Beyond predictions: where technology becomes lived reality
Part two: space, mobility, attention and the arts
This essay is written in two parts. Using Scott Galloway’s 2026 predictions as a starting point, I summarise and extend them to reveal structural shifts in technology, power and culture.
Part One explored markets, infrastructure, energy, China’s strategic ambitions and where advantage is beginning to concentrate in the AI economy. It focused on structure rather than outcome.
In Part Two, the focus shifts. Here, I look at how those same forces begin to surface in lived experience. Space, autonomous vehicles, TikTok and the arts are all places where technology is shaping how we move, how we create and how we think.
Space: The Next Big Thing
The key metric in the space race is cost per kilogram of payload into orbit, now down 89 percent. Fuelling this new race are investments that have increased by 600 percent.
Elon Musk’s firm, SpaceX, is the dominant player with 84 percent of US space launches.
Galloway makes a compelling comparison – Google owns 93 percent of search, Meta controls two-thirds of social connections, Amazon half of e-commerce. SpaceX controls 90 percent of everything else in the universe.
“Everything is a subset of the addressable market that is space”
Not only is Elon Musk trying to control “everything else in the universe”, he is running an integrated play for interplanetary expansion. What seemed like a random acquisition spree for more than a decade has actually been a coordinated strategy. SpaceX provides space travel; Tesla: electric vehicles, battery technology and robots for on-planet travel, power and workers; The Boring Company: fast-to-dig, low-cost underground transportation tunnels; xAI: artificial intelligence; X Corp: massive inputs to train xAI models; Neuralink: implantable brain-computer interfaces designed to supercharge human intelligence to meet interstellar challenges.
Autonomous Vehicles and Mortality
More than 1,300 Australians lost their lives in road accidents last year. In America, there were close to 40,000 road fatalities; in Europe, around 20,000.
Autonomous vehicles may be the solution.
Waymo driverless vehicles have travelled more than 100 million miles with 96 percent fewer crashes, 90 percent fewer injury claims and 92 percent fewer pedestrian injuries compared to cars driven by humans.
Uptake is increasing – from 38,000 monthly rides in 2023 to 1 million rides per month in 2025.
By comparison, Tesla has only logged 1.25 million miles (with human safety monitors).
Enter China. Again.
Deep talent pools, massive scale in electric vehicle manufacturing and leadership in lidar technology are enabling Chinese companies to build robotaxis at roughly one-third the cost of Waymo. Faster regulatory approvals, dense urban sensing systems and other digital infrastructure have driven rapid deployment, with services now operating in more than 50 cities.
China’s reach is extending beyond its borders, with partnerships emerging across Europe and the Middle East.
By comparison, US regulatory approvals remain slow, with some states blocking approvals, and Australia is a laggard.
If we are genuinely serious about reducing the road toll, governments need to move faster in enabling the deployment of full self-driving vehicles.
TikTok, Choice and Attention
Galloway’s media insight is simple.
Choice exhausts us. Curation liberates us.
“Consumers spend 5 days per year deciding what to watch on Netflix.
TikTok has only one channel, and it’s the best one you’re ever going to watch”
43 percent of Americans aged 18 – 29 years get their news from TikTok.
78 percent of Americans aged 10 – 24 watch TV and movies on YouTube and TikTok.
His warning about geopolitical influence is blunt.
“When I say TikTok … I mean CCP spy”
Some comparisons with traditional media:
The KidsDiana show on YouTube runs for an average 2 – 10 minutes per episode, matching rapidly falling attention spans. KidsDiana has 137 million subscribers. Disney+ has 128 million subscribers.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert employs 200 people, costs $100 million and makes $60 million.
“When Colbert shifts to podcasting, he’ll take 8 people with him and make just $20 million, but it’ll only cost $5 million to produce. The means of production are being arbitraged”
The arts community is divided in its response to generative AI. Many see it as a threat. Others are embracing AI not just as a tool but as their creative medium. Either way, the technology is now deeply embedded in how audiences discover, consume and value content.
Rather than rejection, adaptation is the more constructive response. The opportunity lies in learning how human creativity and machine capability can amplify each other.
Claire Silver, an AI artist who collaborates with AI, puts it neatly: “Taste is the new skill.” Her view is that AI shifts the creative emphasis away from technical production and towards judgment and imagination.
As someone deeply engaged in the arts and broadly supportive of AI, I am conscious that my own views continue to evolve. What felt speculative a year ago is now structural. For those interested, my thinking at that earlier point is set out here.
A Final Observation
You don’t have to agree with every number, every metaphor or every provocation to take Galloway seriously. His strength lies not so much in prediction accuracy but in framing the conversation.
That conversation must extend beyond the technology race. Power is migrating from capital markets to computational systems. The future may not be about building the smartest models, but about who embeds them most deeply into how the world thinks.
It's interesting how you connected the structural shifts to actual lived experience. This insightful analysis on integrated tech strategies is crucial.