Tag Archives: future

Breaking bread

Last night I had dinner with online principals from other districts in the province. We are on the online principals association executive, and this was the first time we met face to face in over 2 years. Yes, we are all comfortable with technology and communicating online. Yes, we’ve connected online several times over the last couple years. But there is something really special about connecting face-to-face and breaking bread.

Maybe in a decade or so we’ll be able to meet virtually online and have a full out of body experience, with avatars sitting next to each other and each of us wearing googles that allow ourselves to see the visited environment from a first person perspective. We might even be able to simulate the experience of shaking hands. At some point in the future we might be able to have an experience that feels just like we are together when we are not.

These virtual world experiences are something I look forward to. I’d love to sit in a room with my parents more than once a year. But I won’t be able to taste my mom’s cooking. I won’t be able to break bread. So while the promise of technology advancing so much that we can better simulate being together in a virtual room when we can’t be together is very promising, it won’t replace actually getting together in every way.

I still want to connect with people face-to-face when I can. Not just to eat with them and to taste good food, but to have that human connection that has been mostly absent for the past couple years. I’m excited about technology being able to get us together in new ways, to improve the opportunities of connecting in more meaningful ways, but not to replace actually getting together when we can.

The unseen casualties to come

I am saddened by the physical destruction, and especially the death and disruption of innocent lives happening now in the Ukraine. But I think (and hope) this will end soon. However, this war will affect far more than the Ukrainian people. As US President Joe Biden said,

“It’s going to be real. The price of these sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia; it’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well,” Biden said. “Both Russia and Ukraine have been the breadbasket of Europe in terms of wheat, for example — just to give you one example.”

This will have a massive impact on the world’s poor. Many reading this will feel the financial cost of increased prices, but that burden can be absorbed. We simply will have less buying power and less options of things to buy. But we won’t go hungry. For people living at or below the poverty line, and especially in developing countries where limited food choices become both expensive and scarce, it’s a different story. People will go hungry. People will revolt. People will die.

Since WWII many of the global conflicts have been about oil. The conflicts of the future will be about food and water. No matter what the reason, global conflict affects us all more and more in the interconnected world we live in. It’s one thing to look at the horror of lives lost in a conflict like this, still another to know that more casualties are coming.

Retail sale

It doesn’t matter what store you go into today, there are items on sale. Walk into a mall and it won’t surprise you to see discounts on certain items between 50-70%. The item you came for probably won’t be that cheap, but an item or two you leave with might.

I wonder about the future of retail malls and stores. I’m sure there are specific name brands that will survive, and people will always want to try certain things on before buying them. But how does a small store in a mall survive when the once hard-to-get items they sell are actually easy to get online? And how does a company compete with online prices when they have to pay exorbitant rental/retail space fees?

They do so by drawing you in with a hard-to-resist sale. Buy one, get one free. 75% off. Clearance sale, everything must go. Hardly anything goes for regular retail cost anymore. Everyone expects a deal. Only a few places, like the Apple store, don’t play by these rules. Everywhere else is about the sale. We have entered the era of the discount, and most places won’t survive unless they offer you a deal you can’t refuse.

Retail now means sale. And stores need to provide you with amazing deals that leave you happy to buy, and happy to return for more deals in the future. And if they don’t do this, they won’t be around in a few years. The choices are to specialize or to discount… the niche or the sale.

The real numbers

In the last week and a half I’m aware of 18 people whom I personally know have caught covid-19, likely the Omicron variant. But of these 18, (half of which are 2 families), I think only one of them is reported. Others sat on 811 for more than 2 hours before giving up on the call. Others have mild symptoms, and here in BC they are asking people with mild symptoms not to get tested, because testing locations are being overwhelmed.

Extrapolating on these numbers, even if I overestimated the amount of cases in BC to be 1/3 reported (that would be 6/18 rather than 1/18), then the real number of new covid cases is a massive number.

This is surprisingly a good thing. First of all, our hospitals are not overwhelmed with serious cases. Secondly, at this rate of infection, we are moving quickly to heard immunity.

Well, that’s my hope anyway. I am only working with my own anecdotal evidence, and coronavirus has kicked my predictions in the butt more than once. Still, it’s good to look forward and see a little light at the end of the tunnel.

Maybe by spring everything will be open and masks will be optional. Maybe. Still, it feels good to have a little optimism right now. Even if we really don’t know the real numbers, I think they are looking good… Time will tell.

The laugh track

Growing up, every sitcom I watched had a laugh track. In fact, I think most of them had the same laugh track. My wife was watching a show and left the tv on. What followed was a new show I’d never seen before. The humour was bad, and the laugh track made it even more painful. I think the last sitcom to use a laugh track that actually didn’t take away from the comedy was The Big Bang Theory. But even there, I think they could totally have pulled it off without one.

Then came the commercials. Wow, they are awful. I really don’t watch a lot of TV, and when I do, it’s usually Netflix or some other streaming service that I don’t have to watch commercials on. Is there some sort of strategy whereby really bad commercials somehow work better than good ones?

Bad laugh tracks, bad commercials, bad sitcoms. How is TV going to survive in the next 5 years? Streaming services will be the way everyone watches their shows. I think most TV stations are going to go the way of the laugh track… and it won’t be a funny thing for them.

On the other hand, the old sitcoms I used to watch, like Friends, Seinfeld, and Cheers, are now the shows that my daughters are watching, or have watched. What’s funny about that is that I missed a lot of the shows because I didn’t see them on the night they played, and didn’t catch all the re-runs, but my kids watch episode by episode on demand. And that’s the difference now, shows can be watched any time, and without commercials.

The laugh track will live on in re-runs, but I think the days of the laugh track are long gone, and any good quality comedies of the future will rely on good humour and not a fake audience to cue the laughter of the viewer.

8 Billion

The world population will reach 8 billion in late 2022, or early 2023.

8 billion people!

There’s are more people alive today than the total number of people who have lived and already died.

I’m reminded of this scene from The Matrix:

‘We’ need to figure out how to sustain ourselves and our planet. While we worry about the coronavirus that is locking us down, we also need to figure out how we can be less like a virus and more like a mammal cohabitating with all the other living organisms on this planet.

The trick is, ‘we’ includes 8 billion people in 195 countries. A virus has a singular purpose: to spread its genes through infecting more hosts, humans are a bit more complex than that. Complex, complicated, and carelessly destroying our planet.

8 billion people.

8 billion different perspectives. 8 billion different realities. One planet.

If or When?

I haven’t had any (known) close contact with Covid, but I’ve reached the point where it has touched or is touching so many people I know… I’m starting to wonder, is it a question of ‘if’ or ‘when’ it will reach our family?

Looking a year into the future, I can see the end of the ‘end’emic, with optional vaccines for a covid strain, just like optional flu vaccines today. There may even be a single Pan-Coronavirus “Super” Vaccine that truly ends this. But that’s in the far future, what lies ahead in the next 6 weeks?

I’m afraid my crystal ball gazing conjures no clear images of what’s to come in the short term. What’s my best guess? Businesses and maybe even schools closing from staffing shortages; Tougher restrictions in public (indoor) spaces; and a lot of people self-or-family isolating.

What’s my hope? Less and less hospitalization with more and more mild cases that look like a ‘regular’ flu.

Time will tell. I’m setting a calendar reminder to look back at this post in 6 weeks.

We don’t really understand

We don’t really understand exponential growth. It’s too hard to comprehend because when we look at growth, we tend to focus on what we’ve seen already, and project forward, but what has already happened is always less significant in length or size than what is still to come. So when we compare what has happened already to what is still to come, we are not comparing equal things.

Fold a piece of paper in half 6 times. How thick do you think the stack would be? Let’s have some fun and look at the folding paper challenge:

It was an accepted belief that folding a piece of paper in half more than 8 times was impossible. On 27 January 2002, high school student, Britney Gallivan, of Pomona, California, USA, folded a single piece of paper in half 12 times and was the first person to fold a single piece paper in half 9, 10, 11, and 12 times. The tissue paper used was 4,000 ft (1,219 m; 0.75 miles) long. ~ GuinnessWorldRecords.com

So she needed a 4,000 foot, (1,219 metres) long piece of paper to achieve this. It’s easy to look at this image of her folded paper and figure out how big it was at 11 folds and before that 10 folds, by halving the amount once then twice. But what if she were to fold the paper more times? How many more times would this image represent?

This image represents folding the paper just 3 more times… a total of just 15 folds.

At 23 folds this would be about a kilometre high (3,280 feet). At 30 folds, you would be entering space. 42 folds gets you to the moon. The 51st fold would get you to the sun. Beyond that it doesn’t matter because our brains won’t truly appreciate the scale anyway.

So I can see the difference that folding a piece of paper just 6 times (64 pieces of paper high) to 12 times (the first image of Brittany above) looks like, but I really struggle to extrapolate from this that 24 folds would be 2 kilometres high.

So when we look at things like technological advancements, we don’t really see well into the future. When I bought the 16k adapter for my Commodore VIC 20 computer to get me to a whopping 36k of memory, I could not fathom the idea that I’d one day be buying 2 Terabytes of memory to store photos that were 8 megabytes large. And I’ll have an even harder time imagining what kind of data I’ll be storing 10 or 20 years from now.

Watch out Metaverse here we come! What does this mean? It means that in 20 years we’ll look back at the technology we have right now in the same way someone who lived 160 years ago would look at our technology today.

That’s mind blowing!

Space Travel

If you could take a trip to the Space Station, would you go?

If there was a shuttle to an outpost on Mars, is that I trip you would want to take?

Does the idea of weightlessness, and escaping gravity appeal to you?

I wonder if leaving Earth’s atmosphere is something that will be as accessible as traveling to a distant continent in my lifetime? Pay for a ticket, hop on a spacecraft, and spend a luxurious week in zero gravity.

Part of me wonders if I’d enjoy it as much as I think I will, and part of me thinks I’d feel nauseated for most of the trip. But I want to go! I want to experience weightless and see the entire earth from space. I want to do a space walk. I want to put my feet on the moon or on Mars.

I want to holiday off planet. This is a bucket list destination. Who’s with me?

Creativity and NFT’s

I think by now everyone has heard of NFT’s.

NFTs (or “non-fungible tokens”) are a special kind of cryptoasset in which each token is unique — as opposed to “fungible” assets like Bitcoin and dollar bills, which are all worth exactly the same amount. Because every NFT is unique, they can be used to authenticate ownership of digital assets like artworks, recordings, and virtual real estate or pets. – Coinbase

Right now I think many people see this as a fad, and there are all kinds of tokens being created and sold for ridiculously high prices, which both make the news, and seem like a silly waste of money. But there is something here that is pretty special in two different ways. And when the dust settles and the fad-y-ness goes away, it is creatives who will benefit from these tokens.

1. Re-sale of art.

When an artist sells an original, they get the sale price and then they don’t benefit if the art is resold. Often an artist will take years to get popular (much less famous) and their early work is essentially given away compared to their later work when they become known. With NFT’s, artists can get a percentage of the resale value. The token can be tracked and if sold on an NFT market (rather than a private transaction) then the artist can keep a commission.

2. Tokens tied to real world rewards.

There is a DJ named 3LAU (Justin David Blau) who sold NFT’s of his work in an auction,

“The way 3LAU structured his auction was very cutting edge and the mechanics of the auction should be noted. There were 33 available winning slots in total for the auction. Slot #1 was the Platinum Tier, slots #2 – 6 was for the Gold Tier, and slots #7 – 33 was the Silver Tier. Each tier contained digital artwork, music, and physical goods (Vinyl) connected with the project. The winner of the Platinum Tier also won a custom song created by 3LAU with the winner’s creative direction, tokenized as a 1 of 1 NFT.” ~ Dennis Martin

In another auction, the top tier included lifetime tickets to every concert he does. And since this is an NFT that can trade hands, it can be sold if the buyer no longer wants this.

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So while you’ll read things like, A Rare CryptoPunk Ape NFT Was Sold for $10 Million USD in Ethereum, and wonder why? Or how this can be sustained? Or if this is just a fad? NFT’s will have value desired by others. Yes, there will be silly collectables selling for way too much. But there will also be the ability to play games and earn items of value that can be traded rather than just hoarded. And that is another way NFT’s will be used to trade items people will want to pay for.

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Collectables and video games aside, NFT’s will be a game changer for artists and creatives. And in a world where automation is making items better, cheaper, and faster; and where jobs themselves are becoming more automated, there will be more time and space for artists to hone their crafts as a way of making a living. NFT’s will be part of that future where artists can sell their work, provide experiences for their fans, and benefit from the resale of their work as their popularity grows.

NFT’s might seem like a fad to you, but they are here to stay, and some time in the near future you’ll end up owning one if you attend a live show, or buy a piece of art, or maybe even choose to pay for a song of artist you love to listen to.