Wong's Weblog

Futurists…

So I told a few of you about this crazy speaker I heard at a real estate convention back in January.  He was a futurist which means he speaks about the future Duh… Well some of his ideas and concepts were wild beyond belief and while it may have sounded good to some, it scared the living crap out of me. Crazy ideas of nanotechnology and how one day you won’t have to wash your clothes but with this technology, your clothes will have memory sensitive fibers that will tell your clothes to return to original shape and there will be a sprayed coating on the clothing that once a device is activated, dirt will shake off the clothes and make the clothes clean.  Another idea was a device that allowed you to send emails and communicate telepathically.  Just that idea alone made me think…uhh are you serious?? Am I the only one sitting at this conference wondering where the heck this guy is going with these insane ideas?? Does this guy realize we are at a real estate conference… Anyways he started talking about these 3D printers that printed stuff out in 3D.  Yes, that means 3 Dimensional.  He was talking about how this technology already duplicated a cell phone and the cell phone actually worked (which was all very confusing to me because after I subscribed to his newsletter, which was a temporarily free of course, it explained that these events may or may not have actually happened, once again very confused).

So at this point you’re probably wondering, why is Mike using a million run on sentences and constantly rambling about this.  Firstly, I don’t know how to explain the insanity of these ideas without using run on sentences and secondly I found a rather shocking article about 3D printers…

Could what this guy was talking about really be real? What about the other idea of telepathic absurdity? Yikes, I just don’t know what to think anymore.

Here is a transcript of the speech I heard if you want to know what i’m talking about in more detail:

Wolfgang Grulke,
<http://www.futureworld.org/PublicZone/News/20020110Winn.aspx> is a
futurist, formerly of IBM and recently the author of “Ten Lessons from
the Future.” <http://www.futureworld.org/PublicZone/Store/Storeorg.aspx

>
It’s only appropriate that he spoke at the Urban Land Institute’s Real
Estate Trends Conference, because technology will influence every
message he gives this audience.

A dear friend of mine, Chris Cole <http://www.colecapital.com/> ,
sponsored the talk. I’ve known Chris for over twenty years, through real
estate upturns and downturns, and he has always been one of the most
intellectually curious men I’ve known in real estate. (He’s introducing
Wolfgang Grulke by saying that real estate is 1/3 of the world economy.
Of the $6 trillion net worth of America, 40% is in real estate. And more
will come as the Baby Boomers age and look for income and value. Real
estate as an asset class, he says, is in its infancy.) And technology in
the real estate space is also in its infancy.

Grulke begins by saying it’s way more important to learn from the future
than from experience, because breakthrough innovations always come from
left field.

Exploring the future:

Culture will be determined by economics:From the 1970s to now, there
have been major changes . In our personal lives, every step change —
birth, growth, death –is a major surprise. That’s also true about
social change, and about business. We can never plan for the future. How
can you plan for the things you DON’T know?

The pace of change in the past forty years has been astounding. In 1969,
we sent a man to the moon without microprocessors.There WERE no
microprocessors. But by the 70s, Woodstock was a mirror or a nation at
war with itself. Woodstock was the start of individual rights, civil
rights, women’s rights, environmental rights, and consumer power. Within
the course of 18 months, everything changed, but we only see the extent
of the change in hindsight.

Woodstock was the start of the culture of the individual, which has now
progressed to YouTube.

The Baby Boomers invented the idea of growth and change every year.
Their parents wanted one job with a large corporation for life. They
were the Silent Generation. The next Generation, Generation X, is as
different from the Boomers as the Boomers were from the Silent
Generation. But Grulke says these generations are not about when you
were born, but what kind of economy you were born into.

Kids born into a flat economy will behave the way the Silent Generation
did. The behavior they will exhibit will reflect the economic conditions
around them. The rising economy gave us the cult of the individual.
There are 25-year-old Baby Boomers in Bangalore, because the economy is
booming. The culture of the individual comes from affluence. “Life is
short. Play More!”

Generation X has never known a world in which the product is important.
The idea that quality is a differentiator is gone forever. This
generation isn’t about quality; it’s about spirit.

Technology is everywhere. Changes in technology will take many companies
out of business. Survivors of the last period of technology change will
miss the next wave. SONY and Phillips, who pioneered the personal radio,
missed downloadable music even though SONY had the technology before
Apple. But SONY didn’t use it because they thought they would
cannibalize their own Walkman sales. But now, in the music industry,
retailers will be displaced by downloadable everything.

Connectivity and the ability to communicate with everyone on the planet
is becoming a basic human right and is given away for free. By 2020,
there will be no TV channels, newspapers, or magazines. There will also
be no consumer appliances. Appliances will be replaced by services.

You will no longer need a device to connect with the infrastructure. (No
Blackberry or laptop). You will not have a washing machine. A new
wardrobe closet, made of nanotechnology, will take the dirt and grime
out of your clothes, and because the clothes are made out of smart fiber
they will return to their original shape. This wardrobe will be given
away free. Traditional fields like appliances and apparel retailers
can’t compete with this completely new paradigm that they can’t even see
coming.

Even wireless handheld computing devices will go away.An invisible chip
will store more than you can read in your lifetime. The chip will be
implanted under your skin and connected to your nervous system. “In
2020, when I send you an email messge, you will really get it. The email
message goes right to your visible cortex.” The cost of the network?
Free.

There are already twelve scientists in the UK who are wired up this way
and can communicate with each other directly.

“Neither you nor I will ever feel comfortable with this level of
technology, but our children will never know a world without it.”

In biotech, we will have better foods, new drugs, new materials, and
longer lives. But these advances in genetics are not about biotech at
all, but about information technology. We are now in the Second
Information Revolution.

Clothing will not be manufactured, but will be printed out by a 3D
printer. There’s a printer today that can do this, but it cots $40,000.
By 2015, the cost of this printer will be $40, and by 2020 it will be
zero. Even food is being printed now.

Business will be changed completely: “Eat yourself before someone eats
you first.” In a business cycle, companies start up with a concern for
customers. Then, in the second half of the cycle, most of the energy is
spent internally. They fail to see the killer coming out of left field.
Read “The Black Sawn” about the influence of the highly improbable.
Innovation is always revolutionary, but sustaining innovation is
evolutionary.

Successful companies never innovate, and are victims of their own
success.They try to maintain the status quo. That’s why the cell phone
was not invented by the phone companies. Businesses don’t innovate
because they are afraid their existing business will be cannibalized.

You can’t run your business tomorrow with the same people and systems
you have today. All products, services, and infrastructure are becoming
commoditized because of a boom in technology. Every business plan should
assume that things will be cheaper every year.

(Automating their economy to stay competitive will mean that China will
have an incredible unemployment problem in ten years.)

In the future, fewer people will be employed by large corporations than
now. One person businesses will dominate, everything becomes fractal,
and leadership changes from command to “invite.” Anyone can be anyone’s
business partner when the world is networked. The differentiators are
not products now, but services. Information is more important than your
business. Networks are your most important assets. Relationships are the
most important assets.

This world is full of new opportunities. The future will be very
different. Bring it on!