MODERATOR AT YOUR SERVICE
"If you're going to do something tonight, that you know you'll be sorry for in the morning, plan a lie in." Lorraine
Interesting yes - terrifying definitely! 1984 here we go again!
WT
what an incredibly boring man and its a shame its mostly nonsense. I don't think he has much of a future as a futurist.
I did think the useable bonus points for using public transport idea was good but he fails to realise that in a capitalist society, the petrol and car companies will be able to afford BETTER bonus games than the government. And bonus points for turning up on time to work? how old fashioned - surely flexi systems are the way of the future - and in fact are already here with Europe decades ahead of America on work laws. see here for more on the work/life balance and the disparity between the US and Europe.
So the car manufacturers make games so you drive more economically; gets us to buy cars because we will save money. And the fuel companies make games so that we want to fill up more often. So we end up driving further just so we can use the fuel so that we can fill up - win for car manufacturer, win for fuel company.
I remember that my dad collected "points" from cigarette packets. You get Tesco & boots reward points. Shell used to have a magazine that you could save up points and trade them in for stuff... it's not a new concept. The only "NEW" thing is being able to spend these points on non-material things - to boost your avatar or buy virtual stuff. I think that the sims folk could clean up if they teamed up with the likes of Tesco.
can any else remember, collecting plastic daffodils, and of course,
i don't have much faith in futurologist, did any of them predict, when the mobile phone first came out, in a few years time, nearly every school kid would own one
they may have predicted man landing on the moon, but they did not foresee, we would all watch it live on TV
Last edited by philsmove; 25th-February-2010 at 03:35 PM.
I think he was just using things as examples not as a "This IS what is going to happen".
Personally, i'll be headging my bets on Augmented Reality.
For much more interesting - and, in the majority of cases, better informed - futurism, I'd look to TED. Yes, some of the ideas are a bit flaky (see Niels Bohr on prediction: in most cases it's almost impossible to agree on where we are, let alone where we're going). But there are some truly challenging and interesting ideas out there.
I'm afraid that this video is really just catching up on around 50 years old consumer behaviour research. The technology that goes into building retail environments is streets ahead of what he's describing. The idea of manipulating people through basic psychology to make money is very, very old.
What I find ironic is that he seems to forget the point he made at the start by the time he got to the end. He started off saying that, "we didn't see all this technology coming." Or, more to the point, he didn't understand the consequences of the technological changes. The he starts talking about changing people's behaviour with all this new technology. Does he really think that we can anticipate the consequences of that sort of behavioural manipulation?
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