*I really appreciate this guy's efforts. Maybe more so when I believe him less.
*His main drawback as a futurist is that he thinks that venture capitalists are responsible for everything that happens in the world, but since that's also the audience he's serving, it's forgivable. It's like the standard sci-fi adventure narrative where the lone brainy outcast is the hero destined to save the world.
(...)
So, we have these hugely important new technologies coming, but not quite here yet. At the same time, though, we have a set of more immediate changes, that have much more to do with consumer behaviour, company strategy and economic 'tipping points' than with primary, frontier technology of the kind that Magic Leap or Waymo are building.
First, ecommerce, having grown more or less in a straight line for the past twenty years, is starting to reach the point that broad classes of retailer have real trouble. It's useful to compare physical retail with newspapers, which face many of the same problems: a fixed cost base with falling revenues, the near-disappearance of a physical distribution advantage, and above all, unbundling and disaggregation. Everything bad that the internet did to media is probably going to happen to retailers. The tipping point might now be approaching, particularly in the US, where the situation is worsened by the fact that there is far more retail square footage per capita than in any other developed market. And when the store closes and you turn to shopping online (or are simply forced to, if enough physical retail goes away), you don't buy all the same things, any more than you read all the same things when you took your media consumption online....
(...)
