Looking back into how we imagined the future can be fascinating. We have all snickered when watching the Jetsons and we have turned “where’s my jet pack” into kind of a critique of predictions in general.

THIS ARTICLE was a featured article on LinkedIn in December 2019, and we all know what happened after that. We experienced first-hand Mike Tyson’s “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”.

The article gets some stuff right, some not that well. Here are their list of

1. The perk professionals will want most is time. Nailed it! We used COVID as an excuse to get control of our time.
2. The streaming wars will suffer their first casualties. Not sure about this one. Most streaming services thrived during confinement.
3. We’ll begin the climate change countdown to 2030. This one was inevitable.
4. Governments may have to treat reskilling like K-12 education. Never happened, and we all know how K-12 went.
5. We will talk more openly about mental health in the workplace. This happened, for the good of us all.
6. The Asian century will dawn… under a dark cloud. The dark cloud was bigger and darker than anybody thought. Asia suffered a small step back with all the closures.
7. We will hash out the meaning of meat. This is ongoing, and we definitely have to make more progress, but did not happen as fast as expected.
8. Capitalism will be put on the stand. I think this is ongoing. First we interrupted straight capitalism with (many necessary) aids, and now we are rethinking certain things.
9. Japan will open its doors. Never happened. Japan got a raincheck on this one.
10. Facial recognition will grow more ubiquitous — and more hotly debated. No kidding.
11. The age of the entrepreneur-king will end… When? We still have kingdoms going strong, even though Musk has done everything in his power to make this real, to the extent of buying an overpriced social engineering factory.
12. … but investors won’t entirely fall out of love with unicorns. This actually went the other way around with available funds fluctuating, aggravated by the Silicon Valley Bank debacle.
13. A new kind of startup founder will emerge. We see this is happening. There are some notable exceptions like Sam Bankman-Fried.
14. Your ability to focus will be your most important skill. Wait what were you saying?
15. Climate change will become a pocketbook issue for homeowners, investors and insurers. This is mostly true. We see the impact on insurance policies. Many consumers, homeowners are making changes because they make economic sense. Electric cars with equivalent 140mpg, extra insulation, etc.
16. Talk of recession will abate – but not end. Oh my, where do I start. It never ended.
17. Regulators will come at big tech companies from new angles. We see this playing out with AI. Break out the popcorn.
18. The world will confront a global nursing shortage. Yep. Even without a global pandemic.
19. Brexit will still monopolize the British and European agenda. And…Putin comes into the picture…
20. We will question the value of work itself. This is more true than ever with what we are seeing from AI.

I am sort of ok with Chatbots, you know, the ones that now popup on websites. Especially if they are really good and provide me with the information that I need.

Basically, this would be a chatbot that passes the “Turing test”. If you don’t know exactly what that means, it is that “a human being should be unable to distinguish the machine from another human being by using the replies to questions put to both”.

But lately, there is something that has been ticking me off. Sometimes it happens that I just cannot get the answers I need from the chatbot, no matter how I phrase my questions. Then, frustrated, I do the equivalent of “press zero”, and I ask to be transferred to a human. A few times, it has happened, that they insist they are human.

So wait a minute, are you really a human that cannot answer the question that I am asking and you keep repeating the same rehearsed answer? Or are you just a machine that is programmed to lie? I would assume it’s the later. But then, Why insist that it’s human? What’s the purpose? Are they just messing with me to see how I react?

Programming a machine to lie is to deceive customers, and that’s bad. But you know what would be sad? A human that doesn’t pass the Turing test!

You have been forgetting about it for the last two weeks. And it is bugging you. So now you remembered, and you don’t want to forget again. So you email yourself. You send a reminder from today’s You, to Future You.

Tomorrow, you remember yet another detail, and you reply to the same message, adding to it. By doing this you are leveraging one of the benefits of a messaging system. You are leaving a record, in this case, to yourself.

Does this mean you are having a conversation?

The answer is obvious, but wouldn’t it be cool to be able to? What if you would be able to truly discuss things with yourself, and get a different opinion, a new perspective.

And of course you can’t, because you are exactly the same person. So when you chose your team, why would you look for people who thinks exactly alike? You might as well just discuss things with yourself…