WHEN WILL COMPUTERS BE ABLE TO READ OUR MINDS ?

Technology is already enabling computers to read our minds.

Think of the possibilities that could result from technology that reads your your thoughts. How about an app that knows what your friend wants for dinner so you don’t have to ask or kows the music to play when you get home based on your thinking about it earlier in the day. Convenience and time savings would be huge and the possibilities are endless.

Elon Musk’s company Neuralink is to link the brain to a computer by installing slender electrodes. “If you can connect these signals you can solve everything from memory loss, hearing loss, blindness, paralysis depression, insomnia, extreme pain, seizures, anxiety, addiction, strokes, brain damage; these can all be solved with an implantable neural link,” Musk said at the demonstration of the technology, which also unexpectedly featured live pigs that had actually been implanted with the company’s electrodes.

It would be pretty cool and do a lot of good if Musk is right. You can watch the demo with pigs that have the technology installed here.

BCI Is Coming Soon.

Not only is Musk in on the BCI action, but researchers have shown they can translate brain activity into synthetic speech or text by recording and decoding neural signals, using AI algorithms. So yes, computers are already reading our minds in the research lab.

Guess who else is behind a lot of this research? Facebook.

Don’t tell me you are surprised.

Read more about this technology and what it might mean here .

What Will The Decade Of The 2020's Look Like ?

There are a lot of similarities between the 1920’s and the 2020’s !

I recently wrote a post in the futurists blog titled, “When Reflecting Back on The Roaring Twenties The 2020’s Should Be an Equally Interesting Decade With Great Promise and Terrifying Risk”.

Indeed there are many interesting parallels between the roaring 20’s and current times, although they may not be obvious yet. Sometimes we can forget and lose perspective about what was happening way back when after the Spanish Flu was extinguished in 1919. The history is fascinating and when put in the context of today’s rapid technological and cultural change, the hopeful end of COVID19, and its impact on people’s lives, the comparison helps create a parallel between the post Spanish Flu era and today and what may lie ahead.

As with Amazon today, more frequently anything not available in a local store in the early years of the 20th century, could be ordered by mail . The Montgomery Ward catalog was first issued in 1872, with Sears first publishing theirs in 1894. Mail-order business emerged in Europe at the end of the 19th century as well. By 1900, Sears was fulfilling 100,000 orders a day, and its catalog featured coats, furnaces, furniture, shoes, and even homes. Sears sold over 70,000 mail-order homes between 1908 and 1940. The expansion of mail order was largely enabled by the Parcel Post, which came to be in the US in 1913; Fed-Ex anyone?

Read more about the similarities between one hundred years ago and now here.

Yes Technology Does Liberate Human Capital. The Future Of Work Is Here.

In a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece, How Technology Liberates Human Capital, Michael Milken and Igor Tulchinsky posit that digital innovation, artificial intelligence and robots are opening new possibilities for workers across the U.S. economy. I agree and it isn't just happening in the U.S. While rapid change will be a painful process for some, in the end the future for humans is not being displaced by technology but instead interacting with technology to unleash human creativity, experience and insights . Technology is really a job creation machine; they're just new kinds of jobs.

A key challenge for industries, like health and fitness, medical, legal, finance and more, is understanding this change is already underway and therefore people need to evolve their skills and perspectives to take advantage of new opportunities. Business models need to reinvent themselves as well with this in mind. Innovation starts with me and you grasping this new era as an opportunity to leverage human capital.

McKinsey Global Institute reported in January of 2017 that almost half of paid work can be automated today with current technologies. Yet, 2 million manufacturing positions will go unfilled in the next 8 years according to Deloitte Consulting. This as a result of the "GAP" between employee skills and workplace needs and its just beginning. As hardware becomes cheaper and software become smarter the effects will continue to change industries and work itself.

So what should you and I do about it ? First, stay informed. Read books like Leading Digital , Digital Sense , The Second Machine Age , and The Inevitable. Follow credible thought leaders on Twitter. Listen to great podcasts. Second, start thinking about your organization, career, and life with a 3-5 year minimum perspective. In other words what you are experiencing today will be vastly different in a 3-5 year window. Make sure you are preparing yourself with education and continue to upgrade your skills and knowledge. Finally, seek to align with organizations and people that see this future coming and have adopted or are adopting new paradigms of the future of work. Surrounding yourself with advocates and industry experts who are talking the new talk will help you embrace the upside of disruption. For my latest on how this is impacting the health club and fitness industry checkout my EHFF 2017 and my IHRSA 2017 presentations and more.

Bryan O’Rourke is a #CEO, #board member, #advisor, #keynote #speaker, #author and #investor, who has successfully expanded global brands for over 30 years. He is widely published and quoted in periodicals like Inc. Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times on consumer, technology and fitness industry trends and is CSO of a well known Houston based health club chain. He and his partners launched Vedere Ventures, a boutique private equity firm in 2016 . Bryan along with the Fitness Industry Technology Council support the Fitness + Technology Podcast . Check it out today. Get his recent book the 9 Partnership Principles written with his partner Robert Dyer and other top fitness industry leaders. Bryan also released with Europe Active the bookCustomer Engagement and Experience In The Fitness Sector. To learn more visit bryankorourke.com or follow him @bryankorourke .