Predictions much like goalkeeping, are a draw-lose game. If you get them right, you did your job; get them wrong, and you know nothing. But here we are, and here we go.

Rather than an ominous analysis of what will change, we can short-circuit to acknowledging that even the nature of change itself has changed. If we zoom out enough, we see that most systems (economic, political, cultural) with the exception of technology, keep to a pattern of pendulum swings.

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Only now, the pendulum swings exponentially faster, so fast that we barely absorb a paradigm shift before it returns to a faintly recognisable mutated 3.0 version. Technology, however, tends to take an upward and onward path. I promise I’ll put in a buzzword eventually.

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On the nature of change and pendulum swings, Meta recently rolled out (under regulatory pressure) a paid version of Facebook and Instagram in Europe. The saying ‘if it’s free, then you’re the product’ has pushed towards this major change to some degree. Meta now joins a similar commercial structure to Spotify, Yahoo and YouTube that price discriminatorily for
ad-free versions. 

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Around half of the world’s Spotify subscribers use an ad-free, paid version. Netflix, ironically, did things the other way round, with an ad-supported subscription introduced years after the bread and butter paid version at a subsidised price
(see that swing?).

In the expanded media and tech universe, as in our daily lives, attention will remain thescarcest (and maybe the most sacred) resource, mined from our minds that are increasingly always-on. The value of unplugging – whatever that means – will keep delivering dividends in wellbeing that will oppose most commercial ones.

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The type of change can be counterintuitive; rather than a linear change towards offering more for less, we have the reverse. The democratisation and sheer volume of information or content available inevitably results in non-linear change. So maybe the change has changed.

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It makes sense that our cave-dweller brains, that have biologically evolved minimally over a quarter of a millennium, protect us by a heightened reflex to fear and thus caution, and so bad news gains our attention much faster than good news (which in any case is mostly innocuous).

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The spectre of COVID has only sharpened this in us. But as new generations are born into and help shape the rules of the attention game, they will show themselves to be sharper, more selective and more suspicious of content and ironically load themselves with less irrelevance and noise. A situation that is starkly different in older age groups born in an analogue age.

“What’s wrong with AI-generated content, news or art?”

Of course, Artificial General Intelligence (I promised you at least one buzzword) will up this game of blending the foundation of ‘human-based’ natural intelligence in an ocean of digitally generated content, news and art. So what if we always ask, “What’s wrong with AI-generated content, news or art?”.

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As with any technology, it can be used for good, for bad or for nothing. None of us will have any issue with an AI-driven cure for cancer (a very likely scenario) whilst taking umbrage at an AI-driven political disinformation campaign (equally
likely)

As always, it’s the unknown unknowns that are the most interesting. The blindsiding
happenstance moment that unravels a whole new side story that quickly becomes the main saga.

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At least, given that change is changing, it’s a safe bet to accept that the most important guardrails are likely to be constant learning, adapting but not changing for the sake of change and mastering nuance and emotional intelligence over any other kind. Finally, godspeed to MeetInc, here’s to becoming a first amongst equals in a challenging,
changing arena.