Joe Youngblood took the stage next, and surprisingly, linked the changing landscape of search engines and digital marketing to talk of physics and the future.
He prefaced this discussion with a few of the predictions he’d made about the digital world: that Google would disappear as a website and instead become a voice in your house. Secondly, that the website as we know it would die.
“In five to 10 years, it won’t be uncommon for businesses to not have a website,” he predicted.
From there, he launched into a discussion of atoms and physics – noting that these intricate concepts also apply to human ideals, beliefs, and businesses.
“Before you can predict the future of anything, you have to understand the universe is an ever evolving duality between chaos and order,” he said.
On the internet, we tend toward order.
Not only did Youngblood discuss physics and the future, he even touched upon the meaning of life.
“The meaning of intelligent lifeis to make the next generation better, to make it so they can do more with the same input,” he said. “The meaning of business life, on the other hand, is to exist into the foreseeable future, to ensure the generation that exists tomorrow can do just a little better than the generation before.”
On that note, like kings of old, “kings” of the industry don’t like to lose their crowns.
“Amazon wouldn’t walk up to Walmart tomorrow and say ‘you know what, we’re done with this. We’re done with this whole retail thing.'”
The mortal enemy of kings? Information, Youngblood said.
A natural side effect of advances in information is technocoalescence: the fusing of two or more separate devices into one, when previously those devices worked separately.
“Your only hope moving forward is to be innovative,” Youngblood said.
“These tiny decisions you make today have a giant impact on the future.”
