“The future is very important, because we will kind of spend the rest of our lives there. So we better make it really good. :)”
Martin Wezowski is the Chief Designer & Futurist at SAP. He joined Webit to put some perspective on “what is work and what is human in a superhuman future”.
Martin, being a fan of the Beatles, started with playing a tune that resembles the style of the iconic band. But later he revealed that the song was created by AI that mimics the Beatles.
“It listens to everything that The Beatles have ever done and makes new songs. It does it so successfully that it has over 2M views on Youtube. That should really raise deep and profound questions.”
The main question is WTF – What’s the future?
One example of that is the healthcare.
“It takes 7-10 years to make a doctor, which gives us a severe shortage of doctors.”
With the soon-future-AI, medical help will be in infinite amount everywhere, all the time for everyone. That should also change our minds about what is human work. Nowadays AI can diagnose heart diseases or lung diseases more accurately than humans. Funny enough, humans and AI combined are almost 100% correct. In the 90s we decoded the human genome. It took billions of dollars. Now there is a DNA sequencer for 1000$.
What does this mean for research?
What does it mean for animal testing?
The NOW has never been so temporary as it is today.
Maybe we should start imagining the futures that we want and start creating them, rather than react to what we where we are today because thus we are too late.
That might be a little scary because we see jobs disappearing. A hundred years ago almost everybody worked at farming, fishing, forestry. Now it’s only about 2%. What did they do? What would they think if you’d tell them: “Most of you will not be in agriculture.” What would hey imagine that they will do, accounting? Web development?
We are in the same situation today. And it doesn’t matter because we will imagine new jobs as they emerge. We can’t plan for it. And the real question is this:
What to teach kids to become relevant in 30 years from now?
How can we adapt to the change? What new values do we need? The stability of planning is a little bit of fake. The opposite to stability is not instability, it’s emergence. It’s risk, it’s rock’n’roll. To transform, to challenge and take risks. Innovation is sort of rock’n’roll in business and we need more of that.
One thing we rely on is the thinking of the 3 horizons.
- Continuous innovation – Ready to consume:
Traditional KPIs (key performance indicators) of predictable outcomes and repeatable results and scalable efficiency. - Adjacent innovation – Ready to Co-innovate:
Forecasting your intelligence and resources to the near future, the next, the adjacent innovation where you co-innovate with your partners and/or customers. - Transformative Innovation – Ready to Inspire:
Thinking away from what you can do today and the tools you have.
Your vision and thought leadership leads to ideas that you must articulate very clearly so you can have a decent discussion on executive and board level about these ideas.
Help the world run better and improve people’s lives.
These two things go to the two sides of the spectrum with 4 dimensions:
- The self running company
For example: Counting logotypes in commercials for example is not a human work anymore. Machines do that now. And it changes the whole business model for the industry. Now they pay for what they get.
- Self organizing Business Ecosystems
They are built on the philosophy that the current power is a like money – the more you hold, the more powerful you are. The more relevant you make yourself in the distribution of that power – the more powerful you will be.
- Augmented humans
The Super Human – that we all carry inside. By removing the constraints of the human bias and knowledge we can be beyond that and be super human or human at last. That answers the question: What is the smartest app? Well that’s the one that makes YOU smarter.
- Purpose Led New Market & Business Models
Why are you relevant 10 years from now? It doesn’t have to be to save the planet, you have dreams and focus and markets, you would like to create. Something that excites you to the moon. Articulate that very well – why are you relevant 10 years from now – because if you don’t, you might not be.
“Everything from the beginning is an open end and it’s up yo us to actually sit down and actually use this methods and look across all the 3 horizons, articulate futures that are desirable where we can play a significant positive role. That’s our purpose. And if we do that I actually think we can design futures that we all want to live in. And we should remember to have some fun as well. :)”