Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2014 and Beyond

[jakeXT]

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By 2020, the labor reduction effect of digitization will cause social unrest and a quest for new economic models in several mature economies. Near Term Flag: A larger scale version of an "Occupy Wall Street"-type movement will begin by the end of 2014, indicating that social unrest will start to foster political debate.

Digitization is reducing labor content of services and products in an unprecedented way, thus fundamentally changing the way remuneration is allocated across labor and capital. Long term, this makes it impossible for increasingly large groups to participate in the traditional economic system — even at lower prices — leading them to look for alternatives such as a bartering-based (sub)society, urging a return to protectionism or resurrecting initiatives like Occupy Wall Street, but on a much larger scale. Mature economies will suffer most as they don't have the population growth to increase autonomous demand nor powerful enough labor unions or political parties to (re-)allocate gains in what continues to be a global economy.

By 2017, 80 percent of consumers will collect, track and barter their personal data for cost savings, convenience and customization. Near Term Flag: The number of Kickstarter-based auctions of personal data will increase by triple-digit percentages by the end of 2014.

The escalation of consumer awareness of data collection practices has set the stage for offering consumers more control over the disposition of personal data — collected both online and offline. As increasing demand and scarcity drives up the value of such data, incentives grow to entice consumers to share it voluntarily. Meanwhile, consumer interest in self-tracking also suggests that consumers are investing more time and energy in collecting data about themselves. They increasingly view such data as a key asset for life improvement, which is potentially consistent with the idea of trading it for value under the right circumstances.

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http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2603215

[jtuck004]

1. A lot of people are gonna get left behind that have no clue the train is leaving...

I wonder if massive neighborhood Python, Ruby on Rails, Hadoop, Linux potlucks would help?

Just like guys, and a few women, used to know how to change the tires and oil in their cars, programming and understanding digital data from all the billions of new senors (and the unbelievable amt of data that is going to produce and which will need to be analyzed) may define who lives and dies. Or at least who owns the house they live in.