Daily Inspiration: “It’s often the most boring of trends that provide the most exciting of opportunities!”

“It’s often the most boring of trends that provide the most exciting of opportunities!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

People don’t like ‘boring’ – it’s boring. They like fast-moving, exciting, edge-of-your-seat excitement.

So too it is with the future – AI is exciting, it’s fast, it’s far reaching. That’s an exciting future.

But boring? That’s to be found in some of the most slow moving, somewhat uninspiring, and definitely unexciting trends – yet most far-reaching of future trends – for want of a better phrase, ‘methodology modification.’ I covered this yesterday in my latest post to my BIG Future series.

What’s it all about? Process change! Changing the way we do things! Methods! Boring stuff!

But at its core, it’s this – essentially, we’ve been doing the same thing in every industry the same way for many decades (if not centuries) with the same basic methodologies. But the impact of technology, digitization, artificial intelligence, new material science, and much more means that we are now seeing a very significant shift of those methodologies, into something that is entirely new.

The idea might not seem very significant, but the transformation is truly profound. A few diagrams put the trend into perspective in ten different industries – you can basically take any industry and see a similarly significant shift that is underway.

Agriculture? We’re moving from farming only when the sun is up, to farming 24 hours a day – essentially, the kid playing Farmville today will be managing the complex, virtualized autonomous-technology farm of tomorrow.

In automotive and transport, vehicles are shifting from carbon-based, rather unintelligent low-tech things that we drive – to rolling hyperconnected iPad-like devices with big batteries and increasing amounts of autonomous intelligence. We’re shifting from ‘driving cars‘ to ‘supervising cars.’

Construction? A lot more pre-fab, factory-assembled process is taking over, fundamentally shifting how we do things: Lego, anyone? Add to that new material science – such as 3D printing with concrete.

Education? It’s no longer what you know – it’s how you know what you need to do to get what you need to know. AI with technology such as ChatGPT accelerates this trend – those who know how to write the best promote are those who will have the best knowledge access (provided they can probably distinguish between correct and incorrect AI generated information.)

Energy? Oil is over, it’s all about renewables, and smart-hyperconnected grids are the future.

Food? How it is produced is undergoing a significant change – and the data that we ingest while preparing and/or ingesting our food changes the very nature of our relationship with food. Your glycemic index for an apple will be different from mine – and there’s an app for that!

Healthcare? We’ll be increasingly fixing people before they are sick rather than after. Essentially, we are turning the entire healthcare system upside-down, shifting from reactive to preventative.

Insurance? Moving from looking back to looking at ‘now’ – and looking ‘forward.’ Risk underwriting and assessment move to real-time. Goodbye urine and blood tests – hello, 24 hour constant body monitoring!

Manufacturing? From mass production to mass customization, products individually customized to an audience of one, built by a lot more autonomous robotic technology.

And retail? It used to be all about going to get the stuff you need – but every day, more of the ‘stuff’ simply come to us.

Behind all these seemingly small trends lie absolutely massive transformations, leading to new companies, jobs, careers, skills, industries, materials, and more. Suffice it to say, each and every one of these transformations lies new trillion-dollar opportunities. To me, that’s not boring!

If you want to understand the BIG Future, much of it can be found right there – by understanding the idea of ‘methodology modification.’