A computer walks into a bar…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1956, John McCarthy coined the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) to describe the type of machine-based intelligence that he thought would be reality within ten years. Warp-drive to 2012 and AI still seems a very long way off, especially if you use the well-known Turing Test to assess intelligence.

But perhaps the Turing Test, which attempts to capture the nuances of human speech by asking humans to guess whether something is a machine or another human being, is the wrong test, especially when you stop to consider that computers are already flying planes, driving cars and buying and selling shares on global financial markets.

One possible alternative to the Turing Test is a visual test created by researchers at the University of Exeter (above). Click here for more…

The Future of Flying

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wish I’d seen this before I did a presentation to the British Airline Pilots Association. Some good futuristic stuff in here, much of which I’ve seen before, but some of which not (e.g. formation flying, illustrated). Click here for the PDF (17 pages). The section on biomimicry on their website is good to.

BTW, if future of flight/flying/airlines is your thing follow the tags below.

The Future of shopper behaviour (and the shape of cities).

 

How’s this for a coincidence. Two emails in of 24-hours from two different companies asking about shopper behaviour in 2030. Both were food companies. There was a third a month ago.

On a somewhat different note I had a very interesting conversation in Rome last week about how the visual nature of cities (i.e. the aesthetics of buildings and urban planning) can impact wellbeing. This links somewhat to the work I’ve done looking at how physical spaces can influence feelings, which in turn impacts thinking.

Does anyone know of any good studies showing a direct correlation between the presence of art and physical or mental health?

Fauxstalgia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New book #1 is done. Now to catch up with What’s Next, which is now so late it’s almost historical (and hysterical). Several things caught my eye today. Firstly, a new term – fauxstalgia – meaning new technologies that make the contemporary look classily dated. According to Wired magazine, an app called Retro Recall is a good example. This randomly showcases fashion, music and TV from 1980 onwards. iZotype is another example, which is a sound-processing program that adds ‘authentic’ vinyl crackle to digital recordings, although when I looked at this it didn’t quite seem to be what the app was offering.

What’s going on here? Possibly it’s the idea put forward by the writer Simon Reynolds that for sections of society “the past has replaced the future in the imagination.” Why so? I think it’s possibly related to anxiety caused by uncertainty.

More seriously, the other things included an article in the FT saying that India’s richest 100 people own assets equivalent to 25% of Indian GDP. Also, fact that 800 million Indians live on less than 50 cents a day. Meanwhile, in an older edition of the FT, there’s the assertion that next year the US Air Force will have more drone pilots than pilots of ‘real’ F16 fighters.

 

Finding the time to think

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two days ago I was in London speaking at a conference on resilient water resources. My brief was to speak about how people in the water industry could think differently in order to become, you’ve guessed it, more resilient. I was given 15-minutes, which rather points towards an answer that says something about giving people more time.

A lack of time for thinking was something that came up again yesterday in Rome where I was attending a workshop on megatrends organised by the House of Ambrosetti, a firm of management consultants. What was rather lovely about this event was the pace. It started at a very reasonable 9.30 and went on to 4.30, but there was ample time for a proper sit down lunch.

This fitted rather well with a presentation given in the afternoon by Tal Ben-Shahar, a psychologist that teaches at the interdisciplinary Center at Herziliya (Israel) and was formerly at Harvard, who delved into the creative process and highlighted the much forgotten fact that the brain needs sufficient time for it to work effectively, especially when it comes to the generation of original thinking. Immersion in a subject is the first phase and this cannot be rushed. Equally, incubation, the second phase needs time too and especially a period of relaxation and there are no short cuts.

I especially liked the research study he quoted saying that if you have your email permanently open (or Facebook up) and are trying to do something else at the same time (like thinking, for instance) this is equivalent to the loss of ten IQ points, which is comparable to being awake for 36-hours straight. Smoking cannabis results in a loss of a mere 4 IQ points (yes, I too thought about the impact of being awake for 36-hours, being on Facebook and smoking cannabis all at the same time).

Takeaways? Find the time to think and make switching off (switching of digital devices but also switching off and slowing down yourself in the sense of rest and relaxation) a daily ritual rather than an annual resolution.

 

Looking backwards

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A nice quote from Stewart Brand, reviewing a book by George Dyson called Turing’s Cathedral: “One of the best ways to comprehend the future of something is to study its origins deeply.”

I couldn’t agree more. I worked with a newspaper many years ago looking at delivering tomorrow’s newspaper and a vital element was looking backwards one hundred years or so using an historian.

The World in 2020

Here are the headline results of what the world might look like in 2020 based upon a conversation with 130 people in a workshop in Dubai yesterday. Some information has been left out due to confidentiality, but what remains is still interesting I think. You’ll no doubt see that it’s a bit negative on one level, but I suspect that’s because people tend to project things forward from the present. Note that this was done in a couple of hours and was very much a top line of what the group thought.

More extreme political environment
Cyber-war a serious issue
Internet regulation in place or being rolled out
Further device convergence
Continuing shift to digital environments
Virtual teachers in use
Personalised learning programs
More women in leadership roles
Bring your own device the workplace/school
Role of teacher becoming that of mentor/life coach
More virtual workplaces
Increase in wealth disparity (rich getting richer, poor poorer)
Greater trade protectionism
Longer working week
Multiple careers standard
24/7 Workplaces
Increase in obesity/poor health
Much more everyday stress
Environmental change worse than expected
More global catastrophes (greater impacts and frequency)
Increase use of biofuels & alternative energy
Increase in distance/virtual learning
Further privatisation of schools
e-books have largely replaced text books