Future Beat: Maintaining focus

It's easier than ever to be distracted, and it's more difficult than ever to maintain focus.

Technology, and in particular smartphone push notifications, make that so.

While delivering the opening keynote for Dubai's AI and Web3 festival, UAE AI Minister Omar Al Olama joked that his speech, taking place just hours after the US presidential debate, would have to compete for the attention of those debate headlines.

For technology companies, a similar story is unfolding. To stay relevant, those companies have to find ways to gain mindshare within the incredibly cluttered consumer brains.

The good news is that ultimately, the tools that allow our minds to be so cluttered are the same tools that can give us the space to get our messages across.

That's what we try to do with Future Beat every week, so without further ado, let's try to focus on the stories that matter.

Cody Sigel Combs , Future Editor

The Big Story

Can smartphones ride the AI wave?

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Predicting the future: Signal or noise?

Earlier this week Fitbit users around the world complained that the wearable fitness trackers suddenly changed time zones on their own, leaving users temporarily unable to fix the problem. Was this just a glitch, or is there a bigger lesson to be learned?

This is a signal: I'm old enough to vaguely recall that setting your watch accurately often meant a toll-free phone call to the "time and temperature" service, at least that was the case in the US. Those days are long gone obviously. Now, most of the time we simply rely on our internet synced smartwatches, smartphones and computers to automatically get us in sync with the rest of the world. Yet as the recent FitBit incident shows, relying on that sort of apparatus isn't perfect, and when it doesn't work, the problems can be felt all over the world. Now, when one watch breaks, seemingly millions of watches break. That's worth taking note of.

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