Ready, Player Two ?
I was having drinks with a few friends last evening and reminiscing, and discussing how different our lives have become in mere 30 odd years of our existence. In every aspect. I am not talking about specific cases of economic progress or declines at individual or societal levels. I am referring to the more banal day-to-day individual lives. There have been dramatic changes across the board for everyone. Whether you talk about the average guy walking on the street, the grocer, the high-flying businessman, the data scientists, the housewives, the children, the grandparents. Anyone. Everyone. The biggest change-creators? Everyone’s increasingly integrated external minds (second, third, and more) – the Chip-Powered Devices (CPDs), increasingly available access to the Internet, and access to better Healthcare.
These change-creators are understandably resulting into certain consequences. Some of these are extremely bewildering though. For instance on the CPDs & Internet bit, did you know that US folks average between 3.5–4 hours a day on just their mobile phones (see here), another 3–3.5 hours on television (see this). Developing countries and the globe generally isn’t far behind and in certain cases, far outstrips averages (see this, and this, and most definitely see the long slideshow here). Add some more for time spent on CPDs (homepods, wearables, cameras, etc) or workplace time on official computers, but on general web surfing, and I suppose, at least a third of every 24 hour day (maybe even more) gets easily accounted for. We aren’t even talking yet about the computer-facing jobs, where the average workers are spending more of their time. Point is, there is a humongous amount of time now being spent on CPDs & Internet – unlike 30+ years back. Huge portion of which is non-productive or entertainment related (gaming, home entertainment, music and the works). Better Healthcare, across the board, is ensuring longer lifespans (see this) and ironically, more time to spend on doing more activities. What activities though? That’s worth thinking. More on this a bit later.
On to the primary point then. The way it seems from those numbers above and the recent trends, it is quite clear that our species has already started living longer, while at the same time having entered into the virtual world big-time. Big-time. How you look physically, matters a fair bit – but how you look online, matters even more. Think about all the photographs and selfie enhancement apps available today. Not just this, how you actually think, what you believe in, and what you speak in the real life matters – but it is becoming equally or more important as to what your quasi-real, 100%-virtual presence behaves. Expression avenues are a galore, you pick! Whatever content you consume (movies, TV shows, news, games, adult stuff, and whatever else), and how / where you consume it, are a huge focus for several entities worldwide. What you shop for offline or online – it’s very precious knowledge to many. Again, several examples are widely available. Point is, your virtualization is happening in a huge way, whether you realize it or not. Bonus addition, you are going to live longer as well. To summarize, we humans are spending more time in the virtual world, over longer lifetimes, doing some activities.
This established, I am curious to find answers to two inter-related questions. Question One, where are we headed towards? In other words, how will our future canvas / landscape / background to our day-to-day existence manifest itself, and how will this increasingly virtual and technologically advanced existence look like. Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Homo Deus : A Brief History Of Tomorrow, makes a solid attempt to answer what-the-future-may-look-like. Longer lives getting continually being virtualized and technolized (is that even a word?) to an extent that Homo Sapiens herself morphs into an upgraded AI-enhanced version, Homo Deus. Immersive read, and very thought provoking. Ready Player One, a movie released last year, sets itself in a backdrop of a society completely immersed into a virtual reality game-world chasing an easter egg. For all one knows, that could be a direction the world moves towards – who is to say? Another movie called Circle, talks about a Big Brother-like corporation that tracks anything and everything you may do – and gains power more than any government in the whole world. The very disturbing but extremely rudimentarily-relatable TV show, Black Mirror, presents several scenarios the future might play out as. Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon book series talks of humans being uploaded into stacks and downloaded into human body “sleeves” to solve the mortality problem (at steep costs of course). Any and many of these possibilities could open up as we move forward. In fact, think of any possible scenario amalgamated with technology, and for all you know, it might play out. Tough to call, in fact, extremely tough to call especially if you look over extended periods. On this count in fact, I think calling the next decade also looks tough.
What I believe to be relatively more forecastable / guessable, are the broad trends over next few decades about what we humans might be doing. Brings me to.. Question Two, i.e. what will we be doing in future? That is to say, of the 24 hours available to us each day, what activities will this break-up into. To this end, I think I do have a few likely leads. One fairly strong premise (and thereby, the construct of likely consequences) that I am gravitating towards is that humans are experiencing a buoyancy in their free time at hand. Partly due to efficiency gains in the plethora of jobs we do, partly due to increasing automation and technology gains, partly due to longer lifespans, and partly owing to the ease of access to more avenues of doing several virtual activities at minimal costs (thanks to CPDs and Internet) that increasingly pervade / distract our minds. The entertainment avenues are all around us, just switch on your mobile phone. Content consumption is soaring, and we just can’t get enough of it. Ironically enough, this has already created a new economy of sorts. The capital beneficiaries, whether the direct ones like the providers and the creators, or the market players that benefit from this spiking consumption, are sitting at one end of this economy, the few. The capital losers, are primarily all the rest in the world, the consumers, the many. The problem with this construct is that capital will slowly but surely move towards the beneficiaries, even though today it appears that the consumer is winning (cheap cheap stuff!). In words of a respected erstwhile colleague, it is like drugs. As these drugs permeate human psyches, human inefficiency will rise whilst humans will keep wanting more. Fear not though, the world will run. AIs and smart machines will do the jobs. Another given in such a construct is that the intellect will continually chase jobs tuned towards creation of technology to ‘serve’ humanity, or creating content to entertain and keep humanity busy with something. New professions should mushroom, but several existing ones will simply vanish, and I wager that at a net level, useful job creation will fall.
Overall, a somewhat depressing state of affairs I concede. Cheer up though. The game is on, and the game needs players. How to play it is totally an individual choice, of course. All of us will be the consumers, that is a given, but what role we play in this game, that is something to ponder over I think. If you are an equities guy like me, I am thinking increasingly towards video game makers, and entertainment providers for my next long hold personal investments. Cheap, accessible, immersive entertainment providers, aggregators and creators. There are other directions my thoughts are also headed towards. Technological disruptors could be excellent picks. Though the problem with the disruptor is in the name itself. The fact that it disrupted, means that it can (and most likely will be) disrupted itself. Bio-engineering and genetics players are other great avenues worth looking at I think. Anyway, the purpose of this piece was to structure my thoughts as they are at the moment, to share it with a wider audience in the hope to hear counter thoughts, and to hear what readers think of my thoughts. Going forth, I intend to write about specific themes emanating from the above, with the aforementioned line of thought serving as a preface to those.
As things stand, the dice is already being rolled, and Player Ones are already in action. Time for us Player Twos to get ready. Game on!
