Founder, CEO & Strategist | Extensive experience growing global businesses from start-ups to public companies. Expertise sits at the crossroads of content, technology & creativity | MBA | Entrepreneur
🧐 Wow – Victor Riparbelli’s opening line in his TED Talk stopped me in my tracks: "Your grandchildren will be the last generation to read and write." Yikes. That’s a startling thought, but it speaks to the transformative power of #AI, #GenAI, and #LMs. At the recent #IDMLC, hosted by the Digital Media Licensing Association - DMLA, we experimented with #NotebookLM to create podcasts about our events. The results were mind-blowing. Mark Milstein fed event details into NotebookLM, and it generated dual synthetic-voice podcasts that sounded remarkably real. They enthusiastically shared the story of DMLA, our events, and insights into the presenters. We live in a world that thrives on instant gratification, efficiency, and immediacy. Tools like NotebookLM will only continue to improve, making it easier—and often better—to share our ideas, stories, and work. However, these tools, no matter how advanced, will still rely on human input, refinement, and direction. They’re evolving rapidly, and we’ll need to adapt quickly. But back to Victor's opening line. It reminds me of something I’m already seeing. Kids are not being taught cursive writing, which will likely become more of an art form than a requirement. But in considering the future, and the real issue of where we, as humans, fit, while I’m concerned about what skills we might lose, I’m more interested in how we choose to integrate these technologies into our lives. We’ll use them to advance, ideate, solve problems, and make life easier. But they can also give us back time for what we truly love. I rarely handwrite anymore—my computer, phone, and tablet have taken over, and picking up a pen feels almost foreign now. Others prefer writing with pen and paper or using tools like reMarkable. I listen to podcasts and books, and consider it a luxury to read an actual book when on vacation (although I use Amazon Kindle). It’s not about losing traditional reading and writing entirely but evolving how we do these things. In the end, it will be up to us to craft the future that we want because the possibilities will truly go well beyond what have imagined. 🤔
Your grandchildren will be the last generation to read and write. My provocative opening to my TED talk in Vienna this weekend which did exactly what it was supposed to – divide people in half 🙂 I made the case that humanity's relentless pursuit of better ways to convey ideas and preserve knowledge doesn't end with text and that future generations will replace the written word with more direct and intuitive forms of communication like audio and video. Thank you to Alina Nikolaou and TEDAI Vienna for giving myself and Synthesia the opportunity to share our vision. In case you're wondering: I don’t think text will completely disappear within the next 100 years, but it will eventually become a luxury past time we choose to engage in – like listening to vinyls or going to the theater – not because it’s our only option for consuming information. I’ll still be picking up the occasional sci-fi book 🔮
