Category: Cool

FUTURE SHOCK

Wednesday, 16 February 2011 08:53 Written by Eric Garland 0 Comments

Bought a new automobile last weekend. It includes XM Satellite Radio. I tuned it to channel 96, where a robot reads traffic conditions in Canada to me in an awesome computer-y voice.

<ROBOT>Zzzrp….the conditions…in…Hamilton Ontario…are…clear…nothing to report. Zzzrp…the Champlain Bridge in….Montreal…has a blocked…zzzrp…right lane…please use caution….Zzzzrp…the traffic in Abitibi-Temiscamangue…is…non-existent…zzzrp. </ROBOT>

OMG the future is totally here. Robots are telling me about how to drive in Quebec while I drive 70 miles an hour in Missouri.

This is your future shock for 16 November….zZzzrp…20-11.

Expert technology assessment of vintage innovations

Saturday, 22 January 2011 11:04 Written by Eric Garland 2 Comments

One of the key elements of writing scenarios is accepting that you are describing people of the future who will most likely not share your assumptions about the world. Their society will look and act differently. Technology will solve new problems and cause new complications. They won’t be, in many ways, like you and me. This is scary, because it makes us feel obsolete and more likely to avoid the real implications of where the world is heading. Nobody likes a bracing shot of mortality with their futures work – but that’s what we get.

Don’t believe that your world will one day look foreign? Watch this group of Quebec schoolkids try to somehow fathom the bizarre world that you and I must have inhabited.

What, after all, could this strange, backward group of people been thinking to be playing with this absurdly inferior technology?

Almost two million Facebook users will die this year

Wednesday, 19 January 2011 13:03 Written by Eric Garland 0 Comments

This sounds like a story lede so inflammatory and sensational that it wouldn’t even make it onto the local TV news. Yet, statistically, its just a fact of life that many, many people who use Facebook will die this year.

Nothing sinister is at play. Remember, as investors pile millions into the company with the big blue F, they back up the soundness of their reasoning by telling themselves that there are nearly 600 million active users of Facebook. That’s a pretty significant population – twice the size of the United States. And when you talk populations that big, you can make predictions based on public health statistics, which is what Fast Company has just done:

It’s a question of percentages. Sure, there is mortality rate of just 0.100% for people between the ages of 20 and 24, but when you start talking about massive sample sizes, that’s going to be a number that sounds shocking – 22, 640.

Then again, let’s think this through – how many people who use doorknobs will die this year? How many people who leave this mortal coil in 2011 will have consumed PEANUT BUTTER at least once in the past 12 months. IT COULD BE THOUSANDS. MILLIONS!

The real point is that Facebook is reaching a scale at which it become a public utility. Skype – which has around 27 million users at any one moment, users that pay nothing – released a profuse apology for letting their largely free service go down for a few hours. Now, as someone who remembers a time when rural areas like where I grew up only got one TV station in dubious quality, I find it fascinating that CEOs now apologize when they cease giving away free intra-planetary telecommunications for 24 hours. The world sure has changed. Social media is not consider a frivolous entertainment,  it is more like water, sewer and electricity – people expect it to just be there.

Facebook is getting more publicity that the average religious deity because they are hip and relevant. Then again, think of the hipness and brand awareness of your typical utility company. Does anyone write feverish, excited prose about the new business model of the water company in your city? Apple CEO Steve Jobs has just taken another medical leave of absence, and markets are holding their breath. When was the last time that happened for the CEO of an electricity distribution company? Who can name a SINGLE natural gas provider?

Utilities tend not to stay on the front page forever.

The future is watching the Cosby Show and Cheers

Thursday, 13 January 2011 10:57 Written by Eric Garland 0 Comments

Back in the ancient days of, say, 1996 – back when we were erecting large stone monoliths in honor of the various tree gods in exchange for their mercy during the winter months – there was this strange superstition that one should pay authors and musicians and filmmakers for individual copies of their work. You got to “own” these copies and you were able to listen or read or watch anytime you wanted. Some people even got rich from this business of selling copies of artistic work.

Bizarre, isn’t it?

Now we have a host of digital music services that offer unlimited music for fractions of a penny per listen. But even stranger, we now even have things like Grooveshark which work like the original, gangster, Wild West, lawless version of filesharing circa 2000 – only prettier and easier to use. I’m listening to it now. It is positively baffling how well it works and how free it is.

We have entered into an age like no other, in which a human being born today will essentially have unlimited entertainment from the artistic output of a number of centuries available anywhere he/she goes, and for free.

Future generations will be able to spend a year watching situation comedies from the year 1985 – in real time – commercials and all – available for free in some far off Burbank computer server. Next year, do you want to do nothing but listen to Dixieland jazz and Glenn Miller-era swing? No reason not to. When you have finished, you can read every book published in Scotland in 1820 while listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival. Don’t forget to tune in for our free streaming marathon of Greek and Albanian soap operas! Followed by 2000 straight hours of the Manga Channel, a specially curated webzone for people who love extreme tentacle-centered Japanimation.

And not a dollar will change hands.

Let the implications of that development sink in. It means a lot for how future generations will act.

Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion: Robots playing music

Sunday, 16 May 2010 11:46 Written by Eric Garland 0 Comments

Often, I think the 21st century may look increasingly like the 19th. Sure, there’s the dominance of coal in the developing world. There’s unprecedented globalization. European disintegration. Resurgence of local agriculture. All this, plus world health is considerably better. Not a bad future, necessarily.

In the musical world, there is a recent event that hearkens back to the 19th century days of the player piano, but will 21st century elegance and complexity. Pat Metheny, one of the top guitarists and composers in the world, has experimented for years with MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), the technology that allows musicians to connect directly to synthesizers, samplers, and recording devices. This year, his vision has gone steampunk – the Orchestrion project, a centrally-coordinated digital orchestra that triggers actual instruments instead of their synthesized counterparts.

Watch the video – this is an incredibly beautiful sounding vision by a mad professor bent on calling back a more elegant age.

Beats talking about housing and finance for a moment.

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This is the official trend blog of Competitive Futures, a management consultancy that provides trend research and analysis for business and government around the world. Here, we update you on interesting trends we see as part of our work for our clients.


For managing partner Eric Garland's new author and speaker blog, please consult and bookmark http://www.ericgarland.co

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