Ross Dawson Wisdom and a rumination...

In this country we are blessed to have some very smart people who have a gift of being able to ensure they remain topical relevant and future sighted and Ross Dawson is one of these people.

Over on his blog Ross has looked at the on-line world of 2016 and the following are some of his insights:

Ross’s forecasts for 2016 include:

• Many people will wear video glasses as they commute and walk around, experiencing new forms of television, news updates, and detailed information about the world around them and people they meet.
• ‘Lifestreaming’ will be commonplace, in which we capture, store and share on social networks almost continuous videos, photos, sounds and conversations from our everyday lives.
• We will have natural telephone conversations with computers, with almost all call centre staff replaced by automated systems.
• Public measures of individual reputation will guide who we hire, do business with, and go on dates with.
• Over 40% of adults will work independently rather than as company employees, many providing services to organisations all over the world instead of commuting to an office every day.
• A next generation of ‘thought interfaces’ will allow us to control our computers just by thinking. While the technology will still be relatively basic, we will have begun to merge machines and humans.
  

As a historical reflection, Ross’s second book, Living Networks, published in 2002, opened with a description of corporate blogging, and discussed the idea of social networks years before MySpace or Facebook existed, as well as the rise of “micro-messages,” anticipating the Twitter phenomenon.

Whilst I think Ross is again on the money there are two things that I think are being discounted in his assessment . One is an ever growing disharmony in the civil liberties area which is dead set against the use of published personal information for anything except the individual. This will be influential and with pressure on governments leading to inevitable on-line regulation. I am not advocating this but am also a realist and it is only a matter of time IMHO.

The second thing is automated response systems. Believe it or not I class this in the same field as automation of flight systems in aircraft. Currently the Airbus class of jets is under a huge cloud of doubt as experts seek to understand how to ensure pilots can take back full control of a jet when automated flight systems fail. This is thought to be a possibility in the Air France catastrophes.

Companies who have automated response systems in call centres would suffer major damage if the system were to fail and there were not sufficient people to answer calls for customer service requirements. With the anticipated patience of a consumer in 2016 almost next to zero, this is something I think is still something that needs to be taken into account.

Risk management will move into another dimension clearly linked to on-time, up-time 99.99% of the time to ensure consumer satisfaction.

Now what are the learning ramifications here? More informal learning and performance support will be the staple for this and me thinks it would be scenario based delivered through my video glasses whilst I "think" about adding it to my academic record in my publicly available LMS of choice linked to my preferred industries.

Lots of ruminating to be done.......