Marc Andreessen, Netscape founder and a hugely successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist, said recently that if you invest against Elon Musk, you’re investing against the future of humanity. What this implies is that the smart money jumps in on anything the entrepreneur backs. But what about Musk’s assertion that we are all living inside a computer game simulation? Is that something we should all jump onboard with?

All of us – including your clients and customer – are hipsters now. And while your customers perhaps won’t go so far as the classic Portlandia episode and want to visit the farm your business' ‘chicken’ comes from before they eat it for dinner, they do crave digitally verified evidence of an ethical supply chain - something which you can now do courtesy of digital traceability.

Everything is mobilising, and the interface with our world is in the palm of our hands. As consumers, business-to-business (B2B) customers and citizens, we’re increasingly taking life matters into our own hands, via our smart devices such as phablets, tablets and smart phones. And so you know you need to repurpose and optimise your business and brand for this increasingly mobilised, real-time, contextual future. 

Digital disruption is not new and it's been coming for all businesses – it has just been a matter of when and how big the disruption was going to be. So how can you respond now that we are living in a Post-Digital Disruption Society? How can your business take advantage of digital advances without losing your human touch?

In recent blogs I’ve discussed some of the disruptive changes that banking and finance have been going through over the last five years. I covered the cost of cyber criminals, and how banks need to be transformed by innovation rather than weighted down by regulation. As the banks move slowly towards change, we’ve seen financial technology companies like Lendico, TransferWise, FutureAdvisor and Tink revolutionise the ways consumers do their banking. Banking today has, thanks to digital technologies, become increasingly democratised and mobilised as the FinTech players decoupled consumers from their primary financial and banking relationship. In short, they’re enabling a more empowered future for adaptive futurephiles.

 TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES WITH A BANKING LICENCE

By now you’ve probably seen some footage or coverage of Robot Sophia, designed by Dr David Hanson and his team at Hanson Robotics. Not only can Sophia respond to questions put to her, she can ‘read’ the world around her, gaining knowledge from facial expressions and reactions. Through these interactions, according to Dr Hanson, Sophia can even learn and evolve. But where are humans placed in the race against robot learning and evolution?

Historically, the workforce as always been pretty fluid – as employment requirements waned in one industry, they grew in another, and people eventually learned new skills and flowed across. Economists point to the historical changing nature of work as reason not to fear the robots coming for your job. But work is changing at a faster rate, and technological advances are affecting more people than ever before. So how do you protect yourself and train for jobs that might not exist yet?

We’ve all heard the warnings that robots are coming for our jobs, and that this threat is only going to grow exponentially in the future, and dramatically change the work environment. Indeed, a statistic quoted by the World Economic Forum estimates 65 per cent of children entering primary school today will grow up to be employed in jobs that don’t yet exist. So, with no specific indication yet what these jobs might end up being, how do you prepare yourself and your children for the future of work?