Autonomous vehicles, Metaverse, Neural Implants. A Dark Unsustainable Future of Marketing

I’m publishing this today but it was written 3 years ago.

Today I completed a course on “Forecasting: See the Future Before It Happens” from the Institute of the Future via @coursera.

I managed to do a worrying forecast on the future of marketing and sustainability. And an Inspiring forecast of the future of philanthropy.

Here Is the worrying future.

A 30-seconds ad appears as you load the metaverse for a client meeting. At that impulse, your neural implant alerts the autonomous car to order, pick, and deliver the item in the ad. Or in a fully automated scene, you can imagine your smart fridge ordering out-of-stock items from an online store and sending the driverless car to pick and deliver them — without human involvement. Sounds far away, but the technologies to enable these are all in advanced testing stages. And there doesn’t seem to be any government about to consider this illegal — because the government seems to be concerned only when our physical bodies are violated, not when our souls/spirits are violated.

The mobile computers that autonomous vehicles are will collect, process, and share real-time data, indexing it from a multitude of sources, GPS, smart homes, IoT, and even data streams to and from our brain via neural implants. Ad platforms will gain a goldmine of precise data and insights to create consumer profiles for super-personalized ads with never-seen-before conversion rates.

Advertisers (who might be clever AI machines that bought data profiles of consumers, hired other machines to write persuasive marketing copy, bought consumer products from humans, and stocked inventory in self-owned or rented warehouses — well owned by 2–4 cofounders) will make more sales and profit — which they use to buy and sell more products, then divest into more and more lucrative consumer sectors. Yes, companies like Fetch.ai are using web3 to enable machines codenamed digital twins to own, transact, contract, and reinvest in the economy. While OpenAI and many others are enabling machines to acquire more-than-human creative capabilities.

Brands will deploy powerful digital twins of celebrity influencers in the metaverse to influence not just humans but fellow machines (smart home gadgets) to make purchase decisions on your behalf.

As the infrastructure that makes it easy for people to buy and consume products even when they don’t need to becomes easier and more materially rewarding, people and machines are incentivised to extract more of nature’s finite resources.

For ad platforms and merchants,

…the success of making a sale will be ever more accurate. Like Facebook’s head of Retail says, “Businesses will focus more on the 80 percent of customers they don’t have than on the 20 percent they do. This growth will continue, as businesses no longer wait for customers to develop purchase intent. Instead, they will create it.”

For the consumer,

…the line between freedom to choose which product to buy or whether to buy at all and ads manipulating minds and emotions will be even more blurred.

Today your soul’s choices are externally manipulated by marketing algorithms, in 10 years your soul will directly delegate its role of choosing material needs to machines. The individual will be more attached to the illusory material well-being and further alienated from the more genuine inner and mental well-being.

As everyone (including machines now) competes for more and more material possessions and more social fame that comes with accumulating more than others, global use of material resources and energy will increase four times more than the whole world should be using. NB. We are already using twice as much as we should be using — most of which goes into landfills.

Wastage will increase and circularity will struggle to catch up with the exponential demand for material extraction and energy use — which means exponential growth in greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

For the economy,

…more and more wealth will be held by fewer and fewer people who own money-making machines. More people will struggle to create incomes as they are displaced by high-performing autonomous machines which as hiring managers will prefer fellow machines. Mental health issues are likely to increase as the economy becomes more demanding of the individual yet more denying as wealth is held by a few.

For society,

…inequality will skyrocket, protests will increase but will/might be contained as usual and won’t affect change much, crime — both high-tech and petty will also be rampant, and slow governments and civil society will lose power to corporations and struggle to balance self-interest with common-interest.

All this will be the result of two reinforcing forces that rotate around the individual citizen. 1) The increasing capacity of the marketing system to hijack and centralise purchase intent from the individual, enslaving him/her to accumulate material possession beyond need. 2) Which increasingly disconnects the individual from his/her life purpose, and civic duty to protect the health of earth and society.

As we pursue efficiency and effectiveness through endless innovation, it is important to think about the effects of innovations on the souls of users.