It's beer o'clock

Typically this newsletter is my more focused on my technical and industry research whereas our newsletter at Singular XQ is more latest news and trends but this week has been massively distracting. So let me get some of that out of the way first because there has been a disjuncture between our research and the news this week. Here goes.

We predicted this but it still delights and surprises.

We started an annual forecast this past December. Like other forecasters and anyone in the industry of "futurism," forecasting, strategic foresight, or whatever you want to call it, we do it because the act of doing it increases our vision and prepares us to better serve our clients, partners, the public and our own research agendas. While we appreciate and laud those who have made a whole profession and degree programs out of the practice we think its very much like vacation. If you outsource it you lose the benefit. I might ask Laura Massa to take a boat trip to Iceland for me because I think I don't have time, but she will get the rest and relaxation, cool Icelandic breezes, and the soothing swaying on the boat rocking her to sleep at night and all I will get is social media pictures I could have gotten from Pexels anyway. (I need a vacation on a boat very badly, but I digress.) We think the act of scanning horizons, doing a little mathy-math, and forming predictions (or as we like to call them hypotheses) and then testing them against the real world is something all people who want to lead should do at regular cadences. This week has certainly brought some of that into light.

And so it begins.

This past December we predicted that there would be an increased scrutiny and crackdown on tech as the sleeping dragon has been awakened. Labor organizing, strikes, and legal action in favor of the public. Just this week we have seen that someone is getting scrutinized for election tampering, voter fraud, illegal data collection.

More to the point, while some forecasters were telling people to lay bets on Google as their stock pick for the year, they were called a monopoly in no uncertain terms, and there are more suits in their pipeline.

There is a scenario where this actually benefits Google investors who will glean at least short term benefits from divestitures, the jury is out, even though Wall Street is speaking in strained tones, telling people not to panic. And as far as our predictions, all these rulings were pipelined and visible so it didn't take much. However, we also have a week in which Meta also paid out a billion to Texas for facial recognition software. And NVIDIA was caught scraping video for its AI tool. Musk reopened his suit against OAI and has escalated a suit against his advertisers.

If anything, rather than Google, I'd invest in law firms.

We mentioned unions and labor.

So that is also proving to be an even more interesting scenario than we anticipated with the RNC beginning to pick up a pro-labor tenor under VP pick Vance's influence and several other factors and Harris's pick Walz also feeling the labor love. It seems that whatever the outcome this fall labor unions are in. Further, there is rumbling in the booming chip market where worker unrest is starting to cause some problems. Video game workers are striking over the use of generative AI, and some are even using the word "zeitgeist" which is my favorite philosophical word outside of "hylomorphism." (Shout out to my philosohpy nerds in the house.)

Will return to our research agenda findings next week, but I had to give our team at SingularXQ a little pat on the back for their first shot at horizon scanning. Do you want to join us in Q4? Hit me up. We'd love to have you. And we commit to keeping PII protected so if you don't want to be named but want an inside view and we can verify you, let us know.

Happy beer (wine, whiskey, mocktail, sparkling water, herbal tea) o'clock!

Please sign up for our newsletter at Ghost. We have a platform there where we share more than these newsletters. We are singular dash xq dot ghost dot io. Share with others and share this one, too. You all are awesome.