Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future

How has the global pandemic impacted procurement?  How long will the impact last?  What have we learned from this experience?  All of these questions and more are discussed in this important interview with Etosha Thurman, SAP's Chief Marketing & Solution Officer for Intelligent Spend and Business Network at SAP. ************************************************************************ Kevin Benedict Partner | Futurist at TCS View my profile on LinkedIn Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence ***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Last week, I had the opportunity to participate in the SIGA (Sports Integrity Global Alliance) conference at the Nova School of Business and Economics in Lisbon, Portugal.  In preparation for speaking, I researched the business of sports and the critical role of integrity in it. Sports are games.  People participate in and watch games to experience competitors struggling within a set of rules to overcome and succeed.  At its bare essentials, sports involves a relatable struggle.  A young man or women overcoming a traumatic childhood, poverty, violence, broken relationships, injuries, etc., to become a winner.  This can be highly entertaining, and audiences are willing to spend billions of dollars for the opportunity to watch this struggle unfold.

The massive volume of new data surrounding us is growing at an extraordinary rate.  This data plus its meaning and the the value it offers will inform the winners and losers of tomorrow. It's not that individual bits of data have such great value on their own, rather it's the combinations of data from different sources, and their combined meaning that is golden.  The challenge of course is finding and combining all the data sources and their meanings into something really useful, and trusted.   Often we can find data, but we don't know its accuracy, source or trustworthiness.  We also don't often have a lot of time to find, combine and refine the data sources and their combined meaning.  We need blockchain like processes that can include the source of data, its meaning and how it can be combined with other sources to reveal new insights.

When supercomputers are upgraded the amount of information they can process in a second of time increases. Researchers report that between the years 1956 and 2015, there was a one-trillion-fold increase in what a supercomputer could process in a second of time.  Our brains, however, haven't noticeably improved their processing speed during the same timeframe.   Speed can create interesting phenomena.  Speed has the effect of stretching a second so more can be accomplished during it.  It's almost as if the faster something moves the slower time passes.  We see this illustrated in the movie Matrix. Neo was taught to stretch time so he could avoid incoming bullets.  Today's supercomputers have Neo-like capabilities - they can stretch a second so more gets done.

In this episode, we visit the frontlines of AI with expert Giri Athuluru, Co-Founder and CEO of ExperienceFlow.ai .  Most AI, as we have known it, has been used for very specific and narrow applications.  Today, however, AI is moving up the value change and providing critical assistance to leaders and the C-Suite.   Assisting leaders takes a unique application of AI that looks across a much larger set of data and KPIs to provide useful advice.  Join us in this fascinating discussion about AI's limits and new capabilities for industry and ecosystem leaders. ************************************************************************ Kevin Benedict Partner | Futurist at TCS View my profile on LinkedIn Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence ***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

In the next 28 years, the global population of humans over the age of 65 will nearly double.  In that same timeframe, the population of people over age 80 will triple.  All of these developments are coming simultaneously as we are about to achieve significant life extensions.  These developments will change the world.  What will all this mean for the future of retirement, social services, healthcare, the economy, and elder care?  Join us for this discussion with expert Paul Tyler, CMO with Nassau Financial Group, a company focused on term life, final expense policies, fixed annuities, delivering guaranteed income, protecting savings, and paying for healthcare costs. ************************************************************************ Kevin Benedict Partner | Futurist at TCS View my profile on LinkedIn Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence ***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim

Historically distance has limited what we must worry about.  Our cave-dwelling ancestors only had to worry about being heard, seen or smelled by predators or enemies in their immediate surroundings.  As time went by large human armies could retreat and separate themselves by 100 miles, which during the Roman era equated to 5 days of marching.  That meant they didn't have to worry about a battle happening for at least 5 days.  Today it is different. One hundred miles equates to mere seconds. The security of distance has died.  Today, we must worry about wider circles.

In Oded Galor's insightful book, The Journey of Humanity , she analyzes history to reveal patterns that led to accelerated progress and higher standards of living. Some of the cultural traits that positively impacted societies include cooperation, trust, higher levels of gender equality, an entrepreneurial spirit and a future-oriented mindset.   In addition to the cultural traits, Galor identified good and bad geographies for food production, the kinds of institutions that are helpful, and  the right amount of diversity that helps improve a region's standard of living.  We learn that diversity helps up to the point where it jeopardizes social cohesion.

In Ernest Cline's 2011 book, Ready Player One , the protagonist, Wade Watts, distracts himself from his tragic, apocalyptic surroundings by connecting to the Metaverse - to a place called the Oasis. An old laptop, haptic clothing, 3D headsets and a personalized Avatar all help him escape into an alternative digital reality. People in the Oasis can become someone new, different and better.  In the Oasis, one can dress up, change voices, change genders, create new personas and drive nice cars.  It is a sensory explosion of sounds, physical touch, avatars and 3D immersive experiences. One of the many interesting concepts to come out of this book is that characters go into deep financial debt in the physical world to enhance their digital lives.  Metaphorically speaking, they starve in the physical world in order to feast in the digital.  They re-prioritize their financial investments from the earth to the digital Aether to improve their status and experiences there.

As a futurist, I spend my time studying the future, looking for signals that hint at what is to come.  I also invest a lot of time looking for patterns and lessons from the past that can inform our future.  The past is behind us and it's too late to change the present, so the future is our canvas - a place where we can create our artistic masterpieces. Many people that I have interacted with pine for the past.  They wish to return to a mythical past nirvana.  The challenge of course, with that way of thinking, is time only moves one way, and it is away from the past.  It's a one-way street.  T he progression of time moves like a train from the past, to the present, and on into the future.  The arrow of time points in one direction only.  In the direction of the universe's expansion. We cannot see, touch, hear or taste time, but we can measure its passage.  Time can be marked, measured, documented and archived, but never returned to.   The inevitable passaging of time, innoc