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By: Simon Anderson

Most people will read this title and think “Not my kid!” They would never do anything that would earn them the label of ‘criminal.’ Well, I have bad news for you…

It’s not that your kids will be any worse than you were or than anyone else’s kids are today. But, they will still be criminals. In fact, you probably will be too. Think about everything you did in the last week. There is almost no chance you didn’t break at least one law. What if there were cameras at every traffic intersection? What if your car was reporting everything you did (it already may be). Even a heated discussion about a football game between you and your friends could look like “disorderly conduct” when viewed remotely on a police monitor. Internet laws are moving towards enabling extreme monitoring- what if your teenager posts a video of themselves singing their favorite song on YouTube? That’s copyright infringement! That’s the path we’re headed down right now.

Unfortunately, exponential advancements in technology and societal changes are creating an unyielding convergence of trends that all but guarantees a future with little privacy and a lot to watch out for. These advancements are just hard to perceive because our minds naturally think linearly, not exponentially. The number of things that are illegal to do, say, write, etc., grows with each new legislative session. And new technology makes monitoring your every move cheaper and easier by the day. If everything is recorded, how will law enforcement adapt to the massive wave of new ‘criminals?’ Our antiquated criminal justice system is simply not going to adapt in time. Some court houses are still using DOS-based systems. Literally.

The first publication to advocate the protection of privacy in relation to advancing technology was the article “The Right to Privacy”, written by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis- in 1890! They were concerned about newspaper articles and photos turning gossip into a trade. One hundred and twenty plus years later and our privacy is being invaded in ways they could have never imagined. Their fears would be placed decidedly on the far “least concern” side of the today’s “Spectrum of Invasion”, and sadly most of us have no idea how far across that spectrum we are preparing to travel. Our current privacy concerns usually amount to being indignant that Facebook keeps track of everything we do to better sell their product (us) to marketers. Or we use Bing instead of Google, because Google now combines everything you do on any of their sites to better sell their product (us) to marketers. In a painfully short amount of time, having the fact that we watched a YouTube video about panda bears or that we like chocolate cake recorded in a database somewhere will be the least of our privacy problems. Neither will the Supreme Court’s recent failure to stop potential employers from demanding your social network passwords as part of the interview, or even Arizona’s House Bill 2549 that just passed both their house and senate, with wording so vague it makes just about anything you put online potentially criminal.  Read More →

 By: Simon Anderson

I just read ‘Why one-third of hospitals will close by 2020” by Jonathan Fleece and futurist  David Houle. While I certainly agree that changes in healthcare will be transformational and will likely result in many healthcare facilities closing or being restructured, I’m disappointed that a futurist could miss so many of the primary reasons that this will happen. The authors identify costs, medical errors in hospitals, customer care, and electronic medical records and added transparency as the four main drivers of this change.  These issues are real and will be a contributing factor, but I posit these three trends will be the real catalysts of the change:

Genomics: sequencing the first human genome took more than a decade and cost >$1billion. Now, it’s rapidly approaching $1000 and takes an afternoon. This now becomes an issue of the size of the data set (which is growing quickly.) Once we have a few million accessible from the cloud, it becomes much easier easier to identify correlation, and probably not long after, causation. The price of sequencing is dropping exponentially. At $1k it’s already a cheap medical test – wait until it hits $100. Of course, there are major ethics issues, etc. that will need to be addressed, but this advancement is happening regardless. Read More →

By: Jack Uldrich and Simon J. Anderson

(Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from our forthcoming book, Foresight 2020: A Futurist Looks Ahead to the Ten Trends That Will Shape the World of 2020. This chapter takes a look at the future of retailing and marketing.)

In the summer of 2011, Tesco, a British retailer, implemented an interesting pilot project in Seoul, South Korea. Because the price of land in the South Korean capital was so expensive, Tesco created an experimental virtual store on the walls of a subway station. The retailer posted a visual display depicting items on a grocery shelf and allowed passengers, using their smartphones, to select products for purchase as they waited at the subway stop. By day’s end, the items were delivered to their homes. The experiment resulted in 10,000 shoppers taking advantage of the convenient opportunity and Tesco increasing online revenues in South Korea by 110 percent. This project offers a sneak peek into tomorrow’s customizable retail shopping experience.

What follows is a futuristic scenario from the day after Thanksgiving in the Year 2020. The protagonist is Brittany, a 29 year-old woman who works as a professional “remote” nurse in the Veteran’s Administration Virtual Intensive Care Unit where she is responsible for remotely monitoring 40 patients in their homes. Today, however, she has the day off and has one thing on her mind—shopping. Read More →