Childhood's End

I try to be realistic and relative with new ideas I see, hear or read about, and don’t use labels such as “mind-blowing”, “revolutionary” or associate ideas to Toffler’s “Future Shock“ too easily.  But I've come across one of those concepts, and I’m staggered by it.  The implications are life-altering on a species-level for humanity, and I’m stunned by it’s significance.

I recently wrote about the mountain of data we were on the verge of collecting, and ironically, I think I missed a rather key point.  The real-time reality capture we’re on verge of making happen is but one of the mega-data components we’re enabling today.  The other is the object data, connectivity, rules and implicit implications surrounding the internet of things.  For those uninitiated, the internet of things is the connected-ness of inanimate objects and networking them.  At a macro-level, imagine your refrigerator connected to the web and telling you to pick up some eggs on the way home from home via SMS when you’re low on them.  Clever, yes ? At a more detailed level, it’s the labelling of each individual egg with unique identifiers that exist from production through distribution and consumption and these guide the need to create it, how to care for it, the distribution and marketing of it, the pricing of it and finally its’ consumption and recycling.  A smart egg indeed.  Every single item, in every household and every business, everywhere, in real time all connected and interacting.  Starting to see the scale ?  Complement that with real time capture of every stage in every day of both human and automated process reality.

Like any system, efficiency is achieved through scale.  With a rudimentary backbone already in place to connect (the internet) early systems, the framework for this infrastructure exists today.  The check-out is connected to the warehouse now, so demand, shipping and re-supply are all automated already. Getting more granular is straightforward.

Go forward now. The implications for us are overwhelming.  For this to happen we will need to revolutionize how we look at a number of aspects of our lives as we know them.

·      *   We will require whole new identification systems as today’s are cursory and simplistic when the   interactive and pervasive nature of the future is considered. Bar codes, RFID and IPV6 don’t cut it.  Will we need to be tagged too ?

·      *  The economics of this world will need to change as production is empowered with smart supply and smart demand.  More pointedly, the economics will need to systemically embedded so that ‘things’ understand their intrinsic systemic value.  The “Blade Runner” future vision of being hammered 24/7 with advertising we’ve been weaned on misses the point that as we’re too feeble in our attention spans to manually manage ourselves in this world, and will have to hand over ‘economic rules’ to the system itself. Who defines these ?

·      *  The rules or law itself will need to morph from what’s happened, which typifies our current legal approach to the web, to being enforcement of design rules.  Over-production, or faulty production (Sorry we accidentally killed your husband, the factory had a glitch) will cease to be human-caused, and so our liability concepts will evolve to allow statistically acceptable levels of error.

·      *  We will live always-connected, a cog in the wheel in a system we don’t actually run any longer, but enabled.  ‘Opt-outs’ will be a lifestyle choice I might imagine until it’s clearly uneconomic for the system, so will be eliminated.

·     *   Power in the form of politics and nations will have to evolve as protection of systems rises in importance equal to people.

·      *  Power in the form of electrical generation will also develop, as today’s data storage and management already takes the energy of 30 nuclear plants. 

I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that by and large, we don’t see this coming. 

"Much like a body slowly infected with a virus, the invitation to this future won’t be announced and the milestones missed.  The move to this future ‘utopia’ will be as fundamental a change to our species as the evolution into nations from villages 2500-4000 years ago was.  That was the dawn of civilization, and we’re verging on the end of its childhood.

Design - The Issue with Electric Cars

Like many of you, I'd like to do my part for the environment.  Like many of you, I would like to make good choices where possible, and where the 'cost' of doing so isn't prohibitive, or problematic.  And like many of you, I don't own a pure electric car.

I think of the core issue here as one of design, or specifically poor design.  It isn't that the automobiles in questions aren't attractive, they are.  It's the use-case design that leaves much to be desired.

Let me explain.  I have two flashlights at home, and one is a battery powered flashlight.  When the batteries die, I replace them.  If I need light immediately, this works fine.  It does require I have a supply of spare batteries handy, otherwise this plan doesn't work so well.  I also have a rechargeable flashlight.  After some prolonged use, the light dims, and I must recharge the flashlight. At times, this isn't feasible as it's often required when the power itself is out..  If I need light immediately, this doesn't work fine, in fact, it remains pretty dark in this latter situation.   Now, I have two flashlights as both use-cases support one another, and act as spares if one situation wouldn't work out...I may not have spare batteries, or may have to use the light for an extended period, or perhaps it isn't fully charged.  But let's get back to cars...

Now the issues with the pure electric car isn't a choice - replaceable battery or recharge station, as the former option doesn't actually exist.  In fact, the principal issue (besides the general lack of recharge facilities) is that the recharge takes hours.  Think of the lines you've seen at the gas pumps.  That takes 5-8mins to re-fill a gasoline or diesel tank. Now imagine the lines if it took 5-8 hours to refill/re-charge.

Herein lies the problem.  What we need is a hybrid (no pun) design so that I can borrow (think propane tank refills) a battery pack, connect it to my car and be off for the next 300-400 miles before I have the time and access to a proper re-charge station. That proper recharge might be at my home, office or destination.  And for what it's worth, the gas/electric hybrids don't cut it here..their mileage isn't great as the battery is an afterthought, and so they're just cumbersome, slow and awkward.  Don't believe me? Drive one.

If we focus on pure electric vehicles and the concept of 'battery packs', there's even a pricing model here that would offer benefits for the return of a fully charged portable battery pack, versus say an empty one.  But...as I said, the design doesn't allow for this, and on top of this
a few issues exist that would be problematic, such as standardized connections, moving them, storing them and so on.  Battery technology remains heavy and well behind where it needs to be...just think of your cellphone and the endless recharges it needs.  Even before this technology gets better though (and it will), someone needs to apply some common sense design-thought to how we actually use cars if the pure electric vehicle is ever to go mainstream.

Otherwise Tesla, Fisker and others will go the way of the dodo.

Short & Sweet

Sometimes you can hold someone's attention for a long period of time. Other times (most times) you have to be efficient, eloquent and succinct and make your point quickly and clearly. Often, we don't do that.  We should more.

Feeling Overwhelmed...Don't Look Up Then

There's a lot to remember these days. Between the dawn of civilization and 2003, there were five exabytes of data collected (an exabyte = 1 quintillion bytes). Today five exabytes of data get collected every two days. Soon, there will be five exabytes every few minutes. (Don Tapscott in Designing Your Mind)

The implications of items such as Google glass, and life logging are astounding, and not simply in a big data sense.  How are we to deal with all this data in how we think, recall, and synthesize what's around us, into experience we can use..?  Technology will be the enabler, but the significant change coming quickly at each of us is not appreciated I think.   We're about to personally experience Moore's Law on steroids, on crack, with a triple expresso on the side.

We're going to have to make choices, we're going to have to switch off vast areas, and we're going to experience an intellectual renaissance as a species, once we understand the depth we can reach as time in everyone's reality can be tracked, in real time, at the same time.  This has implications across everything we think about, and touch.

Fasten your seatbelt, the next big shift is almost here.

The Chains of Success

Beware the chains of success, for they will ensnare you with your knowledge and agreement.

We are often wary of the dangers of failure, avoiding it with great effort.  Sure, we know that we learn from our mistakes, but they are still to be avoided at all costs.  Better to have constant success - right ?

I hope we all see that we have to fail, and fail often, to continue to grow.  I saw something wonderful written by Samuel Beckett today.. "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."  Let that thought simmer in your mind for a moment - read it once more, slowly. Like the first sip of a fine wine, it has after-taste and resonance.

Much has been written about the value of failure by far smarter people than me.  But I think at times we aren't warned enough about the danger of success.  Achievement of success means we stop breaking new ground, we stop taking risks and we become comfortable.  We don't want to rock the boat or spoil the success we have attained.  How do we find ourselves in this predicament ?  We do some of the worst things we can do - we reward ourselves for success achieved and often in a disproportionate way.  We buy expensive toys or houses.  We let the monetary side of success seduce us.  Our new relationship with success makes our lives more comfortable, and that feels... good.  A little like rich chocolate as a treat, except that the treat is frequently longer term, and addicting. We get fat on success.

As time goes by, we want the success to continue; in fact we need it to continue to maintain our newly established lifestyle.  Everything in our consumer society drives this point home.  The result is that we aren't taking new risks with our work, our art, or passions.   We know from experience early-on, risk and success don't go together - wisdom filled mistakes taught us this.  So we become derivative in our work, our art and passions.  We settle for this and justify our specialization to ourselves as sensible, all the while not admitting to ourselves that we sold-out to the new house, or expensive toys, the lifestyle enabled and we grew very little.

So beware the chains of success for we invite them, and shackle ourselves with their luxury.  But chains, even gold-plated ones are still chains and they hold us back from our own potential.

Loyalty

When an organization seeks loyalty and gets it, the work just begins.

It's not about handing out the points, the perks or providing the ability to track "status".  It's a contract - a subtle one where the organization has said - "we value you, and we'll recognize that".  That in itself is a huge step.  And it's the heart of the matter.

The loyalty offer doesn't have to be made by the way; we could all live in a Walmart world where the provision of lowest prices carried the day. When the organization elects not to do that, and instead seeks our continued patronage in return for recognition, it's very compelling for many people.  However it carries an implicit promise that is so often over-looked, and that is that when we perceive that the recognition of the value you or I provide isn't forthcoming, we tend to head for the hills quickly.

Recognition isn't 'points' by the way, these are the reward for past behaviour and the lure for future patronage..just one more coffee, flight or trip to the grocer for the free whatever-it-is-we-seek.

Recognition is that acknowledgement that we're all participating in a contract whereby you get my business in return for the understanding that it's appreciated.  When that stops - the points and other mechanisms aren't enough to maintain that loyalty on their own, as just about everybody else has similar reward schemes these days.

Sadly too many organizations have lost the plot on loyalty.  They think they're trading prizes for loyalty, when in fact that wasn't really the basis the customer had for entering into the arrangement.  It is why their customers leave though.

Dear North Korea..

It's fun to watch you posture.

It does make many people nervous, but I don't think they really "get" you.  I think you huff and puff and the whole point in threatening and preening is to score some points at home.  After all, the thought of who might be on your side in an unprovoked attack narrows the field down to...well no other countries actually.  It's really too bad for you that you didn't discover some egregious military faux pas, like a sub stranded in your territorial waters, or South Korean soldiers sliding under the fence for some authentic BBQ beef.

If we look somewhat coldly at the facts, there's been no provocation, no recent event that you can point to, and little attention paid recently to you.  So what's changed ?  Why suck in your gut and inhale out your national chest right now..

Well I suppose there is the issue of succession, which probably doesn't sit right with some of your generals who may have had aspirations.  And Mr. Kim Jong-un (can I call you Kim ?) I imagine you do want to look good in front of the people...after all if it's seen clearly that you're a pimply faced, fat little man who has little talent, and isn't aggressive enough to be his father's son..well, I bet the prisons there aren't too sweet.

So if all this is to make yourself look imperial at home and unafraid of the big bad west, how much is enough ?  What exactly are you waiting for to concede that you've seen victory in this little war of posture.  That's the million won question isn't it.  Who in the west will make some public concession to you so that you can save face and stand down.

Therein lies the problem Kim.  You see without that initial cause to rally around, the one that the rest of us can highlight as the reason you were thrown a bone to shut-up, there's really little empathy for what you're doing.  It may just be too much this time.   When it's agreed it is too much - the payback won't come in the form of a carrier group steaming up the Sea of Japan flying the stars and stripes in the wind..no..the payback will be a messenger from Beijing and it'll be more painful for you personally.

It is fun to watch you posture Kim, but it's not entertaining for very long.

Signed,
Everyone