Fast Talk: What's the Biggest Change Facing Business In the Next 10 Years?

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"Over the next few decades, we think the capabilities of intelligent machines will evolve rapidly."
--Donna Dubinsky, Numenta Inc.

"A lot of my people [who read Dilbert] would prefer not to have any human contact, because they feel they work for and with idiots."
--Scott Adams, Cartoonist and entrepreneur

Fewer and fewer people will want to be employees of corporations, because corporations don't have anything to offer. Corporations don't provide security and provide fewer and fewer benefits. People may find new ways to sell their skills. I can imagine eBay or the equivalent of eBay being in the business of letting people bid on work all day long. Office buildings may turn into housing, or maybe individuals will rent office space as you would rent a hotel room.

And those individuals will compete with people from all over the world. This isn't globalization, because globalization to me feels big. I think it's the opposite, it's villagization--making everything smaller and in some sense more intimate. And that's very powerful. I'm totally capitalistic, but I don't like large organizations because they tend to want to control. If this reduces the power of corporations and governments to limit what human beings can do, the thing most exciting to me is the potential for everyone to participate."
--Interview by Danielle Sacks

Kevin Roberts

Worldwide CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi
New York, New York

Roberts, 56, is the garrulous and provocative front man of one of the world's leading advertising companies. He's also the author of two books: Lovemarks and his latest, sisomo: the future of the screen, a book about engaging people with visual stories.
First appeared in Fast Company: December 1998

"The dominant interface of the future is the screen. TV, the most obvious screen, is one of a family of screens--mobile devices, computers, and big Times Square billboards--engaging consumers. And they all have to work together. No one medium is going to replace another. I've got 2,000 creative people at Saatchi, and instead of them doing 30-second spots, I want them producing content across all the screens. The promise shouldn't change. What should change is the context and the way it's handled for the mobile phone or the computer, TV, or movies. But Nike should always be 'Just do it' no matter the medium.

When people are in front of a screen, they can either lean back or lean forward. You have to engage consumers emotionally, tell them a story, so they lean in and get involved. That's the challenge for business going forward. Steve Jobs understands that any MP3 player does what the iPod does. But he has made his products irresistible. You're engaged, so it doesn't matter that the batteries still don't work.

To pull this off, the corporate organization is going to change. No longer will there be a few people at the top, millions in middle management, and very few at the bottom. It's going to become a lot of people at the top thinking strategy, and a lot of people at the bottom executing it against all these different segments. Sod all in the middle--it's the end of management."
--Interview by Joseph Manez

Donna Dubinsky

Founder and CEO, Numenta Inc.
Menlo Park, California

Dubinsky, 50, was cofounder and CEO of Palm Computing, which created the Palm Pilot, and of Handspring (now Palm Inc.), creator of the Treo smartphone. Her current company is focused on developing a new kind of computer memory system.
First appeared in Fast Company: June/July 1998

"The next generation of computing is 'intelligent computing,' based on the same principles as the human neocortex. The human brain works in ways fundamentally different from the way computers do today, which is why computers have never been able to realize true intelligence. The brain uses vast amounts of memory to create a model of the world. Everything you know and have learned is stored in this model. The brain uses this memory-based model to make continuous predictions of future events. It's the ability to make predictions about the future that is the crux of intelligence. For example, when humans see a dog, they immediately know it's a dog, even though they may have never seen that specific dog before. Even a young child can identify 'dog' and be very certain, but a computer still can't. Intelligent computing will allow a computer to identify a dog the way the brain does, by building a memory model that has been exposed to many images of dogs such that it begins to actually understand what a dog is. The computer will become 'intelligent.'

This technology will offer a fundamental new building block for the next generation of computing and business, and it could create a new vector for innovation across a great number of industries. Over the next few decades, we think the capabilities of intelligent machines will evolve rapidly and in extremely interesting directions. Intelligent computing could be used in image identification, speaker identification, data mining, security, automobile safety, robotics, and ultimately natural-language processing. Our hope is that intelligent computing will help us accelerate our knowledge of the world, let us explore the universe, and make the world safer."
--Interview by Jennifer Pollock