Category Archives: Futurist

If you break your leg, you will recover after a certain time, but it alters the way you walk forever.

Feels like we all need a group hug as we get out of our homes and back to routine. But hugs and handshakes wont return so quickly, and routines may never be the same.

Futurists everywhere predict a post-coronavirus economic recessionand fundamental changes in how we socialize, shop, work, learn, travel and eat.

Global institutions and governments may unravel, leading to a new world order where Google or Amazon collect taxes and provide health and banking services.

Below, four Israeli pundits share fascinating insights on how things may play out in the immediate wake of the pandemic and for years to come.

Some of the massive shifts in our lives will be unsettling and inconvenient. Others could point us toward a better future.

Nationalism, conflicts, institutional shakeup

PROF. DAVID PASSIG: futurist, lecturer, author and international consultant on technological, social and educational futures; head of the Graduate Program in Information and Communication Technology and the Virtual Reality Laboratory at Bar-Ilan University School of Education

Israeli futurist Prof. David Passig of Bar-Ilan University. Photo: courtesy

Passig has an impressive track record of accurate predictions, among them the 9/11 terror attacks and the 2008 financial crisis.

He divides the post-pandemic future into immediate (up to 3 years), short-term (4-10 years), midterm (up to 30 years) and long-term (30-50 years) segments.

The picture Passig paints isnt pretty.

In the immediate future, we will seesaw between open and lockdown periods as governments struggle to manage Covid-19. This uncertain reality will affect everything from economics to emotions worldwide.

The short term will be characterized by the decline of globalization and the rise of nationalist and populist movements.

The globalization and capitalism weve known since World War II was at deaths door before Covid-19 anyway, drowning in a toxic sea of fake news, too much information, conflicting expert opinions and failed public institutions, Passig says.

One result of this malaise is that the World Health Organization had no authority to tell China what to do as the epidemic unfolded. When institutions meant to help us instead disappoint and confuse us, their days are numbered.

In the short term, the transition could be dangerous.

Historically, leaders used pandemics as an opportunity to take over and spread hatred, says Passig. Based on models and statistics, there is a 50 to 70 percent probability of conflicts and possibly wars in the next decade between nations already in conflict.

However, in the midterm years a different globalization will arise. Borrowing a term from quantum physics, Passig and his colleagues call the new model the entanglement mindset.

The new globalization will inspire institutions and policies built on the recognition that we are all in the same boat.

In the entanglement mindset, international bodies will have the power to manage the ways we are entangled, says Passig.

That mindset will evolve into really understanding how a person in a market somewhere can affect the whole of humanity. And well have to bring it into our new institutes.

Passig is part of a worldwide group of futurists studying how entanglement globalization will look. One possibility is that people will be less influenced by what celebrities do and say, and more open to ideas from previously marginalized people for better or worse.

The end of influencer marketing, shopping malls

DAVID LAXER, Lead Strategist & Storyteller at Laxer Brand consultancy Tel Aviv

David Laxer of Laxer Brand. Photo by Daniel Tchetchik

Celebrity influencer marketing in fashion and tourism is over, Laxer confirms.

People reacted angrily to the rich and famous posting Instagram pics from luxurious home isolation. (This NY Post headline says it all: Quarantine has unmasked A-Rod and J.Lo as malignant narcissists.)

Were not going to look up to people who have no empathy and dont understand that images of a perfect life are in bad taste. People will expect empathy and humility, says Laxer. That attention-grabbing economy will rub people the wrong way.

While celebs are getting the cold shoulder, relations are warming between former enemy nations, Laxer notes. This could herald a new era of international cooperation.

There will be an element of going back to the nation-state as part of the move toward reshoring and more local agriculture and manufacturing. But in our world, we cant completely hide behind borders. So well need some level of globalization. It will be a delicate dance to achieve that.

Laxer speculates that Israel could be the Switzerland of this new world order.

Israel is probably the best place to be today, he says. Israel is economically aligned with China and India, and we will continue to do business and grow with a global perspective.

However, after the pandemic companies will need to adjust their branding the glue between what a company is offering and what people actually want to fit a radically different consumer culture.

There are entire industries that have disappeared and there is a collective mood that is not optimistic. Businesses need to understand this, says Laxer.

He believes Covid-19 put a halt to me worship, narcissistic selfies and mindless consumerism. Well spend more with family and less in stores.

Shopping malls were already going obsolete before corona and now their demise is being accelerated. Its not just that people dont want to be in a big public place; they dont want to buy things they dont need. We must therefore rethink what purpose shopping malls fill, says Laxer.

Click hereto see Laxers amusing infographic on these and other post-pandemic predictions. Some of the changes may be permanent.

If you break your leg, you will recover after a certain time, but it alters the way you walk forever, he says.

Cutting out middlemen

LIOR FISHER SHILONI,partner in The Visionary, a Tel Aviv lifestyle and design trend forecasting agency

The sharing economy boom could go bust in this era of social distancing, Shiloni says.

Our instincts tell us maybe its not such a good idea to share everything with everyone, even though rationally the sharing economy is a wonderful model. It will have to undergo a revolution of some kind.

One example is Eatwithand similar tourism initiatives matching groups of travelers with local meal hosts.

This idea was so cool and popular and now suddenly people will not want to meet with strangers and eat at a strangers house, Shiloni says.

This new attitude will force a change in coworking space design as well.

Its too early to say that its the apocalypse for coworking spaces but they definitely will have to adapt, Shiloni says. Interior designers and architects will have to create some sort of experience in the space where people can work together but still feel very safe.

Trend forecasters Lior Fisher Shiloni, left, and Nataly Izchukov of The Visionary. Photo by Michael Topyol

The popular farm-to-table movement will only grow stronger, she says, not only in food but also in fashion and design as a metaphor for cutting out all middlemen.

She predicts that consumers will seek out local designers and brands that manufacture on a small scale.

Minimalism in fashion and design flourished after the 2008 financial crisis and Shiloni thinks it will happen now as well, but with a twist.

Two countertrends will emerge when the crisis starts to end, she says. We will see minimalism in terms of where and what we buy; but after a long time of staying home, people will want to celebrate life and that might create a very joyful maximalism.

Israeli designer Stav Ofman makes double-layer Savvy facemasks for men, women and children. Photo by Adi Ezra

Fashion was one of the first industries crushed by the coronavirus crisis, she notes.

Fashion weeks were canceled. Manufacturing, distribution and advertising were hurt across the board, from high fashion houses to chain stores. Numerous companies stopped manufacturing for next season. What well see in stores for the time being is not new collections, Shiloni says.

One surprising outcome of the corona crisis will be our accessories.

Well see masks and gloves becoming fashionable for a period of time until people feel secure walking around without them, says Shiloni. We are already seeing Israeli designers offering facemask collections that are less intimidating than medical masks.

Shortages, travel woes, government

ROEY TZEZANA, futurist, author, public speaker, researcher at Tel Aviv Universitys Blavatnik Center for Drug Discovery, senior adviser to the World Future Society, researcher at XPrize

Roey Tzezana lecturing at Tel Aviv University. Photo by Chen Galili

In the post-Covid world, we will experience shortages and price hikes for foods imported from Asia; less meat at higher prices; limited and highly regulated air travel; and major workplace changes, says Tzezana, who has a PhD in nanotechnology.

Not all of that is negative, he notes. For instance, the slaughterhouse slowdown in the United States will lead more people to try clean (cultivated) meat and alternative proteins, which are better for health and the environment.

But air travel will be a huge hassle, at least until theres a vaccine.

There will be some closed borders and some level of quarantine for arrivals. Youll have to get to the airport four hours ahead of time to be tested and disinfected. Youll board in groups of 10, and possibly be required to have masks on during the entire flight, Tzezana predicts. It wont be fun.

Ongoing unemployment also wont be fun as a recession hits the Western world.

Tzezana says people who do get rehired after the pandemic wont necessarily get their original jobs back, due to general belt-tightening and an accelerated shift to automation of jobs including delivery services.

A more flexible balance of working from home and from the office will be accompanied by increasing technology. Tzezana believes virtual reality will become common for person-to-person work and play at a distance.

Covid-19 will also affect personal liberties, as countries implement surveillance measures to identify quarantine breakers and virus carriers and eventually formulate vaccination policies.

On the other hand, stricter global public-health policies will ensure well never have another pandemic, Tzezana believes.

We will have new viruses emerging, but we are now prepared. Well be able to know immediately when someone is a carrier and we can quarantine them so the outbreak doesnt grow beyond the epidemic level.

The healthcare revolution will be fast and vast, says Tzezana.

Imagine a world where healthcare doesnt depend on you making an appointment to go to the doctor. Instead youre constantly being monitored by your smartphone, smartwatch and Google, and the data is flowing to your healthcare provider for diagnosis by AI. It could take just a few years for this to happen.

In Tzezanas 2017 book Rulers of the Future: Money, Power, Technology and Hope, he predicted that large Internet companies and global organizations would challenge traditional government power bases.

This seems to be coming true as the corona crisis caused a boom for companies such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

We can expect at least one of these companies to develop new forms of governance that will enable people to circumvent their own territorial governments laws, says Tzezana.

I think thats one of the best things that could happen to the world. If we can globally regulate those new systems, they could provide better governing services than almost any government we know today.

If you want to find out more about what the future holds in the wake of corona, listen to Lior Fisher Shiloni and Roey Tzezana in our Zoom Webinar with ISRAEL21c Editor, Nicky Blackburn. Below.

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What will the world look like after corona? - ISRAEL21c

According to a new report by The Wall Street Journal, Chinese and Iranian hackers are targeting US efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine.

China has long engaged in the theft of biomedical research, and COVID-19 research is the fields Holy Grail right now, assistant attorney general for national security John Demers told the WSJ. While its commercial value is of importance, the geopolitical significance of being the first to develop a treatment or vaccine means the Chinese will try to use every tool both cyber intrusions and insiders to get it.

US officials told the newspaper that the two countries have been hacking a range of American businesses and institutions since as early as January though its important to note that intelligence agencies have yet to show any evidence of the cyberattacks.

Some officials are worried that the alleged attacks could be viewed as an act of war, since the hacks could be getting in the way of finding a cure to the ongoing pandemic.

A vaccine is of paramount importance in our efforts to fight the coronavirus,since it could stop its spread and allow societies around the world to go back to normal but experts are warning a vaccine is still at least 12 to 18 months out.

An announcement published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) today notes that the agency is investigating the targeting and compromise of U.S. organizations conducting COVID-19-related research by [China]-affiliated cyber actors and non-traditional collectors.

According to the FBI, these actors have been attempting to identify and illicitly obtain valuable intellectual property and public health data related to vaccines, treatments, and testing from networks and personnel affiliated with COVID-19-related research.

According to White House intelligence, Iran or state-affiliated actors have also been targeting some US facilities, the WSJ reports.

Officials have yet to publicly release any evidence of such hacks or if they have hampered any attempts to find a vaccine, and China is already pushing back against the accusations.

It is immoral for anyone to engage in rumor-mongering without presenting any evidence, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said in a briefing Monday, as quoted by WSJ.

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US Officials: Chinese Hackers Are Targeting Vaccine Research - Futurism

Elon Musk-led space company SpaceX has launched a browser-based simulator that allows you to take over the controls of a Crew Dragon spacecraft and dock it to the International Space Station.

To give it a shot, click here.

Fair warning, its not easy maintaining a good trajectory. But NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine apparently nailed it on his first try using SpaceXs full-scale docking simulator last year, he claimed in a tweet.

The controls in the browser simulator arent far off from the real Crew Dragon, according to SpaceX. The company says the game uses the controls of the actual interface in a notice displayed before starting the simulation.

In reality, Crew Dragon capsules are capable of autonomous docking as demonstrated during the companys successful uncrewed test flight last year but astronauts are able to take over manual control at any point if necessary.

The game debuted mere weeks before SpaceX is planning to launch the first crewed Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station.

The flying task is very unique: To come close to the space station and fly in proximity, then slowly come into contact, is maybe a little bit different from what you would see for flying a space shuttle or an aircraft, NASA astronaut Bob Behnken told TechCrunch last week, referring to the Crew Dragons futuristic interface.

Of course, you know, growing up as a pilot my whole career, having a certain way to control the vehicle, this is certainly different, Behnken added.

Alongside fellow astronaut Dough Hurley, Behnken will be on board the Dragon capsule during the first crewed test flight later this month.

READ MORE: SpaceX simulator shows you what its actually like to dock Crew Dragon with the Space Station [TechCrunch]

More on Crew Dragon: SPACEX IS OFFICIALLY SENDING ASTRONAUTS TO SPACE NEXT MONTH

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Dock a SpaceX Spacecraft to the ISS in This Amazing Simulator - Futurism

Bad news, according to the World Health Organization (WHO): even if scientists invent a vaccine, the coronavirus that causes the sometimes-deadly COVID-19 might be here for good.

It is important to put this on the table: this virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities, and this virus may never go away, WHO emergencies expert Mike Ryan said during a Thursday briefing, as reported by Reuters.

He noted that other illnesses, such as measles, already have a vaccine but have yet to be completely defeated.

HIV has not gone away but we have come to terms with the virus, Ryan said.

And timelines, he cautioned, are not much more than educated guesses.

I think it is important we are realistic and I dont think anyone can predict when this disease will disappear, Ryan added. I think there are no promises in this and there are no dates. This disease may settle into a long problem, or it may not be.

Ryan also argued that finding a vaccine would be a massive moonshot,according toReuters.

Luckily, its not all doom and gloom. On the plus side, according to a WHO survey, scientists are working on more than 100 vaccine candidates worldwide, ranging from more traditional vaccines that use an inactivated version of the virus to more experimental attemptsthat hijack your DNA to build up a resistance.

Rather than rushing into reopening economies and borders and restarting air travel, the WHO says that a safe return to normalcy will require patience.

We need to get into the mindset that it is going to take some time to come out of this pandemic, WHO epidemiologist Maria van Kerkhove said during the briefing.

Originally posted here:
WHO: The Coronavirus Might Be Here Forever - Futurism

If you thought spending a month indoors binge-watching Netflix and ordering delivery was some sort of gruelling quarantine ordeal, imagine being sealed inside a giant glass terrarium in the Arizona desert with seven other people for two years, all while operating a self-sufficient farming project and managing a working replica of the Earths ecosystem.

That's just what happened back in September 1991, as a group of researchers set out to inhabit a project called Biosphere 2 a self-contained structure of glass Aztec-style pyramids and sci-fi domes that housed an ecological experiment to test the potential sustainability of life on other planets.

It was the mother of all iso projects, a utopian vision that seemed as such visions often do like a combination of wild-eyed scientific endeavour and idealistic, otherworldly cult.

This unusual episode of relatively forgotten pop culture history is captured in the new documentary Spaceship Earth (named for the phrase popularised by futurist Buckminster Fuller, a key inspiration for the project), which uses a wealth of archival footage and new interviews with the "biospherians" to tell a story of technology, art and environmentalism working in inspired synchronicity until their eventual unravelling at the hands of utopia's great foe, humanity itself.

Director Matt Wolf is drawn to eccentrics that tend toward (sometimes unlikely) genius, as evidenced in Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (2008), a tribute to the late experimental pop musician, or Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019), which chronicled how one woman's 30-year obsession with videotaping television led to her becoming a key custodian of the late 20th-century news cycle.

In Spaceship Earth, he finds perhaps the perfect subject for his fascination: visionary experimenters whose futurism had roots in the counterculture, theatre and the arts.

Of course, to an outside world fed by the prejudices of mass media, it had all the trappings of a potential cult.

From the film's opening shots of the biospherians in their quasi-futuristic attire looking less like intrepid explorers than the hapless henchman of some 90s-kids-TV villain through the early sequences locating the project's hippy-adjacent genesis in late 60s San Francisco, it's tempting to draw an easy thread connecting spaced-out, self-proclaimed visionaries and apocalyptic cult delusion.

But as Spaceship Earth demonstrates early on, this was a movement that took countercultural ideas and pushed them towards tangible progress, conceiving of projects that were committed to transforming humanity's vision for the future.

The group coalesced around John Allen, a systems ecologist who was less a guru than a kind of visionary frontiersman, closer to a fedora-hatted traveller from a Philip K Dick novel than some be-robed charlatan of the type that the counterculture specialised in cranking out.

Allen's Synergia Ranch and its Theater of All Possibilities attracted like-minded artists and futurists, whose energy soon focused on what they saw as the impending ecological disaster facing a resource-depleted planet.

The movement's peculiar combination of theatre sports and scientific entrepreneurship might scan as a precursor to 21st-century tech company culture, but seen here in grainy, hand-held 16mm footage, it's as though the troupe from Jacques Rivette's Out 1 were training for space colonisation images that Wolf splices together to resemble dispatches from an alternate history of a better future.

Allen and his colleagues speak with admiration for Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running (1972), another radical, post-60s sci-fi imagining in which Bruce Dern communes with plants inside a biodome cruising into deep space.

But as the group's finance VP Marie Harding is quick to point out, the Theater of All Possibilities wasn't a commune but a corporation.

Bankrolled in part by billionaire Texas oil scion and eco-sympathiser Ed Bass, the group took a necessarily capitalist approach to funding their designs, and as the 80s wore on, with its high tech advances in space travel and boom economy, their plans would come to encompass a vision for developing extraterrestrial colonies in space an eco utopia that seemed to herald the best of what business, technology and ecology could achieve in tandem.

Under the imprimatur of Space Biosphere Ventures, the team set about construction of Biosphere 2 on land in Oracle, Arizona between 1987 and 1991 at a cost of some $150 million and curiosity surrounding the project would turn its launch into a national media event.

It even had in one of the film's more surreal interludes a Golden Girl, Rue McClanahan, introducing it to viewers at home.

Wolf, as he loves to do, conjures this expectant atmosphere with so much gloriously bled-out analogue video footage, overlaid with the familiar yapping of 90s media pundits that would almost feel nostalgic if it werent tainted by the ghosts of early 24-hour news cycle sensationalism.

As he proved in Recorder and his underseen youth chronicle Teenage (2014), Wolf is attentive to the aesthetics of cultural ephemera, pausing to linger on peripheral fashion, the occult-like vector graphics of current affairs broadcasts, or showing a group of black kids in Afro-centric t-shirts wondering why the biodome containing a self-proclaimed "ethnically diverse" group didn't have any provision for "brothers in space".

In these heady moments, Spaceship Earth recalls the anticipatory montages of last year's wondrous Apollo 11 just with more acid wash and hypercolour.

Meanwhile, sequences showing the early stages of life inside the biosphere the farming, the oceanic aquarium, the far-flung technology of video calls connecting occupants to the outside are set to the appropriate strains of Talking Heads' This Must Be the Place, aligning the biospherians with another eccentric American utopian, David Byrne.

But as with all dreams,reality, and human pettiness, inevitably intrudes. (It's telling that no-one interviewed seems to recall the bummer ending to Silent Running.)

"It won't work," says one random bystander interviewed for a TV vox pop. "People are too mean."

While the media do their bit to dismiss the project as "eco entertainment" at best, and a cult at worst, problems with rising carbon dioxide levels, issues with public transparency and inter-project bickering conspire to give the naysayers the fuel they need, and Biosphere 2 gradually turns into a proto reality-TV house with outside observers wondering wholl last the duration inside.

By the time the eight biospherians emerge from their terrarium, it's a different world one in which their vision has been called into question, and a Goldman Sachs banker by the name of Steve Bannon has been put in charge of administering the project, with a view to turning short-term profits.

It's a depressing moment, for sure, but the project has something approaching a hopeful ending, as many of the original members convene on the Synergia Ranch looking for all intents like the cast of Cocoon awaiting their benign alien transport or at least for SpaceX to give them a well-earned ride to the stars.

It may have been a flawed experiment, even a visionary folly, but as Allen says at one point, "it's all theatre".

Spaceship Earth is screening on DocPlay, which offers a 30-day free trial.

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Documentary Spaceship Earth resurrects stranger-than-fiction story of utopian Biosphere 2 experiment - ABC News

In order to find new treatments for COVID-19, scientists are probing how the coronavirus alters human cells when it infects and hijacks them.

Medical virologists at the Frankfurt University hospital have been culturing cells of SARS-CoV-2 since February, learning as much as they could about how itaffects them, according to a Goethe University Frankfurt press release. Now, theyve identified a number of compounds available in existing drugs including the metabolism-inhibiting cancer medication WP1122 that seem to stop the coronavirus from reproducing inside a host.

The teams findings were published Thursday in the journal Nature. With those in hand, pharmaceutical companies are already launching clinical trials in a bid to develop new pharmaceuticals that could block the deadly virus.

Some viruses force cells to dedicate all their resources to churning out copies of the virus, but the virologists found that SARS-CoV-2 takes a less extreme approach. Instead of taking over all protein production within the cell, it increases the amount of proteins the cell synthesizes and helps itself to the surplus.

As a result, the team found that they could stop viral reproduction by taking away the building blocks of proteins, and found a number of compounds that did the trick.

The successful use of substances that are components of already approved drugs to combat SARS-CoV-2 is a great opportunity in the fight against the virus, lead author and Frankfurt virologist Jindrich Cinatl said in the release. These substances are already well characterized, and we know how they are tolerated by patients. This is why there is currently a global search for these types of substances. In the race against time, our work can now make an important contribution as to which directions promise the fastest success.

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Scientists Have a Promising New Idea to Defeat the Coronavirus - Futurism

On Tuesday,top U.S. COVID-19 adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci urged the Senate against prematurely lifting lockdown restrictions.

Pressure is mounting from President Trump to resume normal life and business operations in the U.S. But Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, argues that doing so would be ill-advised, The New York Times reports. Hastily lifting the lockdown, he says, would result in new coronavirus outbreaks and a spike in deaths.

The major message that I wish to convey to the Senate [Health, Labor and Pensions] committee tomorrow is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely, Fauci told the NYT. If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to Open America Again, then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.

Republican officials immediately pushed back against Fauci after it became publicized that he was going to caution against reopening, the NYT reports. Andy Biggs, a House Representative from Arizona, accused Fauci of spreading fear and despair on Twitter.

But the numbers dont support reopening states: unenforceable federal guidelines say that states should have a two-week-long decline in new cases of COVID-19 before lifting lockdown measures. Most states have yet to reach that goal, according to the NYT.

Were not reopening based on science, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the NYT. Were reopening based on politics, ideology and public pressure. And I think its going to end badly.

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Fauci: Reopening Too Soon Could Lead to "Suffering and Death" - Futurism

(Magic Leap Photo)

Update, 4:42 p.m. PT: A Magic Leap representative confirmed that the office has closed.

Original story: Magic Leap will close its Seattle satellite office, according to a new state filing, as the well-funded augmented reality startup sheds workers and pivots its focus to business customers.

A WARN notice filed with the Washington state Employment Security Department says that Magic Leap will close its Seattle outpost. The move will impact 39 workers beginning June 21, according to the notice.

In a April 22 blog post, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz said the company cut staff amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Bloomberg reported that about 1,000 employees were let go, or about half of the workforce.

The secretive company, headquartered in Plantation, Fla., landed in Seattle four years ago. Its one of more than 125 out-of-town companies that have established engineering and research-and-development facilities in the Seattle region in recent years.

Magic Leaps Seattle office was led by Neal Stephenson, the famed science fiction author who became the companys chief futurist six years ago, along with Brian Schowengerdt, a longtime University of Washington professor who is its chief science and experience officer and co-founder.

The outpost hosted a group called SCEU, short for Self-Contained Existence Unit, a content-focused R&D squad led by Stephenson. It was also home to a developer relations team led by gaming veteran Tadhg Kelly, who left Magic Leap this month, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Weve contacted Magic Leap, Stephenson, and Schowengerdt for details about the Seattle office and will update this story when we hear back.

Magic Leap has generated immense interest over the years, and even more cash, raising more than $2.6 billion in its lifetime from heavy hitters including Google, Alibaba, Andreessen Horowitz, Paul Allens Vulcan Capital and others.

Virtual and augmented reality has found some traction with businesses but not as much with consumers. Even with the ongoing pandemic and more people staying at home, VR remains a niche product, Axios reported this week.

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Augmented reality giant Magic Leap is closing its Seattle office amid layoffs - GeekWire

Whenever a wild card becomes possible, the future planning playbook has to be rewritten. This quote by Tamar Kasriel, a retail futurist, speaks volumes. She was commenting that futurists had regarded the pandemic as a wild card. That is, an occurrence that would have big, worldwide impact, but a highly improbable event. Well, the event is here and were muddling our way through its big impact.

My focal point in this statement is about the rewriting of the playbook and in particular, the customer experience playbook. Customers have been cooing about their newly found freedom to transact business when and where they choose, using digital tools. As well, theyve been signalling their interest in seeing the coming attractions that businesses have in store for them, post lockdown.

Ive been curious about customers reactions to conducting business online. The majority of persons whove responded to my questioning have said that they have no intention of going back to the old way of doing business. One service provider declared to me recently that he would no longer be collecting a cheque for his services and that we should pay via direct deposit to his account. Multiply his migration by the thousands like him and we begin to see the scale of the shift to online technology. The adoption of digital tools has opened John Publics appetite for convenience and ease of doing business. This sentiment accords nicely with the expanded tools that will have to be rolled out as part of the new digital way of doing business.

Businesses, on the other hand, are trying to catch their breath and catch a break from the body blows inflicted by the disruption. Their big worry is the battle to cope with having to triage reputation excellence, public health management and economic survivability. As we look into the future and follow the arc of the disruption, theres even more disquieting news for businesses. Were seeing protracted economic upheaval looming in the distance. Whew and were only in the fifth month of the year. No pressure.

The pandemic has brought individuals, customers and businesses to their inflection points. Individuals are having deep, existential discussions with themselves about what matters. Customers are reflecting on whether they will continue to patronise their favourite retailer, given the retailers socially responsible and public safety track record during the pandemic. Businesses meanwhile, faced with some or all of this contextual intelligence, have to decide on the best landing points that will keep their customers happy, whilst navigating an largely unfamiliar network of new technology and operating systems.

Perceptive businesses will connect the huge display of humanity during this crisis, to customers need for more sensitive displays of concern from their favourite grocer or restaurant. Customers will be inclined to do business with businesses that have displayed a social conscience and not just revenue chasing behaviour.

But lets focus on the social conscience forces that are reshaping customer personas amidst this crisis. The next normal may demand that businesses re-introduce themselves with a renewed commitment to values that reflect kindness, care and concern for their customers, employees and social causes. As this customer friendly touch begins to gain traction, businesses that amplify simplicity and empathy actions will benefit.

Simplicity means that businesses will begin to pinpoint and expunge the majority of complexities associated with transactions. Will electronic signatures, chatbots, interactive teller machines, a single bank card that enables all transactions, contactless payments and self approved loans become commonplace? Will in-person visits to business places become a thing of the past? The answer is yes, in time. Bear in mind that while Trinidad and Tobago, as well as the Caribbean region are typically two to three years behind the rest of the world in digital adoption and adaptation, our acceleration into the digital age will continue. Slowly maybe, but surely.

An over-abundance of empathy has been on display at a national level. Customers in their citizen incarnations, have been extending goodwill and humanitarian assistance to those less fortunate and now are highly sensitive to the level of care that they expect, in turn, from businesses. What customers have been giving, they will now expect to receive. Businesses that are powered by a customer first philosophy, will not miss this marker. They would have already communicated to their people that nothing is too much trouble in service delivery.

So, let me address the elephant in the room. Are any of these service delivery notions new? Absolutely not! Are the customer expectations markers new? Again, absolutely not! Whats new is the context and the climate in which we now find ourselves. The ravages of the pandemic have caused people to recalibrate first, whats important and what matters to them. Next, to begin judging their service providers with a more deliberate yardstick that is connected to higher order values systems and how those values translate into the treatment of the customer.

Business leaders, as you continue to roadmap your navigation out of this lockdown, how will you translate lessons learnt into determining how you will re-introduce your business to your customers? Now is the time to decide how your business will stand out in a sea of sameness. Differentiation is power. Youre armed with intelligence, hindsight and insight. How will you use these three data sets to scale up your service excellence foresight?

We must not be simply good at making noise as we have in the past about service excellence. We now need to be good at making the moves to create a differentiated customer reality. By choice.

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How will you re-introduce your business to customers? - Trinidad Guardian

A resurgence of coronavirus cases is starting to hit China, as well as other countries including South Korea and Germany, just as governments are starting to loosen restrictions. Even Wuhan, the Chinese city and epicenter of the now global pandemic, experienced a new cluster of five cases.

The trend has governments worried. Is this the much-feared second wave, or a sign of smaller and controllable valleys and peaks as testing becomes available to a larger number of people?

While its still too early to predict the scale of this second wave if it turns out to be one at all,as opposed to statistical noise it demonstrates that countries are shifting towards a whack-a-mole approach, putting out a number of smaller fires rather than instituting blanket rules to contain a nationwide spread.

Chinese authorities reported 17 new cases over the weekend, The Guardian reports, which is the second day of double-digit new cases and the highest in almost two weeks. Its a far cry from the four digit daily new cases the country experienced back in February but still an ominous trend for the deadly, highly-contagious virus.

Chinas new cases were largely isolated to regions in the northeast. Shulan, a city in Jilin province on the border to North Korea and Russia, had to be put back under partial lockdown over the weekend after officials reported 13 new cases. Other regions also had to be put under renewed lockdown over smaller outbreaks.

A number of new cases related to nightclubs in Seoul, South Korea also has authorities worried about a potential second wave. As a result, bars and clubs are again temporarily closed in the capital. The South Korean government even pushed back the reopening of schools.

But officials cautioned that the new cases do not necessarily mean a second wave is coming.

The first wave has not ended and had a break to start another pandemic, Jung Eun Kyeong, director-general of South Koreas Center for Disease Control told NBC News during a briefing on Monday.

Its not over until its over, noted South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Sunday, noting that South Koreans must never lower [their] guard regarding epidemic prevention.

Just as Germany decided to leave reopening measures to its individual 16 states, with citizens returning to restaurants and bars in some regions, authorities noted that the reproduction rate how many people an infected person ends up infecting in turn appeared to rise back to 1.1 in the European nation, ringing alarm bells.

Germanys center for disease control, however, claimed there was still uncertainty surrounding the latest estimates but noted that more data was critical. Federal rules in Germany state that any county with more than 50 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants will be locked down, CNN reports.

The fears come just as countries are starting the long process of a return to normalcy while maintaining health and safety measures including social distancing and encouraging the wearing of face coverings.

Disneyland in Shanghai reopened to the public on Monday, albeit with enhanced health and safety measures. The first restaurants reopened in Germany over the weekend. Earlier this month, South Korea announced that baseball and soccer matches are expected to start up again, albeit without stadium audiences.

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There's a Resurgence of Coronavirus Cases in China - Futurism