What Bill Gates predicted about Amazon, Google and Instamart 26 years ago!
#AuthorAsProphet #Reflections
This evening, while ordering a few things on Instamart, I was surprised when the app said that, the things that I’ve ordered will be delivered within four minutes!
[If by any chance, it exceeds four minutes, as a privileged BlackMember, I get a discount of Rs. 100/- on my next order, it assured me as well!] 😊
I was pleasantly surprised at the pace in which business has evolved, today.
The one book that immediately comes to my mind is Business @ the Speed of Thought by Bill Gates and Collins Hemingway.
When Bill Gates and Collins gave us this 1999 book they were doubling up as digital prophets foregrounding a range of possibilities in the world of business.
Business at the ‘speed of thought’! 😊
Well, so in essence, they (Bill and Collins) were in fact visualising a digital nervous system for the future of business and for business entrepreneurs to bring their businesses to automatic mode, to maximise their profits!
One important point that Bill and Collins mention here in this book is noteworthy for our discussion here –
“Intermediaries will evolve to add value… Customer service will become the primary value added function in every business”.
How true their words prove, today!
An online intermediary, by the way, is a third-party entity that operates online to facilitate interactions, transactions, or the flow of information between two or more other parties. They act as the customary middleman, providing a platform or service that connects individuals, businesses, or content.
By that yardstick, Google is categorised as an ‘intermediary’ under Section 21(1)(w) of the IT Act.
Most of us know about instances in law courts, when Google has tried to wriggle out of penal proceedings, citing their services as a mere ‘intermediary’, as per Section 79 of Information Technology Act, 2000, and hence not liable for content uploaded by third parties.
YouTube is also considered an intermediary under the Information Technology Act, 2000.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, along with online marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart, cab aggregators like Ola, Uber, etc are also considered intermediaries, while travel aggregators like makemytrip are also called travel intermediaries.
If Business @ the Speed of Thought foregrounds intermediaries as the dons of the digital nervous systems of the future, then -
Yuval discusses the decline in humanism that corresponds with the rise of dataism, in his 2015 book titled, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
Dataism declares that the universe consists of data flows, and therefore, data processing becomes the ultimate source of value, rendering humans obsolete if AI becomes better at it, thereby serving as both a prediction and a warning about the future we are potentially creating for ourselves.
“Literature always anticipates life” said the renowned Irish writer Oscar Wilde!
Indeed, a good author thus doubles up as a prophet of sorts - predicting the future by keenly observing existing social, technological, and scientific trends and then logically extending those trends into the future.
A good author is also a visionary thinker, (an organic intellectual like Yuval especially!) who explore the “what if” scenarios based on the present trajectories.
To be continued…
PS: You may want to read our past post on ‘What If’ or the Counterfactual Imagination, HERE on our blog.
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