Future

I was tempted to include this in the economics section, but the focus is different. The focus here is on your company, its staff and work. Economics is focused upon countries, markets and investments. The two are different. Nevertheless, it is hard not to cover the same things, as almost all business predictions seem to…

Welcome to 2025! As usual, at the start of the year, there are a whole raft of predictions as to what will happen. I used to write my own personal predictions and review them at the end of the year but now, with so many predicting so many things, I’ll leave to the panel of…

I asked the question: What’s a cash machine for if no-one uses cash? in the 1990s. As the guy heading up the strategy for cash machines for a major cash machine company beginning with N and ending in R, it was a good question to ask. Thing is that no-one took the question very seriously…

I found a very nice montage of the future jobs world on my newsfeed the other day, so here is the final summary of the other work we will be doing. I don’t agree with all of the thoughts below, e.g. working anywhere in the world is already here, but it makes for an interesting…

A really interesting conversation popped up during a meeting with a fintech yesterday. The core of the discussion was around trust and identity – my favourite themes of the moment – and we got into a debate about the fact that most people want freedom and control of their lives. They want privacy and security…

It is easy to believe in these futuristic scenarios that we won’t need human advisors. In the words of Vivian Ward, the escort in Pretty Woman: Vivian: You work on commission, right? Saleswoman: Ah, yes. Vivian: Big mistake. Big. If you believe that the future will no longer involve financial advisors, you are making a…

With drones, self-driving vehicles and supersonic flights rising day after day, we are very likely to see a massively congested sky by 2050. Some would say the Jetsons has arrived and, if you look at what is happening today, they are not far wrong. Most of our flying and automated vehicle structure will run autonomously…

There’s a lot of debate about the big axis of power today: America and China (ed: what about India?). Both have massive tech giants  and both have super economies. Where does this leave Europe? It’s interesting for me in that most of the discussion is that Europe and Eurocrats strangle all innovation with regulation or,…

We are looking at a possible million humans or more living on Mars by 2050. How will they live? What will they be doing? Is it going to be easy to travel between Earth and Mars? Are the communication systems going to work to keep connected with families on both planets? Why would you want…

I talked a bit about Amazon and Apple teaming up to develop AI strategies to compete and beat Alphabet/Google and Microsoft the other day. It got me thinking: why are we talking the American Big Tech giants when there are several Big Tech Asian giants namely Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and NVIDIA themselves. What are their AI…