Throwforward Thursday 81: Overnight 3D Print Shops
Graeme Codrington's Future of Work
Release Date: 12/12/2022
Throwforward Thursday 146: Rocking the afternoon
Graeme Codrington's Future of Work
Ageing musicians still touring, and ageing fans still wanting to go to their concerts, might prefer an afternoon start time rather than waiting until 9pm or later for the main event. It's not just Festivals that should schedule afternoon concerts - maybe every band should do so. The theme of this week's "jump into the future" is that we should be open to questioning what is considered "normal" in our industries, especially when doing so could open us up to new opportunities, markets and customers. What's "normal" in your industry? And what experiments could you try to see how you could...
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ThrowForward Thursday 145: Phytomining (extracting minerals and metals from plants)
Graeme Codrington's Future of Work
All plants extract minerals and nutrients from the soil they're growing in, but some appear to be able to extract metals as well, or at least metal ions that we can in turn extract from the plants. If we can do this at scale, we can use phytomining to get the metals we need to build the batteries we use to power our lives. <P>Here are some links to experiments underway on phytomining, and the promise of what this might bring in the future:
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ThrowForward Thursday 144: Future Experiments in Government
Graeme Codrington's Future of Work
As we watch elections in 2024 spanning nearly 70 countries and 4.2 billion people, one thing is clear: the current systems are not working. Voters are not happy, and have little enthusiasm for the politicians they can choose between (if they have any real choices at all). <P>So, come with me to the future, and consider four 'ridiculous ideas' for new approaches to Parliaments and Governments. We need to stretch our strategic imaginations in an effort to come up with new political systems. <P>Watch episode 9 about AI Politicians: <P>Download the Strategic Imagination...
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ThrowForward Thursday 143: LAMs: Large ACTION Models and the future of smartphones
Graeme Codrington's Future of Work
ChatGPT, CoPilot, Llama, Bard, Grok and all the other Generative AI Large Language Models have demonstrated that we can engage with our technology using natural language. Now we need to get our devices to understand the heuristics of requests and actions we ask them to do. <P>Rabbit R1 was launched to much fanfare in December 2023, as a first model of a device that can do this. I doubt it can deliver yet, but it's definitely heading in the right direction. And I love their coining of the LAM: Large ACTION models. <P>I think that Apple's AI play later this year will integrate Siri...
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Throwforward Thursday 142: Water Wars
Graeme Codrington's Future of Work
As the world gets more and more water stressed, those who control water supplies in rivers, lakes and dams, will exercise more power and restrict access to water to those downstream. This could lead to conflict - legal and physical - that is both internal and crosses national boundaries. Some countries may even use the need for water as a reason to invade a neighbour. Whether as an individual or a business, or a region or country, we need to have a plan for water security that is equitable, agreed on by everyone, and future proof. We cannot live without water.
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ThrowForward Thursday 141: No More Plastic
Graeme Codrington's Future of Work
We have to do this! In our lifetimes we have to find a way to end the use of plastic as we use it now, so that we stop adding more toxins and pollution to our planet.
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ThrowForward Thursday 140: No More Ships at Sea
Graeme Codrington's Future of Work
Imagine a world in which Rogue Waves made the oceans too dangerous for ships to sail, and we had to stop cruise liners and container ships from sailing. It would change our world as we know it. <P>It is an extreme and alarmist scenario, with one of the worse cases for the impact of climate change and global warming. It's designed to keep us thinking about what needs to be done to mitigate the impact of extreme weather on our world.
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ThrowForward Thursday 139: Robot Window Washers
Graeme Codrington's Future of Work
It's not a horror movie, with spider-like robots clambering around the outside of buildings. This is the future of the $40 billion window cleaning industry, using robots. They can do more than clean, though - they do real-time, ongoing analysis of the external skin of the buildings, keeping a record of issues and greatly enhancing preventative maintenance. <P>This is just one example of the potential of predictive data analytics when applied to real world objects that are instrumented and analysed. How might you be able to these data analytic ideas to your business?
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ThrowForward Thursday 138: Chatbot sued by owner
Graeme Codrington's Future of Work
A company is suing its own AI chatbot for providing misleading information to a client. I wish I could make up a headline from the future that was better than this - its actually a real story from February 2024 involving Air Canada. <P>The practical lesson is that we need to be careful of automating our workforces, rather than augmenting them. People who use AI are better than people who don't. AI, though, is better when it is used by people than when it is left on its own. <P>Learn from Air Canada's mistake.
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ThrowForward Thursday 137: AI Selected Life-Partner (A Valentine's Day suggestion)
Graeme Codrington's Future of Work
Would you trust an AI-driven algorithm to help choose your life partner? If people were honest about the data they entered into these systems, and genuine in their desire to find a true life-partner match, this would definitely be an improvement on the basically random, luck-based most of us rely on. <P>Happy Valentine's Day... from the Love Algorithm. ❤️
info_outlineApologies for the late posting of this episode of our weekly series into future trends. Today we imagine that we might have dedicated 3D print shops, or maybe 3D printers in local building supplies stores, that will be able to print out any 3D design for you overnight.
A few decades from now we will probably all have multipurpose 3D printers in our homes, but between now and then, we will be able to go to local 3D print shops to do a quick print out of anything we need. Email them the design file, drop by later today to collect it. Simple.
The link to Episode 8 on 3D printing is: https://youtu.be/G1BXDAMAOAc