Description
Augmented
My six-year-old son Thomas won’t need a driver’s licence to own a car and it’s highly likely he won’t even own a car; he’ll simply rent car “time” instead. Throughout his entire life, he will never be without a smart device which will soon tell him when to go to the doctor for advice (and his insurer will require him to wear it), he’ll live in a smart house where robots clean and fridges or a household AI order groceries (delivered by a robot), he’ll never use a plastic card or chequebook to pay for anything (and likely no cash either) and he’ll interact with hundreds of computers every day that won’t have a mouse or keyboard. Thomas is part of the so-called Generation Z which is growing up in a world so dramatically different from the world that their grandparents were born into that if you had predicted these changes 100 years ago, it would have simply been called science fiction.
You might be tempted to pass these changes off as the simple forward march of technology, but there is something more fundamental taking place at a personal level and even in the way society itself functions. How many times a day do you check your smartphone for messages or check your Facebook newsfeed? How often do you log in to a website or use an app? Do you listen to music, read a book or play games on a device? How often do you walk into a new restaurant, hotel or office and immediately ask for the WiFi password? Have you ever taken a selfie?
While it is true that humans have been adapting to technology continuously, in the next two to three decades more changes will be thrust upon humanity than in the last 1,000 years. We’ll have the technology to cure diseases and perhaps even extend life itself, we’ll have machines that mimic or surpass humans in intelligence, we’ll have self-driving cars, we’ll land the first humans on Mars and we’ll finally have the technology to live sustainably on the planet with abundant energy and creativity.
Shifts of these magnitudes often bring incredible opportunities, jarring sociological adjustment and, on many occasions, even violence.
The Internet, social media and smartphones brought us email, selfies, hashtags and YouTube, but they also brought us the Arab Spring, ISIS propaganda, Wikileaks, NSA’s PRISM programme and the global Occupy movement. Social media gave us Facebook and Twitter and arguably propelled Barak Obama to the presidency in 2008, but it has also allowed some of the most hateful and racist vilification in recent history to find a home. It has created cyberbullying that has left numerous victims in its wake and has exposed intimate details of both famous personalities and secret government agencies.
Is all this technological advancement inherently good or bad for us? Are the emerging changes going to result in a new golden age, or an age of even greater disruption?
This book is about the world that is coming, the changes society will need to make to adapt to that world but, more importantly, it is about the journey that each of us individually will take to arrive in that future. We will explore where we’ve come from and how we’ve found ourselves in potentially the most disruptive and innovative age of mankind’s history. What will your life look like in 2025, 2030 and beyond? How will we get there? That’s the essence of what we’re trying to answer in the pages that follow.
This glimpse into that future is ultimately optimistic but, along the way, I wanted to see if there are any specific lessons we could learn as to how we might react to the seismic shifts coming. I interviewed and sought the contributions of some of the world’s most pre-eminent experts in the areas of network effect, health care, artificial intelligence, robotics, consumer behaviour and sociological impact to ensure that you don’t just get a single commentator’s view.
In the last decade, I’ve spent my life talking to business leaders, entrepreneurs and media about the future. How banking, money and commerce are being fundamentally changed by smartphones, how identity and privacy are evolving, how consumer buying habits have shifted around buying books, music and TV and will never return to what they were in the past. What continues to astound me, the optimist that I am, is how many so often push back against technology changes and trends as they emerge.
I think it is fair to say that most people have a nostalgic view of the past; it is why we call them the “good ole days”! The world, however, never stays stuck in the past. So why is it the instinct of some to resist change, often passionately? What I do know is that despite any fears that we might have and challenges we might face, the future is incredibly bright, incredibly interesting and coming at us fast.
Augmented is about how your life will change on a day-to-day basis as data, sensors, machine intelligence and automation enhance our world, and our place in it. It’s about how you will adapt to live in a smart world.
I hope it will inspire you and supercharge your imagination.
Before we get started in earnest on this journey, I’ll leave you with a quote from one of the greatest science fiction authors of our time, William Gibson.
The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.
William Gibson, Economist, 4th December 2003