The future that the world is headed in, is determined by many different aspects like geopolitical developments, economic developments, technological advancements, societal evolution and it is very interesting to imagine what the world will be like a few decades down the line.
The opinions on this regard will differ from one person to another and depending on who you ask, the future world could either be a dystopian one portrayed well in fiction or a utopian one, where everything is rainbows and unicorns.
Not surprisingly, many people think that human greed and the centralisation of power could very well lead us into a dark dystopian world. One of the popular scenarios that is often suggested is that of a few corporate giants, ruling over all aspects of our lives.
I remember watching some movies, which centre around the same idea and while I don’t personally believe that it will be anywhere near as bleak as they’d like us to believe, I do think that the future could be a toned down version of what they portray. So, which of today’s corporations could be our evil overlords?
Apple
Apple is one of the largest companies in the world today and is well on its way to become the first trillion dollar company by market capitalisation. Over the last few years, it has done really well financially with one record breaking quarter after the other.
As a result, it now has a cash pile of $260 billion! That’s a lot of money which it could use to buy out several other companies. In fact it could buy out Tesla, Uber, Netflix, Twitter, Snapchat and Airbnb with change to spare.
The point is, even though, going by marketshare, only a fraction of people in the world use Apple products like iPhones and MacBooks, if the company wanted to go on a buying spree, it could easily establish its presence in most people’s lives by buying out companies that do.
In fact, this has been a common trend in tech companies where larger companies simply buy out smaller ones. In the future, as these companies grow, they will be more powerful than ever and could easily become among the handful that control all aspects of our lives, with access to all our data (which is a valuable asset in today’s world).
Amazon
Amazon is one of the world’s largest online retailers and a default options for a huge number of people around the world when they want to shop for. Amazon has dedicated websites for a lot of countries in the world and with it’s global stores, it is truly a worldwide corporation.
Not only that, Amazon has a 45% market share in cloud computing thanks to its AWS (Amazon Web Services) that many other companies in the world use. It is also winning over the online grocery market with a share of 40% and with the recent acquisition of Whole Foods, it is getting even more serious.
Imagine the kind of data that Amazon must have about the hundreds of millions of people that use its services in their daily lives. With the recent push in the smart home accessories market, that will only grow.
Therefore Amazon is another contender to be one of the corporate giants that control many different aspects of our lives. If it overtakes other smaller corporations along the way, it might very well be the case.
Personally, I think that if there ever will be a world controlled by a corporation, the most likely contender for it is Google. In the past decade, Google has positioned itself as far more than just a search company, so much so that just recently, it had to go through a major corporate restructuring which saw the inception of ALPHABET.
Alphabet is now the parent company of Google and several other subsidiaries. Thanks to this, a single conglomerate is now undertaking a search business, AI research, robotics, internet services, smart home accessories, life sciences, life longevity research, venture capital, urban innovation, self driving cars, energy, cloud computing, smartphones, Android operating system and so much more.
If that list doesn’t prove to you the kind of unstoppable power the Google will have in the next 50 years, when the research and development cycles will have completed several times over, I don’t know what will.
It is exactly companies like these that have presence literally everywhere, that are shown as the evil guys in sci-fi movies. I am not saying Google (Alphabet) will go on to become one but it is sure that unless it somehow fails, it will be one of the very few companies that will control all aspects of our lives. Scary indeed.