I look forward to a future where digital and physical mix and where we go back to have a mostly physical life, but digitally enhanced.
There are a lot of good reasons to worry about that, and I have listed some in a previous post. Leaving this aside for a moment, there are also many reasons why we should be happy that our inescapable digital future that has so far sucked us into two-dimensional glassware will finally spit us back to the three-dimensional world where we belong. The future that awaits us is one where we freely utilise data generated by living in a world of bits to make choices in a world of atoms.
An interesting example comes, not surprisingly, from Amazon whose CEO is on record saying that there is nothing "new" about opening physical stores and that the focus of the company will always be delighting customers and if customers want - also - physical stores then this is what Amazon will do.
This recent tweet with photos taken from one of the first Amazon bookstores shows where the potential lies.
These are some of the ways that the Amazon brick and mortar book store is categorizing books. pic.twitter.com/fTwZCokK4O
— Paul Shapiro (@fighto) April 2, 2017
Data tracked from our digital interaction with amazon and kindle is used to create innovative classifications and smart in-store signage. Just judging from these photos it seems already a better way than "history", "politics", "fiction" or simple alphabetical sorting. It is worth noticing that Amazon can do this because we have now been buying books on its website for a long time and that, since introducing kindle, it has been also able to track what we read, what we highlight, what we finish and what we don't (and where we stop in those cases).
Again, forget about how creepy this all sounds when we really think about that - this part will have to be solved, at least I hope [1] - and think about a future where the same level of tracking can be embedded in our physical world. The optimistic view is to see that as the time where digital loses its advantage against physical. I want to be optimistic.
[1] Every time I think about this I see no alternative to a system where we have private ownership of data combined with the ability to give third parties access to it.