? Future Normal: Fast Forward

31 glimpses of what's next that you might have missed in August...

Welcome back! ??

Like a good European (can I still call myself that when I live in London…?), I’ve been enjoying a more relaxed few weeks as events and meetings largely stop over the summer period.

However, I wasn’t entirely on the beach :) Working with the brilliant Natalia Talkowska, we launched VisuAIse Futures, an illustrated guide to AI’s not boring innovation opportunities. The first edition covers Marketing & Advertising, so if that’s relevant to your work then do check it out. #madebyhumans

While AI continues to be the big innovation story of 2023, there are of course many other exciting areas where the future is being created, today. Scroll down for another roundup of some recent stories from the past month that are worth your time.

Yes, there’s lots of AI (transparency! jobs! ethics!) but you’ll also learn about managing extreme heat and other climate adaptations, waste-free beauty, fashion and real estate solutions, new synbio innovations, the future of work, incredible healthcare breakthroughs…as well as some failed or less desirable glimpses of the future normal, to remind us all that the path to the future remains bumpy and uncertain.

Don’t read each story as a definitive prediction, but instead use them as early glimpses of potential futures.

The value lies in using them as prompts to ask, ‘What if this becomes normal? How will this impact our industry?’ And most crucially, ‘how can we respond now?’

And yes, if your colleagues aren’t up for that discussion, you can always ask ChatGPT ;)

Let’s get to it...

Future Normal: Sustainable Solutions

1. Fast-Growing Forests Help Cool Arid Amman.?Like many cities, Jordan’s capital is facing above-45C temperatures. Deema Assaf, a local architect is fighting back. We dive deeper into Urban Forests in The Future Normal.
2. Farmers are breeding heat-resistant cows. Some Puerto Rican cows developed shorter hair and more active sweat glands. Expect to see “heat-resistant” solutions becoming sought after in industry after industry.
3. Biosolar Roofs – Combining Green Roofs and Rooftop Solar Panels. The cooling effect of green roofs helps reduce the negative impact of extreme heat on solar panels, plus they offer insulation, water runoff, and biodiversity booster effects too. Where else might you unlock compounding positive feedback loops?
4. A Decade of Cell-Cultured Meat, 10 Highlights Since the First Tasting. While plant-based ‘meat’ might be struggling, this excellent roundup from Green Queen gives a great overview of cultivated meat and its future (check out Unnaturally Better in The Future Normal for our view on why this is important – and not just for food).
5. Stuart Trevor, the founder of All Saints has launched his new, eponymous fashion brand with the vision to produce no clothing, instead using only dead stock fabrics and reworked and recycled items. This won’t be the last ‘zero production’ brand, in fashion or beyond.
6. Could baker’s ammonia be the key to recycling polyester? Cheap and impossible-to-recycle, poly-cotton blends account for half of global textile waste. Now, researchers in Copenhagen have seemingly accidentally (!) discovered a safe, cheap and effective way to separate the two fibres. \o/
7. Can fast fashion kick its dirty habits? This long read from the FT explores the EU’s attempts to shift the industry towards a more circular economy – because innovation at the margins won’t get us there fast enough, if at all.

1. Plastic-Free Barbie Hoax Fools Some News Outlets. I remember being enthralled by The Yes Men documentary while at university. In some senses, their latest hoax is both inspiring while also being a damning indictment of how little has changed, despite 20+ years of brand purpose.
2. Black soldier flies could be turned into biodegradable plastic. And then…stories like this can’t help but give you hope. We explore the promise of Waste-Free Products further in The Future Normal.
3. “Fully biodegradable in less time than a banana peel.” Behind Wild’s 100% plastic-free refill. Soon we will find it wholly abnormal that we ever used non-renewable, polluting, ever-lasting materials to package goods that we used for a few weeks or even just a few minutes.
4. How to build a biodegradable house. Don’t think this will stop at packaging. The core belief behind both The Future Normal and my first book, Trend-Driven Innovation, is that it’s worth looking at niche behaviours in adjacent sectors – because these experiences will change the expectations of your customers / employees / users / citizens, etc.
5. Pangaia, Haeckels & C16 Launch Palm-Oil-Free Body Soap Bar. With apologies to Monty Python, if you’ve asked “What will synthetic biology ever do for me?” then this collaboration from three of my go-to trend-driven brands will make it tangible. Lab-grown via fermentation in just 7 days, C16’s synthetic palm oil substitute is most definitely Unnaturally Better than its notoriously toxic alternative.

Future Normal: Work, Tech & Culture

1. Google’s TextFX is a free creative tool for rappers and writers. Google Labs has partnered with Lupe Fiasco to offer 10 AI-based wordplay tools, such as Simile, Alliteration and Acronym. Have a play – this is exactly what we had in mind when we wrote about Augmented Creativity in The Future Normal.
2. TV Producer Banijay Launches AI Fund. The company behind Big Brother and MasterChef has launched a fund to develop television formats focused on, and using, artificial intelligence. The cultural impact of AI will be as interesting to watch (pun intended!) as its economic impact.
3. McKinsey’s Lilli is a generative AI tool that’s a researcher, a time saver, and an inspiration. Firm’s internal knowledge networks are white collar firms’ biggest assets and their biggest challenges – Lilli will help McKinsey’s consultants navigate 40 curated knowledge sources, more than 100,000 documents, and a network of experts across 70 countries. AI will give every worker superhuman powers.
4. Duet AI for Google Meet can take notes, summarise, and even attend meetings. It’s always fascinating to ask, “which of today’s normal behaviours will AI kill?” Will note taking go the way of map reading? And will 90% of meetings just become the host talking to everyone else’s avatars?
5. ElevenLabs' AI Voice Generator Can Fake Voices in 30 Language. Similarly, regular readers will know I’m obsessed with the emergence of real-time translation and how it will change both the world of work and social relations.Make sense of where we’re headed next.Subscribed
6. Watsonx powers AI-Generated US Open Tennis Commentary. Highlight reels of every match will be augmented by AI-powered text and audio commentary. Naysayers will worry about loss of jobs; advocates will point to expanded coverage and the potential for multi-language commentary. My take – AI will do functional, while humans will have to work to be more interesting and unique.
7. AI images are getting harder to spot. Google thinks it has a solution. Open AI might have given up on trying to detect AI-generated text, but Google’s new approach to watermarking AI images is the latest in companies’ attempts to ensure their AI products are used responsibly.
8. The human costs of the AI boom. Biased outputs are one huge issue with AI. Hidden costs – both human and environmental – are another. Billions of dollars will be made by those who can offer ethical AI products to companies.
9. AI Nutrition Labels. Will Twilio’s AI labels become universal? In all honesty, probably not. But I love the positioning and commitment to Transparent AI that they signal.

Read more about Transparent AI in VisuAIse Futures

Read now

Future Normal: Health & Wellbeing

1. AI Helps a Stroke Patient Speak Again. Electrodes were able to ‘read’ brain signals as the patient silently tried to say sentences; converting her brain signals into written and vocalized language, and enabled an avatar on a computer screen to speak the words, and display smiles and other expressions.
2. Neuroscientists Re-create Pink Floyd Song from Listeners' Brain Activity. And the above isn’t a one-off, as this similar successful study shows. Will brain reading become as much of an unremarkable part of the future normal as GPS is today?
3. Parkinson's disease could be detected early with AI scans. As the breakthroughs start coming thick and fast, I remember hearing famed longevity investor Christian Angermayer urge an audience, “just try not to die in the next 15 to 20 years…If you survive until then, you will potentially have the chance to add several healthy decades.”
4. Human Coaches Make AI Health Apps More Effective. A Stanford study of 65,000 weight loss app users found that people on combined AI and human coaching plans lost 74% more weight than those on AI-only plans. As Fitt Insider summarises, “accountability is hard to automate.” Knowing which elements of your customer experience are hard to automate will be what drives success in the coming years.

1. The NASA-backed Apollo robot is the droid coworker you've been dreaming of. Many a futurist has proclaimed “The robots are coming!”, but now it looks like they are getting closer to taking over at least some of the dirty, dull and dangerous jobs. One question I’m fascinated by is when will it be considered completely normal to have a robot coworker?

The Future Abnormal

The final few stories in this roundup take a different turn. Some readers of the book have noted that we’re overly optimistic about the future. And it’s true – at least in its pages. We wanted the book to be optimistic. If we didn’t hope for something to become part of the future normal, we just didn’t write about it we (like crypto, thankfully!). But that’s not to say we are blind to undesirable futures. Here are a few stories that are worth taking different lessons from.

1. Robotaxis Are Making Enemies as They Go Around San Francisco. Less a cautionary tale about self-driving cars themselves but more about moving too fast and breaking things, in the wrong places. There are plenty of lower-hanging fruits in the mobility space than a B2C product in a busy city, like intercity freight.
2. Worldcoin just officially launched. Here's why it's being investigated. Sam Altman believes we’ll need some kind of UBI to support people displaced by AI. Yet after a decade of broken promises from Big Tech, expecting people to embrace an opaque foundation offering crypto in return for your biometric data feels astonishingly out-of-touch.
3. Social Media Is Dead: No One Is Posting on Instagram, TikTok Anymore. What if the social era was just a passing phase?
4. Saudi Arabia’s NEOM reveals ‘significant progress’ on snow resort Trojena. NEOM is so outrageous it is easy to criticise. And yet…like space exploration, we will undoubtedly all benefit if some of its more extreme projects (carbon neutral skiing!) end up succeeding – once any new technologies can be applied to areas in the world that aren’t purely designed to indulge the 1%.
5. LK-99 isn’t a superconductor — how science sleuths solved the mystery. Perhaps some of you also spent 10 days tracking the global race to verify (or refute) the claims regarding LK-99. While it is obviously disappointing not to be embracing a climate crisis-busting black swan, my overall takeaway is more optimistic – just as we saw with Covid, it showed us that our collective abilities are pretty damn awesome if we set our mind to something.

On that note, time to get back to work… ;)

What Is The Future Normal For Your Business?

The Future Normal: How We Will Live, Work & Thrive In The Next Decade, explores 30 trends, from continuous glucose monitoring to job sharing.

I also give inspiring, actionable presentations that help your team spot and seize emerging opportunities.

Get in touch if you'd like to discuss an upcoming event or project.

Or, sit back and enjoy the keynote that myself & Rohit Bhargava gave at SXSW to launch the book:

Thanks for reading,

Henry