3. Flowing

Stocks to flows, ownership to use. Atoms and bits are now flowing from creators to consumers who are themselves creators. We want things that flow, in time and space. “Hard” goods were yesterday; flowing content and shareable resources are the future of commerce.

Material goods used to define commerce. With the advent of the internet, however, much of what is bought and sold is intangible, streamed online or shared offline. In other words, modern goods are flowing. A flowing good is a good you can purchase as a service or real-time update. For instance, previously if you wanted an answering machine for a phone, you had to purchase and install hardware. Today, software can automatically install itself on your smartphone without you lifting a finger. Once a good is digitized, a user can transform, copy or share it. Consider music streaming service Spotify, which allows a user to build playlists to then listen to, like or share with friends. Services such as Twitter, Spotify and Netflix which offer real-time content streams are just the beginning. People who subscribe to and use these services also contribute to another force that’s shaping our technological future which is 'sharing'.

4. Screening

We will interact with information through screens. All information will become fluid, linked and tagged. All content and libraries will become symbols on screens we interact with. Screens will have a profound impact on how we absorb information. Indeed, screening is another powerful future trend. In the future, screens won’t just be fixed on subway station platforms or smartphones, but will appear everywhere. This is an important development. On screen, text and ideas aren’t fixed and authoritative as they appear in printed books but rather constantly changing and thus open to question. Compare the Encyclopedia Britannica, a series of printed tomes, to its online equivalent Wikipedia, where users can discuss and edit entries. Screens encourage us to interact, pushing us to research and discuss the ideas on display.

5. Accessing

The availability of anything, atoms or bits, immediately without owning. Whatever you need you can get, and get the latest and best. Ownership is no longer necessary. Why buy goods when you can rent them instead? Possession will give way to access in the future. In the not-so-distant past, possession, whether of a business or a good, was essential to engage in a commercial transaction. Today the largest provider of accommodation in the world, Airbnb, owns none of the real estate it offers as rentals. This business is part of a larger trend, in which physical possession is less important and access is more important.

Businesses are seeing the benefits of providing services instead of selling physical goods. Offering car rentals instead of selling a vehicle outright means a business can accrue greater benefits from the same object. A business doesn’t even need to own the object it’s “selling,” thus requiring less capital outlay for maintenance, too. Additionally, access-based businesses are often available in real time, and therefore offer better service. Peer-to-peer taxi service Uber, for example, can offer a ride to a customer faster than can a centralised taxi service, precisely because of its decentralised workforce. Every Uber driver is self-employed and owns a car, thus allowing Uber to offer the services of multiple drivers at any time, anywhere. Accessing instead of owning is a key driver of the future. 

6. Sharing

Everyone creates and it’s all shared. Any idea, thought, expression or artifact can be contributed to by anyone and experienced by anyone if they so desire. When you watch a movie, listen to a great song or share an insightful tweet over a social network, you’re adding your content to the general stream of online information. Sharing, therefore, is another key force that will affect how we engage in commerce in the future. Every day, people share 1.8 billion photos on social media. We’re witnessing the evolution of a sharing economy, a market in which people form networks, exchange resources and collaborate on projects – such as the open-source, online community encyclopedia, Wikipedia. A sharing economy allows any person to become a producer, by giving that person access to equipment, such as a 3D printer, for example, without having to own it personally.

7. Filtering

Attention is the scare resource. Allocating it to an exponentially expanding universe requires filtering based on who we are. Future filters will both serve us and surprise us. Online content has been expanding at an exponential rate. To make sense of all this data, we need to be able to filter out what’s important to us. Filtering, which depends on AI, will help shape the future. In just 9,000 days, people produce over 60 trillion web pages! If you ever want to find what you’re looking for online, you’ll need to use a robust filter, such as a Google search engine. AI can ably filter through content and identify relevant pieces because it can process massive quantities of data. All the while, AI learns to personalise results to individual user preferences. 

8. Remixing

Whatever is new is a remix of what exists. Remixing requires radical deconstruction and the ability to find the pieces to recombine and transform into something new. More and more growth today is generated by rearranging content – even further rearranging rearranged content – instead of producing new resources. It’s not possible to talk about remixing without mentioning the transformation of people from passive consumers to active content producers. While Hollywood makes 600 feature films yearly, 100 million video clips are shared on the internet every day, and many are simply remixed snippets of preexisting movies. Now that it’s so easy to copy and remix content, the next step should be a service that offers video hyperlinks, allowing people to cite specific frames of a film or video at the click of a button. This also means that property rights will need to adapt, as most are written for a world of tangible, owned goods, not digitised snippets that are easily accessed and remixed. (This is quite interesting as this was written before the time NFTs have started to become mainstream, however doing some research looks like NFTs have been around since 2014. Kevin McCoy was the first to create one.)

9. Interacting

We will interact with our devices and with others in realistic virtual and augmented worlds. Our devices will ‘know’ us and we will know worlds and others through our devices. Virtual reality and screens will transform human interaction, bringing the world into our living rooms. Virtual reality, or VR, is a form of simulation that is essentially fake but feels real, which is why it could change our lives.For instance, the possibilities offered by VR will transform human interaction while increasing the actual number of interactions people have. Interacting is another key force that will affect the future.

10. Tracking

We will track and be tracked everywhere. What we track will expand exponentially and become extra ‘senses’. ‘Coveillance’ will emerge where the watchers and the watched are transparent. Personal privacy and certainty will disappear in the future, but really, it’s not all that bad. Tracking will bring both big risks and big opportunities in the future. Today we quantify and document an ever-greater amount of our lives, and in the process, we are producing tons of data. If performed accurately, data collection can be then used to customise aspects of our lives to match specific needs, such as creating personalised medicine. But if tracking becomes too invasive, we’ll spend too much time monitoring personal data and little time living our lives.There is also the risk that personal data could be compromised. Businesses or even other people could collect your data from sources such as blogs, social media and apps, using the information against you. Even if it is, this new “transparency” is inevitable. Society will undoubtedly learn to accept it, even enjoying its upsides. While coworkers will be able to track you, you’ll have the option to track them as well – and as a result, everyone will be more accountable.

11. Questioning

Billions of connected people are creating a new level of organisation where questioning is the norm and answers emerge from the collective. Unimagined questions beget unimaginable answers. As tracking becomes a larger part of our lives, so will questioning. The future, with its exponential growth of content, will force us to sift through a tremendous amount of information in search of truth. The amount of information society generates doubles every 1.5 years, yet much of it is contradictory and uncertain. For every fact we discover, we’ll find another to dispute it. Plenty of society’s longest-held assumptions have been proven false over time. For instance, we used to assume people would never work for free, but today free intern labor is widespread. The point is, people have begun to question everything, no longer believing in a universal truth but rather in multiple truths assembled from a stream of facts. This desire to question can only grow since every truth or solution produces new questions and as a result, new knowledge.

12. Beginning

Now is the time in which, 30 years hence, people will look back and say, ‘that was the dawn of the era we are living in’. These forces will shape our future and we are only at the beginning. In just a few hundred years, machine intelligence will meld with human minds to produce a “super intelligence". This intelligence is called the force of beginning, and it marks a new era – that starts today. Consider this: 15 billion devices are already linked through the internet, essentially forming one massive circuit. New connections are made every second. What will this mean for the future?