One of my favorite quotes comes from Kurt Yeager who once said:
“In periods of profound change the most dangerous thing is to
incrementalize yourself into the future.” I was reminded of
this quote because although I often speak to businesses about the
future of technology, I frequently encounter push back from
executives who are mostly interested in identifying ways to
incrementally improve their businesses or products. In short, they
are looking for improvements in the range of 10%.
I constantly remind them, however, that we are no longer living
in an era of linear growth – a 10% improvement might have been
sufficient to keep them competitive in the past, but it is no
strategy if they desire to be in business in 10 years. To achieve
that goal, they must be on the lookout for how 10X improvements
will transform their business. (Ray Kurzweil, in this excellent editorial , also
emphasizes this point.)
To this end, I recently came across a couple of articles that
highlight this point. The first addresses how a number of researchers are looking to increase data storage by “a
factor of a hundred.” It is difficult to contemplate how a 100X
improvement in data storage might transform education, media,
advertising and even health care, but it is imperative that
professionals in these fields start thinking along these lines
immediately. (cont.)
As a response to Accel Rose’s post on the future of cities by
Stewart Brand, I thought I would pass this along as a supplement.
It’s a one-hour presentation on the “City-Planet”, a long-term
trend barely noticed by anyone.
According to Brand, “The massive urbanization of the world now
going on is changing everything, affecting economics, the
environment, and global population—- most of it, in surprising
ways, for the better. The more I delve into the subject, the more I
find it packed with news which is not being widely reported or
thought about.”
This is one of a monthly series of Seminars About Long-term
Thinking, given every second Friday in San Francisco, CA, organized
by The Long Now
Foundation .
Futurist Stewart Brand
explains that the global rise of squatter cities is a good thing
because it enables people to connect with others and gain access to
education. He points out that unemployment in squatter cities is
generally near zero.
Check out his short and sweet presentation at TED:
Brand projects that the number of people living in squatter
cities will grow three-fold to $3 billion over the coming decades.
Makes me wonder if these regions will become the new hot-beds of
innovation as technology rapidly lifts their inhabitants up the
hierarchy of needs, provides cheaper connectivity and better
education.
The Lithuanian capital city of Vilnius is about to embark on the
construction of a new-age masterpiece. Designed by award-winning
British Iraqi
deconstructivist architect Zaha Hadid, the new Guggenheim
Hermitage Museum will be a museum and arts center that houses the
St. Petersburg-based State Hermitage Museum and selected Guggenheim
collections.
The pre-build research for the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum is
slated for completion by 2008 and the building set to open in 2011.
Check out the phenomenal photos of the design pictured below the
fold.
Other remarkable projects by Zaha Hadid currently underway
include the CMA
CGM Tower in Marseille, France, the Bridge
Pavilion in Zaragoza, Spain, the Kartal Urban Transformation in
Istanbul, Turkey, and the Glasgow
Transport Museum in Glasgow, Scotland.
Seeing such forward-thinking architecture cropping up in the
small post-Soviet Baltic country of Lithuania, with a total
population of only about 3.7 million, demonstrates just how high
the bar has been set for futuristic architecture around the world.
I wonder when such design will make its way into more expensive
markets like NYC? (cont.)
Exponential
technology and information are
poised to transform the world, but can the human species muster the
social will to let that happen?
To date we’ve created amazingly fuel-efficient cars, robust water
purifiers, revolutionary stem cell -based therapies, and
better, cheaper light bulbs, all of which have met with great
social and political resistance, greatly slowing the pace of their
spread. This has caused many to scratch their heads in confusion,
others to curse up at the sky, and some to chuckle at the naivete
of their fellow meme-monkeys.
Take for example Dean Kamen, the
Edison of our time who invented compact kidney dialysis, the
Segway human
transporter and most recently a water purifier that could save
upwards of 5 million lives in under-developed nations if widely
deployed. Kamen’s innovations have repeatedly encountered social
barriers, causing him to proclaim that creating new technology is
the easy part.
“I’m disappointed with every project I ever do. Because you work
on something for years that you think should take hours. You
finally get it done and you think, ‘Now the world’s going to be a
better place,’ expressed Kamen in a recent Newsweek article,
“Then you find out that as fast as technology moves, people move at
the same slow, cautious pace they always did. If anything, people
have gotten more cautious, more afraid of change, more skeptical,
more cynical.”
Sloth-like technology diffusion is nothing new. The late great
Everett Rogers
taught us that all technologies except for Interactive
Communication Technologies (ICTs) spread at an amazingly slow rate
due to cultural barriers. Seasoned futurists all point out a
consistent bias in favor of overly ambitious predictions and
sternly warn their fellow prognosticators to avoid similar
mistakes. And now Kamen has joined the ranks of those with enough
experience to back up the notion. (cont.)
“Sometimes I feel like the late Dr Frankenstein,” once said
celebrated science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. Although he was
not being entirely serious, Clarke’s powerful predictions did
release a sort of monster – one whose powerful memes penetrated
many aspects of society and will continue to spiral out of control
far into the future.
In the wake of his passing, Clarke’s predictions have been
highlighted for their genius and accuracy. The following video,
created for Ovation TV, is a great overview of some of his most
exalted predictions, which include inventions like the videophone,
email, space shuttles, laptop computers and cloning, and explains
how he is “responsible for revolutionizing modern communications.”
What follows this overview is commentary by renowned experts
informing the weight of Clarke’s predictions.
Alvin Toffler, acclaimed futurist and author of Future
Shock, said, “The future is not inevitable, it is made, to a
considerable degree by human beings, and chance plays a role.
Nevertheless, it is possible to see patterns that others haven’t
seen. And I think that is certainly something that Arthur Clarke
has done.”
Larry Smarr, Director of the National Centre for Super
Computing, remarked the rarity and utility of Clarke’s work by
saying, “We have incredible numbers of specialists, but how many
people do we have that are synthesizing this knowledge and
visioning the future?”
“Clark will emerge as one of the greatest visionaries of the
20th century,” added Jeff Greenwald of Wired Magazine – I think
it’s safe to say that even among the moderately informed, few would
disagree with this statement about Clarke’s legacy.
This Future Fiction piece was cross-posted from the
blogFuture Feeds.
TechnoTraveller, the Tokyo company that was making furor on the
stock markets for the last months has recalled all of its 12
million Electro-suits after a teenager was found dead in a Tokyo
park. The unfortunate youngster’s solar electro-suit, while powering his
laptop, cell phone, iZune and Thermo-sweater malfunctioned and
directed all the sun-powered energy to the Thermo-sweater. Built-in
feedback systems that should have prevented such an event did not
work appropriately and the Thermo-sweater function will from now on
be disabled in the product, a TechnoTraveller spokesperson declared
in a company press bulletin.
The company’s hot selling item was the driving force behind
TechnoTraveller’s dethroning of Google as Wall Street’s darling
finding a need for cheap power on the road to fuel all electronic
portable devices and warming people in cold climates by using
high-efficient solar fuel cells weaved into a suit. TechnoTraveller
stocks plummeted by more than 55%. The press bulletin further
stated that although the recall will decrease profits and losing
the Thermo-sweater feature will impact sales, there is no need for
panic by shareholders and the future of solar clothing is still
looking bright. The Tokyo coroner performing the autopsy is still
trying to establish whether the cause of death was sixth-degree
burns or electrocution.
One of the richest cities in the world, it’s no
wonder architectural innovation is blossoming in Dubai. The
latest of which is the Pixel Tower – a new-age, champagne-inspired
state of the art residential building for the hip and filthy rich.
Designed by James Law of James Law
Cybertecture International, this 18-story beauty sits on
Dubai’s waterfront and is designed specifically with sun exposure
and seaside-viewing maximization in mind.
Not only an architectural sight to behold, Pixel Tower is also
fully equipped the technology their target clientele is after. With
security cameras that can be read from cell phones and PDAs and the
ability to control one’s apartment remotely, its first residents
will feel light-years ahead of any average young and trendy
apartment dweller situated most anywhere else.
Check out more pictures of this architectural phenomenon
scheduled for completion in 2010 below the fold. It is indeed, as
Law put
it, a “forerunner of building towards future living that embodies
great design, efficiency, style and technology.”
I recently finished reading James Burke’s excellent book,
“Connections,” in which he explains how a
myriad of seemingly unrelated advances in technology helped to
create new technologies and how these technologies, in turn, often
lead to changes in societal behavior. For anyone interested in the
future, I highly recommend reading the book because if it teaches
us anything—it is that the future will unfold in unexpected ways.
At the risk of sounding like a nitpicker, I would like to take
objection with just one of Burke’s main points and that is his idea
that the only way to look at the future is through the past. To
this point, I’d offer two quotes from the book. The first is:
“Anyways, there is nowhere else to look for the future but in
the past” and the second is: “Why should we look to the past
in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else
to look.”
In a general way, I agree with the sentiment and that is why I
dedicated an entire chapter (“Back to the Future”) in my new book to this idea. (In fact, I am
now contemplating writing an entire book on this theme).
Nevertheless, I don’t agree that the past is the only way
to study and understand the future. I also believe that science
fiction offers an alternative way to think about the future. Among
the best thinkers of how new technologies will transform societal
behavior are science fiction writers. This is because they are not
merely obsessed with technology for technology’s sake, they seek to
understand how it will also influence and change people’s thinking
and behavior.
Founded by a group of international architects in NYC in 2003, eVolo Architecture aims
to set new standards for the future of architecture. Although it
claims to act as a forum of discussion for the development of new
ideas pertaining to architectural design, it effectively provides a
forum for innovation and forward-thinkers to be as creative as they
can be, and get a bit of credit for it.
The forward-looking group holds yearly international
competitions for innovative architectural design with absolutely no
height, shape, or other restrictions (besides being technologically
feasible and environmentally responsible). Prizes for the most
creative and innovative designs are awarded, incentivising
forward-progress and some elegant roadmaps for the future of urban
architectural development.
Below we’ve showcased five of the nine 2008 Skyscraper
Competition winners’ amazing works of art.
A few years back, I came across a quote that has really stuck
with me: “You can’t incrementalize your way into the
future.” With this quote in mind, I’d invite you to read this
short article from Popular Mechanics
discussing the new X-Prize to create an automobile that achieves
100 miles-per-gallon or more—and can be mass-produced.
What I like about the contest is that it is not trying to
“incrementalize” the automobile industry into the future. In other
words, the sponsors of the contest are not looking for a crappy 5
or 10 mile improvement in MPG performance
from the automotive industry. They are looking for a 4X
improvement.
I’m optimistic that the contest will succeed and that within a
decade’s time many of us will be able to purchase a safe, stylish
and comfortable car that can run more than a 100 miles on a single
gallon of fuel. This is because by freeing researchers, scientists,
hobbyists and tinkers from the constraints and paradigms that have
so far mired the automotive industry in a century of un-innovative
thinking; the sponsors have provided inventors a sufficient
financial incentive – in the form of a $10 million prize – to
approach the issue from a completely fresh perspective.
As an analogy consider the following: If you asked a high jumper
to improve his jump by 5 to 10%, he would probably focus only
improving his leg strength – so he could jump higher. If, however,
you told him the goal was to “jump as high as possible” and that he
would be rewarded for reaching the highest level, he would llikely
look at a whole new set of tools with which to achieve the goal. To
keep the analogy simple, he might consider using a pole vault – an
advance which would effectively double the height he could
jump.
Along the way to cheaper, energy-efficient Organic Light Emitting
Diode (OLED) surfaces, there’s a window of opportunity for
technologies like regular LED and Electro-Luminescent
(EL) signage. If mega-rapper Kanye is any
indicator, then the
flashing LED suit that he wore at
this year’s Grammy Awards will
become all the rage as it drops in cost.
One company poised to take advantage this technology in the
near-term is Australian LED and EL
product manufacturer Ozibadge. They’re already selling
dynamic EL signage, crazy LED belt
buckles, and flashing EL t-shirts. Take a look at this promotional
video to get a sense of the items just on the verge of exploding
into the environment around you:
Get ready, because all of the obnoxious trend-setting children
in your neighborhood will very soon be following in role-model
Kanye’s footsteps.
youngster’s solar electro-suit, while powering his
laptop, cell phone, iZune and Thermo-sweater malfunctioned and
directed all the sun-powered energy to the Thermo-sweater. Built-in
feedback systems that should have prevented such an event did not
work appropriately and the Thermo-sweater function will from now on
be disabled in the product, a TechnoTraveller spokesperson declared
in a company press bulletin.
One of the richest cities in the world, it’s 
