Antonym: The Zeitgeist-Buster Edition
Let the Antonym AI read those 2024 trends reports for you.
Dear Reader
The price you pay for the low, low cost of this newsletter is enduring the self-indulgent prose that takes its sweet time to wend its way to a point. If I were writing this for money I’d get right to the point, not “bury the lede” or waffle on for a while. You’d get the headline, the summary, the main points and then the detail.
As it’s Christmas, here’s the main thing today…
I do not have time to read the 1.5 GB of trends reports from researchers, banks, agencies and consultancies which a kind soul shared with me in a Google Folder. So, I built an AI bot on the Poe app called Zeitgeist Buster and threw a bucketload of the reports into it, and now it can answer questions about what they all say.
I think you get three questions without having to register, but if you do register for a free Poe account you can ask as many as you like. More about the bot later in the newsletter.
Now back to the wordy run-off from my Sunday morning brain…
Musical interlude: “LoCKeDoWN2”, by Meute
Meute is a German brass band that plays techno, but are as far away from a novelty act as you can get. Their music was part of the rich soundscape created as part of the exuberant brilliance of the TV show Babylon Berlin (one of the best and under-watched (in this country) TV shows of the last few years). A lot of brass bands mainly do covers, and Meute has a few (its cover of Flume’s You and Me is gorgeous), but its own compositions are stand-out fantastic. LoCKeDoWN2 has become my song of the moment. Here’s a video of them performing it on the street in Amsterdam:
Predictions Health Warning
Not every bank, marketing agency or business publication sends Christmas cards these days. They send trends and prediction reports, despite every single one for the last five years being utterly useless after a couple of months.
Reports are written in October, edited in November and come out in December. This leads to forehead-slapping omissions and bum steers.
For instance, The 2020 versions were published around the same time that officials in the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission were getting worried about a new form of “viral pneumonia”. The 2021 predictions crop were bullish about “post-corona” and the new “roaring twenties” that would follow the recovery from a terrible year, when in fact things were about to get a lot worse. The optimism was resurgent for the 2022 forecasts, even as Russia massed forces on the border of Ukraine.
Last year, tech and marketing predictions were intensely excited about 2023’s coming Web3 boom, fuzzily conflating technologies including cryptocurrencies and virtual reality. Even as reports were landing in client inboxes, ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI, firing the starting gun on a technology revolution that made “the metaverse” sound like “fetch” from Mean Girls.
When trends reports disagree
You can go and chat to the massive bundle of reports in the Antonym Zeitgeist Buster bot I mentioned before. Ask it about trends that will affect your job. For instance, here’s a screenshot of a query I made for a friend who works in consumer financial services.
The links take you to an excerpt of the report that the AI used as a reference.
I also asked where the reports disagreed with one another. This is the sort of task that AI is excellent at – though with the usual check-the-sums and don’t-take-it-all-at face-value caveats. It gives you a start on where to dig deeper into data, where to ask more questions. Here’s what Zeitgeistbuster said:
Macroeconomic conditions: The Kantar Media report suggests economies will face challenges from geopolitical tensions and climate change impacts, while the GP Bullhound report takes a more optimistic view of artificial intelligence driving economic growth despite uncertainty.
Healthcare spending: The Economist Intelligence Unit report predicts healthcare spending will rise in real terms after two years of decline, while the GP Bullhound report is silent on healthcare trends.
Regulation of technology companies: The Economist Intelligence Unit report and GP Bullhound report both mention increased regulation as a challenge, but the GP Bullhound report does not discuss the specific dilemmas Chinese tech companies may face regarding overseas investment as mentioned in the Economist Intelligence Unit report.
Climate change impacts: The Economist Intelligence Unit report discusses physical risks from climate change like extreme weather, while the BBC R&D Advisory Team report focuses more on the conceptual questions climate change raises about sustainability and human/system impacts.
Have a go yourself. It’s not perfect, but it gets you thinking about which bits of which reports might be useful to read.
American Psycho if Spotify Wrapped had existed when it was made
This is very funny.
This week I’ve been...
Reading
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch. Won the Booker and it is brilliant. I read it quickly because it wouldn’t leave my mind alone for a minute. I think it won’t be long before I go back and read it again.
Right Kind of Wrong, by Amy Edmondson. It won the FT Business Book of the Year and rightly so. It gives a vocabulary and framework for thinking about failure in a much more useful way than it is in most work cultures.
Amy C. Edmondson is credited with coining the concept of psychological safety in teams. She is a Harvard Business School professor who has extensively studied the performance of teams in the workplace. Her research has shown that psychological safety is a key factor in team performance and that it describes an environment of low interpersonal fear, where individuals feel confident that candour and vulnerability are welcome in their workplace. This concept has been widely recognised and has become an important area of study in various fields of work and life. [written by Perplexity]
Watching…
Kin. (BBC iPlayer) Irish crime family drama. Intense and thrilling, with an excellent cast and writing, and next-level cinematography.
That’s all for this week, folks…
I think we will be back next week with things we’ve read and learned in the last week before Christmas. There’s also an annual book review in the works, which will hopefully be ready before New Year.
Thank you for reading. Let me know how you get on with Zeitgeistbuster — I’d be interested in any experiences good or bad with this little experiment.
And if you liked it – stick a share on this for me.
Antony