The Future is Here
Trend Hunter's Future Festival dove deep into AI
In September I flew out to Toronto to attend the Future Festival. If you’ve spent time on the Trend Hunter site, you know it’s an onslaught of signals of the future from across the world, from soda trends to the most cutting edge technology.
Here’s three takeaways from deep diving into AI and trends with a room full of future thinkers.
We’re just at the beginning
Jeremy Gutsche spoke about quantum computing--well, he spoke about a ton of radical changes happening concurrently and at a speed that we can’t even fathom, highlighting AI as an inflection point that put the foot on the gas. But of all the change in all the world, what stuck with me was the speed of quantum computing. Still in its infancy, the quantum computing world shifts us from the binary 0-1 language that computers have had since their inception and into a quantum physics dimension that I won’t even pretend to explain to you. Functionally, however, this computing radically speeds up processing, and that will radically accelerate computing. Although quantum computers aren’t yet stable enough to be unleashed on the public, they will radically increase the calculations that all this AI will take.
Generational differences and AI
Armida Ascanso shared a deep dive into generational differences in relation to AI. I was struck by the generational differences in approach to AI, mostly tying to life stage and career, and it couched technological impact in generational change in away I hadn’t thought about before.
Our lovely friends the boomers, in their retirement years, don’t have to care a whole lot about the impact of AI in their career, but they’ll benefit from advances in AI as they deal with a changing health care industry.
Gen X, reaching the apex of their careers, see it as more of an opportunity than a threat; they’ve lived through so many changes. The generation raised on MTV has navigated through computers, mobile phones, the internet, social media, a few boom and bust cycles, and the only thing that’s really phasing them is passing into the next stage of their lives without a legacy intact. They’ve also built a career already, and have the networks, the soft skills, and the experience to build into what’s next without as deep of a concern of being replaced by a robot. Armida invited the audience to raise their hands if they were spearheading AI initiatives at their company. Then she invited them to leave their hands up if they were part of Gen X. The ratio was almost 1:1.
Millennials, on the other hand, are extremely worried. They’re at growth stages in their career where AI could radically shift what the rest of their careers look like. If they have children, they worry about their children—already navigating the battlefield of screentime, AI will add to that.
What the internet was to Gen X, and social media was to Millennials, the AI revolution will be to Gen Z. They will come of age with this technology, speak its language and shape its usage. In five or ten years, they will fondly recall the days before AI, and have nostalgia about internet search, or human-made copy, or knowing if an image was real or not. They will marvel at their children, if they have them, who did not know a time before AI.
Much of what we learned is through the lens of a dominant, middle class culture in the West, focused on upward mobility and white collar careers. If we expand the lens to other parts of the socio-economic spectrum, I’m curious how it changes. Will AI create more need for blue collar work? Will there be more need for prompt engineers or data managers and other roles that don’t require deep computer science knowledge? Will it change money management for the wealthy?
Spending time with innovators
In advertising we think mostly to the year ahead. We map out what we want to say and where we want to say it. We fill media buys against the year’s pulse points, and sometimes leapfrog into the future for big moments like the Olympics or the World Cup. We talk about the ephemeral, like social media trends, and the intangible, like a brand’s meaning, and the measurable, like advertising effectiveness.
It was a treat to be surrounded by strategic thinkers that cast their lines further into the future. R&D people, innovation people, strategists and futurists who take the signals of today, the edge cases that envision the future and build their products, services, and companies to be ready for what’s next. I met people in R&D creating the future of frozen food, and people in entertainment envisioning the future of theme park, and someone assessing the future of the crafting world.
Most impactfully, an innovation team from a community college envisioning what future young people would need to learn to be ready for the world of five or ten years from now—and surprisingly, it’s not all tech. Trades and hands-on work is going to be one of the many skills that will thrive as AI makes its mark on the workforce. But so is coding, and math, and a whole slew of other skills that will make up jobs we can barely imagine. I interviewed someone recently who told me they started in the ‘traditional’ route of community management—a role that didn’t exist when I started my career, and that doesn’t necessarily take a traditional education (ok, I found a community management degree from a very reputable-looking institution). The internet and social media birthed millions of jobs and thousands of job descriptions that hadn’t existed before; the future of work at the precipice of where we stand with AI scares many people, but it’s beyond what we could imagine.
You’ve just read Framing, a regular newsletter about what’s good culture, marketing, and business by Anita Schillhorn van Veen.
I’m Director of Strategy at McKinney, on the advisory board of Ladies Who Strategize, and a writer over at my other favorite Substack Why Is This Interesting.