Category Archives: Generation-M

The age of the unthinkable

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Some weeks ago, i had the opportunity to listen to a fantastic speech by Joshua Cooper Ramo, writer of the book “The Age of the Unthinkable: why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it”.

This is the sort of guy that when he takes the stage, you immediately know you’re in for something special.

Some personal notes on this great speech:

Our world has now more actors, more groupings. The unpredictability is part of the system. It will be a given part of our future. He talks about:

SHAPESHIFT

Our world offers more options. We have a spectrum choice between no options –> limited options –> unlimited options. You can’t predict what people are going to do with these unlimited options.

YOU CAN’T PREDICT

Our world is more networked. It also means it is easier to share and spread risk

So far the analysis. How can we manage this unpredictability ?

One eye-opener was a visual showing how differently western and eastern people look at a picture: western people mainly look at the object, eastern people mainly at the surrounding environment of that object. So, understanding of unpredictability has a lot to do with understanding the environment.

It will also require resilience. But not resilience as we know it from messaging networks like SWIFT. More a resilience deeply integrated in the ecosystem, a bit like Hezbollah integrates resilience in every little piece of its organization.

Periods of change are not the exception but the rule.

You have to surf the wave, not try to predict the wave, but

look at how the wave can help you.

It will be ever easier to disrupt. The question is how to empower people to disrupt for the good. This is really about innovation driven by a set of values. Oh boy, how close is all this to the ideas of our Think Tank on Long Term Future.

Innovation in big companies can NOT take the lead. They have NOT been instrumental in the shifts from magazines to online, from Microsoft desktops to web2.0 cloud, from Financial Institutions to… un-banked payment and financial solutions.

The speech was delivered as part of an Oracle conference. So, i found it a bit “cheap” to say that Oracle was innovative and Microsoft not. The rationale being that Oracle “buys and integrates” and Microsoft buys “tons” of innovation but does nothing with it, does not integrate. Was a bit too close to the Oracle conference message of acquire and integrate.

He then went further on the theme of personal responsibility (i am free to smoke) and the balance with a certain set of basic rights (for ex healthcare). And that in the USA, everything is about rights (and maintaining that state) not about personal responsibility and that that has to change.

About maintaining states: Twitter is all about maintaining state in a constant changing environment.

And that there is hope.

And that

FEAR is an easy commodity to sell when

people are confused

during disruptive change. And that in these circumstances simple answers are usually dangerous answers.

Or the closing topic: never invest in people older than 25 years, as they are not used to live in constant change.

The speech was great. The book reads “like a train”.


How Bill Gates destroyed the universe

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The Singularity Summit is coming on 3-4 Oct 2009 in NYC. See the impressive list of speakers here.

One of the speakers is Ben Goertzel, who will speak about “Pathways to Beneficial Artificial General Intelligence: Virtual Pets, Robot Children, Artificial Bioscientists, and Beyond”.

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When talking about Robot Children, i would not be surprised if he used the following video made by his 12 year old daughter. Found it via Accelerating Future.

Is this what a 12 year old is thinking about ?

  • Grand Pa’s dying, and let’s upload his brain onto the computer ?
  • It’s uploaded on a Windows computer… do kids care ?
  • Is Grand Pa dead together with all the files on my computer ?
  • A universe with Windows does not deserve to exist ?

If you can believe the credits at the end of the video, at least 12-year old Scheherazade Goertzel does.

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In this case  – among many other things – Scheherazada’s father is the originator of the OpenCog open-source AGI framework, as well as the proprietary Novamente Cognition Engine AGI system.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is an emerging field aiming at the building of "thinking machines", that is, general-purpose systems with intelligence comparable to the human mind. Good starting point to learn more about AGI is http://agi-network.org/

You see what happens when kids get this sort of ideas served with the mothermilk 😉 We recently presented another mothermilk example when we spoke about Aza Raskin, now Head of User Experience at Mozillla Labs. His father was Jeff Rasking, one of the big minds behind the Apple user interface.

Very curious to see what how this Generation-M will move up the ladders, and one day be our leaders. Any other wizkids you are aware of ?

Ted, Bill, Steve, Larry: The way it is

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From the Andy Kessler blog of 20 July 2009 with my choice of extracts and highlights…

The 70s were a smog-filled haze. Upward mobility was a pipedream. Stock markets stagnated and all the moon-walking Space Age dreams of the 60s were shattered with layoffs and plant closings and Rust Belts and urban unrest.

You were told to do well in school and maybe you could get an entry level job at a big company and wear a white short-sleeved shirt and work your way up over twenty or so years, so you could buy that little house in the suburbs and squeeze out 2.3 kids and afford a station wagon and … well, that’s the way it is.

Someone else has all the money and you don’t.

That’s the way it is.

Unknown forces control your life.

That’s the way it is.

Governments are corrupt.

That’s the way it is.

Society is divided into classes, and you’re stuck in yours.

That’s the way it is.

Instead, what it took was a few little microchips (Ted Hoff at Intel), and a couple of funky pieces of code (Bill Gates at Microsoft) and a few smart people (Steve Jobs at Apple and Larry Ellison at Oracle and thousands of others), who weren’t content working for The Man. Each of them dislodged "the way it is" and got a few people asking "why is it this way?" and declaring "think different" and "eat my dust," and

bang,

the status quo crumbled.

Hoff1Bill_gates_011  Jobs_and_wozniak_1975-7564451 Larry_Ellison

You could create your own future. Power shifted out of the hands of conglomerates like Gulf & Western and Engulf and Devour and away from centralized bureaucrats running faceless government operations. Instead, power ended up in your hands, my hands, all of our hands. To do what we wanted.

To change the world, for the better, increase the size of the pie, bring the rest of the world onto our wealth grid. And not by building huts in Costa Rica but by taking down those obstructing progress, those leeching off the rest of us, holding us back, milking the present for their own benefit rather than standing aside and letting wealth-creating innovation increase everyone’s living standard.

Those "that’s the way it is" types needed to move over.

But they didn’t move on their own, so we either had to wait for them to die or just destroy them. Seek and Destroy. Music companies. Travel agents. Insurance brokers. And we’re not done–the hard work has just started.

It took me a long time, well into my life, to get Cronkite’s words out of my head and realize that not only is anything possible (thank you Kevin Garnett), but that I was the one that had to make it happen. There were no gifts, no trailblazers to follow.

We all have to invent the future

by destroying the past.

Sadly, the old mentality is back.

Citibank is too big to fail.

That’s the way it is.

The government needs to bail out the automakers.

That’s the way it is.

Taxes are going up.

That’s the way it is.

Carbon dioxide will boil the oceans so we need to live in cities and walk to work.

That’s the way it is.

Elites like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman and Al Gore will tell you what you’ll be paid, how much health care you’ll get, how much risk you can take, what kind of car you can drive, how much water you can use to flush your toilet, because …

That’s The Way It Is.

 

It does NOT have to be that way.

 

Inspire people to dream,

and to realize their dreams.

15 years and counting to 51

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Not that recent anymore: Morgan Stanley Research Europe published mid July 2009 a report on Media & Internet “How Teenagers Consume Media”.

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What’s cool is they asked a 15 year old summer work intern, Matthew Robson, to describe how he and his friends consume media.

There is a lot to do about this report, as Twitter co-founder Stone does not care that teens are NOT interested in Twitter.

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Also the New-York Times jumped on the bandwagon and said:

As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.

Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.

That’s interesting, especially in the context of the Think Tank for Long Term Future we are putting together – starting up later this year from Flanders: in that Think Tank we want to include upfront young people between 15-25 years old today, who will be our future leaders in 20 years from now (2030 timeframe).

So what is all the fuss about in the Morgan Stanley report  ? I took the pain to download the report and read it myself to have an unbiased opinion and share it with you.

I found the report via the site of the Financial Times. Download here.

First, it is important to understand that the report does not have any representation or statistical accuracy, as it is just the opinion of one 15 year old. It is also very UK centric referring to BBC services and Virgin Media as provider.

The paragraph where all the fuss is about is the following:

Most teenagers are heavily active on a combination of social networking sites. Facebook is the most common, with nearly everyone with an internet connection registered and visiting >4 times a week. Facebook is popular as one can interact with friends on a wide scale. On the other hand, teenagers do not use twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they release that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are pointless.

No wonder that Stone does not care very much. A lot to do about nothing.

The report contained however some other interesting elements. I am just picking a couple that surprised myself. I don’t have a 15 year old at home. My daughter is 3 1/2, so i guess all this is coming my way big time :-). Also, when reading those statements, i feel 15 again as sharing the same feelings. But for my age you have to invert the digits :-/

My personal top-10:

  1. Fast.FM: can choose the songs they want instead of listening to what the radio presenter/DJ chooses
  2. Online TV allows them to watch shows when they want
  3. Don’t read newspapers
  4. Teenagers never use real directories (hard copy catalogues such as yellow pages).
  5. Most teenagers enjoy and support viral marketing, as often it creates humorous and interesting content.
  6. Teenagers see adverts on websites (pop ups, banner ads) as extremely annoying and pointless, as they have never paid any attention to them and they are portrayed in such a negative light that no one follows them.
  7. Music: They are very reluctant to pay for it (most never having bought
    a CD) and a large majority (8/10) downloading it illegally from file sharing sites.
  8. 99% of teenagers have a mobile phone and most are quite capable phones
  9. Nearly all teenagers’ computers have Microsoft office installed, as it
    allows them to do school work at home. Most (9/10) computers owned by teenagers are PCs, because they are much cheaper than Macs and school computers run Windows, so if a Mac is used at home compatibility issues arise.
  10. Games Consoles: Close to 1/3 of teenagers have a new (<2 ½ years old) games console, 50% having a Wii, 40% with an Xbox 360 and 10% with a PS3.

The summary of the report says it all:

What is Hot?

•Anything with a touch screen is desirable.
•Mobile phones with large capacities for music.
•Portable devices that can connect to the internet (iPhones)
•Really big tellies

What Is Not?

•Anything with wires
•Phones with black and white screens
•Clunky ‘brick’ phones
•Devices with less than ten-hour battery life
…

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I really would be interested to find recent and statistically relevant sources of information on 15-25 years old internet behavior, and more importantly on the typical value kit of teenagers, if anything as such exists. Or are we now talking about Generation-M ?