I came across this video via LinkedIn and TechChrunch. It was produced by Ericsson, a company that is celebrating its 135th birthday today.

It is quite intriguing, and paints a complex, open-ended picture of our future. There’s little here that those of us in the technosphere don’t already know at some level, but it’s nice to have it put together and presented in a format that makes it more compelling to contemplate.

One nit to pick. At the 2:44 mark, the comment from Ola Ahlvarsson is “A lot of companies saw what was gonna happen in the future”. That’s wrong. Companies saw nothing, companies have no such capacity. People saw possibilities. People took chances. People formed companies to provide structure and boundaries. People were right and wrong and close and adaptive and some caught the wave and some missed it and some were in a better position when the next wave came by.

The future, of which the Networked Society is only a part, is about us and the world in which we live. It is not about “corporate vision”.