Digital v Human

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I’ve decided that for the next few months this blog is going to be about the development of my next book, Digital v Human (with some exceptions). First I’ll start by adding a few things I’ve deleted. The appendix below seemed like a good idea when the book was a straightforward sequel to Future Files, but now less so. Hopefully, it will find a use in scenario planning and such like.

Appendix 1: Assessment of probabilities*

If you want to capture peoples’ attention about the future it’s useful to use words like “will” and “won’t.” People like people that project confidence and say things with absolute certainty. Avoiding detail, especially specific dates, works extremely well too. However, if there is one thing that we can say about the future with absolute certainty, it is surely that it’s uncertain. Therefore, logically, there must always be more than one possibility, outcome or future.

To this end I have tried to be careful with my language. Certain words used throughout this book are associated with broad levels of probability. This isn’t intended to be scientific, but it has been thought through and is meant to alert both readers and myself to any definitive statements. Probabilities are based upon widespread occurrence, acceptance or rejection by the year 2050, which hopefully creates a small degree of accountability.

Description Range of probability
Will/won’t Greater than 90%
Likely/probable/should 60-90%
May/might/could/possible 20-60%
Unlikely/improbable Less than 20%
Impossible/never Less than 5%

* With due acknowledgment to the Ministry of Defence, DCDC.

My New Book

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Thought I’d share with you the contents of the new book. Book is now written, but I’m entering a 2 month edit stage. Jumping on a plane tomorrow too with a copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick) and Travels in Hyperreality (Umberto Eco). Image above is of my writing desk the past few months and, yes, that is wine – “write drunk, edit sober” 😉

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Preface: Taming the future

1. Society & Culture:
How we came to love our machines more than each other.

2. Media & Communications:
Why instant communication is killing our conversation.

3. Science & Technology:
Is it safe to build a parallel universe in your spare bedroom?

4. Money & Economy:
How invisible money meant we were all mugged by reality.

5. Healthcare & Medicine:
Can we ever acquire a lasting immunity toward loneliness?

6. Planes, Trains & Automobiles:
Where might our self-driving cars eventually take us?

7. Education & Knowledge
What happens to learning when your teacher is an app?

8. Work & Employment:
Why the future might look a lot like The Middle Ages

9. Time Off & Time Out:
Why holidays are happy and retail therapy doesn’t last

10. Home & Family:
Remember when we lived and loved in analogue?

11. Life, Art, War & Death:
The search for (and submission to) something much larger
than ourselves.

12. Conclusions & Suggestions
A simple question that hardly anyone is asking.

Where are you?

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Sorry readers. Become rather focused on the new book. I’m working to have the first draft done by the end of the month, so not much time for anything else. Vaguely normal service will resume in April. I have managed to escape a little. I spent 3 days in Austria where I was involved with a series of innovation workshops for Porsche. Also a breakfast for KPMG and some government work on long-term risks. This was fascinating, although a little frustrating because I can’t talk about it.

It did remind me though of a conversation I had a while ago with a Ministry of Defence guy. We were talking about whether you could tell if you were right or not. For example, if you identify something as being a future issue, but you take steps to offset the risk and it doesn’t happen, were you right or wrong?

Similarly, I think there are a few vulnerabilities (risks) but if I mention them publicaly (in a book say) I might alert someone to an opportunity and something may happen. In this case would I be responsible for making this something happen? I think in a sense yes, which is why I’m keeping quiet.

To end a quote for you, which pretty much sums up what’s being going on with the new book (tittle now agreed but not quite public).

“You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.” – Picasso.

Are Our Communications Killing Our Ability to Communicate?

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Crowd of One is an interesting book by John Henry Clippinger, a senior fellow at the Beckman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. One of the central thoughts of the book is that people only become themselves through their relationship with others. If we become isolated our growth becomes stunted. Critical to this thought is another, namely that technology is changing our territorial and psychological boundaries.

This point is picked up by Sherry Turkle at MIT who argues that: “what people mostly want from public spaces these days is to be left alone with their personal networks” and that a new “state of self” is now developing whereby people can transport themselves somewhere else at the touch off a button.

I think I’ve witnessed this first hand. First on holiday where numerous couples were sunbathing next to a swimming pool, each of them on some kind of portable electronic device. What were they doing? I have no idea but they certainly weren’t talking to each other. They were undoubtedly connected to something but I couldn’t tell you whether their ‘self’ was developing or not.

The second instance was when I took my brother’s kids to an indoor playground. Soon after I sat down a couple in their late twenties sat down next to me with a girl aged perhaps six years of age. The girl was dispatched into the safe play area and both parents took out Blackberries and proceeded to check email. They did this for over sixty minutes without once speaking to each other or acknowledging the presence of their small daughter. Again, they were certainly connected but to what and for what reason I’m not sure.

It’s the same at work. Ten or fifteen years ago people didn’t take calls in the middle of meetings. Today it’s commonplace. I was in a meeting with News Corp not so long ago when someone from their ad agency took a call and the rest of the room was put on hold for almost ten minutes until the call had ended. You can see this teleportation process in operation in countless restaurants too where couples are talking to each one minute and then divert to receiving phone calls or checking emails the next.

Back in the day this would have been considered rather rude and people would have switched these devices off or hidden them under the table. These days it’s just considered normal and these devices are proudly and openly on public display.

In short, we are becoming so tethered to our electronic devices that we never entirely switch off and escape from the presence of others. Now this may be a very good thing in terms of the development of individual identity, because we are constantly connected to other people, but I wonder what it’s doing to the quality of our thinking.

Firstly, our connectedness to others through digital networks means that a culture of rapid response has developed in which the speed of our response is sometimes considered more important than its substance. We shoot off email mails that are half thought out and long-term strategic thinking is constrained by a lack of proper thinking time. We are always responding to what’s urgent rather than what’s important. I could have probably put all that together a lot better but I’m pushed for time and really can’t be bothered.

This connectedness is constant but our full attention is only partial as a result. Linda Stone, an ex Microsoft researcher, coined the term Constant Partial Attention to describe the fact that we feel some kind of need to scan electronic and digital environments to ensure that we are not missing out on something more important. We don’t want to be left out of the loop. As a result, nobody feels secure enough to leave these electronic devices off for an hour during a meeting, let alone for a week when they are sitting next to a pool on holiday.

But it’s not necessarily speed that worries me. There is evidence from Malcolm Gladwell and others that many of our best decisions are made when we have little or no time to think. We can probably get away with this for a while, especially when the decisions that need to be made are fairly unimportant, but sooner or later I suspect our lack of aloneness and reflection will catch up with us.

We just don’t switch off, ever, which means we never truly create the time to properly reflect. We scroll through our days without thinking about what we are really doing or where we are ultimately going.

Emerging tech timeline in Wired magazine

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Really nice spread in this month’s issue of Wired magazine showing the technology timeline that I developed late last year with Imperial College (hand drawn draft above).

Here’s the original link to the map, together with details of the high resolution PDF. If anyone would like to order an A3 full colour hard copy these are available, although there’s a very small charge to cover post and packing.

Original post on tech timeline here….

Interesting list of technologies that didn’t quite make it onto the timeline here…

What’s Next – issue 36

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The new issue of my What’s Next trends magazine has just gone live. Find it right here.

Also, below, is a sneak peek of the new brainmail.

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Have you heard of auxetic substances? Thought not. These are really new and really interesting materials that get thicker, rather than thinner, when stretched. Not only does physical form change when subject to external force, the material stores energy very quickly too. What could you possibly do with such materials? How about blast resistant curtains or dental floss that gets into the tricky bits?
Ref: Economist Technology Quarterly (UK)

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Ever fancied a computer the size of a snowflake? Scientists around the world are working on tiny computers with skeleton operating systems that can report on conditions nearby. Powered by sunlight, vibrations or temperature change such dot-sized devices could monitor buildings or be injected into a tumour to monitor growth. Most useful of all, perhaps, people could embed motes into everything they owned in the physical world and then be able to conduct searches from them in virtual worlds. “Where are my keys?”
Ref: New Scientist (UK)

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Is your boyfriend or girlfriend becoming more trouble than they’re worth? Or perhaps you’re not in a relationship, but the social (media) pressure to be coupled is just too much. Well a solution (some say) is at hand. For $24.99 a month, a Minnesota-based app allows you to have a relationship with a virtual boyfriend/girlfriend who not only texts you back, but will engage with you in conversation.
Ref: Daily Mail (UK)

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A study by Ilsedore Cleeves at the University of Michigan says that half the water on earth is older than the sun, having been carried here as interstellar ice. The study also claims that water is far more common than we previously thought out in deep space.
Ref: New Scientist (UK)

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You’ve no doubt heard of Tom’s shoes and perhaps One Water. How about Who Gives a Crap (sorry, but that’s what it’s called). 2.5 billion people (roughly 40% of the world’s people) don’t have regular access to a clean toilet, which means that diarrhea related diseases kill 2,000 children under 5 every day. Three enterprising Aussies have come up with a way to help. Order their toilet paper online, it gets delivered to your door and 50% of profits go to Wateraid to build clean toilets in the developing world.
Ref: Grapevine (Aus)

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It seems that some people feel better inside if they spend time outside. Ecominds is a scheme run by the mental health charity Mind in the UK. Projects use nature, especially woodland activities, to help people with mental health problems improve their confidence and self-esteem. http://www.mind.org.uk/ecominds

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If you’re a scientist drowning in digital data then Sciencescape might be for you. The site is essentially a “twitter-like experience” that allows academics to filter science stories using chosen categories. One aim is to allow people to ‘follow’ specific geographical places or even individual buildings.
Ref: The Scientist (US)

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Following news that Google has withdrawn the Google Glass prototype from the market comes news that the Google X shunk works is developing smart contact lenses that can analyse a user’s tears to detect medical problems.
Ref: International Business Times (UK)

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It’s not been widely reported but Google has been buying roughly one company per week since 2010. Not surprisingly, many of the companies and technologies are involved in search, or autonomous devices that one way or another finds out more about people, although a great many are in robotics and artificial intelligence.
Ref: Business Insider/CBC News

THE NUMBERS
Danes that drink regular Sprite are 10% less likely to support the welfare system than Danes that drink Sprite Zero.
Ref: Harper’s (US)

In 1975, the cost of the fastest supercomputer was $5,000,000.
You can currently buy a used iPhone 4, which is roughly equal in performance (mflops), for $80 on eBay.
Ref: McKinsey/Brainmail

The cost of factory automation relative to human labour has fallen by half since 1990.
Der Spiegel (Germany)

In the UK two-thirds of 11-year-olds in the UK have a television in their bedroom.
Ref: The Times (UK)

The average automobile now contains 60 microprocessors.
MIT Tech Review (US)

6% of people living in New York that own a smartphone admit to having used it to make an online purchase during a funeral.
Ref: Harper’s (US)

There are now more Christians in China than members of the Communist Party.
Ref: Financial Times magazine (UK)

Worldwide, three times as many people die of obesity than die of starvation
Ref: Daily Telegraph (UK)

Since 2007, the number of prisoners in solitary confinement in the New York area has risen by 63%.
Ref: Harper’s (US)

It took 76 years for 50% of US homes to acquire a landline telephone. With cell-phones it took just 7.
Ref: PWC (UK)

QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.” – Alain de Botton

BOOK OF THE MONTH
From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner (2006)

WORD DETECTIVE
Nomcore (noun) describes people that wear unfashionable clothing as a fashion statement.
Ref: Daily Telegraph (UK)

WEB SIGHT OF THE MONTH: The Way back machine
What the web used to look like back in the day
http://archive.org/web/

To receive regular bites of brainmail, sign up free here….

Brainmail stat pack

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Had a lovely lunch yesterday and dreamt up a new idea with a business called Artefact. Using the content from the last ten years worth of brainmail (!) I’m going to create a stat pack that can be used in workshops for strategic provocations and idea generation. Hopefully have some available in a month or so.

Currently working with Ross Dawson in Sydney on a thought leadership report, about to put What’s Next issue number 36 up and working on the new book.