What Does the Future Hold?
At last months AV virtual event, we spent most of the day discussing the future of pro AV. While our presenters and panelists had plenty of answers, the event left me with even more questions. Dont get me wrong. Its always interesting to hear peoples viewpoints and why they think things will turn out a certain way. Its even more interesting to go back and listen to older predictions and see how wrong (and occasionally right) people were. It turns out theres a lot of psychology involved in predicting the future. In 1980, Neil Weinstein, a psychologist at Rutgers University, published a paper titled Unrealistic Optimism About Future Life Events. His evidence supported this theory: People believe that negative events are less likely to happen to them than to others, and they believe that positive events are more likely to happen to them than to others. Essentially, we generally believe that we are the exception and not the rule. These beliefs spill over into our work lives. For example, a Pew Research study found that 65 percent of Americans in 2015 believed that robots definitely or probably would be doing much of the work currently done by humans in the next 50 years. At the same time, 80 percent of those surveyed believed that their own jobs or industries would remain largely unchanged and would exist in their current forms 50 years later. Im not sure, but I can tell you that change is inevitable, and I predict that we wont stop trying to predict the future! P.S. If you missed AV and want to hear predictions from AV pros like Bren Walker, Jeremy Caldera, Peter Lawrence, Rony Sebok, and more, you can still catch it on demand until July 15 (and earn 4.75 AVIXA RUs!). Visit av3event.com to learn more. Click here to read more stories from the July 2021 issue of SCN.