The Future – Coronavirus decided it could no longer wait on humans!

Ahhhhh, The Future, The Future, The Future! My one bold prediction is that it’s coming. Ok, on a more serious note, I think the mistake we make is that we think about it in terms of being ‘away down the line’, a few years off (yet), even decades.

In many respects, the future is already here. An hour away is the future, tomorrow, next week, next month – all the future. It’s understandable where this thinking might come from. In previous eras, change was slow and cumbersome, and if you lived at a time when disease was rampant and scavenging for food was a daily necessity (among the vast majority), and the average lifetime was the grand old age of 35, then you can see why the future might not have been high up on people’s list of priorities.

Whilst much on one hand seems or perhaps even feels the same (if you’ve grown up in Northern Ireland like I have, politics here often elicited a feeling of groundhog day) the rate of technological advance in the last few decades has been immense. When you consider how long it took us to take to the sky in a plane and only a few decades later make it into space, the pace of change has been incredible. When you consider that some of us were still becoming acquainted with cordless phones in the 1980s but contrast that now with the modern smart-phones, the advances made (in a short number of decades) have been equally incredible.

Whereas change in the past might have taken years, advances now come in a matter of months and even days, perhaps even minutes. The adage of whenever a new device comes out it is already out of date never seems so apt. In fact, that adage has just gone out of date!

That said, no matter how advanced developments can become, some basic and fundamental questions remain. It seems especially apt that as we endeavour to emerge from Coronavirus (at the time of writing), the question of how we will share this planet in the future will also emerge. Back to normality? Can we really go back to such an imperfect world? What promises can we now elicit from people as Mother Earth is badly in need of a rescue mission?

Among the steps I believe we need to take is reasserting a commitment to scientific credibility and its institutions informing how we should really considering living and policy that governs us. We need to more seriously examine not only the personal but also the legal implications for humanity of the aural and data capture by the likes of Facebook, Amazon and Apple including efforts to capture data related to our emotions, especially as Technology has become of the overwhelming winner from this pandemic!

Championing ‘Old is the new, New’ – a return, for example, to things like books and vinyl (although there has been a bit of a renaissance with these two) and living (somewhat) ‘off the grid’ et al is something that more and more people are considering to ‘get away from it all.’

A replacement for capitalism (there was a time after all that it didn’t exist) alongside the reality that (if estimates are correct) there will be more people living in developing counties (by 2050) than developed countries poses serious questions for us to mull over.

As climate change continues and the search for a quality life begins to really engulf those in the South, ramifications for those in developed countries will be many, not least of all, increased migration to the wealthy North.

The future of the United States were it’s estimated that by 2040, ‘white America’ will be the minority (47%) – what are the implications of this not only for the States itself but the globe? How will Earth’s own network, i.e., ‘The Internet of Things’ evolve and in what ways will it come to effect us? Will for example, the advent of MOOCs lead to all university courses all going on-line? What if (and when it comes), a ‘Digital Wildfire’ takes hold and we are all suddenly off-line? Can we ever move away from being harder workers, shorter sleepers and fast thinkers as we all remain connected (even when our phones are switched off), and therefore our 24-7 existence, and all the expectations that come from this, will it grind us into semi-automated beings?

Can we ever move from the concept of small ripples creating a wave to one where the wave creates a tsunami in order to wake us from our seemingly collective apathy?