The Future of Almost Everything, page 7
‘Digital bombs’ inside large organisations
Targets were also hit in Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Ireland, India, Iran, Belgium, Australia and Pakistan. In many cases, it turned out that the viruses had been working away for up to 6 years without detection, despite every check. The viruses were constantly listening online for a single command to detonate tens of thousands of digital ‘bombs’ across every part of the nation. It has been reported that Russia is now so anxious about American penetration that security agencies are using printed paper for ultra-sensitive communications. The Chinese, meanwhile, are building a quantum computing link between Beijing and Shanghai, which they hope will lock out foreign surveillance.
In 2007, Estonian banks, government agencies, parliament, broadcasters and newspapers were also hit by three weeks of cyber-attacks that completely paralysed their web capabilities. These followed a disagreement with Russia, though responsibility was never proven.
So we will see huge investment in cyber-resilience, by governments, banks, stock exchanges and utility companies in particular, in the wealthiest nations, but smaller nations will remain very vulnerable. At least a quarter of all attacks will be espionage – directed at stealing state secrets or corporate research that has yet to be patent protected.
Hackers will be recruited by spies and gangs
Expect growing numbers of full-time professional hackers, operating as independent consultants to criminal gangs and secret services, offering services in combination with others to plan major attacks. In many cases, these hacking geniuses will never realise who the end client really is. They may think they are working for MI6 in the UK, for example, when they are actually working for a Bulgarian gang, which is assisting Russian Federal Security Services, or for the CIA or Mossad.
Many attacks will be multidimensional. So a large-scale identity theft takes place a couple of hours before a vital payment channel is hacked, to create new PIN numbers. Minutes later, two hundred people with cloned cash cards start withdrawing cash from ATMs in over 50 cities.
Hackers will be turned against other hackers
Expect a radical rethink about what to do with convicted hackers: people with proven genius in cracking open systems, who may well be the best people in the world to test your own security, and help improve it. Do we really want to see those lives wasted in prison?
Some hackers will be offered rewards by governments to attack and destroy the so-called dark web. The aim will be to identify many millions of users of Tor web browsers (these are like normal web browsers, but prevent ANYONE monitoring your web activity) and other ‘secret’ tools: people who want to keep their activities and payments 100% secret.
Over 400 dark websites were closed in 2014 alone, including sites that sell illegal drugs, illegal arms deals, advertise professional assassins to kill spouses or politicians, and every kind of depravity. However, many dark web users in future will simply be trying to evade ‘oppressive’ state snooping – particularly in countries like Russia or China where web controls have become severe. Use of Tor in Russia leapt from 60,000 to over 200,000 people in just a couple of months following the seizure of Crimea.
Future of surveillance, spies and state snooping
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU – George Orwell’s 1984 gives a chilling picture of how technology could be used by a dictator to control millions. But the tools available today have advanced far beyond what Orwell saw.
Governments have never had so much power to invade privacy and spy on every citizen. Expect rapid scaling up of government budgets in most developed nations for national surveillance using publicly available data, commercial data, legally and semi-legally or illegally intercepted data. Cyber-espionage will become a crowded world with constant risks that experts are working for more than one master.
You should expect intelligence agencies in most developed countries to have complete remote access to any computer or phone they wish, able to listen using built-in microphones even when devices are ‘not in use’, to watch using built-in cameras, and to monitor every screen, every keystroke.
Secret back doors into every device
As we know from recent leaks by whistleblowers, all computer and mobile phone operating systems have become targets for the CIA, MI5 and so on, with the aim of being able to control devices belonging to private individuals or companies, read files, intercept passwords, turn on built-in cameras and microphones remotely, and so on.
Expect further revelations to show that secret ‘back doors’ were successfully coded long ago into most versions of Windows, Mac, Android, and so on, including back doors into encryption and security companies like Symantec, without any knowledge of the companies concerned. As a result, we can also expect growing numbers of worried consumers, living under oppressive regimes, to turn off all their devices whenever they wish to be ‘alone’.
Companies like Google have been criticised for handing over security keys to government agencies to make spying easier. Many IT and phone companies are developing systems that are so secure that they cannot decode customer data even when ordered to by secret service agents. Apple and Google have already begun this process, creating security worries that newer smartphones could be used by terrorist groups to evade surveillance. Some media interviews about these ‘security worries’ are no doubt a smokescreen by intelligence services, who do not want the public to realise that they are right inside these new systems as well.
Every meeting and conversation recorded
On top of all this, individual Do-It-Yourself spying has never been easier – and will become even more so – via wireless devices hidden in standard power adapters, or pens, or ornaments, or concealed micro-cameras, each able to transmit over 1000 metres to a base station which then transmits instantly online, or using Apps installed secretly onto anyone else’s phone, which can take just a few seconds, or using a drone equipped with a video camera.
It is already the case that business leaders should assume that every meeting may be recorded, or transmitted live to a wider audience outside the room – using just a voice memo on a smartphone concealed in a jacket pocket, or an open voice call set to hands-free.
Doctors, nurses and home carers are already discovering that their careless habits may end up immortalised in YouTube videos. The same applies in every other kind of workplace. And then there is secret tracking of family, friends, competitors or enemies – made so much easier by automatic trace facilities built into every mobile device, and wide availability of spying Apps.
How to become an instant ‘spook’
As a test, one day I decided to plant a powerful bug on a participant sitting in the second row of a seminar of senior bankers, without any of my audience seeing what I had done, to show how vulnerable they were. I did this right in the middle of a lecture, in full view of everyone yet without them realising, in half a second. After I revealed what had happened, the participants took quite a while to locate who was carrying it, and where it was placed, even when the receiver was in their own hands.
Of course the greatest risks to all large corporations and governments will continue to be insiders – either criminals, or spies, or ‘innocent’ staff who have been blackmailed into co-operating.
Future of publishing, paper and news
We have looked at spying, but what about public media and government scrutiny by news agencies or book authors?
Expect continued rapid growth of e-book sales, and a gradual decline in sales of paper books and magazines, except in niche areas such as glossy travel books or ‘experience books’ for children. The physicality of books will become more important: touch, look, feel and smell.
Sales of e-books are likely to overtake those of paper books in the UK by 2018, when at least 50% of the population will own an e-reader of some kind – even if just a smartphone App. Sales of e-books are likely to triple in the next 5 years from £380bn to over £1bn. Sales jumped 66% in 2012 alone to 12% of UK book sales, while the paper book market share fell by 2%. Yet it is also true that in 2014 Kindle sales were flat in the UK while pre-Christmas sales of physical books leapt by 5% in one of the largest chains, children’s books up by 9%. Physical books have a lot of life in them yet.
Specialist magazines will be more resilient – indeed, throughout the last few years, magazine titles in many countries have boomed in number, for ever more niche groups of readers. Magazines will continue to benefit from convenience, and from a superior look and feel to reading matter on a mobile device.
Paper will still mean a faster read
Stupid predictions have been made for years about the ‘paperless office’, when the truth is that more paper is printed each day per manager than ever before in most corporations: 92% of executives print something each day, 45% print 10 pages or more and 15% print more than 50. As I predicted years ago, paper will be with us for a long time yet.
Despite the huge growth of e-readers and online news channels, e-books and all electronic media will face a challenge from print for a long time to come, because of one single fact: reading speed, due to larger page size, format and resolution. Reading speed is less of a consideration when enjoying a novel on an e-reader, but it really makes a difference at work.
As every busy executive knows, the fastest way to read and mark up a set of lengthy board papers, or a long contract, is to print it out. Most people read printed pages at up to ten times their on-screen speed, using unconscious techniques such as page scanning, and are less likely to miss important sections than if they scroll through endless electronic pages of text. Their recall is usually better with paper, especially if they have a ‘photographic’ memory, and they are better able to reproduce important thoughts at the relevant part of the board meeting, because of their notes in the margin. And they usually find what they are looking for more quickly than by using the ‘find’ function in an e-version of the text.
Speed-reading will help newspapers
Set the speed-reading challenge to any group of friends and see for yourself. Most senior leaders can only read around 500 words a minute on-screen, but can easily make overall sense of an entire 40,000 word publication in less than five to ten minutes. So any corporation running a strict paperless office is wasting a huge amount of time and money.
You may think all this will change with higher resolution, larger screens, but this will not be the case for a long time. We already have large ‘retina’ screens, operating at the maximum resolution the eye can process, but they are hardly mobile. We will need to wait for electronic paper: flat, foldable membranes with the same contrast, resolution and convenience as large sheets of paper. Expect prototypes by 2020, but large retina-resolution sheets will be unusual and costly until well into the 2030s.
Future of news agencies, newspapers, news channels and reporting
It has often been said that ‘News is what someone else does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising.’ But the fastest spreading online content is heartwarming videos, funny lists, and eye-catching headlines on sites such as Buzzfeed or ViralNova. These appeal to positive, affirming emotions, and are promoted by friends.
Newspapers in crisis – but growth in emerging nations
Newspapers will rapidly decline in almost all developed nations over the next 5–10 years, while readership will grow in news-loving nations such as India, driven by expansion of the middle classes.
In 5 years, newspaper readership fell in America by 47%, but will grow by at least 15% in India in the next 5 years. One in five of the entire world’s daily newspapers are published in India – more than 100 million separate titles, with 45% of all advertising spend.
In developed nations, traditional newspapers will struggle to convert readers into profitable online subscribers, losing over 60% of their previous income in many cases. Expect closures, mergers, consolidations and serious downgrading of content, as staff are laid off, offices closed, and regional and specialist reporting stopped. The number of newspaper journalists in America fell from 55,000 in 2007 to just 38,000 in 2013. Expect numbers to fall further to less than 20,000 by 2020.
At the same time, some free newspapers will do rather better, whether dailies given out in metro stations with minimal editorial teams, or local weekly papers in areas with robust local advertising, particularly from estate agents.
Future of news media
More Americans now watch news online than on cable TV, including more than half of 18–29-year-olds. Over 5,000 new full-time jobs have been created by around 500 digital news firms, including jobs for experienced journalists who have left newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post. Digital newspapers will develop a new working model – for example, there is no cost-limit on length of an article, nor any need to make it all fit neatly in pages of a printed newspaper.
Growth in digital news will not halt the declining audience of news companies. For example, Facebook users who click on news links only spend 90 seconds a month on news sites, on average.
As I predicted, news broadcasting is now a social activity – half of all social media users already share news, and comment on news posts, while 7% of American adults have posted news videos they made themselves to a social network or news site.
Research shows that sad news stories are least likely to go viral. Positive stories get the most share-time. Expect these trends to profoundly shape our communities, and impact all news companies. The fact is that entertainment has always been a bigger business than news.
Who cares about depressing news online?
There is still no proven business model for a fee-paying online news service, because of impossibly strong competition from hundreds of well-respected, free sources such as the BBC, Guardian and the Huffington Post (a news Wiki), including news aggregator sites such as Google. In addition we can expect to see a cluster of new ‘community’ news sites, similar in philosophy to the Huffington Post, again all free access. Curators of content will multiply: people who gather various types of related web content, sometimes adding editorial of their own.
In 20 years’ time, high-quality, in-depth investigative journalism for print media will have almost disappeared in developed nations. Aspiring journalists will be working instead for TV news, with linked (free access) web pages. But even large TV news companies will struggle in future with the cost of maintaining their own reporters across the world. The three largest news channels in America – CNN, Fox and MSNBC – lost 11% of the prime-time audience in a single year.
Expect rapid growth of freelance reporters and camera teams, without formal backing of news companies, or their protection, working alone or in packs, taking huge personal risks in the competition to get stories and sensational images. The result will be more frequent deaths among journalists, especially in war zones, together with worries about loss of professionalism and possible bias.
News fatigue will cut audiences further
In the past, most news tended to be sad or bad. Slayings, beatings, rapings, job losses, natural disasters, air crashes, bomb blasts, wars, business scandals, and so on. Editors cram all the worst and most sensational events onto the front page, or the first 60 seconds of TV headlines. The more gruesome the images, or the more sensational the event, the more it will be broadcast.
Audiences are experiencing ‘news fatigue’, fed an ever more sensational diet of stories, built mainly around availability of images. This matters most for TV news where it is almost impossible to report a story without video. Any citizen with a smartphone can be a news source, but quality is declining.
TV news distorts reality, even more than printed news or web pages. You could be forgiven for thinking at times that the entire world is affected every week by terrorist bombs, or by terrible murders, or by natural disasters. Whereas the truth is that on most days of the week, there is not enough real national news to fill bulletins.
Audiences will also be increasingly bored by current affairs debates and political interviews. As we will see in Chapter 5, differences between politicians are usually exaggerated in media debate. Most people in developed nations don’t trust politicians anyway, so why bother to listen to what they say?
Expect democracy to be weakened as a result of all these different factors, with less media scrutiny, and greater susceptibility to being hijacked by relatively ill-informed, viral social media campaigns (see Chapter 5, ‘Radical’).
*
In this chapter I have shown how the speed of change is accelerating. I’ve described the risk of Wild Cards, how emerging economies will grow, and the impact of digital. And also the paradox that some things are changing surprisingly slowly. We need to look next at how our world is physically moving, with a billion migrating to cities, huge demographic changes, rapid improvements in life expectancy, and what it all means for your future.
Footnote
* See, for example, Futurewise (3rd edition 2003, 4th edition 2007, Profile Books), plus numerous lectures.
Chapter 2
URBAN
THE SECOND FACE OF THE FUTURE IS URBAN – radical changes in megacities, migrations, demographics, health and life expectancy. Our entire world is becoming urbanised at an astonishing speed and the demographics of any city or nation will predict its future. How big the market will be for children’s toys; how many high school places will be needed in ten years; how many women will develop breast cancer; how many workers will draw state pensions.
One billion children will become consumers in the next 15 years – the biggest jump in human history. Today in Africa 350 million children see glimpses of your lifestyle and compare this to their own, surviving on less than $3 a day. Most of them will spend their entire adult lives living in cities, chasing dreams of wealth.
