Another excellent conference and excellent value
Here are a few things i took away
Steve Hilton may sound modern (took his shoes off in public/wore T-Shirt etc) but his ideas are really a reworking of ideas launched by the levellers in the 16th Century, and developed by Romantics in the 19th century- he wants things on a human scale and thinks that big things (Govt /Big Business) are (mostly but not always) in opposition to this ie are dehumanising. Romantics said similar things about the factory system. Steve’s plea that we should turn offer our mobiles and get back to nature could have come out of the mouth of Wordsworth ( if mobiles had been around then). A man with interesting things to say but you would not want him running anything – much that makes modern life enjoyable and safe is the product of big business and big government. Steve may be right about back to nature- it’s just a really old idea. I notice that hipsters/visionary policy wonks rarely acknowledge the intellectual traditions that they draw on.
Baroness Susan Greenfield talked about the plasticity of our brains ( how each of us is encoded with memories from our individual experience ). Interesting bit for branding people is how different senses (sight,sound,touch,smell/taste) are processed in different parts of our brain. Sight ( ie reading and following narratives) in the front of our brains. Sound and smell in the deeper more primitive parts of our brain. A strong brand/category should try to encode memory through all the senses. That’s probably why we love coffee shops: they satisfy all of the senses from the story of the heritage, to the smell of the coffee, to the sound of the artfully chosen playlist coming out of the speakers. In Starbucks you can even feel the coffee beans
Richard Watson: the idea that AI can replace humans is largely fantasy as you can’t code a machine to learn a combination of unpredictability, individuality and imagination.The problem with self driving cars is not the tech but the unpredictability of the humans the cars might bump into. A more likely future is the increasing use of AI tools to support human efforts. In fact we already do this when we search on Google or use face recognition on Facebook. Doctors will use AI to make better diagnoses. But a machine wont be able to read the will of a patient to get better. The film ‘Her” is worth seeing as a credible dystopia of a world in which we will be served by AI “personal assistants”. Some shopping/organising of our lives will be done for us by these in the future
Russell Davies: The problem with technology is not humans- we as individuals adopt and adapt all the time- it is organisations. Big ones are very bad at it ( hence all those failed Govt IT projects) and the ones that are good at it have tech in their culture.(Tesla, Google, Amazon etc) Basically you can’t plug in new technology into an organisation led by people who just “don’t get it”. These are the types of people who (earnestly) go to a seminar about the impact of social media but have a Facebook account which they rarely bother to look at. They know they should know about it – but they don’t live it. This describes much senior management today