Megashifts & Technologies

The Megashifts

Technological shifts are rewiring society and transforming the landscape.

We believe the coming clash between man and machine will be intensified and exponentalized through the combinatorial effects of ten great shifts — Megashifts, if you will, namely:

1. Digitization
2. Mobilization
3. Screenification
4. Disintermediation
5. Transformation
6. Intelligization
7. Automation
8. Virtualization
9. Anticipation
10. Robotization

As a paradigm change is to thinking and philosophy, so a Megashift represents a huge evolutionary step for society, one that may seem gradual at first . . . but then has a very sudden impact.

Exponential and simultaneous

Many of the world’s great innovations were born decades, sometimes centuries, before they eventually swept through human society. They often occurred in a relatively sequential manner, each following and building on the previous ones. In contrast, Megashifts might grow slowly as well but many were born together. They have now started sweeping through society simultaneously and at a much faster pace. Megashifts present immediate and complex challenges and differ in nature to the forces that have swept through society and business in the past. A key difference here is that a relatively few organizations and individuals that anticipate and find ways of exploiting or addressing a Megashift can normally expect to find opportunities and reap the biggest benefits. You may be familiar with these terms already, but now I want you to imagine them as distinct technological forces combining to create a perfect storm for humanity. Technostress? The challenges we have experienced so far won’t even register on the stress scale when compared with what’s to come…

Megashift 1: Digitization

Everything that can be digitized, will be. The first wave included music, then movies and TV, then books and newspapers. Now it is impacting money, banking, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, transportation, cars, and cities. Soon it will have transformational impact in logistics, shipping, manufacturing, food, and energy. It is important to note that when something gets digitized and moved to the cloud, it often becomes free or at least vastly cheaper.

Megashift 2: Mobilization and mediazation

Computing is no longer something we do mostly on computers, and by 2020 even the idea will seem utterly fossilized. Computing has become invisible and ingrained into our lives, piggybacking on what we used to call mobile telephones. Connectivity is the new oxygen, while computing is the new water. Both next-to-limitless connectivity and computational capability will become the new normal. Music is mobile, movies are mobile, books are mobile, banking is mobile, maps are mobile . . . the list keeps growing. Mobilization also means that technology is moving much closer to (and soon, into) us—from the desktop into my hand or onto my wrist via wearable devices such as watches, then onto my face as augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) glasses or contact lenses, and soon directly in to my brain through brain–computer interfaces (BCI) or implants.

Megashift 3: Screenification and interface (r)evolutions

From type to touch and talk, almost everything that used to be consumed as print on paper is now migrating to a screen. These interface (r)evolutions mean that newspapers are very likely not going to be read on paper at all within just ten years. The same fate, no doubt, will overtake magazines, but somewhat more slowly, because most magazines are also about the sensations of touch and scent. They are just more experiential in the raw that way.

Paper maps are already moving to devices and will likely disappear almost completely in a few short years. Banking used to be done in buildings or at automated teller machines; now it is going mobile and into the cloud at a frantic pace. Phone calls used to be made with telephones; now they are becoming video calls conducted via screen services like Skype, Google Hangouts, and FaceTime.

Megashift 4: Disintermediation

A key trend in online commerce, media, and communication is to cut out the middle man or woman—disruption by going direct. This has already happened in digital music, where the newer platforms like Apple, Spotify, Tencent, Baidu, and YouTube are disrupting and dislodging the record-label cartels that used to get 90% of an artist’s earnings.

It’s happening with tourism and hotels: Airbnb enables us to stay in private residences and book directly with the apartment owners, without the need for a traditional hotel. It’s happened in book publishing, where authors can now go direct with Amazon Kindle Publishing, getting up to 70% of the revenues

on an eBook rather than 10% from a traditional publisher. Can you imagine the impact on the popularity and earnings of Tolstoy if he’d had that kind of direct access?

Uber has disintermediated the taxi and limousine market, and that has been an amazing benefit to a lot of customers, as well as to the drivers and other Uber workers. However, in the process of becoming a very large and powerful player on this turf, Uber itself has become a new kind of intermediary. Some pundits are calling this “platform capitalism” and “digital feudalism” because of the way Uber is treating its drivers as highly expendable commodities—a clear downside of the gig economy.

Megashift 5: Transformation

Going beyond mere change, the biggest meme in 2015 was “digital transformation,” a phrase that has already acquired the somewhat stale taste of “social media.” Nevertheless, the term is a good fit as it goes far beyond mere change or innovation. It literally means becoming something else, morphing from a caterpillar to a butterfly, or from a toy car to a toy robot, or indeed from a car manufacturer to a mobility provider. Transformation will be the number one priority for most companies and organizations as exponential technological change impacts them across the board. Transforming into what will work five years from now requires a lot of foresight as well as courage, and naturally the support of all stakeholders and the capital markets. But let’s not forget that the mother of all transformations will be our own Megashift from being physically separate to being directly connected to computers and devices.

Megashift 6: Intelligization

This is a core reason why humanity is being challenged as deeply as it is: Things are becoming intelligent.

Every object around us that used to be disconnected and without dynamic context is now being connected to the Internet via sensor networks and continuously updated and interrogated via global device grids.

Whatever can be made intelligent will be because now we have themeans.

Deep learning is a key enabler of intelligization, and it is a huge game changer. Rather than using the traditional approach of programming machines to follow instructions and get a job done, the emerging dominant paradigm is to give them nothing but massive processing power, access to huge amounts of legacy and real-time data, a base set of learning rules, and a simple command such as, “Figure out how to win every single GO, chess, or backgammon game.” The machine then comes up with rules and strategies that we humans might never discover ourselves.

Megashift 7: Automation

The great promise of many exponential technologies is that we can digitize everything, make it intelligent, and then automate and virtualize it. Automation is key to this idea of hyper-efficiency because it makes it possible to substitute humans with machines or software. This will have massive impact on society, wealth distribution, employment rate and possibilities, education, etc.  The expected degree of automation has now led to serious considerations of taxation of robot or automated production and labour.

Megashift 8: Virtualization

Virtualization, simply put, is the idea of creating a nonphysical, digital version of something, rather than having a tangible copy of it on location. Some of the most commonly used virtual services are desktop or server virtualization, where my workstation is in the cloud and only accessed through a terminal on my desk or an app on my smartphone. Another example is communications and networking: Rather than using networking hardware such as routers and switches, calls and data communications are increasingly routed in the cloud

using software-defined networking (SDN). The resulting benefits include potentially huge cost savings and faster service, but it is also disrupting the business models of huge global players such as Cisco.

Virtualization via cloud computing can, some suggest, deliver up to 90% cost savings.64 Rather than shipping printed books around the globe, Amazon virtualizes the bookstore and sends digital files to readers on their Kindle reader.

Megashift 9: Anticipation

Computers are already becoming very good at anticipating our needs before we ourselves realize what they may be. Google Now and Google Home are intelligent digital assistants (IDAs) from Google,

and a big part of the company’s huge bet on AI. They will anticipate any changes in your daily schedule—be it airline delays, traffic, or meetings that overrun—and use the information to notify the next meeting about your delay, or even rebook a flight for you. Crime prevention based on algorithms is quickly becoming a very popular topic among law enforcement officials. These programs are essentially using big data such as crime statistics, social media, mobile phone locations, and traffic data to predict where a crime may happen so that police patrols in that area can be stepped up. In some cases, eerily reminding us of the “precogs” from Minority Report, individuals have even been singled out for a visit by a social worker or a police official because the system indicated that they were very likely to commit a crime.

Megashift 10: Robotization

Robots are the embodiment of all these Megashifts, where everything is converging in some spectacular new creations—and they are going to be absolutely everywhere, like it or not. As science makes big leaps in natural language understanding, image recognition, battery power, and new materials that allow better movement skills, we can expect the price of robots to fall dramatically while their usefulness—as well as their likeability—will skyrocket. Some robots might even be 3D printed, just as the first cars are now being manufactured almost entirely with 3D printers.