Graeme Codrington's Future of Work

Here's something that should make you look at your smartphone differently. It might help save your life in an earthquake. Not because it can predict the future. But because the tiny accelerometer inside your phone can detect movement. The same technology that notices if someone has fallen can also spot the first micro-tremors of an earthquake. Same phone. Same pocket. Different purpose. That's wha...

Here's something that should make you look at your smartphone differently. It might help save your life in an earthquake. Not because it can predict the future. But because the tiny accelerometer inside your phone can detect movement. The same technology that notices if someone has fallen can also spot the first micro-tremors of an earthquake. Same phone. Same pocket. Different purpose. That's wha...

Here's something that should make you think twice before asking ChatGPT about that headache. Oxford University ran a study earlier this year. They gave the same medical scenarios to AI chatbots, twice. First with 100 doctors at the keyboard. Then with 1,300 ordinary people. The doctors got 95% accuracy. The ordinary people got 34%. Same AI. Same scenarios. Different humans. Why the gap? And what d...

Meta lost $80 billion on the Metaverse. We called it in 2022. Here's why the same mistake is happening again - right now. In this week's ThrowForward Thursday, I revisit our April 2022 episode on the Metaverse hype cycle and what it teaches us about separating real technological change from expensive noise. With AI, spatial computing, and the "next big platform" dominating headlines, the ability t...

In the 1980s and 90s, people smoked in restaurants while the rest of us were eating. Then we made a change. We literally changed a global culture, made new rules, and people (fairly) quickly changed their habits. We could do that again in public spaces - banning phones. Why not? 

I think I know why Donald Trump wants Greenland. But why does everyone else see it as strategically important? It's not what you think. But it will change the world. Listen to this week's episode to find out more.

If robots can be developed to run ultra trail marathons and compete in sporting events, then why should humans even bother anymore? Maybe it's less about being better than someone else, and more about finding out where one's own limits are. Maybe that's the essence of being human. In this episode of ThrowForward Thursday we ask how advanced humanoid robots are rewiring not just our view of automat...

Faster, higher, stronger - the Olympic motto that inspires the best athletes to push themselves to the limit. But what if we changed where those limits are? What if we allowed humans to not just rely on good genetics and intensive training, but also on chemical, medical and biomechanical enhancements? The team at The Enhanced Games are aiming to answer this question in a few weeks time in Las Vega...

 Our team at TomorrowToday have developed my digital twin: a ChatGPT agent that contains all of our books, white papers, blogs and videos from the last twenty years of work. You can now access this GPT agent for free (as long as you have a ChatGPT account), and ask questions about the future, thinking like a futurist, foresight, leadership, and innovation. It's available at http://www.graemecodrin...

In Season 6 of ThrowForward Thursday, we are revisiting some of our previous predictions and finding out what's happening in the world right now. This one is scary.  In Episode 66 (see https://youtu.be/V-b-U2Zf4V4 ) we talked about the end of antibiotics. Just this past month, in October 2025, the World Health Organization released a research report on antibiotic and AMR resistance, and it's getti...

Sport can't fight weather The 2025 edition of the Cape Town Marathon was cancelled due to strong winds making the course unsafe. It's not the first major sporting event to be affected by weather; and it won't be the last.  Back in 2020, I was due to run the London Marathon. It was cancelled due to Covid, and we were encouraged to run a 42.2km distance in the 24 hours of the day of the marathon to...

What if the truth could be edited? In a world of AI deepfakes, fake news, and manipulated media, how do we know what's real anymore? Blend science fiction and foresight in this mind-bending episode of ThrowForward Thursday, inspired by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams' classic story predicted today's world - crowdsourced "truths," social networks, and reality distortion fields l...

In a world filled with AI slop, fake news, photoshopped photos and AI generated videos, how do we work out what is true, what is real, and what is not? In this week's ThrowForward Thursday episode, we look at six ways we can respond to a post-truth world. 

Deep fakes have been around for a while - in fact, way back in 2020, I was one of the first people I knew to feature in a deep fake video (it wasn't very good, but it was a sign of things to come). The era of fake videos has arrived much faster than we thought we would. It's here, right now. We need to learn how to navigate a world in which we cannot trust what we hear, read or see. It's sad, but...

Welcome to the new season of ThrowForward Thursday. Each week, we will be looking back over the 175 episodes we've recorded in the last four years, and seeing which of our future predictions are starting to come true - what we got right, and wrong, and what it tells us about the world we live in today. Join us every Thursday for a Tour Guide to the Future.

Imagine... the future is imaginable. And our imaginations help to set the tone for how we engage with the future, and the world around us. So, at the end of 2024, let's imagine the best possible future we can - whatever that might mean for you. For me, it would be a world without war. Thank you for your support and feedback on our scenarios over the past year. We plan to come back in the new year...

On December 4, 2024, the CEO of one of America's largest healthcare insurers was shot dead on the streets of Manhattan. Angry people, living in a world that is filled with inequality and feeling squeezed on every side, will eventually snap. This is not something we want, nor is it a call to arms. But it is a possible future scenario that CEOs of large companies might need to be as careful of their...

It could happen. Sometime in the future. Data centres use an incredible amount of electricity and water. Towns that incentivise these data centres to locate nearby for jobs and tax benefits might find themselves dealing with unrealistic demands for power and water - to the point where a data centre could sue the town to continue providing them with water even if it means the people living in the t...

Nearly 100 years, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030 we would all be working just 15 hours a week. If only, right?   What went wrong? There is an answer, but you're probably not going to like it. We need to change the whole system to ensure we are not crushed by a system that seeks relentless productivity, endless activity and soul sucking workloads.   Maybe the 15 hou...

Elections are messy, noisy and can overwhelm voters with too much information and too many choices. In the future, it could make sense for us to rely on our personal AI assistants - algorithms trained on our preferences, understanding our worldviews and able to mimic who we are in communications and interactions - to analyse every politician, their promises, their track record and what we expect t...

Don't get too excited by the title - it's not quite what you think. In the future, it is possible that companies will not supply us with email addresses, but we will rather bring our own (just like we buy our own cars, phones and have your own personal cellphone numbers these days).  This is more than a technology conversation - this is about fractional workers (senior people working for more than...

Imagine logging into your web browser and there's just nothing: no websites anywhere. You check your internet connection, and that seems fine. Your phone seems to be working. Except most of the apps are showing error messages, and there are just no websites.  This is what would happen if the DNS system stops working. This is the system that turns your website request into an address the IP and HTT...

Come with me to 2029, when a dark side of the robotic world becomes reality. The robots we will deploy in care homes and kindergartens - those humanoid robots who look after our elderly and children - are now revealed to be controlled by underpaid and overworked human operators in sweat shops on the other side of the world.  Yes, of course, we will one day have fully autonomous, talking robots in...

It's sometime in the future, and the next version of your favourite smartphone has just been released. Once again, the marketing hype is astounding, but the reality disappointing. What did they say: it's a few millimetres smaller (or bigger), and slightly lighter, and the camera has some extra megapixels and zoom, and ... that's it? Smartphones should be curing cancer already. There's more computi...

Imagine what the world would look like if we all had the data about our genetic makeup, and we could see the many multiple ways our genetics shape who we are and what we are capable of. Imagine that gender wasn't the issue it is today as we think of the classifications of sports codes - no longer would be it "male" and "female" as the only two categories, but rather many different categories based...