Simon Woodroffe says leaving school at 16 meant he didn’t have his imagination educated out of him. And he argues that we have it in every one of us to use what he refers to as ‘Imagined Hindsight’ – to look inquisitively into the future and from there figure out our next moves.
It’s what science future writers do and that’s why submarines, computers, monorails, robots and all the rest of it have come true. You just have to make it a part of your waking hours to dream about what could be.
Indeed, we have been fortunate to have been born into this age and to see what will now unfold as well as what we can do with it.
I’m not scared, I know there’s a ten or fifteen percent chance it could all go terribly wrong, but that’s pretty good odds to me; certainly, a lot better than some of the risks I have previously taken. Moreover, humans so far have had an uncanny knack of solving the problems they have created, usually just in time.
In my first restaurant in Poland Street in Soho I commissioned a robotic drinks trolley with a digital voice that after 9pm said: “Move your fat arse someone’s got a job to do in this restaurant.” People loved it. Just imagine the interactions if I’d had AI to talk to my customers.
My greatest regret though is that I got talked out of another robotic voice on a digital menu board outside the front door that would have said, “Fuck off we’re closed”. Everyone and their sister would have come over after clubbing to see that one!
History however will likely see not AI but robotics as the revolution of our time, with a manufacturing capability that will create an age of wealth for us all, and all before your young child becomes a teenager.
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese are out in front with this and there are some pointers in their dynamic society as to why. Case in point – if you want to build a new road in America it takes 20 years to get permission. In China that road is built in 18 months.
That kind of dynamic thinking can be applied to everything we do, I say go round stone walls and build golden bridges. There are always show stoppers that come across our bows.
In that early restaurant, for example, the health and safety people virtually forbade raw fish on a conveyor belt. But rather than being disheartened I enquired as to the maximum time they’d permit and found a way through with handwritten sell by times on the perspex covers. As for the fire department – and with an open kitchen feet away from customers – I carried on and when they saw the hundred metre conveyor installed and the robots, they loved it all and helped me get the safety right.
So, instead of debating, remember to start dreaming again as you did when you were young and cultivate the imagination. If we reach down deep enough we already know what may happen ahead.
When I was starting out I wanted to do everything myself – in my case learning Sage accounting, CAD (computer-aided design) drawing, reading legal contracts, designing kitchens and having megalomaniacal control. It was simply the best way at the time, though not necessarily for all time.
And today? Well, I simply ask AI. It’s young and just learning. But then so are we. However, it’s also likely that us early adopters and encouragers will emerge at the front of the pack as we grow up.
