15
Avoiding Obsolescence and the Road Ahead
Congratulations on making it through the entire book and to the final chapter. By now you probably feel as though you just drank water at point blank range from a fire hose. We appreciate your participation more than you know. As you can tell we had a lot to say. But anyone who knows the two of us won't be surprised.
We thought the best way to wrap up this book was to finish up with a few thoughts on the future that highlight the amazing opportunity and ethical challenges we face as we all endeavor to elevate the digital sense of humanity.
Dead Ideas
Let's start with a chart in Figure 15.1 that shows the newest paradigm shifts of what Chris called “the Opportunity Age” in a blog post back in 2013. These are important shifts to noodle on as a business leader and marketer, as they will influence and shape your thinking around everything from where the gaps in your market will be in the years ahead and where your organization must mentally move on to broken “x” type ideas that no longer hold value or merit.
Figure 15.1 Chart from Chris J Snook's Blog R.I.P. Information Age…Welcome the Opportunity Age1
It's estimated by Forrester Research in their “Death of a B2B Salesman” report that 1 million B2B salespeople in the United States will be obsolete in the next four years. The report says that buyers in this market “overwhelmingly prefer” a DIY approach.2 After all, they're one of the Bs in that equation, and marketing automation is delivering increasingly personalized and relevant value without the annoyance of the dreaded salesperson follow-up voice mails and inbox notes with “just touching base” in the subject line.
With online research readily available, it's often not necessary to talk to a salesperson anymore. You can manage the entire sales process by yourself, at home, and never with the awkwardness of “dealing” with a human who is worried about the end of month number. It's said that websites, not people, are what's keeping the B2B sales process ticking now.
Experts Evolve into Sensemakers!
Okay, buyers might not need “salespeople,” but they will always need experts in the form of sensemakers. Sensemakers are able to rapidly learn, assimilate, leverage their network, and customize a solution to the buyer's problem and architecture. The role of trusted advisor/sensemaker is your goal to avoiding obsolescence.
There's another study from SiriusDecisions in 2015 that argues against Forrester's research, stating that “Buyers interact with sales representatives at every stage of the buyer's journey.”3 It's a false perception that salespeople are “declining due to disintermediation by digital buying behaviors.”
Instead, this research encourages the B2B community to remember human interaction can and will happen no matter what. Digital marketing doesn't equate to human interactions leaving entirely, according to Senior Research Director Jennifer Ross. She says, “It just means that buyers and providers are interacting in new digital ways. Just because buying behavior is done digitally does not mean that sales representatives are no longer required to instigate or facilitate a buying process.”
The business world is moving forward faster and faster, and as a marketer or sales leaders you need to position yourself as the person who can help organizations make sense of it all and to keep pace.
Lifelong Learning as a Habit
Good leaders all have at least one thing in common: you need to develop the childlike curiosity of your youth again and see learning as a daily habit. The other area you must invest in developing more of is your emotional intelligence, because at least for the next several decades, it will be the only advantage and form of intelligence humans will have in exclusivity from the machines and deep learning protocols.
If you consider the idea that 70 percent of learning happens at work, 20 percent via mentoring, and 10 percent in classroom settings, the message is clear: we need to be learning more at work since it's prime time to do so. To try and appease this formula, we've embraced the concept of incremental learning at work. Basically, we get an idea, practice it (maybe with some feedback), and eventually “master” it. This kind of learning is easy, obvious, can be addictive, and is a culture worth cultivating in your office.
5G, IOT, AI, VR, and Drones, Oh My!
Are you feeling excited and ready? 5G is coming soon! Get ready to feel like that Colonial soldier we spoke of at the outset of this book. In many ways, the world will become more open, transparent, and amazing. It will also be filled with more examples of chaos, polarization, and violence as humanity adjusts and deals with the terror barrier en masse. Some will be well equipped emotionally and intellectually and many will not. Leadership will be needed at all levels across society. We all face an amazing opportunity to move beyond the cyclical norms of violence and war, and in other ways, if we aren't careful, it could become a bit dystopian. The extra effort we need to make now as you have upgraded your digital sense is truly “thinking” about what Humarithms said: we need to embed in our methodology as much as we have obsessed over our proprietary algorithms.4 The ethics and moral center will be tested and are uniquely ours as humans to keep at the heart of all we design moving forward. Technology, like money, is a great tool, but can be a horribly dangerous God/master.
On the positive side of near-term technology upgrades, as 5G rolls out to everyone with 10Gbits/sec connections, information will flow to us faster than ever. We will be able to stream gigantic files at impeccable quality. Factor in virtual and augmented reality, and we'll be able to stream virtual worlds that are virtually indistinguishable from our true reality (no pun intended). Dominique Bonte, VP of ABI Research, recently produced a report on 5G that envisions three versions of 5G:
- Enhanced mobile broadband for higher-bandwidth mobile applications
- Low-bandwidth, high-latency connections designed for supporting hundreds of millions of devices on the Internet of Things
- Ultrareliable, low-latency connections, which is best for automotive applications
In October 2015, Huawei and NTT DOCOMO partnered to test 5G wireless data at a large scale, using sub-6GHz bands. Unlike previous lab experiments, the entire test was conducted in a public place. Huawei and NTT DOCOMO were able to reach data speeds of 3.6Gbps! The International Telecommunication Union recently standardized that 5G data speeds should reach up to 20Gbps speeds.5 However, Nokia believes that 5G can be as fast as 30Gbps. This is like having Internet speeds of a faucet drip and moving to a firehose!
In late June 2016, U.S. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler circulated a proposal to kick off 5G wireless for the United States. “If the Commission approves my proposal next month, the United States will be the first country in the world to open up high-band spectrum for 5G networks and applications,” Wheeler stated in prepared remarks. “And that's damn important because it means U.S. companies will be first out of the gate.”
Lightning-fast Internet. Everything connected to the cloud. Mixed reality headsets and 360 cameras becoming a commoditized norm. Connected autonomous cars driving in unison. Everything with a battery linking to 5G. Wow. This is your next decade in real time.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution
With all of these technologies rolling out, there will be a mass elimination of jobs performed by actual human beings. Gerd Leonhard has predicted that 50 percent of the jobs that exist in 2017 will be eliminated within 5 years, never to return, while 50 percent of the jobs needed in 5 years have not even been conceived of yet. Take restaurants for example: we are already seeing kiosks eliminating order takers. Manufacturing jobs, truck drivers, repetitive tasks from accounting to tax preparation and paralegal reviews will all be replaced by machine learning AI.
In fact, look to the survey date from the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. At this gathering of world political and economic leaders, the Fourth Industrial Revolution was a central topic.6 The forum surveyed senior executives from over 350 of the world's largest companies and found that as many as 7.1 million jobs in the world's richest countries could be lost through technology advancements, redundancy, and automation. These losses could be partially offset by the creation of 2.1 million new opportunities in various sectors, but current estimates show that in the short term there will be a gap of 5 million jobs until we come through the other side of the curve and figure out the true need there.
There is a large chance that even the concept of money will need to be rethought or will face a forced disruption as 7 billion-plus people try to navigate continued survival in a world where crony capitalism and central banking theory has become completely inequitable and unsustainable as a faux free-market ideology that creates far too many losers and far too few winners. Innovation can be stifled but it is highly unlikely at this point, since we are officially in the knee bend of the technology curve, and the dark side of the Force has fewer and fewer places to hide as hackers for humanity begin to appear in deeper density around the globe.
Virtual Reality Mini-VRcations
It seems unlikely for many who have not seen how powerful VR simulations have become, but we could take minivacations in the middle of the afternoon, while our robots work! We call them “VRcations.” You can put on your virtual reality headset, sit on a hammock in your office, put on your headphones, spray some coconut scent, turn on a fan, and relax for 15 minutes (okay, 30) or so before getting back to work.
Our actual reality may be a bit polluted with smog, and many humans may lack the financial health to take a real vacation, but in virtual reality we would be sitting in a lovely location somewhere in the world. With 4K and 8K video resolution streaming via 5G download speeds, we will be able to “teleport” to any destination on Earth at a moment's notice. As we perfect the scale of suborbital flights it will also be very likely that transcontinental air flight in the future will be reduced to hours or minutes versus half of your day. Once affordable you could hop in a Virgin Galactic ship in Los Angeles (or similar) and head straight up into suborbital space to allow the world to spin below you and then reinsert right back down in an hour or two to Dubai.
No need to worry about translation, either, because according to Baidu Research voice recognition will jump to 99 percent accuracy from 95 percent within the next few years, and that will mean that language translation and dialect interpretation will be as good as our normal language processing, making cross-cultural communication a breeze and replacing the need for typing forever. We can't wait and have agreed not to write another book until that is a reality LOL.
Virtual Reality Masterminds and Uploadable Consciousness
One area where we are particularly excited about the potential of VR and 5G is the prospect for a new type of mastermind meeting area. If you've ever seen Travis's business card, on the back of it he has a group of about 50 people who have inspired him throughout time. Ray Kurzweil has discussed the possibility of digital immortality within the coming two decades. There will come a day when each member in the mastermind group is fully integrated with artificial intelligence and we are all able to interact with each other and legends of the past (Figure 15.2). Their audio, writings, books, and videos from the past will detail their personalities. You could eventually have conversations with them—or at least their AI twins. Who do you wish you had the chance to meet? Soon you will be able to have virtual coffee with anyone in the history of humanity. Imagine what happens to disease when your medical doctor can download the totality of the world's best surgeons in that practice area from around the world before they operate on your loved one.
Figure 15.2 Travis Wright's Personally Customized Virtual Mastermind
Do you remember the scene from The Matrix where Trinity downloads the knowledge of how to fly a helicopter in seconds? The singularity is predicted to occur somewhere around 2023. This will all become real in the next 6 or 7 years and it will all become widely affordable shortly thereafter.
5G Allows Minimal Latency
Another thing that fascinates us is the prospect for vehicles in the future being interlocked in an autonomous grid. The minimal latency of 5G will allow fleets of cars to communicate with each other on a massive scale. With only a 1-millisecond latency, your car can adjust slightly and all of the cars nearby will be able to react in almost real time. This could potentially eliminate many car accidents. It also comes with a major opportunity to secure the gaps in security to prevent a large terror hack that can be executed from a remote location with catastrophic consequences. There are two sides to every coin but solving some of the more humanistic aspects of these scenarios first for the benefit of all humanity and not just for profit will also provide us an unprecedented shot at peace on a large scale.
“5G could also open up other commercial applications, including lifecycle management, enabling car manufacturers to update vehicle firmware wirelessly, in the not so distant future,” said Dominique Bonte of ABI Research.
A “Hilton hotel car” with no driver will pick you up at the airport and take you to the hotel. As of the writing of this manuscript Uber had already launched its driverless pilot project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Your vacation or business trip will begin with minimal transportation stress.
The Dark Side of Drones
Drones will unfortunately begin to litter the sky. You may actually need to put on virtual reality goggles just to see a peaceful blue sky with scattered clouds if we aren't careful. Google has a top secret project called “Project Skybender,” and it aims to deliver 5G Internet from solar drones; it is also experimenting with millimeter-wave radio transmissions.
One concern for many civilians is drones becoming so connected. Israeli startup Airobotics recently launched their autonomous industrial drones and announced $28.5 million in funding. It makes drones that fly, with very little human involvement, thanks to a series of breakthroughs in robotics, sensors, and navigation systems.
Why is this important? Well, these aren't consumer drones that are retrofitted; these are fully redesigned autonomous drones that fly in squadrons. They can handle much larger payloads than consumer drones, allowing them to become weaponized. And if you think you could escape them by jumping into a body of water, well, enter the Hydroswarm: the drone that can swim in water. For some reason humans have always designed technology to create more efficient and better ways to eliminate our existence before we move to more productive uses. With nanobot technology becoming more prevalent as well, we could have swarms of mosquito-sized nanobots flying around on various military missions.
OpenAI is a nonprofit artificial intelligence (AI) research company, associated with business magnate Elon Musk, that aims to carefully promote and develop open-source friendly AI in such a way as to benefit, rather than harm, humanity as a whole. The organization aims to “freely collaborate” with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public. The company is supported by over US$1 billion in commitments; however, only a tiny fraction of the $1 billion pledged is expected to be spent in the first few years. Many of the employees and board members are motivated by concerns about existential risk from artificial general intelligence.7
This is an area where we could take a wrong turn in the future. As marketers and business leaders, we are only sharing these potential dark futures so that you are not marketing or developing paths to profitability today that will have an unlikely chance of being benign in the future. One of the most important open source projects out there right now is OPENAI and we encourage you to follow the blog at OpenAI.org/blog.
We should always strive to use technology for the betterment of humanity, not for killing or controlling people. That would openly lead to our extinction as machines reach superintelligence in three decades.
5G Possibilities
5G wireless networks will connect 50 billion people and things by 2020. Only the next generation of networks optimized for 5G will able to meet the speed, latency, and energy efficiency required to deliver the Internet of Things (IoT) experiences of the future. “5G will give birth to the next phase of human possibilities, bringing about the automation of everything,” said Marcus Weldon, chief technology officer at Nokia. “This automation, driven by a smart, invisible network, will create new businesses, give rise to new services and, ultimately, free up more time for people.”8
The future is set up to be one helluva ride for all of us. There are some dangerous roads that civilization could go down, but personally, we are hopeful that digital sense will continue to spread as you solve the short term needs of your business sustainability and focus on putting the human touch back into every interaction and decision point using the EMF.
You may look around and feel as though we are living a real world version of that movie Idiocracy, but we see much more progress in the opposite direction. Youth have always held humanity's future promise. The next 9 to 10 years will be filled with evidence that can be interpreted as the end of the world, but if you read The Fourth Turning by Neil Howe and William Strauss and The Watchman's Rattle by Rebecca Costa, you will be gifted with more knowledge on what dynamics are at play as humans navigate our evolutionary biology within times of quantum technology.
We have enjoyed giving you a thorough and practical model for upgrading your human software layer with more digital sense, and thank you for joining us on the journey to bring more light to humanity and commerce with each action we take as a collective from this day forward.
The End (and The Beginning)