How the past shapes our future

Picture the scene, it’s 1992…mobile phones are a luxury reserved for ‘big shots’ who struggle to hold them with one hand, more people are using fax machines than the internet and if you do want to get on the web, you have to make sure nobody else is using the landline at the same time!

This relatively disconnected world at the dawn of the computer revolution is barely recognisable to our lives today. So how on earth do you go about imagining what life will be like 30 years from now?

But that’s exactly what ‘Chief Envisioning Officer’ Dave Coplin has done, taking lessons from the past and picking up on clues which most of us would have missed in the 90s, then looking at the technology emerging today which could be mainstream in the 2050s.

The report launch coincides with Virgin Money launching a new, free business banking service, M-Track, which enables its current account customers to collate their banking information with data from other systems they use to help run their business, in a single online dashboard to provide an at-a-glance view of their business’s financial health.

Aston spoke to futurist and envisioner Dave Coplin.