Have a look at a couple of the excellent videos on this wrap-up site about Farsight2011.

I could spent days and days in this space. All my favorites, including Hedge Fund Manager and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Recorded Future co-founder and CEO Chris Ahlberg, journalist entrepreneur Esther Dyson, and many more in one big long session about long term future. Yammy – Yammy !

Search is no longer the simple act of typing words into a text box. New user interfaces and mobile devices are expanding the web into all aspects of daily life, and even changing the way we think. An explosion of innovation has allowed us to dream big about the role of robotics and Artificial Intelligence. And yet the future of search is fraught with challenges. The stakes can’t be higher. Is the search industry locked in a race to the bottom or are conditions ripe for a breakthrough? This question took center stage at a gathering in San Francisco on February 1, 2011 which was streamed live on BigThink.com.

 

(Peter Thiel at Farsight 2011 in “How to end the Google monopoly”)

Some quotes from Thiel:

• You need a 35% market share in search to make break-even
• The core problem is how to cut down the massive fixed costs
• Until you solve the fixed cost problem, you have a natural monopoly
• Underestimating fixed costs is a mistake that I intend not to make twice
• I am not so much focused on the revenue side, as I am on the cost side
• Everybody can do the front-end and the revenue with it
• 5-10B$ yearly cost is the barrier to entry
• Microsoft is probably the only company with the capital resources that can compete with Google at this moment in time.

Or have a look at Salim Ismail, Executive Director, Global Partnerships, Singularity University, talking about The Future of Privacy.

• Computing is getting exponentially faster, smaller, cheaper, better
• Our assumption is that these new technologies can scale at global level
• Turning our lives more and more into an information property
• From Discover to Aggregate to Process
• Retrospective vs. Prospective search
• Quantified self, Health Data, Sensor Networks, Internet of Things
• Total explosion of information

About total explosion of information: I also invite you to watch the video of Hasan Elahi’s talk at the Lift11 Conference this Feb 2011 in Geneva, at about the same time as this BigThink Farsight 2011 Summit. The title of his talk is “Giving away your privacy to escape the US Terrorist watch list”;

he is in essence explaining that

by releasing

an explosion of information

about his where-abouts

he makes it impossible

for these authorities

to make sense

out of this massive set of data

The intro is a bit long (but worthwhile to set the scene) but if you are short in time, jump in as from minute 8’30…

• To be formally cleared, you need to be formally charged
• A very unbalanced relationship: I give and I give and I give, and I don’t get anything in return
• They have the ultimate authority, I knew who was in power, and you turn to very animal primal instincts of survival
• And in my case, survival meant co-operate
• And I decided to put everything public

Here is where the video gets mind-blowing: as from minute 12’30

• I wrote a little code that would track me all the time
• It’s kinda bizar seeying yourself as a pixel
• Every flight I have been on since birth
• I am ok with giving you every bit of my data, but you have to do some work to digest it
• My financial records are public
• All my calls
• There is an independent party (bank, phone company, etc) that is verifying that yes indeed I was there…
• I have taken this to a level of absurdity, of detail, that I leave such level of detail about my life, that I live a rather private life.
• After you do the analysis of all this detail, you actually get very little in return.
• Having a little information about somebody is very dangerous as it can be mis-contextualized
• You can’t delete, but you can bury it in an explosion of information
• Or to conclude:

This is another way

of getting back into control

of your identity