This article first appeared in the Australian Financial Review Weekend Edition on September 28th, 2024 by Hans van Leeuwen.
The Future Is Now
Originally published in AFR Weekend, 28 September 2024. Written by Hans van Leeuwen.
Andrew Grill, an Adelaide-born Londoner, has a job title not many can lay claim to. He styles himself as an “actionable futurist”. Under this enigmatic chapeau, he wears many hats: corporate speaker, conference compere, podcaster, mentor, tech adviser and strategy consultant.
There’s a thread that runs through all this: Grill’s daily graft is to unpack the latest tech innovations and trends for perplexed business executives and lay people, to get them enthused about it, and to prepare them for what might come next. For a futurist, though, Grill has just done something pretty old-school: he’s written a book.
It’s called Digitally Curious, and he describes it as “a self-help guide for the technologically overwhelmed”. He takes the tech tsunami — artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, data privacy and security, cloud computing, blockchain and bitcoin, the subscription economy, Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things — the list goes on — and explains how we got here, how to get to grips with the tech, and what it can do for your life or business.
“Help me. Where do I start?”
“My target market is people who have heard about technology but just don’t know where to start. And they’re like, ‘Help me,'” he tells AFR Weekend.
“I went and bought a bunch of AI books to see what’s out there in the market. And they’re all talking about the theory of AI and what’s going to happen. I haven’t yet seen a book that says, ‘Take my hand. I’m going to show you what to do.'”
His basic message: you should be interested in tech, because tech is interested in you. As the now well-known saying goes: AI won’t replace people, it will replace people who don’t use AI.
It’s not a message to which Grill has been especially open, he admits. But he is used to this. When he gives a talk or a presentation, he often makes the audience stand up and asks them six questions. They are told to sit down once they’ve answered “no” to any of them.
Have you Googled yourself lately? Do you consume your newspapers and magazines digitally? Do you bank with an app-only bank? Do you use two-factor authentication on everything? Have you tried ChatGPT? Have you bought some bitcoin?
“By the last question, I normally have just three audience members standing,” he says. Those still on their feet are “the digitally curious”. They want to use technology to solve problems, they are willing to experiment, keen to learn, creative and adaptable.
This is probably the person many of us imagine we are, or would like to be, rather than the person we actually are. But what has struck Grill is how often he encounters a lack of curiosity, or even an outright fear, in boardrooms and C-suites.
The Scary Slide
In his presentations, he has what he calls “the scary slide”. It’s full of words like “smart contracts”, “metaverse”, “ambient tech”, “distributed ledger”, “sovereign identity” and “personal digital twin”.
He asks businesspeople if they are OK not knowing what these things are — and whether they’d still feel so comfortable if they thought, as they should, that these concepts would be materially affecting their business within six to nine months.
He also reckons that if you don’t understand what something like ChatGPT does, you won’t be able to see how it can work within your business. If you’re on the board, you won’t be able to ask the right questions about a tech proposal. To grasp digital, he says, you’ve got to be digital yourself.
A Lifelong Digital Native
Grill tries to set an example. It comes pretty easily to him: at the Gen-X age of 55, he’s possibly one of the world’s oldest digital natives. He acquired his first computer, a Sinclair ZX-80, in 1980. Three years later, he was “dialling up” the bulletin board systems at the Angle Park Computing Centre in Adelaide at 300 bits per second. He bought his first mobile phone in 1994 — very much the Cretaceous period of portable telephony.
He studied engineering in the late 1980s and started his career in satellites before working on telco systems at Telstra and Optus, and then at IBM. Since moving to London in 2006, he has been involved with start-ups but increasingly focused on his work as a futurist.
Curiosity Taken to Extremes
Grill takes curiosity to extremes. He has used an AI system to clone his face and voice, creating an online avatar of himself. He has made his own non-fungible token. And he has also applied his restless spirit to publishing a book. It is full of hyperlinks, but to avoid these going out of date or breaking, he has built his own system of updatable links so that the book remains a living entity.
If this all sounds a bit exhausting, well, it probably is. In person, Grill has a kind of infectious yet easygoing energy that carries you along — probably a necessary trait for a futurist who cleaves to the optimistic side.
Blue-Sky Warnings
As the book goes along, though, some precautionary warnings start to come through. He counsels against jumping on AI for the sake of it — there are some areas where it could do more harm than good. He gets quite specific about how to design an AI pilot project so that it delivers results rather than wasting money. He also wants to scare readers into taking proper control of their personal data, and securing it.
It’s not always easy to be a futurist, it seems: he admits he has to guard against getting sucked in by hype. The metaverse was the talk of 2021 — then ChatGPT came along in 2022 and eclipsed the world’s attention. But Grill says it’s still worth looking at the now-neglected metaverse for clues about the future evolution of the internet.
Grill is on safer ground with the “actionable” part of his job title. Each chapter ends with a “Curious Five” — a list of suggestions for simple ways you can start to grapple with the tech. Unlike many such dot-points in textbooks, these are plenty that you can plausibly imagine yourself doing.
He finishes the book by making good on his promise of being a futurist. He advises all businesses to think about, and prepare for, the possibility that “Q Day” — when quantum computers will render much of today’s cryptography worthless, and open to retrospective attack — might arrive as soon as 2030.
Then comes the blue sky. Wireless charging not only for phones, but laid into roads for e-bikes and electric vehicles. Solar panels in space. Extraordinary advances in tech-based healthcare. Biological computing. Some of it sounds sci-fi, some of it even a bit scary.
A Futurist’s Confession
After the interview, there are a couple of facts and details to check. Rather than message Grill, the author finds himself asking ChatGPT. Then messaging Grill to make sure the AI got the right answers — and it did. “Dammit,” Grill tells him, “he has somehow persuaded me to tinker with tech.”
