for most people, except the really big international companies and largest media houses, but when the TELEFAX came in the 1980's it really got people impressed and fascinated! Suddenly architects could push a drawing through their phone, and it was slowly being printed at the construction site at the same time! But seriously, how long did that fabulous invention last? 10 years or so? Washing machines, mattresses(!), cars, garden hoses and even TV's have longer Product Life Cycles than the fabulous fax had! Reflection?
How does today's 15 year old kid look upon the fax, when visting a museum? The email? When will Skype be placed on the shelf next to it? We are experiencing a time with more rapid and disruptive development than ever before, and I have a feeling that we might only have seen the first few seconds of it so far(!). When I delivered a speech and a following workshop in Moscow last summer, I asked my dear stepson Carl Marbe Markgren to create this attached visual for me.
“We are experiencing a time with more rapid and disruptive development than ever before.”
How big impact does this fast development have on us human beings? Will it even interfere with our evolution as such? Have we entered a new step in time, where we start bending our backs again?
Imagine that Microsoft's Alex Kipman is right, and that the next generation of smart glasses (or perhaps even smart contact lenses) in combination with IoT and Big Data, provides us with an entirely transparent world(!). Instant connection with all satelites and surveillance cameras of the world, linked via advanced algorithms to all data bases(!). Who ever you look at will generate a short data sheet in your right corner. Name, address, weight, length, medical status, sexual preferences, political belonging, religion etc. Whatever you look at comes with the same facts, features and benefits! With your eyes and gaze, you decide next step. Want to know more? Buy it? Make contact? Share and send it to someone?
You look at a thick book, its digital code is scanned and sent to a cloudbased library, which instantly returns the entire book's content - all 400 pages - to your smart glasses, and hence become a part of your own knowledge base(!). Do you want a 5 minute summary of the book, and do you want it read up to you?
Science Fiction? Unbelievable? Like pushing a paper through a phone, and watching it coming out on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean at the same time? Companies are already exploring how digital technology, could make it possible for anyone to learn a foreign language in no-time!
But what happens with us humans if all fantasy is taken away from us? If we always access the true answers to anything within a nano-second? And if our own fantasies becomes transparent, appearing in someone's smart glasses as they look at us? Forget integrity - That we gave away 1995 without realising it! But if you think about also loosing your fantasy, what would that mean?
In dramaturgy, one basic rule is to always leave the last piece of the jigsaw out, to let the receiver finalise it/get the reward. What happens when all the puzzles are completed from the beginning? With our creativity? With our own development? With our imagination? With our satisfaction? Was it pehaps this Stephen Hawkings meant when he said that AI (Artificial intelligence) might be a bigger threat to mankind, than nuclear weapons or natural disasters? Or will it all take the world a little closer to paradise?
In Sweden a start-up company is developing a "Black Box" for human beings! You know one of those "orange"(!) colored boxes in airplanes, that tracks everything and can be traced up to 30 days after a crash. But this human version of it will probably become more of a microchip, inserted in your body, driven by body-heat and keep a record of how you feel, where you are, what you're doing, whom you are with, for how long. Imagine the police having access to this when investigating crimes? Being able to cross analyse it with all the surveillance cameras in the relevant geographical area? Being able to see exactly how a victim's medical status developed minute by minute! Being able to see, via satellites exactly who else were in the relevant proximity, due to each individual's digital DNA! Lots of those technics are already available today. The question is only - Do we want that to happen? Can it even be stopped from happening? George Orwell didn't think so in 1949.
Magnus Brehmer
BRAND POSITIONING & MANAGEMENT
________
Market Economist & Rhetorician with 25 years of international experience, as a specialist, manager, coach, teacher and consultant. Magnus has lectured at the IKEA Business College in Delft for many years, and regularly delivers speeches in various forums worldwide.
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