WHAT'S THE FUTURE?

When you read most pundits the future is not the one we signed up for. It’s currently predicted as likely to be somewhere between ‘Brave New World’ and ‘The Circle’. As Caitlin Moran observed (and what a brilliant writer she consistently is) the only people creating the future currently are Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook (and I suspect Microsoft is still in the game as is Tesla). They are the forces behind driverless cars, robotics and space travel. We have blindly given them all licence to shape our lives and control our destinies.

Whilst they are creating a future of sorts for us we are living in the present and practising mindfulness, being in the now not in the next. Recent oddities in terms of forecasting have made many people apathetic about the future. Brexit, Trump, North Korea - we’re doomed and we don’t know why or when - let’s meditate…

So there are increasingly those soaked in nostalgia, yearning for a safer past when summers were summers and climate change hadn’t been invented (but remember the Great Smog of 1952) and those in the zone, in the ‘now’ controlling (or who think they are controlling)  the present. The future party has no members apart from those in Silicon Valley.

But the future isn’t so hard.

For a start fast as disruptive change seems there’s always a reversion to the mean - what my old History Master used to call “the swing of the pendulum”. In other words despite the pundits predicting the death of books in the face of the threat of e-books, book sales in 2016 went up (specifically non-fiction and children’s books) and e-book sales went down; Justin King when he was CEO of Sainsbury's was categorically predicting the growth of out of town shopping and the demise of the High Street. Well actually wrong Justin. Everyone’s snapping up small shops now - convenience, as well as online, is the buzzword. And as for the demise of TV? Don’t be daft.  Amazon, Netflix and HBO are transforming the viewing figures.

Donald Trump and other so called business leaders often talk about doing things quickly, changing things fast; complex evolutions are expected in days not months. The future will unfold more slowly with, if we are smart and overall I think the human race is very smart indeed, the continued medical breakthroughs making us healthier, communications technology making us reach and converse with more and more people and things like driverless cars liberating the elderly and allowing them life enriching mobility and artificial intelligence making it possible for us to enhance our own learning capacity. Magnus Carlsen, Norwegian world chess champion plays against computers to improve his game. Of course.

What I do not believe is everything will be delivered by drone or that our lives will be so connected that everything we do will be controlled from our watches.

“Run the bath at my favourite temperature now.”

“No run it yourself, lazy git”

Because the future will not be stupid.

BEWARE LOVING THE INTERNET

I was surprised to see so little follow-up after reports last week in the New York Times about recent Russian naval activity around underwater internet cables. It said  “American military officials are concerned that Russia might be preparing to sever the communications lines in case of a conflict".

These fibre optic cables account for more than 95% of daily communications and financial transactions worth more than $10 trillion. In a world increasingly dependent on high-tech communications shouldn’t we be worried? Wasn’t the TalkTalk debacle a shot across the internet bows - even if the shot may have been fired from the pop gun of a 15 year old Irish hacker?  It seems the internet might be more vulnerable even than we’d thought. According to the magazine “Signal” a TechNet magazine which describes itself as “more than a magazine”, the main vulnerability is in the switchers and routers which can be overloaded in a cyber-attack. What would ensue would be the tech equivalent of “goodnight Vienna”.

The older you get, this Black Swan activity that Nassim Taleb describes becomes decreasingly surprising. The internet is a young entity cobbled together with no one in charge of it. In the early days of its existence French investors asked an American techie “who’s CEO of the internet?” Now, just 24 years after the Word Wide Web went live, the same question resonates even more strongly.

It’s the Wild West out there and something’s going to go wrong. A Russian, North Korean, Isis inspired or a freelance disruptive force will bring the infrastructure down. Think tech tsunami.  Now the reality of all this (which is culturally, technically and intellectually way beyond me) is that human resourcefulness, being what it is, this outage would be a serious but just a temporary blip not a long term catastrophe.

Nonetheless imagine the psychological damage first-generation- internet-dependents would suffer. This weekend Twitter suffered a series of outages over a twenty four hour period and   the woe that ensued from that was enormous.

Beyond these blips Twitter is discovering new problems. Its market capitalisation is around $20 billion yet its very existence is beginning to be questioned. Here’s what Caitlin Moran said - she’s the “columnist of the year.”

“Twitter promised access to a new global consciousness where we would have the dizzying thrill of hearing voices we’d never heard before. The reality is that it has ended up sounding like everywhere else. Except …nastier”

She called Twitter the global Town Square. Yes we used to have those where people like my Grand Dad might have said something apparently true….

“If the trees be in leaf on November the 1st
The winter that follows will be one of the worst”

Now just because it sounds plausible (or it appears online) don’t lazily believe it….question it. And don’t delegate your entire life and mind to an infrastructure so vulnerable to collapse. Imagine a world without the tyranny of technology.

I regard this (like Signal) as “more than a blog” but with more of a smile.