For the last twenty years, or so, I’ve followed the Global Trends series that has been published every four years by the National Intelligence Council of the USA to coincide with each in-coming administration, and intended to serve as an unclassified strategic assessment of the key trends that might shape the world over the next…
Navigating the AI On-ramp The AI Outlook to 2030 AI has entered a critical acceleration phase. While we may be able to visualise the longer-range outcome, where AI is all around us and automating much of it, the next steps that we will take to get there are harder to understand. The range, speed and…
Readers of my postings on the pandemic will know that I have been writing about multiple and multiplying mutations for some time. I attach below the summary that I wrote almost a month ago. Mutations are the real challenge ahead. It’s now an arms race. New and more dangerous changes are made by chance among…
Last year was the year of strategic uncertainty. We began 2020 with a big shock in the Spring, empty roads, makeshift working from home, and immense turmoil as we all scrambled to work out how to survive for as long as it might take. We didn’t know how long that might be or what might…
We will look back on 2020 with some nostalgia as a year when life was challenging but simple. The strategy was Hope and Cope, and this would all be over soon. That myth will evaporate in 2021. At one level, the twelve months ahead looks like a straightforward journey with obvious steps to take in…
Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, or at least it used to be. There was a time when we looked forward to more of everything we hoped for and had a good chance of it arriving. Or that was what we thought. We were planners, full of ideas about the things we were going to do,…
Family friends of ours set off last week to drive to see their son who is in his first term at university. They had a call in the middle of the journey – their son had been hospitalised with Coronavirus. Not long ago, a friend of mine was out on his mountain bike with a…
For a few months in the Spring of 2020 it was hard to see what any sort of future looked like. Business decision making was strictly about securing survival and, as they say in Formula One: “If you want to finish first, first you’ve got to finish”. Often, the amount of time this survival effort…
In the middle of all the upheaval and turbulence being caused by Coronovirus, and with anger and posturing all around, business decision-makers must navigate and that means they have take a view and make decisions. Tony Yardley-Jones and I worked on the bird ‘flu epidemic in ’09, giving some business leaders advice on the background…
It’s never been easier to spin up Cloud infrastructure and get going. The obvious brands are, well, obvious – the Hyper-scalers, as they’re known – and they grease the on-ramp with free credits for start-ups; uploading and storing data is free; firing up a few instances is so simple. What could go wrong? Three trends…
The jury’s in, and it’s good news for tech: Coronavirus gave everyone a great big shove and now everyone’s online for almost everything. It was always going to happen eventually, but Covid-19 made the transition of the next five years happen In five weeks. Consumers and business, Enterprise and SMEs, commercial and public sector. It…
Anyone with responsibilities for the future must look past the chaos and wreckage of Covid-19 and largely ignore anything in the rear view mirror. There will be lots of debate and argument about what happened and how different it should have been, but decision-makers have to avoid that distraction because their focus must be on…
Robert Mason described it well. He said that when his flying instructor first gave him control of the pedals, the machine started swinging about wildly, and he hadn’t done anything! So true. You’d think that flying can’t be that much of a challenge, but it is, especially helicopters. My instructor gave me a stern talking…
It was the sight of the old computer board that caught my eye and led me to watch a tv programme first aired over forty years ago. It was nostalgic to see Philip Hughes again, and those green screen word processors. It quite took me back to Logica’s Newman Street offices and gentleman farmer Hector…
Global Trends, the AI On-Ramp, & Insights
