Where Are We Going? Some Speculations On The Future Of Technology

As someone who works in Product, I tend to see the world through the lens of people's problems and how best to solve them. A button that could be clearer. A road that could be wider. A sentence made shorter. So when LinkedIn's Creator Accelerator Program asked me to make some predictions about the future of technology & innovation, I thought a lot about the kind of problems I'd love to see resolved, but also where we could go next.

Sure, there's the basic technical stuff we all still struggle with. Online restaurant menus that refuse to show up as anything other than a PDF. Speaking while muted on a call. Sending texts too fast. Automated customer service bots. The dark arts of trying to unsubscribe from a product that employs growth hackers. And of course, if we had a magic technical wand, we'd wave it and all of these would go away. But I'll pick three which I think are less irritants, and more positive exciting spaces for where we can go together.

Text To Video Unleashes Creators, But At A Price

This one is close to home for me, as I work with artificial intelligence tools such as MidJourney and Jasper.ai to create cinematic worlds such as my new project, Eurylae. But crafting a great prompt to produce a visually stunning result really still feels as if the technology is very much still in its infancy. Text to image is where we are today, but the beginnings of text to video, and text to audio are starting to happen, notably from both Meta and Google, and the pace at which these tools are accelerating and being democratized is breathtaking. Creating a believable image is one thing. Getting it to walk and talk is another.

I believe it holds tremendously exciting new spaces of creativity, but also holds potentially dangerous consequences for the speed and level of production at which movie-studio-level stories can be created. If anyone, with enough time and effort, can create something of Hollywood-level optics on their own, what does this do to the entertainment industry? To the advertising industry? For creators? And what about the implications for abuse? We're already very much living in a post-truth world, where we can no longer really trust our eyes. We hear of fake news and deep fakes, which polarize opinion and do more to divide than unite us. If text to video exacerbates this, would it ever be possible to put that genie back in the bottle?

Behavioral Data Gets Democratized

When I think of true sophistication behind serving users online, I think about ensuring that they see the right thing, at the right time, and in the right place for them. Many times this is more about removing choice than broadening it, but the granular level of sophistication and content targeting per user has yet to really come to small business, individual users, or be democratized outside of the departments of machine learning experts inside of large corporations.

Knowing your user is what separates businesses that grow from those who don't. But for many this is still very much guesswork and intuition. It's more qualitative than quantitative. For example, if I know with large degrees of confidence, which types of article content worked well for me on LinkedIn based on my desired and preferred goals, I'd very much be leaning into that. Right now I'm just guessing based on the blunt force trauma metrics of likes and comments, and avoiding a clickbait race to the bottom of the web. I don't really know with any certainty or sophistication what drives people to engage with me, what brings them back, or why they'd share what I write, so it can often feel as if creators are still fumbling around in the qualitative dark as they try to experiment their way out of the cave.

But as this becomes more important to a broader cohort of businesses, the need to unlock the potential of behavioral data will become crucial, and need to move a lot faster than it does today, with self-serve one of the nearer frontiers.

Universal Search Comes To Streaming

One of the most frequently asked questions in my house is 'what is that show on?'. We have Disney+, Amazon Prime, Hulu, BritBox, Netflix, Paramount+, HBOMax, Peacock, AppleTV and The Criterion Channel, but I've lost count of the times we've simply given up on trying to find something we want to spend our rainy Sunday afternoon together as a family watching. But our choice of streaming product is highly driven by intellectual property. We watch Disney+ because it has The Mandalorian. We watch Amazon Prime because of The Rings of Power. We watch Netflix because of Love is Blind (OK, that one's a stretch but you get my point).

But as the horse race for intellectual property continues to heat up, it's the user that has to keep track of what is where. Admittedly, this isn't too dissimilar from cable a few years ago, but at least with cable you had a centralized guide across everything. This doesn't exist for the streaming apps, or if it does (ie online in a browser), I have to go to yet one more thing to do the work. So I think there's a large user problem to solve here, an aggregated 'one service to rule them all'. But I think the opportunity isn't just for 'what is on'. It's really for recommendations and the intersection with the behavioral data examples I gave earlier. I'm looking for a service which provides recommendations for me across the products. I'll give an example.

I love horror movies. There are thousands of horror movies spread out across all the streaming services. I have to remember that the new Halloween movie is on Peacock, while the Jeffrey Dahmer series is on Netflix. What I'm looking for is a centralized service which remembers what I've watched across all products I'm subscribed to, and then makes recommendations for me based on that previous behavior. A service which doesn't look to silo me into a single service, but which actually solves the problem of what to watch.

I'm really excited about these three frontiers, but hold firm to the belief that the technology must start with the problem, and work backwards from there. I'm a big fan of Arthur C. Clarke, so I'll close with one of my favorite quotes from him about the future: "The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic."

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below, or join the conversation at #mytechprediction. Thanks!

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