thinkfuture: technology, philosophy and the future

Apple can now detect if you are having a heart attack before you even are aware of it and dispatch first responders: this is a) good, because people do not want to die b) not good, because Apple has your health data and c) OK because the positives far outweigh the negatives. This is the kind of help we need. 

Who would want smart bots to do all of this stuff for them – how can they be trusted? So I questioned myself, and I’d like to throw this question out to you, dear readers, what do you think? Do you feel that we should be giving up more of our agency to technology – that we can trust it to do what we want – or do you think that we have already given up too much agency and we should wrest it back?

How often do you hear "let's go for the low hanging fruit"? Why do we always go after the easy stuff - when the sweeter fruit is typically higher up in the tree.

Customers want things to magically happen today - not in some future universe.

The modern world has filled us with stress since we really haven’t evolved far from tribes wandering the savannah. Think about that for a moment – think about the time before smartphones, before the internet, before computers, before human flight, before cars, before locomotives, before the Renaissance, before the dark ages, before the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, and Babylonians. Go way back, even before we figured out writing and money. Once you cast your mind back to that time and think about what surrounded us and affected us then, then you will understand actual reality. Almost everything that we worry about, about everything which depresses us and stresses us, is something we have, as human beings, just invented. Let’s say that you are stressed about being late for work to a job in the city center from your home in the suburbs. Cars, suburbs, and even time are all human inventions.

It’s true innovation. Like the Segway, which pushed the boundaries of personal transportation and Google Glass, which pushed the boundaries of wearable devices, Libra is pushing the boundaries of cryptocurrency.

When you think about it, we are all living in a multiverse of realities. What we each experience is our own reality. Even when more than one of us is in the same time and space, we don’t see an objective reality that we can all agree on – we still see our own realities, they just happen to be overlapping in time and space.

Many jobs are just "wall washing", serving no real purpose. Are you in one of those jobs? Do you know someone in one of those jobs?

Your employees are professional adults - give them a goal to shoot for and just let your folks go.

Is having no personal space at work really the best way to get the most from your people? Maybe it's an underhanded way to get more people to work from home? We've already seen an explosion of purchasing noise-canceling headphones.