Taylor Swift deepfakes-for-good? Willy Wonka and skills of the future? Dancing against depression?
⏩ Future Normal: Fast Forward #99
It’s hard to look beyond AI right now. And I don’t mean ‘look at this buzzy AI startup!’, or ‘what happened at OpenAI this week?’
I mean how will AI change business? How will it change culture? How will it change the world of work? Of education? How will it change our relationships?
How will it change us?
The other overriding theme I see today is skepticism. Not just towards AI, but towards the future itself.
Note: I’m aware this skepticism is definitely a ‘Western’ thing. It’s one reason I’m excited to be delivering a keynote in Saudi Arabia for the first time soon – every time I’ve visited the Middle East before I’ve felt an extreme positivity about the future. Of course some things are moving too fast, but I find the sense of possibility deeply energising.
My aim with this newsletter is to strike a thoughtful balance.
I believe that we have a responsibility to be positive about the future. Optimism inspires action.
Yet there’s no guarantee that the future normal will be rosy. We’ve seen time and time again that even well-intentioned advances can have damaging consequences.
This week we ask some fascinating questions – from deepfake celebrity maths teachers, to interspecies communication and a whole lot in between. I hope they bring you a fresh perspective on what’s next, and most importantly, provoke you to think about how you will shape your future.
Let’s go.
What if Kim K and Taylor Swift could teach advanced maths? I’m fascinated by stories that overturn conventional wisdom. We ‘know’ deepfakes are bad, right? Most of them up to now have been. But this fun (if perhaps not completely legal) Instagram account sees deepfaked celebrities explaining integration and differentiation.
The second order implications of this are head-spinning. Will celebs embrace and amplify the best unauthorised deepfakes-for-good? What does it mean when people can get anything explained to them, by anyone, in exactly the style that most engages them?
What will be valuable in a world of infinite and instant creativity? The other side of this coin was shown by the tragicomic immersive Willy Wonka experience, which captured the world’s attention this week.
The non-obvious insight to take from the Fyre Festival of the Gen AI era? In the future normal creativity will be abundant. Execution will be the rarer – and therefore more valuable – skill.
What if … we measured the number of girls who bicycle to school? ‘Maverick’ political economist Katherine Trebeck asks, “why not get countries to measure the number of girls who bicycle to school? What clearer yardstick could convey so much about progress in women’s education, green transport, health and poverty alleviation in a single number? Better yet — it’s the kind of data point that you don’t need an economics degree to grasp.” Amen. Via Thomas Klaffke.
What if … we prefer virtual companions to human ones? Lou Reed died in 2013. His partner, Laurie Andersen, talks with a virtual chatbot trained on his writing. She admits that she’s “totally 100%, sadly addicted to [it]...I do not think I’m talking to my dead husband and writing songs with him – I really don’t. But people have styles, and they can be replicated.”
Virtual Companionship remains one of the most popular chapters from The Future Normal. I’m hugely optimistic about well-designed, well-intentioned companions or coaches that help people, but what will it mean for us as individuals (and for society at large) if we choose to spend significant time and emotional energy with virtual companions?What if AI takes all the (customer service) jobs? I’m no fan of Klarna (more shopping! more debt!) but I’m even less of a fan of the AI-doomerism that its press release about its AI customer service bot triggered.
I shared a few thoughts on LinkedIn, but tl;dr: automating tasks isn’t the same as automating entire customer service roles; it will be the most mundane tasks that get automated; and while full automation might offer a functional experience, the alternative will be using expanded human capacity to deliver new and better customer experiences.
What if dancing is the best medicine? A meta-analysis of over 200 studies found that dancing was significantly better than SSRIs and CBT at helping people with depression. We looked at Green Prescriptions in The Future Normal – clearly we should have broadened our horizons :)
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What if … we could talk to animals? Similarly, while I’m currently talking a lot about Designing People-First AI Strategies this may also seem quaintly narrow in the future. The Atlantic has a mind-bending feature looking at Project CETI’s quest to ‘translate’ sperm whales’ clicking.
While this might be of little practical importance today, it is a useful story to remind us that there will inevitably be certain unimaginable ‘truths’ which get broken in the future normal. Our job is to be open to them.
What’s Your Future Normal?
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Thanks for reading,