Well, Hello There!
If you are reading this now, there is a good chance that you didn’t just stumble upon my writing on the internet. This morning, I thought about what this blog was about originally, how I have strayed a bit from the initial intent and where it is today.
I started writing online a long time ago. I always enjoyed the opportunity to share information with people and put some thoughts out into the world. I started something “blog” like in the early 2000’s Wayback .
I have always been focused on helping in some way. I stopped writing in my own corner for a little while, but I picked back up in 2009 when I was doing a lot of work with virtual technologies. I started writing a lot about technology and a little about what I believed would happen in the future.
If you had been with me for the ride that long, you’d know that many of my predictions came true. I don’t think that I had some special lens on the world but when I had a chance to talk to people in areas of technology and expertise, I synthesized my own view and shared it based on what I believed was common sense.
I made some mistakes regarding timing. For example, there was a company called Webvan, they delivered groceries and I thought there would be a day that people would have groceries and food delivered to their homes like a taxi service. I was way early. I believed that we would be further down the road with AI, virtual reality, and other technologies by this time. I knew services like Napster and other sharing services would change the face of music. A friend of mine and I built a portable mp3 player that we could use in the car when people still had cd changers in the trunk. There wasn’t any such thing as an “IPOD” at the time. Do you remember when cd changers were in the trunk of the car? We still had tape players in the car!
I would not call myself a futurist, but I believe since I have spent time thinking about technologies, studying them, and learning about how they work relative to the world, I can see possibilities which have a high degree of likelihood.
That’s what I’ve written about over the years with a little bit of personal experience, some information that may help others and some ideas or thoughts about the areas of business and work I am entrenched in at the time of my writing.
What’s Next?
If you are looking for next week’s lotto numbers, you are in the wrong place. If you are thinking about what technologies will become much more visible and important in the next 1-3 years, I think we have some things to talk about. I’ll put a few things out here, if you want to dive into any of these, send me a message and we can research, think about it, and share some thoughts.
- AI is the first obvious but extremely important trend to think about. Companies have been playing with models, testing out things and talking about AI for a very long time. I have written about my view on IBM Watson and the investment they made which I think paid dividends for other companies and the advancement for AI well beyond Watson itself. I may still be a slight bit early but ChatGPT like technologies will in my estimation, change our near-term future. Historically speaking, any technologies that help us become lazier shoot off like a rocket. We are at this place with AI that in a rudimentary way CAN change the way people behave. It will make every device we have smarter; it will make writing less of a thing, it will change art and science. It will pull disparate data sets together and offer insights for invention, innovation, and transformation. It will also create outcomes that I can’t predict because this technology is so disruptive.
- Meta Quest and the other virtual reality technologies are ABC, 123’s of this type of technology. What I mean is that these will be looked at one day like in the same way that we look at a calculator or joke about the Commodore 64. “Do you remember when we put that big cell phone with glass on our heads to go into a cartoon looking world?” This will change quickly, first the googles will get smaller and the reality scapes will get better, and it won’t be long before we aren’t wearing headsets and these things will be in contact lenses and glasses. We will also have augmented or experience technologies in stores embedded into the walls, glass etc. When you walk into a store today, they CAN know who you are when you enter through facial recognition. This is here today, just ask the lawyer who was denied entry to Radio City Music Hall a few weeks ago. Everything we do has the potential to be personalized based on what technology can present about us. Laws, rules and regulations aren’t in place yet, so it will be a technical “free for all” for some time before something terrible happens and they must write the “It’s my data and don’t expose me Act.” Yes, the government will need to catch up because it is going to get pretty interesting for a while based on what technology can tell about you just from a camera. One more example, let us say you walk into a grocery store, the facial recognition camera identifies a pattern in your heartbeat that is abnormal and while you’re walking in the store automatically calls a local ambulatory drone to get you, notifies you by phone and pulls statistically likely next of kin and texts or calls them. Is Howie your father or brother? If yes, please respond to this message. We have vital information to share!
- 3D printing and deposition and OTHER technologies are also in an interesting place for us as far as the general public goes. I think additive manufacturing and other technologies for building or objects even buildings will be in every home. Instead of buying things, we will buy patterns and materials to produce things. We will most like see it start with the opening of stores that are mostly empty except for machines that make things. For example, Home Depot won’t have nails or screws, they will be made to order and you just either pick it up or it will be delivered by the “Home Drone” and you can get to putting your boards together. Some people already can do stuff like this today at home but it will become more normal, less complex and it will lower costs and labor requirements for companies. Printing will eventually change medicine, we are already printing human parts, it will just get better over time and there may be a time in our future that we print people. You never know! I am not getting into the religious part of this, but I am saying for sure, the technologies are here that have this potential.
What about the..
Sure, there is a lot to think about but there is a lot coming at us. The major change here happens when a great percentage of people have access to learn and implement technologies. When people can turn milk containers into speakers, or Pringles cans into directional antennas, we have some innovation, invention, and transformation about to happen. The transformational aspect occurs as everyone in the world may have access to the internet and a global source of findable knowledge. Through technology TODAY, we can ask questions and learn directly from AI. This is probably one of the most significant things to happen to us since mobile smart devices were released into the wild.
As mentioned, I there is a lot to think about and talk about. We should also challenge each other to think through these in order to both help ourselves as a society and protect ourselves from future concerns that we may have some opportunity to predict.
What do you think? I’d like to know.
The Cohenization Project 