The End of Average
Medicine, education, insurance, finance, and entertainment are all moving toward hyper-personalized systems that make standardized products increasingly obsolete
By Futurist Thomas Frey
For most of the twentieth century, “average” was a feature, not a bug. Mass production gave us affordable cars, affordable medicine, affordable education, and affordable insurance because it treated everyone more or less the same. The system worked — not because it was fair or precise, but because it was cheap and scalable. Average was the best we could do.
That era is ending. And it is ending faster than most institutions are prepared to admit.
We are moving, across virtually every sector of daily life, from systems built around the average person to systems built around you specifically — your genome, your learning style, your driving behavior, your taste in stories, your actual financial risk profile. The technology driving this shift is AI. The beneficiary is the individual. And the casualty is the standardized product that served everyone adequately and nobody particularly well.
This is the end of average. Here is what it looks like in five sectors that touch almost every life.
Continue reading… “The End of Average”
