Jump The Curve Archives: 05/2009

Unlearning Science

In relative terms, the field of plate tectonics is still fairly new—becoming widely accepted only in the mid-1960’s. The idea that massive continents could have drifted apart over millions of years was, however, first expounded on by an amateur American geologist, Frank Bursley, in 1908. Bursley was struck by how the shape between the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America looked as though they could fit together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and suggested the movement of the continents might also explain the formation of mountain ranges. Bursley provided little evidence and his idea was soon—and easily—dismissed by the scientific establishment who had little time for the “strange” theories from amateurs.

A few years later Bursley’s idea was picked up by a German meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, who was disturbed by the many animal and fossil anomalies which didn’t fit conveniently into the day’s existing theory of how the earth was formed. Again, it was dismissed. This time because the idea came from an outsider—a meteorologist.

And what precisely was the leading theory used by geologists to explain how the exact same fossils of animals and plants could have existed on the opposite sides of different oceans? The answer was “land bridges”—mysterious strips of land, for which no evidence existed, but miraculously allowed animals to peacefully and successfully meander thousands of miles across vast expanses of the world’s oceans.

For example, when an ancient horse named Hipparion was found to have lived in both Florida and France, geologists drew a land bridge across the Atlantic Ocean to explain away this disturbing discrepancy. Soon, a variety of other land bridges begun to spring up and populate the world of geological science in order to explain everything from how tapirs existed in both Southeast Asia and South America at the same time to how snails could turn up in both Scandinavia and New England.

Surprisingly, and in the face of a complete and utter lack of evidence, land bridges remained the geological orthodoxy for the next 50 years. In 1944, a British geologist, Arthur Holmes, wrote a book entitled Principles of Physical Geology elaborating on Wegner’s theory but it was dismissed by one reviewer who even had the temerity to warn that Holmes presented his arguments so coherently that they might actually be believed by students! In 1955, no less a figure than the esteemed Albert Einstein wrote a ringing endorsement for a book which all but ridiculed the ideas of Wegener and Holmes.

And in 1964, in the face of mounting evidence, a Canadian geologist by the name of Lawrence Morley wrote a paper explaining how magnetic studies of the floor of the Atlantic Ocean were spreading in the exact motion prescribed by the theory of “continental drift.” Morley’s paper was abruptly and rudely dismissed by the editor of the prestigious Journal of Geophysical Research with this now infamous note: “Such speculations make interesting talk at cocktail, but it is not the sort of thing that ought to be published under serious scientific aegis.”

Later that year at a conference of the Royal Society the tide finally began to turn but it wasn’t until 1968 when the same publication, which had rejected Morley’s paper only four years earlier, published the article which gave the science of plate tectonics its name.

The story serves as a wonderful reminder to those scientists who are quick to dismiss ideas from amateurs, outsiders, and unconventional thinkers. To this end, I invite you to watch this 60 Minutes segment on “Cold Fusion” and pay special attention to the outright dismissal of the idea by some of today’s leading experts. Could they be wrong? I don’t purport to know the answer but history suggests that these scientific experts should at least entertain the notion that they might be wrong.

The same is true of the theories of Aubrey de Grey, an outsider from the field of computer science, who is strongly challenging today’s conventional wisdom on the “science of aging.”

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The Future of Search … Isn’t Search

With something which has been touted and even hyped for more than 50 years—as has the field of artificial intelligence—it is easy to dismiss predictions from proponents that “this time it is different.” But one of the funny things about the future is that sometimes (not always, however) “this time” really is different. To this end, I invite you to read this informative article in today’s Mercury News entitled ”Siri Lifts veil on intelligent assistant.”

I especially liked this quote: “The future of search isn’t search. It’s a conversation with someone you trust.” That “someone” will, most likely, be an artificial intelligent agent. The reason is three-fold. First, people are becoming increasingly comfortable relying on their iPhones and smartphones for a wealth of information. Thus, the idea of relying on artificial intelligence is rapidly gain ground in our culture. Second, Moore’s Law isn’t going to slow down for at least another decade which means that computers will become, at a minimum, a 1000-fold more powerful in the coming decade. Third, and most important, due to sophisticated algorithms, artificially intelligent bots can learn from your preferences as well as the preferences of others. In other words, machines can learn and get smarter at a much faster rate than us mere mortals.

Welcome to the Exponential Economy my friends. Your artificially intelligent guide stands ready to assist you on your journey.

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IBM Thinks Small

Since writing my first book on nanotechnology, ”The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business,” I have followed the emerging field of nanotechnology quite closely. As I have often written on these pages, IBM is one of the most impressive players in the field. And, if anything, the pace of the company’s activity in the field has only accelerated in recent years.

To this end, yesterday “Big Blue” announced it was creating a new nanotechnology center in Egypt and today it announced a similar center in Bulgaria. Now, the creation of such centers may not appear like much but I’d argue that IBM is doing itself an immense favor by exposing itself to foreign scientists who might view things from a different perspective.

Like every other field, nanotechnology can fall prey to “groupthink.” One strategy for defeating conventional thinking is to employ scientists from different areas—which is precisely what IBM is doing. It is just one reason why I believe IBM will continue to “jump the curve.”

Related posts on nanotechnology by Jack Uldrich

15 Ways Nanotechnology is Already Making Your Life Better
Nanotechnology & The Future of the Cellphone
Nanotechnology and the Changing Face of the Electric Utility Industry

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The Future is Creative

I recently finished reading the June 2009 edition of Fast Company. It is entitled “The 100 Most Creative People in Business” and I highly recommend it. If you don’t have the time but are interested in the future, I will provide links to two “must-read” profiles. The first is of Neri Oxman, a Presidential Fellow at the MIT Media Lab. I especially loved this quote of hers: “I believe that in 50 years buildings will be like biological tissues.”

The second profile is of Dr. Anthony Atala, Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and a world leader in growing human tissues. I have always been a strong advocate of “thinking like a child,’ and I enjoyed this quote of Atala’s: “It was naive of me. But being naive helped me not accept the current dogma that tissue can’t grow outside the body.”

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The Future Will Blow You Away

Dear Readers:

I am off to enjoy this Memorial Day weekend. Here is a short video that I produced last year. If you haven’t seen it, it is worth five minutes of your time.

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How Tools Are Shaping Our Future

Marshall McLuhan once wrote, “We shape our tools then our tools shape us.” Never has this been more true. Consider first this article from today’s news reporting that a new nanotechnology microscope has been developed to aid in our understanding of the human brain. This, of course, will lead to new discoveries in the field of neuroscience. And, as this article on ”Harnessing science to develop the ultimate warrior” describes, these advances in neuroscience (and genomics) will begin to shape us in new and profound ways.

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The Singularity of Ray Kurzweil

To better understand long-term technology trends there are few people better than Ray Kurzweil. If you are not familiar with Kurzweil’s ideas this six video will stretch your mind. And, as they say, “once a mind has been stretched, it never goes back to its original shape.” Enjoy!

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The Future of War: Ethical Robots?

Having been brought up on a steady diet of sci-fi movies in which robots betray their human masters, it is easy to envision a future in which rogue robots engage in unethical activity.

The opposite—a scenario in which robots are more ethical than human counterparts—is more difficult to imagine. From my perspective as a professional futurist this, however, is the more likely scenario

MSNC.com has published an excellent article entitled ”Robot warriors will get ethics guide.” Here is the operative quote: “Ultimately these (robotic) systems could have more information to make wiser decisions than a human could make.” In essence, because robots don’t get scared or become over-emotional they are unlikely to over-react and act in ways which society would consider unethical.

This is not to say that such ethical hardware and software packages have yet been fully developed but smart human computer and software programmers are working on such systems today and these system are only going to get better. The question we need to ask ourselves is this: In the heat of battle, would you rather have a scared, stressed-out 19 year-old behind the trigger or an unemotional robot which could quickly assess the range of options available to it and arrive at the most ethical conclusion?

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Jump the Curve Strategy #11: Park n’ Save with Robots

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The Future is Closer Than You Think

As a professional futurist my job is not to predict the future. Instead, I offer my clients a range of possibilities about what might happen in the future. As a starting point for these “possibilities, I always begin with those trends that are already here. (As I have said before ”the future is here, it is just not yet evenly distributed.”

To this end, I’d like to share two emerging trends in the personal transportation market that I’m confident will grow in the coming years. The first is the development of solar fabrics which will soon be used by bikers and cyclists to recharge and power their electronic devices.

The second and more exciting trend is the creation of air-powered motorcycles. To understand the latter’s potential, especially in countries such as India and China where smog is a serious problem and people have limited disposable income for fuel, I invite you to watch this short 1.5 minute video:

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The Future of Supply Chain Management

This past weekend I finished reading “Flowers for Algernon”—which was made into the 1968 movie “Charly” with Cliff Robertson. The basic premise of the book is that a retarded man undergoes an experiment and it provides him with superior intelligence for a short period of time.

At one point near the height of his intelligence Charly writes: “Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything--all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it.”

I am in the midst of preparing for a keynote presentation on “the future of supply chain management” and I was reminded of the passage because I stumbled across this front page article in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled ”Clarity is Missing Link in Supply Chain.”

I especially liked this quote from one executive who said when dealing with wildly inaccurate forecasts, “You actually had to pick a number with no knowledge whatsoever, because nobody knows anything.” (The emphasis is mine—nobody knows anything!")

The quote highlights to me the need for professionals in the supply chain management business to—like Charly—first acknowledge how little they actually know. Once they do this they then at least open themselves up to the possibility for both the incremental and the radical advances that might benefit their profession.

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Here Soon, Technology That Will Dramatically Impact the Supply Chain

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May 15, 2009 Jump the Curve: Beware of Emerging Technologies

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Will Wolfram Alpha Jump the Curve?

At 7pm (Central Standard Time) tonight, a new type of search engine—called Wolfram Alpha -- will go live. There is still much that can go wrong with the program but, personally, I am very excited about the project and believe it heralds yet another step down the inevitable path toward artificial intelligence. All I can say is stay tuned. (Below is a 5-minute video explaining tonight’s venture.)

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The Future of the Airline Industry

A few months back, Freakonomics had an interesting post entitled ”What Will U.S. Air Travel Look Like in Ten Years.” The post had some helpful insights from industry experts such as Clifford Winston, Richard Branson and Josh Marks, but few of these insiders looked at the issue through the lens of emerging technologies.

Let me then offer my thoughts on how the industry will change in the decade ahead. For starters, advances in RFID technology will have greatly reduced—if not altogether—eliminated lost bags. Recall that last year, IBM announced it was partnering with Schiphiol Airport in Amsterdam to begin tracking baggage through that airport using RFID technology. By the end of 2009, IBM is hoping to trace all 70 million pieces of luggage that flow through the airport. Given the competitive nature of the airline industry and the high cost of lost baggage, I expect every major airport in the world to have implemented RFID technology by 2017.

Second, while it is impossible to predict how effective labor unions will be in protecting the jobs of thousands of TSA workers, I think there is an excellent chance that consumers will have a much shorter delay when entering the airport of 2017 due to new advances in molecular diagnostics, facial recognition technology, Iris identification and nanosensors. These technologies should allow a limited number of security personnel to efficiently and securely oversee the screening of the millions of passengers that pass through the airport each day by rapidly and accurately detecting the presense of any harmful weapon or dangerous chemical or biological contaminant.

Third, I expect airplanes to become even more crowded as the airlines use improved algorithms to actively sell empty seats to passengers. As America ages, many Baby Boomers will have extra time on their hand and the airlines, by knowing more about each customer (such as knowing that your Uncle Freddy likes to go to Las Vegas) will be able to entice him on short notice to catch the flight for $79.

Directly related to this trend is the fourth trend or what I call hyper-information. Websites such as Farecast are already doing a good job of telling consumers if they should buy a ticket to Paris today or wait until closer to Christmas in order to get a better deal, but as a result of exponential advances in information processing technology, data storage and algorithms these sites are only going to get better. More perfect information will lead to a more efficient allocation of resources and a continuation of razor thin margins for the industry. In short, look for more bankruptcies and mergers as the weak are herded out.

Trend #5: Biofuels will alleviate some of the price and environmental pressures the industry is facing over rising fuel costs. Look for companies such as Imperium Renewables and others to develop environmentally-friendly biofuels for jets. It is even possible that advances in synthetic biology will have lead to companies such as Synthetic Genomics driving the price of jet fuel down signficantly.

Trend #6: This one will still likely be small, but I expect that a number of planes will have only one pilot by 2017. Advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and drones—which will have risen exponentially in military use—will have begun to make their way into the commercial airline industry by this time. Airline companies looking to cut costs will realize that it no longer makes economic sense to have two or three pilots per plane.

Finally, a portion of the regional air traffic (e.g. trips less than 300 miles) will be siphoned off by advances being made in the field of flying cars such as I wrote about here. While the vision of being able to take-off straight from your house likely won’t be possible by 2017, I do believe a limited number of well-to-do consumers will be able to drive to smaller regional airports and fly their cars to other regional airports that are in close proximity to their final destination. (For a video of this technology check out this recent post.)

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Develop a Future Bias

In my 2008 book, Jump the Curve, I make the case that one strategy for “jumping the curve” and helping your organization innovate into the future is to “develop a future bias.”

A future bias is the opposite of “hindsight bias” and hindsight bias is, quite simply, the idea that after an event occurs most people take credit for believing that the idea was pre-ordained and that they knew it would happen. For instance, by 1920, most citizens claimed they knew that man would “always” fly.

Unfortunately, this isn’t true. Most people were completely blind-sided by human flight. Lord Kelvin, the world’s most renowned scientist claimed in 1899 that “Heavier than air machines are impossible,” and no less an authority than the New York Times wrote in an editorial in December 1903—just two weeks before the Wright Brother’s historic first flight—that human flight would not be achievable for “1 to 10 million years.” My guess is that if a poll had been commissioned at the beginning of the turn of the 20th century the overwhelming consensus among the American public would have subscribed to similar opinions or, alternatively, something along the lines of “If God had intended man to fly, He would have given him wings.”

In the future, as a result of exponential advances in technology, many things that sound impossible today are, in fact, not only going to be possible they are going to be commonplace. Therefore, in order to embrace this future, it will be necessary to think exponentially—and not linearly—about the future. As Ray Kurzweil says in his book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, in the 21st century humanity will experience the equivalent of 20,000 years of change (using the 20th century’s rate of change). What he is trying to do in an indirect way is to get people to develop a future bias.

I recently came across this photo on Digg.com that shows the world as it is expected to look in 250 million years.

I think it offers a wonderful metaphor for thinking about tomorrow’s world because tomorrow will be radically different from today. Therefore, one of the first steps a leader must take in preparing him or herself to lead an organization into the future, is to develop a future bias. To do so, it first helps if that leader can envision a world that will look radically different. Therfore, when thinking about the future, I would encourage the “Exponential Executive” to keep the above picture always in mind.

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In Praise of Absurd ideas

As regular readers know, I am a big fan of ”the power of play”—the idea that we need to reengage our inner-child if we truly want to innovate our way into the future. To this end, I’d invite you to read this article by Allison Arieff entitled ”Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas.”

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Flexible Electronics Will Necessitate Unlearning

Technology Review has a good article on the extraordinary advances now being made in the field of flexible (and stretchable) electronics. It can sometimes be difficult to imagine both how these advances might lead to new products in the near future and why some product designers and engineers will need to unlearn many of their ideas of what they think a cellphone, for example, should do and look like. But rather than lecture you about the possibilities, the fine folks at Nokia have produced a video which conceptualizes some of the possibilities. Enjoy and keep your mind open to unlearning:

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Convergence: Brain-Control Interfaces & Robotics

Whenever I give presentations on emerging technologies or the future of technology, I stress to my audiences that one of the big themes they must keep in mind is convergence—the idea that different technologies will “mix and match” in unique and innovative ways.

One clear field of convergence I see on the horizon is “brain-controlled” robots. Although the 40-second video (below) is in Japanese, it offers an early (and admittedly) crude vision of how soldiers, stroke victims and senior citizens will soon be able to control robots by thought alone:

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Jump the Curve, Today!

I have said it before and I will say it again, ”The future is here. It is just not evenly distributed.” For proof of this statement and a glimpse into tomorrow, I suggest that you only peruse today’s news. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Case Western Reserve is experimenting with a new version of Kindle for textbooks. It is only a matter of time before e-books begin replacing old-fashion textbooks on campuses around the world. (Of course, this begs the question of whether colleges will even be relevant in the future.)

Elsewhere, researchers at UCSD have reported that advances in the field of quantum dots have taken society one step closer to ”mainstreaming nanotechnology in medicine.” And, if you don’t think the robotic revolution is real, check out this story reporting that a robot now has its own Facebook page.

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Long-Term Care’s Robotic Future

Later this week, I will be giving a keynote presentation to the Wisconsin Association of Homes and Services for the Aging. In addition to these two trends which I discussed a few weeks ago, another big trend I will be highlighting is the growing popularity of robotic pets. This six-minute video from Japan offers a glimpse into the future.

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The Future Requires Unlearning

Recently, I participated in the first-ever Ignite Minneapolis event. The format stipulates that you can discuss any topic you want but you must use 20 slides and you have exactly 5 minutes to make your case. Below is my presentation on why I believe unlearning will be just as—if not more important—than learning in the 21st century. (I apologize in advance for my swearing but when you have to capture the attention of 500 (often intoxicated) 20-30 year-olds who are Twittering during your presentation, sometimes drastic action is required.)

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Unlearning 101: Lesson #1
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Unlearning 101: Lesson #1

As regular readers of jumpthecurve.net, you likely know that one of the chapters in the book, Jump the Curve, was dedicated to the concept of unlearning. The idea deserves greater attention than a chapter and that it is why I have now started a new website, www.unlearning101.com, dedicated exclusively to the concept. As part of the effort I also intend to produce regular short videos. Below is the first episode. As always, I appreciate any feedback.

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Unlearning 101: Lesson #1
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Jump the Curve: May 1, 2009

In today’s video I explore the connection between chocolate candy bars and your personal genome:

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