Martha Gabriel, speaker, consultant and writer, was interviewed by Arthur Church at the latest edition of the ME B2B Summit. The keynote speaker The event's theme was “In the future, will we be eternal beginners?”, which has everything to do with what we have been experiencing for some time, but which has intensified during the pandemic.
Among several current issues, the guest spoke about the acceleration of changes and transformations in recent years, the need for continuous learning, goodbye to the era of “either” – this or that, critical thinking and, of course, metaverse, the hottest topic of the year.
Below, check out the main topics covered in this special meeting.
Why does everything change so quickly?
The conversation with Martha Gabriel got straight to the point, with a question that sums up the world we currently live in and all the causes of our chronic anxiety.
It took the telephone 75 years to reach 50 million people, radio 38 years, television 13 years, the internet 4 years, the iPhone just 3 years, Instagram 2 years, Angry Birds 35 days, and Pokémon Go just 15 days. What happened that everything is changing so quickly?
For Martha, the feeling of speed is not false, but rather increasingly present and the main cause is technology. Nowadays, we are experiencing the turn of the exponential curve, which has been happening since the last century, and it is what gives us the feeling that everything is changing very quickly.
“We as humans are not wired to think about the future. Before, the future was the same as the past or the present. Now, every day things are changing and it will take time for us to get used to this new reality.”
It is necessary to create actions today to build the best scenarios
Martha Gabriel recalled that the first technology acquired by man was his own speech. In the beginning, the exclusive capacity of human beings for verbal language was what differentiated them from other species and made them synonymous with power over everything we know today. It was thanks to communication that people were able to seek knowledge, evolve and create technologies to make life easier.
We spent millions of years in the hunting and gathering model, thousands in the agricultural period, hundreds in the industrial age, dozens in the information age, and now things change every day.
In the industrial era, despite the advances of the time, transformations happened much more slowly. Today, we are on an exponential acceleration curve. Artificial intelligence, 5G, NFT, blockchain, metaverse They are no longer trends, but rather the reality in which we are living.
If you don’t test and innovate, you can no longer keep up, survive or lead. We all have a responsibility to see the futures that matter to us and create the futures that matter to us.
In the future, will we be eternal beginners?
If the world changes all the time, we are new to the situations we are living in. Martha commented that she does not like the term “new normal”, which was established during the pandemic, because, every day, we face challenges and live the “new normal”. Now, we need to seek the “next normal”. In other words, keeping our eyes focused on the next normality that we want to create.
Everything that could be automated, was, and will continue to be. Therefore, this relationship between technology and human beings tends to be increasingly intelligent.
But there is something that is difficult to automate: human skills, which are the behavioral skills and, therefore, people who have them are standing out in the job market.
We are new all the time, learning all the time. It is wonderful to be able to receive new stimuli every day, to continue being relevant and not to become complacent.
The era of “and”
In an era where technology is the main instrument of transformation, the biggest challenge is to be sustainable. Martha Gabriel cited the study World Happiness Report, which shows the ranking of the happiest countries. The curious thing is that there are places where the technological culture is strong, but the well-being index of the people is low, when compared to less developed nations.
There is no longer just a good side to things, nor just a bad side. There is no longer a choice of “this” or “that”. “Or” has given way to “and”. In today’s business world, you have to be quick. e efficient, efficient e cheap. In innovations, for example, technology e human beings walk together, and so on.
In the era of “and”, it is necessary to outline at least three positive scenarios and three negative scenarios in order to act more assertively. In this sense, critical thinking is essential. It is through rationality and reflection that we can better prepare ourselves for the future.
Critical thinking guides our efforts. Without critical thinking, we cannot transform creativity into innovation.
Metaverse is a new topic only for some
The concept of metaverse is not new. It first appeared in a science fiction book called Snow crash, from 1992, and written by the American Neal Stephenson. Later, it appeared in the game Second Life, in 2003, which was the first materialization of metaverse.
The novelty of metaverse is the experience of mixed reality in 3D dimension.
Martha Gabriel emphasized that an avatar does not have the same physical limits as we do. Augmented reality expands the experiences of the physical world. In the game Pokémon Go, for example, the opposite happens: we use the physical world to interact with the virtual world. The great challenge of living in this dimension is the issue of sustainability and improving people's lives.
When a person doesn't have a good experience, they quickly leave. The challenge for companies will be to promote enchantment in both online and offline worlds.
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