This is the final episode of Season 4 of ThrowForward Thursday. It's a longer episode today, as we review the most significant theme of the last 40 episodes.

This is your reminder that the future isn't just written in data — it's shaped by those who know how to use it. Lead with data, and let it lead you to unprecedented success.

Download the Strategic Imagination Toolkit at http://bit.ly/SIToolkit

Come with me to the future, where we realise that Artificial General Intelligence is not just an improvement on Generative AI but something different, developed on a different path.

GenAI / LLMs are brilliant. They're amazing tools, taking the sum of human knowledge (including all the incorrect stuff lots of people believe) and making it very accessible. Keep using and improving GenAI, but don't get sucked in by the hype of AGI just yet.

AGI is coming. But it is coming down a different path than we are on right now.

Imagine a world where the boring parts of learning - the dumping data into our brains - is all done easily using neural transfers, augmentation and technology assistants. What's left is for the human brain to do what it does best: creative thinking, problem solving, idea generation, and more.

This week's leap into the future takes a view that Generative AI is not actually that intelligent - it just has access to all the data. When human beings have access to the same data, we will come up with much better new ideas, insights and wisdom than GenAI seems capable of now. The future is bionic: humans and machines working together, each doing what they do best to move our world forward.

Imagine the Indian elections in 2052 taking just 5 minutes to process, rather than the 6 weeks it takes this year. The vision is of digital first, ubiquitous, secure, personal technology connections in every sector and industry, reducing friction, demolishing time scales, flattening barriers.

Ageing musicians still touring, and ageing fans still wanting to go to their concerts, might prefer an afternoon start time rather than waiting until 9pm or later for the main event. It's not just Festivals that should schedule afternoon concerts - maybe every band should do so.

The theme of this week's "jump into the future" is that we should be open to questioning what is considered "normal" in our industries, especially when doing so could open us up to new opportunities, markets and customers. What's "normal" in your industry? And what experiments could you try to see how you could change that?

All plants extract minerals and nutrients from the soil they're growing in, but some appear to be able to extract metals as well, or at least metal ions that we can in turn extract from the plants. If we can do this at scale, we can use phytomining to get the metals we need to build the batteries we use to power our lives.

Here are some links to experiments underway on phytomining, and the promise of what this might bring in the future:

• https://thebulletin.org/2024/03/the-greenest-way-to-mine-metals-for-batteries-could-be-with-plants/

• https://resoilfoundation.org/en/innovation-technology/tropical-plants-contaminated-soils/

• https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/metal-guzzling-plants-harvested-to-make-nanomaterials/2500240.article

As we watch elections in 2024 spanning nearly 70 countries and 4.2 billion people, one thing is clear: the current systems are not working. Voters are not happy, and have little enthusiasm for the politicians they can choose between (if they have any real choices at all).

So, come with me to the future, and consider four 'ridiculous ideas' for new approaches to Parliaments and Governments. We need to stretch our strategic imaginations in an effort to come up with new political systems.

Watch episode 9 about AI Politicians: http://bit.ly/TFTAIPolitics

Download the Strategic Imagination Toolkit sample: http://bit.ly/SIToolkit

ChatGPT, CoPilot, Llama, Bard, Grok and all the other Generative AI Large Language Models have demonstrated that we can engage with our technology using natural language. Now we need to get our devices to understand the heuristics of requests and actions we ask them to do.

Rabbit R1 was launched to much fanfare in December 2023, as a first model of a device that can do this. I doubt it can deliver yet, but it's definitely heading in the right direction. And I love their coining of the LAM: Large ACTION models.

I think that Apple's AI play later this year will integrate Siri with early algorithm capabilities that take another step down this path of getting our devices to understand how the world actually works and be able to do a lot of repetitive and mundane tasks for us.

Your company should already be working on which tasks could be given to LAMs, building the algorithm systems to make these work seamlessly, and deciding how humans and machines will continue to become more bionic as we work together in the future. If you're just thinking about automation you're not thinking correctly about this.