I finally know the future

A guy called Stefan Hyttfors was giving a lecture on Monday at KTH. The lecture was called What’s The Future and I thought it would be useful to know that, so I went.

Quite a lot of other people went too actually, but I can’t tell if they all went to know the future, or just to get a free lunch.

Stefan wasn’t very specific about what future brings, but he made a few interesting points. He first talked about different paces at which our world was changing. Since humans appeared on earth around 20,000 years ago until the beginning of agriculture, 10,000 years ago, the world was very slow changing. Since then things have been speeding up. Nowadays every year the change is faster then it was in the previous year, or to put it in different words, the change is exponential rather than linear. The main line of the lecture was to adjust our thinking accordingly to this change.

Fast change is both good and bad news. It’s bad, for example, because of lower job security; you could be doing something for years and be very good at it, but still one day you can become useless because the environment has changed. It’s good, for example, because it is easier for an entrepreneur to emerge among established players.

In the picture above you can see Stefan pointing at the graph. The blue line is the linear progress. The business example given was Blocbuster, a DVD company, who ruled the entertainment market for years, but suddenly went bankrupt when online movies joined the game. The red line represents visionary movements, like the beginnings of aviation. At first no one ever believed that it’s possibly to leave the ground and the first attempts were very unsuccessful (the low on the graph), but once it happened, everything changed forever.

The good about this lecture for me was the relaxed atmosphere and not too much attempt of motivational speaking. The bad was some not always relevant stories about politics, job engagement or catching pokemons, which were funny, but I think it was the main reason for telling them. Main thing I carried out from this lecture was to accept the fast change and to try to be flexible and visionary, rather than acting according to a safe and steady plan.

I checked some of  Stefan’s online videos and in each of them he tells what he told us today. I recommend listening to Stefan for 45 minutes of your lives but probably not longer, because he would start repeating himself. Have a good day!