Five things worth knowing about the future

This image is AI generated. And we don’t hate it.

The Spark Business Lab x Semipermanent Future State Event in Auckland (May 2023) was a remarkably good first pancake for the colab, here’s my 5 favourite moments from the day.

1. Mark Adams of VICE Media had more than a few yarns worthy of a mention, including some early career endeavours as the digital guy for a major talent label; he travelled to Iceland to explain the Internet to Bjork ("It's like a tree" she surmised). And then was the time he gave Lady Gaga the digital playbook he developed for Madonna after she said no. I personally doubt Madonna has few regrets in life but that might possibly be one of them. The overall lesson being some digital movements are worth chasing (like a pack of five-year-olds after a soccer ball) and others are distractions from the opportunity to tell stories that live within (rather than on) the internet.

2. Mikaela Jade of Indigital spoke about the role of indigenous people in building and shaping the next tech evolution, she said that “4.0 deep innovation feels like the way first nations people think about the world”, and I couldn’t agree more, there’s a sense of the collective psyche moving full circle, back to the things that really matter. The long-term connected, sustainable view of development that corporates are waking up to, has always been there for indigenous cultures. What an opportunity for first nations people to take the lead.

3. Danielle Krettek Cobb, founder of Google Empathy Lab, backed up Mikaela Jade by expressing the ways in which “indigenous systems would be the best wayfinders for AI”. She talked about how the opportunity for this new era to be “the great listening” and the opportunity for AI “as a mirror for us and what we choose to teach it”. It’s never been more important for tech to be frankly, humane. If the current tech era has given us ‘digital drift’ (You Tube rabbit holes), AI has the alarming potential for ‘emotional drift’ (it’s already capable of gaslighting).

4. Dr Johnnie Penn, University of Cambridge introduced ‘rest engineering’ into the AI conversation. I’m not too thrilled about unleashing another bolted horse like social media in society, especially one with even bigger teeth, so this was a refreshing idea. What if we simply build AI slower? Adding in the time, the discourse, and the research into each small developmental stage would shape it toward help over harm. Also, given the stats that show machine learning will rack up a carbon debt similar to the airline industry, a solid hold-your-horses makes a lot of sense.

5. Sam Conniff, of The Uncertainty Experts took us on a journey to reframe ‘uncertainty’. I enjoyed this because I don’t like the word resilience, it’s anchored in staying in place and taking the blows, which obviously sucks. Uncertainty is our reality and Sam’s research embraces it. 90% of the time we see or hear the word it’s in a negative context, but scientifically speaking, fear and excitement light up the brain in the same way and he believes that we have the power to “update our evolutionary systems”.  He argues building uncertainty tolerance is the gateway between the two natural human responses of anxiety and creativity, and that conviction theory is what we need. That’s the idea that we tap into the feeling associated with the outcomes we fear and plot the outcomes of our actions to give us the conviction to act. ‘What regret do you most want to avoid?’ was a good reflection to end on.  

By Fleur Skinner, Independent Marketing Consultant: PR, Content, Advertising, Experiences. Member of the HeyYou Collective.