From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The consumer is far better educated today than he ever was. Consumers don't need to rely on intermediaries to tell them what is good or bad- people are social, they share information with friends and strangers, and go to a broader community for help and assistance.
Influencers wield enormous influence, and sometimes, this can manifest negatively. One area I often highlight is the spread of misinformation, particularly regarding health and wellness. The spread of anti-vaccination rhetoric, the reluctance to use sunscreen, and the rise of conspiracy theories like QAnon can be profoundly damaging.
There's a joke within Facebook that if you want to know which countries will have a genocide in the next couple of years, look at the ones that have Facebook free basics.
We can now, more accurately than ever before, view the transactions occurring within our system, identifying the originator(s), beneficiary(ies) and intermediaries along the chain.
Without a doubt, even when an influencer is reaching out to a million followers about fashion, they are still communicating with a million people. That's a staggering degree of influence.
The industrial age economy was characterised by the scarcity of physical capital like machines, buildings, and roads. Capital is no longer the binding constraint on humanity. We have an excess of physical capital. The real scarcity today is attention to the importance of the question, to what end are we deploying this capital.
The potential of wearable health monitoring is enormous, and under appreciated by a lot of society, because version-1 of wearables were – to put it politely – underwhelming. The health care industry spends a lot on curative costs… and if you shift the curative to the preventative, you can save a tonne of money and have better outcomes. That's the future of medicine… being able to see a doctor before something happens, not after.
We haven't really had a technology like AI in the history of technological development – the closest analogy would be the movable type printing press, which came to the fore at the beginning of the enlightenment, some five hundred years ago.
We have lost the personal touch – today, everything is fast – impersonal, digital… yet, we are not robots. We need personal contact, we need to understand each other's feelings… and this can't be done via email; and especially for the older generations in or society, this change is really hard.
The distinction between offline and online retail will vanish, as consumers will not be able to tell where one started and the other finished. This is what we call at Farfetch 'Augmented Retail'.
We don't currently have the accountability mechanisms in our digital life that we do in our physical life.
There are all kinds of things where we can use technology to reflect our own humanity to better us.