In my linkedin article on Banks & Customers, published in 2015, I started by talking about the workshops at Citihub’s World Conference which had posed a 10 year time horizon. Medium term horizons such as this are both liberating and challenging when considering the future of banking and business it is certain there will be massive change and since finance has been the first business to digitise, the future of ICT is a key influencer. I also received a post from Chris Skinner’s blog, “Banks face more change in the next 10 years than in the last 200”; my response on banking is encapsulated in the linkedin article, but what makes Chris’s blog article so interesting is the illustrations about how hard it is to predict the future. For instance he posts a Jetson’s style picture, created in 1966 forecasting the state of science/life in 1999. While we have some moving walkways, they are hardly ubiquitous and much of what they suggest might come to pass has not. We do not have rocket belts, city wide domes, hovering vehicles, nor flying saucers. Looking at these forecasts provoked me to look at “Blade Runner” and its inspiration, Philip K Dick’s 1968 book, “Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?”. “Blade Runner” was made in 1982, and set in 2019, Dick wrote the story two decades earlier and set the story in 1992.
The film makes much of the existence of space flight, off world colonies and perfect humanoid…
