Imagine... the future is imaginable. And our imaginations help to set the tone for how we engage with the future, and the world around us.

So, at the end of 2024, let's imagine the best possible future we can - whatever that might mean for you. For me, it would be a world without war. Thank you for your support and feedback on our scenarios over the past year.

We plan to come back in the new year with a whole new format for these scenarios - we are excited to share that with you. But first... take a break. Have a refreshing and rejuvenating holiday, and we will see you in 2025. 

On December 4, 2024, the CEO of one of America's largest healthcare insurers was shot dead on the streets of Manhattan. Angry people, living in a world that is filled with inequality and feeling squeezed on every side, will eventually snap. This is not something we want, nor is it a call to arms. But it is a possible future scenario that CEOs of large companies might need to be as careful of their personal security as many politicians currently are.

The antidote is to build future-proof businesses that see doing good as good for business. This isn't just a cute tagline - it is a core pillar of the DNA of a future-proof business.

Our team at TomorrowToday helps organisations to understand what a future-proof DNA looks like, and to identify the drivers of disruptive change taking us into that future. Contact us to discover more about our work: http://www.tomorrowtoday.consulting 

It could happen. Sometime in the future. Data centres use an incredible amount of electricity and water. Towns that incentivise these data centres to locate nearby for jobs and tax benefits might find themselves dealing with unrealistic demands for power and water - to the point where a data centre could sue the town to continue providing them with water even if it means the people living in the town get cut off.

For more details of just how much power and water data centres use, listen to Paris Marx’s 4 part mini series on the Tech Won’t Save Us Podcast: https://techwontsave.us/episode/241_data_vampires_going_hyperscale_episode_1 

Nearly 100 years, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030 we would all be working just 15 hours a week. If only, right?

What went wrong? There is an answer, but you're probably not going to like it. We need to change the whole system to ensure we are not crushed by a system that seeks relentless productivity, endless activity and soul sucking workloads.  

Maybe the 15 hour work week is an idealistic fantasy. Or maybe it's a motivating goal to drive a change in our current world of work?

Elections are messy, noisy and can overwhelm voters with too much information and too many choices. In the future, it could make sense for us to rely on our personal AI assistants - algorithms trained on our preferences, understanding our worldviews and able to mimic who we are in communications and interactions - to analyse every politician, their promises, their track record and what we expect them to be able to achieve, and advise us on the best person to vote for in any given election. It’s a great application of the power of data analytics and pattern recognition that GenAI apps are capable of, and it would probably help voters make more informed choices… rather than voting based on charisma, fears or history. #election2024 #election2050 #future

Don't get too excited by the title - it's not quite what you think. In the future, it is possible that companies will not supply us with email addresses, but we will rather bring our own (just like we buy our own cars, phones and have your own personal cellphone numbers these days). 

This is more than a technology conversation - this is about fractional workers (senior people working for more than one company at the same time) and top talent being confident to say that their personal brand is more important than the brand of the company they work for (we do that already on LinkedIn, by the way). 

Now... if only we could actually get rid of email. Am I right?

Don't forget that our team at TomorrowToday Global works tirelessly to help our clients imagine scenarios for the future, anticipate disruptive change and build adaptive DNA in your business today. Contact us to find out how we can help you do this. 

See http://www.tomorrowtodayglobal.com or contact me personally at [email protected] (you see what I did there) for more. 

Imagine logging into your web browser and there's just nothing: no websites anywhere. You check your internet connection, and that seems fine. Your phone seems to be working. Except most of the apps are showing error messages, and there are just no websites. 

This is what would happen if the DNS system stops working. This is the system that turns your website request into an address the IP and HTTP systems can understand. And our DNS systems are incredibly fragile, completely out of date, and most are run by under supported volunteers. Yes, you read that right. One of the most important parts of the Internet sounds like it organised worse than your local primary school parent association. 

We live in a fragile world - way more fragile than we know. 

And the system could fall over at any time. It did so earlier this year, with a bad Microsoft update shutting down airports, banks and water processing plants for two days. That was a warning of worse things to come. 

On that happy note... have a great weekend. 

Come with me to 2029, when a dark side of the robotic world becomes reality. The robots we will deploy in care homes and kindergartens - those humanoid robots who look after our elderly and children - are now revealed to be controlled by underpaid and overworked human operators in sweat shops on the other side of the world.  Yes, of course, we will one day have fully autonomous, talking robots in the future. But for quite some time between now and then, the best way to achieve this is to have some level of human control. I don't think it will be benign and beneficial to the operators, sadly.  There's a cautionary tale here about capitalism, worker rights, technology hype and the illusions of progress. 

It's sometime in the future, and the next version of your favourite smartphone has just been released. Once again, the marketing hype is astounding, but the reality disappointing. What did they say: it's a few millimetres smaller (or bigger), and slightly lighter, and the camera has some extra megapixels and zoom, and ... that's it?

Smartphones should be curing cancer already. There's more computing power in my smartphone than existed on the entire planet when I was born half a century ago.

As much as we live in a technology world, innovation seems to have stalled a bit. We've got multi-billion dollar companies competing with each other for incremental improvements in features that are already good enough. What we really want is innovation that excites and delights, that makes a real difference to our lived experience, and that changes the world.

This week's ThrowForward Thursday is bordering on a rant, but it has an important point to make. What is your company doing to create new products and services that excite and delight your customers and clients? We need to uplift our innovation goals, and aim to do much more than merely optimise stuff that's already good enough. 

Imagine what the world would look like if we all had the data about our genetic makeup, and we could see the many multiple ways our genetics shape who we are and what we are capable of. Imagine that gender wasn't the issue it is today as we think of the classifications of sports codes - no longer would be it "male" and "female" as the only two categories, but rather many different categories based on whatever genetic characteristics were most applicable. And then imagine, we could also apply genetic enhancements to these sporting codes?

We can only imagine now. But this is our future reality.