Plane stupidity

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Richard

I’ve been in Greece doing some stuff. The hotel was very nice, but to be frank it could have been anywhere. Interestingly, the guests were largely American, although that’s probably because the hotel was linked to a large American chain. The BRIC tourist crowd that I usually bump into was nowhere to be seen, except for a few young Russians.

The journey out was awful. Because I wanted a direct flight I ended up going with Thomas Cook, which was beyond dreadful. It wasn’t so much the 8-hour delay, but the fact that nobody ever bothered to make an announcement about what was going on. The airport departures board continually displayed incorrect information (3, possibly 4, factually incorrect statements about boarding and departure times) and to find out what was actually happening you had to find the information desk (no signage whatsoever) and even then you ended up talking with a handling agent, not Thomas Cook.

My only explanation for this is that representatives of Thomas Cook were too scared to make an appearance in front of their own customers. You probably think I’m exaggerating this point, but when the final announcement about whether the plane had been fixed or not was about to be made 5 policemen turned up to keep the peace – in case the news was bad. Actually that’s one thing I’ve started to notice about the English – that they no longer sit quietly and do nothing, but complain loudly like Americans.

But what really got me was this. If the company had the foresight to arrange for the police to be present (armed, by the way, although this was a pure coincidence) then why did they not have the intelligence to handle the whole situation better?

What people wanted was information. They wanted someone from the company to show up in person and explain to them what was going on as soon as things looked bad (so within an hour of the missed departure time). If this meant saying that they didn’t know what was going on that would be fine.

Moreover, announcements that certain things would happen at certain times were just plane stupid if they then didn’t. I can understand (but only just) the fact that the departures board continually displayed incorrect information, because there was, I was told, a third party involved. However, people that explain, in person, that |”You’ll be off by 12,00”…“You’ll be boarded at 2.10” or ‘We can load the whole plane in fifteen minutes” should know better than to make promises they can’t necessarily keep.

Customer service moral: Tell people what’s going on directly as soon as there’s a major problem and don’t say things you know not to be true or things that may turn out not to be the case. I get on a lot of planes and I’ve never seen one carrying several hundred people boarded in 15-minutes, for example.

Also, when you apologise to a planeload of angry customers, do it from the heart and not from a soulless script. “We’re sorry for the delay” is a perfectly good response if a plane is 15-30 minutes late. If a departure is 8 hours behind schedule it just won’t do. “We’re incredibly sorry for the huge delay” might be a little bit better. Equally, offering passengers “One free drink” isn’t really appropriate. Do what Virgin Blue once did and say: “All drinks are on us until the bar runs dry”.

BTW, I’ve got two book recommendations for you. The first one is called Why You are Australian by Nikki Gemmell. It’s a letter from the author to her children about why she moved then from England to Australia and it’s terrific.

The second book, that I picked up on impulse at the airport, is called future Babble: Why expert predictions fail – and why we believe them anyway by Dan Gardner. I’m still reading it but so far so good.

Trends for 2011 (I know, I know)

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Richard

Time to revisit this, I think. It’s a list of predictions (I know, I don’t do them) for 2011, originally published in the Courier Mail in Australia in January 2011.

Here’s the list.

1. Uncertainty
2. Volatility
3. Discontent
4. Religion rising
5. Formality
6. Food inflation
7. Long land
8. Digital deluge
9. Feature fatigue
10. Pyjamas

The full article can be found here.

What cities will look like in 1950 (a view from 1925)

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Richard

A lovely graphic via retronaut.

Why do we keep doing (and falling for) this?

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Richard

Here’s something from the UK press from back in April…

“There are plans for water sharing across neighbouring utilities and warnings of standpipes if the dry weather continues. The cracked ground of a parched riverbed, queues of sunburnt women waiting in the streets for water, wildfires raging across moorland – many will remember the drought of 1976 and the arid climate of Britain’s long hot summer. With the current drought covering huge swaths of the country, are similar conditions in store if it continues into 2013?

According to Professor Phil Haygarth of Lancaster University, our lakes and rivers could become toxic as they dry out, and freshwater swimming may be off limits. “If river flows lessen in the spring and summer time there is a tendency for what’s called algal blooms – toxic algae that grow in rivers and in lakes,” he says.”
The Guardian, 16 April 2012.

And here’s something from the UK media in July 2012….

“Britain has endured the wettest start to a summer for more than a century with up to 17 inches of rain falling in some places and forecasts that the miserable conditions will continue into next month. Thousands of properties have been flooded with insurers estimating the cost of repairs at hundreds of millions of pounds. ” – Daily Telegraph, 11 July 2012.

This is a classic example of simplistic extrapolation, and the reason why most predictions are wrong, but is something else going on here? I’d say yes. The media, especially in the UK, loves sensation and fear. They think it sells newspapers and drives high ratings. But I think we need some realism in such reporting and most of all we need an appreciation of history and the longer-term context.

Computers that predict the future

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Richard

Can you predict the future? Most people would say absolutely not, certainly not in the sense of making highly accurate forecasts about what or when something will happen. But not everyone agrees. Dirk Helberg from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich has suggested a scientifically based way of putting all the world’s data into a single super computer, which then predicts what the future will look like. Astonishingly, perhaps, the debt-ridden European Union is considering giving Helberg one billion euros to build such a machine.

The idea, in a nutshell, is an extension of the Big Data idea. Take every bit of available data across economics, government, cultural trends, energy, agriculture, health, technological developments, together with data linked to climate and weather to create a Living Earth Simulator or FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator as it’s called. Why would such an idea work? Because Mr Helberg says he’s done it before – kind of. Some time ago Helberg built a system to model highway traffic, which showed that reducing the distance between vehicles resulted in an end to stop-go delays. The only problem is that for this to happen you have to reduce the space between moving vehicles to such a small distance that you need self-driving cars to make it work. Moreover, a highway is less complex that the whole earth with seven billion highly emotional, at times irrational and occasionally anarchic human inhabitants.

As Gary Kind, director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard says, agent-based modelling only works when you are dealing with a narrow set of circumstances. For instance, how do you model the emotional impact of the death of a world leader, the arrival of UFOs, $200 oil or 9/11? The timing of such events is surely impossible to predict and there are always complex feedback loops. Moreover, we do not have a rigorous model for human behaviour and humans, ultimately, are at the heart of what Helberg wants to model.

It’s true that with enough data one can build sophisticated models, even if we do not understand the laws governing certain types of behaviour. We can look for patterns and anomalies and these may be used to predict outcomes or create policy. We are also on the cusp of a world with unparalleled volumes of data and analytical sophistication.

Nevertheless, predicting precisely where and when a financial market will collapse or a global pandemic will start is vastly more complex than predicting highway traffic flows. We can’t even agree on what will happen in financial markets tomorrow let alone next year or in five years time. In my opinion Helberg is falling face first into a number of huge traps. The first is that his idea is dependent upon extrapolation from historical data. He is assuming that everything has a rational explanation and that everything can be measured and modelled. But I’d argue that things often happen for no observable reason (dumb luck) or that even when there’s a clear reason the chain of events that follow cannot be accurately predicted. Take 17 December 2010 for instance. How can you create a machine that predicts that a street vendor in a small Tunisian town will on this day set himself on fire and that his protest will create a string of popular revolutions across the Middle East? You might observe that the conditions are right for such an event to take place, eventually, but you can’t say when or where or and so. It’s like saying that an area of land contains dry kindling and that one day it will be set on fire, but you cannot say when the fire will break out or how far – and how fast – the fire will subsequently spread.

Apart from complexity and chaos there’s also the issue of humans not understanding outcomes. What if, for example, the machine says that to prevent a health pandemic we need to kill a democratically elected politician? It would make no sense to us so should we do it? We would have knowledge of the problem, perhaps, but we would not be able to comprehend or understand the machine’s solution. Moreover, if the machine made several suggestions, how would we decide which course of action to take? Another issue is that of the self-fulfilling prophecy. If a trusted model says something will happen then a prediction can impact the situation being modelling. This happened recently in the UK when the government said that a fuel tanker strike might give rise to fuel shortages. Everyone took this prediction at face value and went into panic mode, thereby creating a fuel shortage. Finally, a centralised system of data collection and analysis is a very old fashioned idea. Instead, why not create clouds of open data via the Internet and give access to everything to everyone. An open data format would encourage participation, collaboration and fruitful disagreement. This would cost far less and work far better.

BTW, there’s a computer called Nautilus in the US that reads the news and works out what’s next…kind of. Similar sort of thing.

Obituary

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Richard

Anthony Wiener, who looked into the future in 1967, has died aged 81. He will be largely remembered for his book The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty Three Years, which was co-written with Herman Kahn in 1967. He got things about 50% right, including the suggestion that automated banking, personal pagers and “perhaps even pocket phones” might appear by the year 2000.

Kahn, by the way, was partly responsible for the development of early game theory and it was Kahn who popularised the term “scenario.’ As Kees van der Heijden points out in Scenarios, the Art of Strategic Thinking, the term reinforced Khan’s belief that he did not make predictions, but instead created stores for people to explore.

Stanley Kubrick used Khan as partial inspiration for a character Dr Stangelove.

Why trends bend

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Richard

If one more person had said “Have a magic day” I might have hit them. I’ve been in Hong Kong for a night staying at the Disneyland Hotel. Mickey Mouse in Cantonese and Mandarin is somewhat weird. Anyway, amongst other things, I’m putting the finishing touches to a new book called The Future: 50 Things You Really Need to Know. Here’s what used to be the end before it got thrown out (I hate throwing things away, which is why have a habit of recycling them here).

—

Ideas can be tricky in the sense that they often combine in novel and unexpected ways. Thus, the future rarely ends up as a logical extension of our current thinking. Some ideas will move much faster, or much slower, than we expect, either because we will underestimate the speed of technological change or because we will forget about the impact of human psychology and the inertia of history. This latter point is hugely important. Futurists, especially techno-optimists, often focus on technology at the expense of other important factors, especially the psychology of their fellow human beings, many of whom can be emotional, subjective, irrational, forgetful and stark raving mad.

Therefore, while science and technology will exert significant influence on the future, other, more prosaic, ideas or events may prove to be far more influential, especially when they combine with inherently human responses. For example, it is likely that machines will one day become smart enough to replace people in many more roles. At this point capital effectively becomes labour. But what will the human reaction to this situation be? Similarly, a major man-made or natural disaster could trigger a seemingly illogical technological regression, while a prolonged economic depression might result in anger or resentment towards other nations that ends up with a steady retreat from globalisation and many of the values, institutions and beliefs that we currently take for granted.

If you are thinking that this all sounds a little unlikely and that the future will most probably be a predictable and logical extension of the present, then consider what a handful of men armed with a simple idea, together with some low-tech box cutters and a rudimentary knowledge of flying, managed to do to geopolitics, US military deployment and the global zeitgeist on 11 September 2001.

We might also find that many of our new ideas, especially major scientific and technological breakthroughs that would benefit mankind, are constrained, modified or rejected by large numbers of people in favour of illogical beliefs and superstitions. Rather than a new enlightenment, we may enter a new dark age where it is illogical beliefs, rather than facts, that flourish. Again, you might believe that this future is implausible, but it’s already happening in some regions where the teaching of evolution is being rejected , either in favour of the balanced teaching of various viewpoints, or because religion considers such ideas to be dangerous and subversive.

Or perhaps we will abandon the internet, either because we no longer trust much of the information it contains, or because governments, or corporations, around the world start to censor it or remove many, or all, of its open and generative qualities.

We should also remember that important things happen by accident and that people often find uses for ideas that their creators did not foresee. Sending texts via mobile phones is just example of the unintended consequences of technology. Similarly, Twitter was largely created ‘on the fly’ by its users and not the unfolding of a long-term master plan. We often make long-terms plans based on an imagined future, but life then makes unexpected and unwanted turns. The challenge, to some extent, is dealing with the realities that we get rather than those we expect. Life, as John Lennon said, is what happens to you while you are making other plans.

It would also be a mistake to assume that the future will be a singular experience. Some people will experience the future sooner than others, which is much the same as saying that how you experience the future, 5, 15 or 50 years hence, will to a large degree, depend upon what age you are, where you live and what you spend your time doing. There is also the point made about prophesy by the philosopher Karl Popper many years ago, which is that the future is dependent upon the growth of knowledge, which is itself unknowable or, at the very least, unpredictable.

To conclude, the only thing that we really know about the future is that it will be different. Nothing is inevitable and equally nothing will happen in isolation.
Overall, the future offers us many wonderful possibilities, but it remains up to us whether the opportunities are embraced, squandered or ignored. The future is already here, but it’s unclear what we’ll decide to do with it.

Should we be optimistic about the future? On balance, the answer is probably yes. In the shorter term there are serious issues on the horizon and everyday life is likely to get more difficult for many people, especially in relation to food, water, energy and resources. Mankind also has a habit of doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, often due to short-term pressures, or messing things up completely by leaving things until it’s too late. But we usually muddle through and eventually fix any serious wrongdoings.

Over the longer term things are looking brighter, largely due to forthcoming developments in areas such as healthcare, energy and the Internet. These changes won’t benefit everyone, so one of the key challenges is to ensure that any newfound optimism is evenly distributed and that more of the world’s people can engage in a debate about what kind of future we would all like to live in.

Yesterday’s futures

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Richard

I’ve been at the University of Warwick attending a conference organised by the Society of Chief Librarians. There was a good talk on scenarios by Rafael Ramîrez, a fellow in strategy and director of the scenarios programme at the Said Business School at Oxford. He said something I liked which was as follows:

“Trends are the leftovers of yesterdays futures”

I think this is largely true, especially if you are talking about distant futures. Trends tell you about yesterday. They can sometimes tell you something useful about today, but you have to be very careful about projecting them forward. Having said this, I believe that some trends can stand the test of time. Demographics might be a case in point, although even here you have to be careful. For example, the UN has just adjusted it global population forecasts due to “unforeseen” fertility in Africa.

One other thing. I was in Birmingham earlier in the week (nice new library!) and couldn’t help but notice the amount of people on the street selling grievances. There were two stalls on the street selling personal injury compensation and another asking if you’d been mis-sold financial services. There was definitely something in the air around being hard done by or wanting to claim your share of the pie.

Image: Futurelab.org.uk

On forecasting

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Richard

I’m going through a pile of newspaper cuttings for the next issue of my What’s Next report and found this tiny morsel from an old issue of the FT lurking under a pile of New Scientist magazine cuttings.

Philip Tetlock, author of Expert Political Judgement, found that experts of any professional or practical persuasion make very poor forecasters. At best, expert predictions perform little better than randomly sticking a pin on a list of stocks or picking economic predictions out of a hat. So what can one do if what one wants to do is make good predictions?

The answer, according to Tetlock, is contained within an essay published a very long time ago by Isaiah Berlin, which itself harks back to the thinking of the Greek poet Archilochus. The secret, it seems, is to develop a cognitive style that is highly promiscuous, self-doubting, frantically curious and meddlesome. This will, on most occasions, work better than thinking that is based on a single worldview or a lone idea.

In other words, question everything.

Past views of the future

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Richard

Why do we continue to get the future so wrong? Personally, I think it’s a mixture of three things. First, it’s very hard not to base future predictions on extrapolations. We project recent experience into the future, with little or no regard as to the impact of unexpected new ideas, innovations or events. Second, we simultaneously underestimate and over-estimate the influence of technology. Classically, we over estimate its importance in the shorter-term and under-estimate it over much longer periods. Third, we focus too much on technology, economics and the environment and forget about human nature and the influence of the past. In other words, psychological factors can be critical.

Enough of all that. Now for some funnies…

Click on a date for a film about the future from history.