The distance-less future, and you

The industrial revolution centralized work into shared facilities. That's where we all largely stayed until the impossible became possible a year ago, when the world started becoming truly "phygital" (more here), and people started getting the hang of doing work remotely (more on this here).

Where do we go from here? Time zones will become often more important than physical walls (more here). Most importantly, emotional, not functional, needs will dictate our location choices in the future. That means that we will go back to the office, at least partially, to build trust at crucial times. But it also means that we will develop a habit of asking ourselves if we really need in-person participation for every meeting, instead of a high-quality video conversation - including those taken from a walk. Or, we will opt to have an "asynchronous meeting" - that is, a thread on Teams or Slack.

I explored the immediate implications for professionals in previous posts (here and here). In this one, I want us to look deeper into the future, 5 to 10 years out, when, for instance, (a) most will have mastered remote collaboration, nobody will get lost in Teams or Slack anymore, and many of us will know how to use the "OFF" switch of our devices; when (b) 5G will be there, and (c) augmented reality will be, well, a…reality. By then we will have, among others, AI that can read emotions (affective computing), computer vision will make the space around us completely decipherable by machines, natural language processing that truly transcribes and translates in real-time, and summarizes.

I took a stab at imagining what that will be. Some changes will be immediate. Some are double-edge swords that will require the development of new personal and professional capabilities to ensure positive outcomes. But they're all possible, and they will spawn even more ideas.

But that's not all. These technologies and methods will help us do a lot more - improve our personal life. Some initial ideas here.

What are your ideas?

If we do this well, we get a world of stronger collective intelligence (more on this here), and stronger emotional in-person ties with the people we care about. And we avoid a dystopian, soulless world of personal bubbles and "Zoom fatigue". It is up to us.