What’s the Future?

How would someone from the Stone Age react to a television? What would Socrates think about a digital camera? Just 150 years ago, Scientists believed that putting humans in trains moving at 50 miles/hour would melt our bodies or flush out our organs, what would these scientists say about bullet trains that presently move at 200 miles/hour?

Ipads, Iphones, Hover Boards, Holograms, Liquid Crystal Display (LCDs), Teleconferencing and a host of other items which may have sounded strange to all members of Generation X (born between the early 1960s to early 1980s) and their predecessors when they were youth are all common place items in today’s world. Even we, the millennials (born between late 1980s to early-2000) still weren’t aware of such technology till our teenage years.

It’s a different story all together for Generation Z a.k.a The Digital Natives (born from 2000 onward).  A lot has changed and will continue to change not just in the technological world but also in the world of politics, religion, conventional behavior, and society as a whole.

The Union between Man and Machine

I remember with nostalgia how my sense of fun as a child was playing football on the street, playing police and thief a.k.a ice and water a.k.a catch and there was no greater feeling of joy back then than being the last man standing on your team and waltzing to their rescue. Today things are changing and our children’s idea of fun have become mainly indoor and TV games. The dexterity with which they operate gadgets has me like 👀 😐 . Most millennials have caught up with the trends and we’re efficient at handling most of today’s technology.

However, we started handling such technology in our teenage years and Generation Z started handling such technology in their formative years and going by the Law of Mastery, they are bound to be ruthlessly technologically efficient by the time they’re teenagers, a time when we just started learning.

I sometimes wonder if there’ll ever be a day when I’ll say “Hector, please show me how to operate my **insert future application that’ll take the world by storm** account (Yes future wifey, our son’s name will be Hector, this is part of the non-negotiable terms of our marriage), will there ever be a time when I’ll buy a phone and wish it was still an Android 5.0 or ioS 9? Will there ever be a time when my laptop updates and the new Operating System will make me crave Windows 7, 8 or 10?

As we face a future driven by powerful evolutionary and revolutionary forces – the mega trends which are fundamentally reshaping our world for good and evil – are you considering the implications and necessary strategies required to deal with the evolving and multiple versions of the future?

Frustrated with the Constant Updates 🙂

Will I listen to the music of the future and miss M.I. Abaga, John Legend, Vector, Aloe Blacc, Jamie Fox, Ice Prince, Drake, Ed Sheeran, The Weekend et al, same way our parents miss James Brown, Smokie Robinson, Carl Douglas, Y.M.C.A, Beegees, Kool and the Gang et al.

• What’ll fashion, school, church, marriage, food be like?
• Will Nigeria have a solid biometric database so that the “detectives” I sometimes see wiping for fingerprints at crime scenes can finally stop fooling themselves?
• Will cars still be needed?
• Will it still be profitable for banking halls to exist with the rate at which cashless transactions take place?
• Will INEC still make us line up to cast our votes or will we simply log into a portal and vote from our homes?
• Will there be need to eat food if a pill can give me the exact same nutrients and satisfaction?
• Will Whatsapp Calls finally make the likes of MTN, Etisalat, Airtel and other telcos stop selling call credits? A very alarming notion, don’t you agree?

What do you think about the present? What do you think about the future? Will you adapt or fizzle out?