Going to be on a Future of Enterprise Software panel today organized by the German American Business Association a bit sensationally named: Enterprise Software at the Brink
SaaS, Big Data/IoT, the big paradigms of recent years seem to have run their course. Time to take stock and look at where we are today, and even more interesting, where we are going in the coming years. …
Makes you think about where is it all going? The kids will be fine. As long as there are enterprises, there will be enterprise software and good money will be made by helping companies with their top and bottom lines. The big players are doing fine as well, adapt or being bought.
The bigger question is how will businesses and the larger economy change driven by the technological advances?
One dystopian future is, that more and more people will be turking for the algorithm as described by John Robb.
It is happening already. Fast Company in its last issue wrote about a startup that is using AI to coordinate complex projects. The AI farms out the individual tasks and is coordinating the project delivery.
“Banta says this workflow system helps B12 delivering designs up to twice as fast and at about a tenth of the cost of many competitors with dedicated design teams.”
More and more of these tasks will be fulfilled by ever more sophisticated AIs, leaving more and more people behind.
The internet also should have been the great equalizer enabling everyone to benefit from its opportunities. Alas, 99% of all advertising growth last year has been gobbled up by Google and Facebook.
Douglas Rushkoff is warning about this development in his book Throwing rocks at the Google bus.
In his podcast series Team Human Doug is giving a voice to the other possible future of focusing on human development, creating collectives, DIY approaches to a new economy …
There are crowd funding sites like Kickstarter in combination with local maker spaces that enable you to quickly create your prototype, implement your idea and at the same time put food on the table of your family.
One idea to help us transition to a more just economy and society is Basic Income. I would like to frame it as Basic Innovation Income BII it is not a social handout, but BII is giving everyone the ability to tinker and work on the next billion dollar ideas that will pay for the societies BII.
The next years are going to be very interesting as well as the panel tonight ;-) We all play a big role with our actions, whether we usher in a dystopia of most of us working for the machine or a thriving world for all.
Thoughts? Greatly appreciated.