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Category: Long term megatrends

Longer term trends analysis

  • Digitalization is not to think big, Smart Society is

    Digitalization is not to think big, Smart Society is

    Based upon my earlier post – “I dream about the day I no longer have to talk about digitalization” –  I have thought about what I should use instead of Digitalization as a concept.

    After quite some research and good discussions with a few clever friends of mine I have come to some sort of early conclusion ready for sharing.

    In fact the answer is given as digitalization is not the why but the how and actually only the how in some domains and not all dimensions. So what is the general end vision and purpose of digitalization? Well I think it should be to strive towards a  smarter society. Of course people and organisation will make a somewhat different definition of that why. I also realize that  many of the most successful companies in the transforming world have that why defined for a society where the physical and artificial is converging and where the singularity of artificial intelligence is approaching in a ever accelerating pace.

    I have for past month tried “Smart Society” on people where I would normally use digitalization and it actually works well. When people have asked what I mean with it following definition has evolved:

    Definition (preliminary): The smart society is the socio-technical ecosystem in which the physical and virtual dimensions of life converge and were people interaction is mediated by machines to an ever increasing extent

    I have actually already used the Smart Society perspective to kill of Digitalization proposals that does not stand the lackmus test.

    When you start to think about your day-to-day tasks and queries from a “how does this help make society smarter” you will quickly realize it is a quite powerful in all it’s simplicity.

    Early in my thought process I just assumed with all the buzz around  Smartphones, Smart Cities, Smart manufacturing and all the other Smart something  that I would get an overwhelming amount of hits but were amazed that this was not the case. The most concrete I found is a EU sponsored university driven project founded already in 2013 (so as usual some clever people where quite ahead of the rest of us) that have some interesting publications I plan to explore and comment here.

    To transform all this into something easy to remember  just think of digitalization as one piece of the Smart Society puzzle.

    So next step is to start figure out what other dimensions to add to make this a more complete and usable mental model.

     

    Feel free to share your thoughts on what those pieces should be.

     

  • How big impact will AI have on our economy?

    Or is AI a new type of production factor in the economy?

    According to Accenture research we should start to see AI as a new production factor and they have 3 main arguments:

    • AI is neither labor or capital but rather a hybrid between both and as automation is self improving it should not be written off as ordinary automation equipment

    • AI complement and increases the skills and ability of existing workforce and capital rather than being in competition with them

    • AI drives innovation mainly by creating new business models based on new use of existing data

    By applying the new model on a dozen developed countries and comparing a non AI baseline with a AI a few countries come out as AI mature/ready/forefront (US, Finland, Sweden, UK, Netherlands) where AI stands for significant part of the growth already today and could achieve double digit growth of maximizing AI opportunity

    I share the authors view that today’s way of measuring growth has flaws and that we need to find better ways to capture several disruptive technologies do that in the future.

    I think there are some benefits with the proposed model thinking about AI as something that will significantly change society over time.

    Until we achieve the singularity of AI being able to build new AI I think AI will need to operate together with other technological devices (self driving cars for example) and humans. This means the old combination of human and capital works as a decent approximation even if not perfect.

    I would also challenge that AI would not have to be written off over time. An AI that is not maintained, enhanced, given more computing power will decay over time as it would be replaced by better AIs. The AI also drives operational cost even if run in the cloud so there would always be a trade off between that and solving the task by other means.

    With current technology maturity I think AI short term is more about replacing white collars as automation did with blue collar in the past. Many task will be automated or significantly transformed while new (train the AI for example) will be created for the white collars.

    More interesting is where AI more mid term can enable a smarter society and new business models we will start to change society for real. My belief is that AI likely is a key enabler in that change but will not be sufficient in itself. It is only when you combine the AI with sensor data, robots, better integration with humans, 3D printing and a long list of other technologies and trends that will give us the big changes.

    How to measure that change is still out for grabs and the proposed model by Accenture research is probably not the answer even if a good attempt.

    https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-artificial-intelligence-future-growth

  • Our economy 2028 – a prediction by Swedish Radio

    New approach by Swedish radio Ekonomiekot show to predict trends for our economy in 2028

    They glance through AI, wearable, circular economy and trade and try to make a good overall prediction

    In short they concluded  a lot is likely to happen in 10 years and both companies and employment market will have to change

     

    http://sverigesradio.se/sida/avsnitt/1008876?programid=3626