#BigIdeas2016 – Impossible is Nothing!

2016 will be the year when we can safe and sound say that Impossible is Nothing.

The widespread of a green and sharing economic culture, together with technological tools that empower each individual and a new generation to become a source of positive change, allow us to envision a brighter and sustainable common future.

Let me tell you of how and why I envision it so positively.

I’ll start from the current unfriendly and non-ecological way we use transport ourselves. It is set for change. Autonomous vehicles are already a reality and within a decade or two there will be no need to own a car in a city.

You’ll be able to literally call public transport from your watch, choosing “private” or “shared”, according to your wallet or privacy preferences, and an autonomous electrical vehicle will be in front of you within a few minutes, that being the exact time you expected it to be. A lot of those vehicles will be moving from here to there, in an apparently random, but effectively fully efficient way.

These electrical vehicles will know when to move out of service and go to their underground docking station, which will also serve as their parking spot. No more cars parked in the cities. The size of side walks will more than double and walking in the city will be more pleasant than ever before.

Needless to say that this new way of transport is totally safe. Each vehicle, in each moment, is able to know exactly not only what is happening around it, but also through the full way to its destination. The communication with all other vehicles will be instantaneous and so will be its ability to act based on it. This ensures that no collision will happen and also that the most efficient way for the vehicle and for the whole group is chosen.

You may be wondering how your pizza will be delivered. Will it be an autonomous electrical vehicle?

Well, it may have to be if you order a lot of pizzas, but most likely it will be a drone delivering the pizza at your door. Yes, the way we move things will change dramatically. Your new watch will allow you to call a drone and give it something to be delivered in any other part of the globe. And don’t worry about anything; fast internet, GPS and big data management will sort everything out. Even if you are in closed space, like your office or bedroom, the drone will communicate with the smart gates and smart doors and will get in and out wherever you are.

The air will be pretty busy with drones flying around, but they will be quite silent and flying high enough so as to ensure no disturbance.

You may may even decide to move with your personal drone around. It will be handy to carry any recent purchase, to get anything that may be left at home, or even to fly over your head with an umbrella-styled protection to save you from unexpected rain. This way you can keep coolly enjoying your shopping, using your watch to get all info you want about the products that interest you.

For some of this shopping, however, the word “products” may not apply. Some will be bioproducts, but not be the conventional bioproducts you know today. It will be pretty much as “bio” as you are. Bioprinting will allow the production of living tissue with your own cells, so you may just stop in the local Bio-store and ask them to cure the burn you got when playing with “traditional” fire.

Well, after the pleasant walk in the city you tell your watch to get you home. Time to take care of the house? Well, it may be if you really fancy it... Otherwise, why bother?

Your smart vacuum cleaner drone will ensure there’s no dust in the house and your personal assistant robot will take care of your clothes and any left dishes in the leaving room. This way you can spend your time thinking, reading, sauna bathing, or doing whatever you like to do. And don’t underestimate your assistant… it will do more than just taking away from you all unwanted work. It can also massage your back and even be your personal trainer whenever your watch tells it's time to move.

If you’re afraid that you won’t have anything to do, just think that you can now host more parties at home, since all the hassle will be taken care by your assistant. Parties will be as amusing as today, but there will be a new level of interaction. Besides the normal karaoke that you and your friends were used to do, you’ll be able to get into action in the most famous stages worldwide and even participate in any live show side by side with the main artist. And all this just by wearing a little helmet-styled thing on your head.

Virtual reality will take us to experiment what till now we could only do in dreams: walking or flying in the mountains, exploring the deep ocean, play superman, or simply visit the museum you want as if you were there. Your creativity will be tested, stretched and likely expanded. And you cannot imagine how that will matter!

Yes, it will literally matter! Consumer 3D printing will allow you to materialize your creativity. And it won't be just something cool. It will be another way of people expressing themselves and it will be as natural as writing is today. Looking for products in stores will be out fashioned. You may still go to the local store, but it’s likely you’ll just ask them to produce the object you want with the design and in the material you want. If you prefer to save some time and money, you may decide to produce a prototype at home, maybe recycling some old plastic bottles you still have around, and you may just go to the local store if a higher level of quality is needed.

The mass adoption of 3D printing literacy will catalise the development of new products that will take us to unimaginable new areas of progress.These new products may look like some of the products today, but they will act and feel very differently. They won’t be intelligent, but they will be able to put in practice all the “if this than that” theory we’ll tell them.

One example is your smart gardener robot. It will consider the season, the weather forecast and the weather conditions to decide wether to water or not the plants. Another example is your smart oven. It will know when nobody is at home and it will turn off by itself if it considers there is any danger of accident. All available information will be used in those decisions, and when I say “all”, I really mean “all”!

We’re getting to the point where the flapping of the wings of the (famous) distant butterfly would now only cause a hurricane if we’d want it to.

Given the short lifespan of butterflies, maybe they won’t contribute much further than being the main actors of the previous example. But it may be different with cows, birds and bees, just to mention a few of our “friends”.

You all probably know what wearables are, but some may think they are meant for human only. Well, the reality is pretty different. Any living or non-living thing that may produce some level of relevant information is a great candidate to carry a wearable. Imagine how much we can learn from thousands of cows, bees, ants, or, pushing it to the limit, sardines (yes, I imagine the wearable doing the full cycle). Nowadays capacity to process huge quantities of information makes the management of big data a joy as a new world open before our eyes.

Isn’t all these just fascinating?

If you are getting worried about where all this can take us to, please don’t be.

You may be fearing job losses, but no job where an intelligent person is needed will be lost. Machine work will be done by machines and jobs where intelligence and creativity are required will always be there for humans. More and more we will see better trained and more autonomous personnel, always putting an extra effort to ensure customer satisfaction.

So, yes, this is really fascinating and you should only worry if we’d stay where we are now.

The reality is that despite the amazing progress of the last generations, we’re now coming out of what was one of the most destructive periods of human existence.

Globalization was a make-up word for global concentration of production. Due to it, for these last two decades, mass production was king and with it so was mass waste (and single thinking). This mass production was financed by an overly protected financial system that greatly lost contact with reality (probably as a result of virtual growth based on outrageous bonuses paid to super-effective MBA’s trying to achieve poorly designed KPIs).

Most of the effort done and of the policies defined sought to maximize production and disregarded the inequalities they would create. So it should be no surprise that most of the economic and financial theory have now, in turn, to be disregarded.

The new theory has to help us to seek common good and effective individual freedom. It must help us to ensure that economic development corresponds to cultural development. Culture is the only pillar of development and we shall never seek to go beyond it.

And this is why we should be optimistic about all new technologies.

Technology is empowering the millennial (I’d rather call it Minecraft) generation to take us out of the mess we created. The Minecraft generation developed a culture where propinquity law was pushed to the limit. The meaning of countries' borders has faded away, the language barrier has disappeared and information is globally available, making this generation feel as close to their antipodes as they are to their neighbors. As a result, they see the world as one big sharing place and they experience more fun competing in that collaborative environment.

The Minecraft generation is green not because that’s cool, but because now that’s the culture.

This general attitude of proximity and collaboration, together with the green attitude, the feeling of common belonging and the effective common sharing will make this super-empowered generation work mainly for common good, so...

 Impossible is Nothing! 

Images by: Saad Faruque (future vehicle); Wendelin Jacober (virtual reality); Bohman (Minecraft)