Strategic Foresight for Friends and Relatives

Source: Adapted and extended from Voros (2003)

Merry Christmas.

I am a member of the Strategic Foresight team at Autodesk. The Strategic Foresight team explores future scenarios in a STEEP  (Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political) framework to identify drivers of emerging themes and patterns, and how those will impact our company, our customers, and our customers' customers. The goal of Strategic Foresight is to forecast possibilities and prepare for change by examining how current factors might signal what’s to come.

I write an annual Christmas letter that shares the status of our family with friends and relatives. Most of my friends and relatives don't know what I do for a living, so I include a few items that reflect where our team at Autodesk sees possibilities for the future. Of the many things our team considers, I try to select items that they can relate to. I have done this for three years now, so I thought I'd see where things stand at this moment. How good is our team at identifying which of the many possible futures might come to pass?

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from my Christmas Letter 2021

• With retiring Boomers being replaced by Millenials, expect to see governments and companies focus more on climate change and social issues.

  • "Nations strike deal at COP28 to transition away from fossil fuels", Reuters, 2023
  • "Council and Parliament strike deal on rights for platform workers," Council of the European Union, 2023
  • "A 2023 Proclamation on National Crime Victims’ Week recommits to the work of preventing crime, supporting victims as they heal, and holding offenders accountable.", The White House, 2023

  Articles on the web depict the top social issues of 2023 as climate change, crime, LGBTQIA+ rights, healthcare, refugee crises, wealth gap, gun violence, and hunger/food insecurity. There are plenty of issues for governments and companies to consider, and they are.

• Though we have vehicle-assisted driving now, it will be about another decade before self-driving cars allow us to get where we’re going without anyone sitting behind the steering wheel.

  • "Some California Lawmakers and Unions Want to Ban Autonomous Trucking," Jalopnik, 2023
  • "Tesla Recalls Autopilot Software in 2 Million Vehicles", The New York Times, 2023
  • "Cruise slashes 24% of self-driving car workforce in sweeping layoffs", TechCrunch, 2023

  So self-driving cars are indeed still a ways away, probably 2031.

• Over the next decade, our energy systems will shift to clean and renewable, and our transportation systems to electric.

  • "EU fossil fuel burning for electricity fell to lowest on record in 2023, data shows", The Guardian, 2023
  • "Electric cars are breaking sales records, but here’s why they’re not replacing gas cars anytime soon", CNN Business, 2023

  Though renewables are making progress, more needs to be done with electric vehicles to hit this mark in 2031.

from my Christmas Letter 2022

• Although cities will continue growing, remote work normalized shifts away from major metropolitan areas towards smaller urban-like clusters, which will create challenges for retrofitting both suburban areas and downtown cores.

  • "While remote work is on an upswing [12.7% of full-time employees work from home, 28.2% of employees have adapted to a hybrid work model] traditional in-office work is far from obsolete.", Forbes, 2023.
  • "Retrofitting has appeared as a significant solution for improving the sustainability and functionality of existing structures.", Revitalite, 2023
  • "The Houston region is growing much more rapidly on its outskirts [suburbs] than in its urban core.", University of Houston Public Media, 2023

  The effects of COVID-19 on cities and suburbs will take a few more years to be fully realized.

• With the success of technologies like "Hey Google" and "Alexa," communicating with computers using natural language (voice) will be more common than using the keyboard/mouse (hands) in about seven years.

  • "Technology behind dictation software has some faults such as difficult learning curves, and the inherent bias that humans program into them means that their accuracy can vary, especially for people with various accents, sociolects, and dialects like African American Vernacular English, or speech impediments.", The New York Times, 2023
  • "AI is growing 24 times faster than Moore's Law", Turing Solutions, 2023
  • Voice, gestures, eye gazing tracking, and embedded tech in human bodies are rising. "Soon, everything will be interactive, but won’t need to be actually touched.", Sixteen-Nine, 2023

  Despite the current limitations of alternative technologies, the keyboard and mouse might not be around longer than 2029.

• Knowledge of the social and environmental determinants of health, along with new biotechnologies and an increasingly preventive focus, will transform medicine and grow the care economy.

  • "The first CRISPR therapy approved in the U.S. will treat sickle cell disease", Science News, 2023
  • "Three promising drugs for treating Alzheimer's disease bring fresh hope.", Alzheimer's Society, 2023
  • "The care economy is growing as the demand for childcare and care for the elderly is increasing in all regions.", International Labor Organization, 2023

  People dedicating themselves to the well-being of others have a bright future ahead.

from my Christmas Letter 2023

• AI will not doom us all as it's practically an arm's race to see who can be the first to establish guardrails for machine learning, privacy protection, and equitable application of the technology.

  • "Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence," The White House, 2023
  • "EU Agrees on Landmark Artificial Intelligence Rules," The New York Times, 2023
  • "China's New AI Regulations," Latham & Watkins, 2023
  • "Pope Francis calls for binding global treaty to regulate AI," Reuters, 2023

  There will be plenty of AI regulation on the horizon.

• Interactions between humans and technology will fortify physical capabilities, augment human cognition, alter social relationships, and extend the definition of what it means to be human.

  • "AI-based Digital Bridge Allows Paraplegic to Walk," Financial Times, 2023
  • "Advancements in synthetic biology include breakthroughs that have improved dopamine production.", MIT Technology Preview, 2023
  • "Building on advances in reading brain waves, researchers used electrical signals produced by the brain to recreate a Pink Floyd song.", The New York Times, 2023

  The line between man and machine will blur for the benefit of humankind.

• The combination of social media influencers and AI-generated content will enable a bustling economy for self-employed creators, disrupting conventional approaches to how money is made from subject matter.

  • "Cent, a Web 3.0 platform, transforms X posts into NFTs for creators.", Venture Beat, 2023
  • "Web 3.0 could very well represent the 'great economic correction needed to reduce income inequality as it empowers paying users to become 'earners' and monetizes social currency through stakeholder participation, but with shares (or tokens) that are far more liquid and promise faster upward mobility.", World Economic Forum, 2022
  • "Ellie's Trumpet: A Tale of Finding Your Talent was written by John Theo and ChatGPT AI using Midjourney AI as an illustrator.", Amazon, 2023

  Earning power in the future will be different from earning power of the past.

• Although renewable sources like solar, wind, and advanced energy storage will help address environmental concerns, increased energy consumption for things like servers to power AI will increase fossil fuel use and continue the development of nuclear.

  • "Even by 2040, only 70% of the energy required to power the infrastructure for A.I. will come from renewables.", Ripe Labs, 2023
  • "U.S. crude oil production will increase to new records in 2023 and 2024", US Energy Information Administration, 2023

  The use of fossil fuels will increase before being replaced by renewables.

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Looking at past forecasts is alive in the lab.