To tackle these existential problems, we must address the underlying operating system that created them: Extreme corporate capitalism and Milton Friedman’s enormous influence on the outmoded principle of ‘shareholder return above all else‘

As we stand here today looking back at the past 14 months, it is now glaringly obvious that ‘shareholder return‘ simply can no longer be more important than everything else. This kind of thinking (sorry, Milton) has led us to the anthropocene – it’s an outmoded and increasingly harmful leftover of the industrial economy. After all, who can do business on a broken planet? While the rising tide can usually floats all boats, the absence of any water whatsoever will equally impact anyone, rich or poor. If the stock markets around the globe continue to incentivise short-term profits and perpetual growth at the expense of ‘people and planet‘, the future of our children will be bleak…

Instead of the procedural regulations that guide a real-life town meeting, conversation is ruled by algorithms that are designed to capture attention, harvest data, and sell advertising.

The scholars Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias have called it “data colonialism,” a term that reflects our inability to stop our data from being unwittingly extracted.

Perhaps the most apt historical model for algorithmic regulation is not trust-busting, but environmental protection. To improve the ecology around a river, it isn’t enough to simply regulate companies’ pollution.

The nexus of machine learning and medicine, biology, and materials science will be to the coming decades what Silicon Valley has been to the late 20th and early 21st century.

We need public spaces, built in the spirit of Walt Whitman, that allow us to gather, communicate, and share in something bigger than ourselves.

I am testing out a new feature of my new email system with Hey.com that allows me to create a Gerd-Feed like stream of great articles and content direct to your inbox. If you are interested in signing up and getting more frequent “must-reads” from me, consider signing up.

How has life changed since the COVID-19 pandemic started? Our friends, family, colleagues, and communities have had their lives changed in critical ways that promise to have long-lasting effects.

49 minutes: The amount of time by which the average workday increased by in 2020, according to a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Covid-19 has brought international travel to a standstill. But it will recover and may even become a better experience, says Simon Wright.

A must-read post on future of business Post-Covid from friend and fellow futurist Glen Hiemstra.

The debate has been raging when it comes to globalization and whether the pre-covid levels of inter-connectedness of markets was beneficial, or not. But despite the current crisis and the enormous issues caused for our global supply chain, I think that if humanity wants to tackle its truly existential problems (water, food, population growth, energy etc) it is going to require massive multilateral efforts. Hyper-collaboration is the future.

How, where, when and WHY we work is changing rapidly as the Megashifts such as digitisation, virtualisation, automation and cognification (AI or better, IA) accelerate and increasingly result in the dis/replacement of human routines.  Yet this is only the beginning, and the End of Routine does NOT mean the end of human work.  Our ultimate job is to be HUMAN.

Ken Steele, higher education strategist and president, Eduvation Inc: “I see the development of increasingly personalized and customized programs, modes of delivery and student services as universities continue to diversify the students they serve. More and more, curricula will become modularized and interdisciplinary, and learning will be credentialed through competency-based models rather than models based on credit hours. Experiential learning will be fundamentally integrated, allowing students to weave together classroom study, community-based research, volunteerism and workplace experiences.

Faced with public funding constraints, many universities will create alternative revenue streams through programs to meet the workforce training needs of employers and working professionals. New technologies offer the potential for institutions to share their resources, faculty, programs and credentials, regardless of geography, but this is not yet encouraged by our current funding and budget models, which promote competition over collaboration by humanities and interdisciplinary programs”

Amidst automation, exponential technology, and societal forces transforming our world is, the big question everyone has is: What is the future of work and what should young people be learning?

What if we could use this revolutionary remote/hybrid learning period during the pandemic as an opportunity to truly embed digital skilling as part of school curriculums? What would that mean?

Productivity expert Choncé Maddox writes, “It’s no secret that successful people read. The average millionaire is said to read two or more books per month.”

Earlier in 2019, the World Bank released its World Development Report 2019 as an attempt to answer the rising concerns about the general effects of AI technologies on the future of human labor.

But are these fears warranted? That is the question.