Do we really need self-parking chairs?

I was enthralled by some of the new products and technologies being showcased at Mobile World Congress last month.

Virtual reality, 360 degree cameras, wearables and nearables were just some of the technologies on display. All these will radically change the way we live and work in the coming few years.

One thing that caught my eye was the publicity around the self parking chairs. Haven’t we all walked into a recently vacated meeting room to find the chairs all over the place?

Apparently this will become a thing of the past with Nissan’s Intelligent parking chair. Nissan launched a mesmerizing video where at a clap of a hand, the obedient chairs wheel themselves back under the table.

Whilst it was clearly a clever bit of social media to promote Nissan’s Intelligent Parking assist, it got me thinking about how digital technologies, especially the industrial internet must serve society.

Today, 1bn people go to bed hungry every day and yet we waste as much as 40% of food in production & consumption through inefficient logistics, food storage and stock management.

We have over 60 million displaced people globally many of whom are highly skilled workers but are not able to put their talents to productive use

57m children of primary school age do not go to school because it isn’t available to them and yet we have the technology today to bring universal access to primary education

780m lack access to clean drinking water and yet we have the capabilities to drive dramatic changes in the efficiency of how we manage water catchments, reduce leakage, track and treat water pollution.

Accenture’s Technology Vision launched in January puts "People first". Primacy of people in a digital age is not just about putting digital at the heart of the DNA of the workforce, it is also about building “goods that do good and services that serve,” as Vittorio Colao, CEO of Vodafone put it,

Digital technologies will connect an extra 2.5 billion people to the internet by 2030, many of whom will be the world’s poorest. The potential for digital to drive dramatic social benefit is almost unfathomable. Let’s make sure digital is at the service of society. The scale of the challenges are certainly big enough to make the business case.

Now where is my chair...?