Emerging topics

In these scenarios, we propose a range of ways that parent-child relationships could change. There may be opportunities to expand how children explore the world and equally some interesting challenges about how children can be protected and kept healthy in increasingly online worlds.

We see potential services that make the most of VR either in educational or playtime settings that can be used to create previously unimaginable experiences. These could open children up to creativity in new collaborative environments, but raise questions about the extent to which play should be designed at all i.e. to what extent does supporting imagination weaken it? Alternatively, the technology could be used to build new types of education, like for empathy (in the exploration ‘Empath’), which could build community and tolerance in the world, but raises questions about validity and control of the values embedded within the services.

We propose a context where technology becomes even more integrated and present in children’s lives, which when considered alongside the increasing captological power of governments and commercial organisations, raises fears about the safety of unaccompanied children in online worlds and creates a social distance in the parent-child dynamic. With this problem in mind, we may see services emerge that seek to allow parents into a child’s online world. This could be by creating online spaces for them to share to prevent their isolation or by giving them a window onto what the child is exposed to and potentially even shaping that content. Questions emerge about what is safe for children and what is an intrusion into their personal space? If online environments are gaining power over their young users, how much power should parents be given? 

With a particular focus on the captivating nature of the games industry, we may see other services evolve to protect children that intervene without engaging the parent by using gaming methodologies to promote healthier online and offline habits and reduce addiction. These services represent an industry listening to a demand to be more responsible. 

These explorations portray a landscape of services that may emerge to manage the digitisation of children’s lives by supporting parenting or the parent-child relationship in different ways.

Emerging topics

These explorations depict an environment where it is widely considered that wealth can often come at a cost to others or to the environment. In this context of extreme inequality and climate-change-turmoil, wealthy people may have to respond to greater public pressure to use their financial power with more responsibility. 

The services depicted encourage an egotistical response, offering to help people to repair damage caused to the world while elevating their public status. These services perpetuate neo-liberal, ‘silver-bullet’ ideas of international aid that frame the wealthy as heroes in a problematic way.

What is interesting about these explorations is that while wealth may still be adorned with a sense of glamour, it may well grow to be more widely considered as distasteful or obscene. These services frame a potential scenario where the brands of the wealthy (individuals or companies) may be increasingly driven to imbue ethical values and be forced to comply with them. We may see systems emerge to build transparency in commercial infrastructures and forensically monitor any claims made about the positive impact they have on the world.

While these systems are crude, if opposition to capitalism grows, then there may be mechanisms along these lines that act as some intermediate form of power shift during the potential turmoil of global economic restructuring.

Emerging topics

From this exploration we can infer that open source, online groups may develop more and more services that can enable the independence of communities. The example demonstrates how technology could one day be used to facilitate hyper local currencies that support local economies and cultures. However, services may also develop in other arenas like energy, food or transport, meaning that communities may reap the benefits of digitised society without having to forgo any freedoms or have their privacy encroached upon. These technologies may remain local and particular combinations of digital services may lead to nuanced and localised digital cultures and we may see services begin to accommodate these new community identities. 

If these practices were to grow, we may see   larger companies trying to recapture some of these spaces by creating larger scale platforms that maintain reasonable levels of privacy, ownership and independence while returning some value to their own organisation. In this instance, we might see a new sophistication of public understanding around data privacy and the implications of less transparent systems, which may advance markets into more honest territories.

Together, these types of shifts could lead to a healthier balance of power between organisations or governments and the people they serve. We may see increased levels of transparency, responsibility, and individual ownership of data.

Emerging topics

Through these explorations, we see interesting new types of service emerge from multiple types of perspective. —all engaging with money in emotional ways.

The least provocative of the three explorations represents a type of service that could exist in the shorter term, which begins to normalise the combination of emotion and money. It uses  it to build someone’s agency by helping them recognise positive outcomes from their spending. While this dynamic still has potential for corruption, it is an example of a way that artificial intelligence can be used to create awareness and therefore make the most of your  money.

Another emerging topic is about how t happiness metrics could be used as a way to define the need for a service and the subsequent value of an experience (as shown in Little Things and ‘Universal Basic Happiness). While such extreme examples are unlikely, they frame an emerging space where less complex services may use emotional ratings to determine the need, and therefore the cost that someone should be paying, or even determine their rights to access certain services. While the rating of people’s emotional experience is hugely controversial and unveiling in it’s own right, in combination with financial transactions, we might begin to see unusual metrics such as the cost of happiness. Which may unveil an interesting new understanding of the human condition – Who is happiest? How much does it cost? What is the true relationship between happiness and money?

In all these services, there are consistent threats. What happens when the happiness algorithms get it wrong (as they would do during their early juvenile states, at the very least)?. If they determine your understanding of what makes you happy in incorrect ways, what level of authority will they have in people’s mind? Will people consequently make incorrect decisions that aren’t right for them? Will people’s understanding of happiness be affected? What happens if the provider of the service is corrupt or if the service is  just trained by data that is biased towards certain types of experience and might, for instance, benefit certain commercial or political entities disproportionately?

More than most, these scenarios represent a particularly treacherous convergence of worlds. Technologies that begin to get under the skin of people’s mental mechanisms combined with the corrupting influence of money, marks the emergence of a complex and dangerous new territory. Some of the more palatable services here demonstrate how light hearted excursions may carve easy new routes into that territory.

Emerging topics

From this exploration, we can speculate that services may emerge, which expand human potential either by enhancing our capacities, supplementing our bodies, adding new functional attributes or simply by finely tuning ourselves through our lifestyles.

These services may raise numerous questions for individuals and society, but for people like Thomas, whose work means so much to them, this may seem like a new world of huge potential.

If it is possible for people to dramatically expand their capacity in the working environment, in competitive cultures this could lead to an ‘arms race’ type mentality or performance inflation. Should everyone in the office improve their numerical computing capacity and upgrade their attention span and memory skills, what might people need to do to get a promotion?  We may also see a heightened exploration of what makes specific individuals good at certain tasks, because potentially these innate or pre-existing strengths may have advantages over purely enhanced capabilities. Or perhaps, certain attributes won’t be so readily augmented and therefore more in demand.

In this scenario, It’s plausible  that we may also see services emerge that help people find balance through reducing such a competitive mentality in individuals or workplace environments, opting instead for opportunities to build capacities that lead to exceptional collaboration. We may see questions being raised about why we work, about quality of life and potential enquiries into how we could make these technologies that help everybody reduce the need for work.

An additional area of discussion could form around the challenge this may pose to notions of equality. If such technologies became available, who would they be available to? If access was controlled by wealth and power, and access leads to more capacity, then these technologies have the capacity to also drive inequality into even more dangerous territories.

Emerging topics

From these explorations, we can speculate that some services may emerge to bolster areas of life that may be neglected in a more nomadic or decentralised workplace context.  Other services may enhance and build on the opportunity by connecting staff in new types of relationships (internationally or face-to-face) or instilling elements of stability by replicating a sense of home wherever people travel.

We also see opportunities for employers and services to create new types of experience that optimise working life in harmony with your personal life to promote a new level of balance that could boost productivity and wellbeing. Could working holidays be adopted by large companies to connect whole teams in new ways or change a workplace culture?

These explorations illustrate how services may emerge to progress and innovate in the new dynamic nature of workplaces while other services may aim to bring assurance and stability to people.

In each angle of this scenario, we see services and people strive for authenticity in the way they connect and the underlying intent with which they make exchanges (be it social or commercial). We may see new mechanisms for creating and enabling these types of ‘genuine’ experiences.