The EnvisionaryBy 2030, the world will be both very familiar and unrecognisable, but how will our mindsets have shifted towards social innovation change?
It’s easy to think about high-tech robots and the future of living in space. When we take reality out of the equation we can let our imagination go wild. Sometimes this can help us look ahead from certain conventions and limitations we may hold today, but what about realistic predictions of the next 8-10 years?
Instead of focusing on specific innovations, this article looks at the paradigm shifts that will likely have to occur over the next decade to ensure we can sustain ourselves.
By 2030 what could realistically change in our world, how will it affect us, and why is it needed?
1) There Will Not Be Flying Cars….Unless Sustainable
Let’s start with what we won’t see. It’s less than 10 years away, so whilst technology is rapidly changing and advancing the idea of the flying car or the hoverboard will likely remain a bit of a future-led pipe dream.
It’s not because it’s not possible either. Whilst it could certainly be difficult it’s more because the mindset of change isn’t about creating something that is completely outlandish or cool anymore, but instead the keyword of the next ten years is sustainable.
Sustainable innovations are everything now, from the net-zero climate targets set by 2030 to the further human effect that becoming more sustainable has on us.
2) Environmental Innovations Will Become Centre-Stage
As part of humanities raised awareness towards the need for acting against further damaging our home we see opportunity lie in how we create environmental solutions.
Even if parts of an older generation can’t see any need for doing so the fact that younger generations are taught almost every day to be more aware of their carbon footprint means that many young minds will be evolving over the next 8-10 years with much more environmentally-led innovations.
This could be from seeing a boom in smart farms in urban centre’s to how plastic is eradicated from supermarkets.
3) People Will See The Value In Becoming Self-Innovators
To take this a step further more people will seek to be self-sufficient and resource, and less reliant on the rules and regulations set out by governments.
That’s not to say governments aren’t needed, but when it comes to food sources and earning potential more people will seek towards creating their own platforms or eco-systems that allow them to live off their own created produce.
Self-innovation also will allow people to see how they can become more involved each day in the solution-led transformation of society. Instead of working for a boss all the time more people will develop the entrepreneurial and co-creation skills required to add something of value to the world, rather than just seeking to get by passively.
4) A Social Media Revolt Will Lead To Very Different Social Consumers
The last decade and a half have been owned by social media platforms. They rose out of nowhere to become the leading-edge companies that all the other companies advertise through, yet just how they came to be so powerful – through creating a hub where everybody hung out – they can also be broken down in a similar fashion.
This doesn’t mean billions of people suddenly boycotting social media but simply outgrowing it.
Like any shiny new toy people generally want to try it out, but they most likely had no idea how they would become sucked in by the dopamine kicks and convenience. Yet, design thinkers are smarter these days and aren’t the same naive tech-savvy, but psychology-redundant designers who created platforms to be hooked and addictive.
Tomorrow’s design thinkers will stand up more to the capital-hungry bosses and inform them that money won’t be made by creating platforms to be more addictive but through fueling innovations that help solve addiction and help people find a greater balance in life again.
Social consumers will be smarter, and won’t simply buy something because an influencer said so, and won’t blindly believe something on Facebook because they were suggested it. They will have wised up and will use social media for more conscious and direct reasons.
There will clearly be a push for more ethically-led platforms out there, but that in itself has the potential to be a double-edged sword, as it could end up creating a Pleasantville-like scenario where people don’t feel like they have the freedom to say anything challenging again. There’s a lot more to come in this space.
5) Social Connectivity Won’t Just Be About Making Fun Little Videos But About Finding Like-Minded People To Create With
We live in the world of TikTok where young people especially have found a place to express themselves, albeit still with a need to gain attention and validation.
By 2030, that expression through digital means will change. Instead of it being simply a form of fun or challenges, it will become a bigger entity where people can connect with others to develop more meaningful projects, with people they don’t even know but who share the same ideas and motivations.
Connectivity might also well have moved into VR where people will feel they can somewhat let their inhibitions go more and express their creativity. Whether this movement into VR is a healthy thing for us or not is debatable (we already seem hooked enough as drones with phones, and maybe VR is just the next level shiny new toy here) but it’s hard to see how VR won’t have an impact on our lives, both in a positive and negative way.
6) There Will Be Less Talk About Social Injustices And More Action Towards Social Integration, Sparking Multicultural Innovations
Today you switch on the news and you can’t help but hear a story about some kind of social injustice happening around you. It’s all part of the evolving process that goes from awareness to acceptance, to change.
We will hopefully be at a point by 2030 where most of us don’t feel the need to make every conversation about how we ‘all need to get along and sort this privacy issue, this social injustice, this political agenda’ etc.
Instead, we hope we will have evolved as a global society to treat people as people, not as labels, as today even with the best interests far too many people still seek to raise identity groups and ‘isms’ in need of raising awareness in order to be validated.
Once we move past the individual and societal needs to be validated then people can focus on working together (regardless of background or makeup) and will be able to focus more energy on progressing as humans. Less time and energy will be spent trying to fix technology to prevent biases or slander, and more time will be spent on growing technology to humanity’s benefit.
When this happens all kinds of wonderful multicultural innovations can begin to materialise.
7) There Will Be Worldwide Innovation Ecosystems That Will See Creativity And Innovation Go To A Next Level Through Living Labs
We’ve often seen work as being separate from technology. Sure, we might use technology to aid our work and might have meetings these days by Zoom or communicate and promote businesses through social media, but we still think of technology as an aid to allow us to do our work.
By 2030, we will see the emergence of interconnected societies and worldwide collaborations and teams that come together to create much more through technology. We might think of going online to ‘connect’ or find information out today, but we could soon see it as a portal to so many open innovation projects we can get involved in.
If we have a certain bit of knowledge or the imagination to feed an idea into development then we can find living labs around the world that suit our idea and connect.
Eventually, this could lead to country and world-level innovation ecosystems, rather than the small, semi-open networks that exist today.
8) Artificial Intelligence Will Help Improve Lives…If We Let It
There’s good reason to be concerned about AI, after all, it’s such a huge development in our lives that could completely change the way we live and act in the future.
Much of that can be for the better, as we live longer, healthier lives as a result of advancing technology. AI and robotics can help us in so many ways we couldn’t have envisioned before, but AI also has that dystopian edge to it. If we didn’t anticipate the pitfalls of social media to our brain’s development then AI could take that to another level.
AI could on the one hand spread misinformation at an alarming rate (as we are already seeing in how people are easily led by fake news), but it could also be used to do the opposite, to pick out fake news and misinformation.
The idealists within us will clearly hope we can utilise AI in a positive way. Yet, capitalists will always seek to create money from whatever the next trend is, and whether or not it’s good for us on the whole. It may well lead to creating jobs but does it align with ethical morals? These are likely some questions raised in the next few years as AI steamrolls ahead anyway.
The applications of AI are boundless. Think about anything you’ve ever used and imagine it having a smarter brain to remember certain actions and suggest improvements. This could be from a simple AI toothbrush telling you where you missed when brushing, to a whole system autonomously run through AI machine learning. Exciting and scary in equal measure.
9) Education Innovations Have To Lead Future Generations Into Original Thinking Rather Than Forced Echo Chambers
What we are seeing a LOT of today, and rightly so for the transition we are currently in, is the emphasis on diversity, equality, and inclusion. While Point 6 covered why we should hopefully have moved on from this focus, we have to think about the impact all of this education may have on people by the time 2030 comes around.
By then certain parts of the world will have it heavily ingrained that people should respect one another, but the flip side of that could be that people might be nice but also become far too afraid to develop an opinion of their own.
It’s like teaching people what to say rather than how to think and this could lead towards MORE biases rather than the perceived freedom of biases. Of course, when people are not aware of diversity and cultural needs they clearly need that type of education, but there comes a point where it can feed into control, and the result of controlled education can incite rebels.
Instead, we will need to ensure that young learners feel they can communicate openly and are encouraged to develop solutions towards sustainable and social innovation issues, and we need to stop putting screens in front of kids as a lazy replacement to good education.
Of course, there are times that digital education can be useful but people learn so much more effectively when they are allowed to expand their minds and communicate outside of a box. This obsession with using tech to solve everything will only robotise future generations unless we are careful.
10) Health Innovations Will Be A Major Focus…But Also Create A Problem Of Their Own Making
There’s been no better time to live a healthy, long life than…tomorrow. Already, today we experience much greater life spans than before and this trend is likely set to continue.
Living to 100 won’t be such a rare occasion but the norm in years to come, but there’ one thing living to 100 and being in ill-health 30 years prior and another still being healthy at 100.
We all care about our aging parents, and we all like the idea of living longer, more productive lives. There’s so much information at our fingertips that we may wish each day to be slightly longer so we could know more.
Well, while we can’t make the days longer, we can work on health innovations that can help prolong our lives, which come in many forms such as livable devices, self-checkups, and even designer babies.
An aging population brings its own challenges too, with more than 1 billion people predicted to be 65 or over by 2030. This gives a lot of attention and focus to a silver economy and we will likely need to keep innovating in this area for years to come.
11) We Will Require Further Future-Thinking
For all the smart thinkers and scientists in the world there often comes this ideal that everything turns out like a movie with a finalised happy ending.
When you hear about people’s predictions of future innovations they tend to land on how all sorts of matters will be fixed, without thinking for a second just how many issues we have today despite prior generations thinking the same.
We need a dose of reality in ourselves too, as the most likely answer is by 2030 there will be many advancements, but also many new issues to ponder.
There’s so much positive focus on the future but that can also blind the reality, which is that some things will be overlooked. Sometimes we will need to take a step away from our march forward and think about the potential side effects we could create, and then see if we can preempt and disband the side effects before they even become a reality.
Will we have out ourselves one step closer to a climate crisis or an AI take over? Will we have completely new innovations and resulting potential consequences to worry about? Will our ethical algorithms lead towards too much control rather than freedom? Do we really want bots that make our financial decisions for us? Are there solutions to these before rushing ahead?
Maybe, maybe not. However, this final point is made because no matter what we seek to solve today for tomorrow’s world it will always be an iterative process of constant refinement, and not like a movie that has a concrete happy ending.