The fashion industry has always been about tribes: what kind of person do you want to be? With whom are you identifying by the way you dress?  Expect hundreds more highly influential 16- or 17-year-olds, each with several million social network followers who read their blogs or tweets or watch their videos, to follow suit. That's regardless of how they buy: online or at a traditional store, beyond COVID.  

The fashion and textiles industries are worth over $1.8 trillion, growing 5% a year, employing 75 million people. At present 50% of global growth in apparel sales is in China, which has overtaken the US as the largest market. But prices globally have been falling in real terms for two decades, and will continue to do so as scale increases.

In the US, the industry employs 4 million people, in 280,000 outlets for clothes and shoes. I met an American cotton manufacturer recently who makes 1,400 pairs of socks every minute. Fashion is worth over $40bn a year to the UK economy, employing over 800,000 people – more than telcos, car manufacturing and publishing combined.

* "How AI Will Change your life - A Futurist's Guide to a Super-Smart World" - Patrick Dixon's latest book on AI is published in September 2024 by Profile Books.  It contains 38 chapters on the impact of AI across different industries, government and our wider world, including future impact of AI on fashion, textile industry, marketing and retail.

The COVID pandemic massively accelerated pharma and biotech innovation - every aspect from drug discovery to recruitment for clinical trials. And AI / Artificial Intelligence is accelerating this pace dramatically, enabling highly sophisticated matching of medical data to gene patterns to predict your future health and disease.

And in all this frenetic innovation, we have entered the Age of the Gene, as I predicted decades ago in The Genetic Revolution (1993). Humankind now has the power to redesign the very basis of life itself, and to create a new super-race of people with enhanced DNA. It is impossible to overstate the long term significance of this, which is the basis of transhumanism.

Ability to read your genetic code (genome): It took $3bn and 15 years of work to decode a single genome, a cost which has already fallen to around $1000.  By 2025, it is likely that doctors will be able to read an individual’s genetic code in less than 2 hours for less than $500, enabling us to predict our medical future with far greater accuracy – comparing patterns of genomes, medical records and lifestyle data.

Expect gene readers on devices as small as today’s USB sticks by 2040, taking 30 minutes to decode each strip of genetic code. Gene screening will be free for many people within 20 years, paid for by pharmacies for loyal customers, or by companies wanting to protect employee health, or by insurance companies and governments.

* "How AI Will Change your life - A Futurist's Guide to a Super-Smart World" - Patrick Dixon's latest book on AI is published in September 2024 by Profile Books.  It contains 38 chapters on the impact of AI across different industries, government and our wider world, including future impact of AI on health care, AI in Pharma innovation, AI in genetics and biotech.