I'm probably wrong

I've been going through an interesting (for me anyway) mental exercise recently.  You see, I disagree with how someone close to me is treating a 3rd person we both know.  I fear this person close to me will get hurt, and let down, and I don't want to see that happen.  I tried to suggest caution and going slow...to no avail.

I'm not particularly hurt my advice (unsolicited) wasn't heeded - that's not my thing.  Rather I was concerned that we both had seen evidence that trust was abused in the past, and I didn't see that this person close to me had 'learned' from it, as I had.

So I've stewed for a few days.  Not fumed, or was angry in any way, just stewed.  You see this person close to me is probably the wisest person I know.  So the question in my head wasn't.."Why don't they see what I see?"...rather it was.. "What do they see that I don't ?"

I still feel the same way about the situation, and left to my own instincts, I probably wouldn't have done anything that took me off-course from acting in a manner that demonstrated that.  But, I'm putting aside what I think, and acting instead on what they think, and what they are doing.  You see I trust this person close to me, and while I can't get my head around their rationale, I know that's ok - one day I may be able to, and in the meantime, it's better to follow the judgement of someone that you know always makes good decisions.

I don't see it yet -  that I'm probably wrong, and they are right- but one day I hope to.

Pay It Forward

This was a lovely little movie from the year 2000 with that oh-so-cute little actor (Haley Joel Osment) that undoubtedly grew up and became less cute.  At least that's the reaction I get when people see the bracelet I wear that says "Pay it Forward".

In fact the concept goes back many many years, and is attributed to many practitioners from Benjamin Franklin, to Emerson and the phrase itself is credited to Lily Hardy Hammond in her 1916 book entitled "In the Garden of Delight".

Pop culture means historic and interesting references give way to movies though - and the movie had a core message that was conveyed in the title and the desire was to make the idea into a movement.  I'm happy to say that Charley Johnson has done that - and founded Pay it Forward, from which my little bracelet comes.  It's a wonderful idea, and one I'm happy to support, thanks to a few very smart people in my life that helped make me aware of it.

The concept is brazenly simple and elegant.  Do something nice for someone else.  Then give them the token (the bracelet in my case), and ask that they pay that kindness forward to another.  I wear it as it provides a constant reminder to me that I should be thinking of others more than myself.  That's what I 'get' out if it.  Being able to do something nice for another person - well that's just a bonus.

Interested ?  Get your own bracelet here.

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.