Mumbai: Isobar, a leading global digital agency from the Dentsu Aegis Network, predicts that 2018 will be the year of Augmented Humanity, a year where technology enhances and scales our most human attributes. In 2018, technological interfaces will become more natural and instinctive, technology will automate repetitive tasks to free up time for creativity and compassion, and artificial intelligence will meet emotional intelligence.
Isobar’s innovation and strategy experts from around the world have defined five key trends that explore this evolving relationship between humanity and technology and predict a harmonious future. Augmented Humanity explores the ways in which technology enhances and fuels our most human attributes – the ability to recognize and trust each other, to adapt to changing circumstances and the power to deliver true creativity.
Jean Lin, Isobar’s Global CEO, comments, “Artificial intelligence is great, but humans score on emotional intelligence. The power of being human is in empathy. This cannot be automated or outsourced. Augmented Humanity will use technology to scale everything that is best and most powerful about human interaction.”
Shamsuddin Jasani, MD Isobar India, states, “It’s already clear that such technology will thrive in almost all businesses and will revolutionize the way we treat and manage specific services across sectors. The coming years will guide body augmentation competencies in a number of ways that will empower humans to be smarter, stronger and more capable than they are today. In India, consumer technology has already taken a huge leap forward. Analytic practices are growing in density and companies are using machine learning and prognostic modelling to increasingly consider complex data sets.”
The report argues that we may one day view the era of anonymous, one size fits all transactions as a temporary blip in our evolution, and that as technology advances it will become more human, not less. It will return us to a time where voice will be the primary way we interact with the world, where we will be recognized and rewarded in stores, and where we will buy more directly from trusted suppliers.
Isobar’s five key trends for 2018 explore this intersection of technology and humanity, magic and the machine, code and conscience:
- Body Talk explores the body as an interface, as our eyes and ears replace touching and tapping.
- Powered by People tackles the shift from customers to communities as technology turbocharges the sharing economy.
- The Economy of Me looks at the power of AI to deliver ever more personalised products, prices and places.
- The Ethical Algorithm tackles technology as a force for good; in a world of fake news and algorithm bias is there such a thing as moral code?
- The Makers and the Machines explores the extraordinary union of art and technology to create outputs we could never before imagine.
Within each theme, Isobar unpicks key sub trends and explores how they come to life today, in the future, and what they mean for businesses and brands right now. The report celebrates the importance of emotion at every touchpoint; in this new landscape it will no longer be enough for technologists to ask “how does it work?” – they need to consider human emotion and drivers and ask “how does it feel?”.
