Futurist Duncan Stewart at EEI International Luncheon

At the Edison Electric Institute’s International Luncheon last Friday, with many countries’ representatives in attendance, futurist Duncan Stewart wowed the crowd with a talk that needs to be seen. And you can glimpse Deloitte’s extraordinary director of technology, media & telecommunications research in these four brief video clips, each about a minute long.


I. “You get one for Christmas and you wear it, you count your twelve thousand steps, and then you put it in a drawer and never look at it again. … Fitness Bands are the high-tech equivalent of the January gym mmbership.”

II. “What I just said is true in Africa. It is true in Asia. It is in Lat Am. I could do this in Mideast. I could run Europe and North America. This is a global trend. There is a secular shift out of hardware towards software, services and content.”

III. “We're currently about five meters away from my phone. If I put my new phone down and my old phone from last year beside it, I would be able to see the difference even from twenty feet away … That's never going to happen again.”

IV. “He deserted me in the desert. Whoa. Can you picture a computer reading that properly? Man, that's hard. What Google's done is they said, instead of using traditional technology, let's do speech synthesis, using machine learning.”

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Steve Mitnick, Editor-in-Chief, Public Utilities Fortnightly


E-mail me: mitnick@fortnightly.com