To survive tomorrow, we must step back and take a holistic approach. Understand the era of digital augmentation and why it is already around us.
Today, 3.7 billion people live in urban areas, which will double by 2050; cities and industrial companies (such as the automotive players) still operate under the 17th to 18th-century mindset. Most of our eco-social constructs have expired, and our urban, medical, educational, and transportation systems serve the limited information input/output model of yesteryear’s society.
To be able to survive tomorrow, we have to step back and take a holistic approach. It is essential to recognize that this gap is not due to a lack of technology. Like in several other industries, technology has also progressed by leaps and bounds in the automotive domain. However, the supporting ecosystem has been lackadaisical at best.
The new narrative
A new narrative is emerging, enabling us to break the barriers of one-dimensional interactions and dramatically change our perceptions of identity, ownership, and society. In this context, Facebook became the world’s largest media hub, and while it does not create any content, it allows people to consume as much of the media as they can without owning it. People do not buy CDs; they pay to access music on Spotify. Alibaba, Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, and Amazon operate under the access-based economic model. We are moving from a world of ownership to one of ‘access-ship,’ and in that case, people do not need ‘things in the traditional manner. They need practical solutions that fit their digital flow, i.e., a touch-point.
The time is ripe to take responsibility for the fields of potential that lie beyond the digital obvious. We must cease the silo-thinking mindset regarding software, hardware, humans, and technology and commence on the path to becoming the machine before the machine becomes us.
The era of Digital Augmentation
The era of digital augmentation is not in front of us but instead surrounding us. The enhancement of presence and perception through code-driven content pushed our communication and languages to new heights and exposed us to new awareness sets.
Augmentation of empathy, freedom, well-being, intelligence, education, governess, creativity, economics, politics, and more gives us the ability to observe ourselves from parallel vantage points, understand our genetic heritage and structure, design our cognitive process and social identities, can isolate our internal mechanisms and create interactions that are customized by our intention and personalized for our needs and wishes.
For the first time, we are not simply interacting with data but instead become part of the data that sets our potential trajectories into the future.
Areas such as Artificial Intelligence, robotics, genomics, biotechnology, neurotechnology, adjustable reality, and the codification (of value interactions) will let us re-imagine every aspect of our lives. We will be able to design spaces not governed by a fixed physical architecture but dynamically adjusting to the users’ wishes. We can build cities that focus on experience rather than on productivity. And the visual elements of the city will be a personalized experience (Graffiti/ Street art/ Architecture and Advertisement will no longer necessarily be a social experience but can be personalized to include or exclude based on your preferences.)
The time of “every device is an island” is over, and the focus on ecosystems should be a thing of the past. The creation of products in the future is one of the ecosystems where collaborative and interconnected solutions with multiple expandable and inter-exchangeable business cases will flourish. Several key factors play a significant part in creating such infrastructure. Every essential element is a small piece of the giant puzzle that makes up the ongoing disruptive shift. The focus on creating a whole solution is not one of a singular company. Companies that can see the whole picture from their place in the puzzle to the best position for the future will flourish. Complete oversight of the customer journey and the ability to forge alliances and strategic partnerships, thereby enabling the creation of infrastructure to package complete 360 solutions tailored for the mapped customer, will be vital to growing the core business.
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