Jump The Curve Archives: 07/2009

The Future Will Get Under Your Skin

I know I just said the other day that social networking is the future of health care. But another healthcare trend I am equally bullish on is the utilization of robots for the treatment of a growing assortment of ailments. The picture to the right shows you how incredibly small these devices are getting (1 millimeter) and they are only going to get smaller due to continuing advances in nanotechnology. As they do, according to this article, these devices will eventually be able to do everything from deliver drug loads to precise locations to clean out clogged arteries.

The future is about to under your skin and, while the idea might make some people’s skin crawl, it will also make them healthier.

For other robotic-related madness, check out these old posts:

The Future of Health Care: Part 3 (Robotics)
The Robot Will See You Now
Hospitals Robotic Future: Part 2
Hospitals Robotic Future: Part 1
Hospitals Get a Lift

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To Survive the Future, The Publishing Industry Must Unlearn the Past

On August 5, 1949 Wag Dodge and a team of fire-fighters went into the Mann Gulch in Montana to battle a fire. The conditions were hot and dry. As evening approached, the fire changed directions and hot embers flew over the crew cutting off access to the Missouri River. It was soon apparent to everyone that they could not contain the fire.

Dodge and his fellow team members did the most logical thing and sprinted toward the top of the closest ridge. Soon the winds grew faster and the fire began advancing at a rate of 600 feet a minute. The crew dropped their gear and 50-pound packs in an attempt to run even faster.

Feeling the heat now pressing upon his back, it was clear to Dodge that he and his team weren’t going to make it to the ridge. He yelled at his men to stop. Either not hearing Dodge over the din of the roaring fire or thinking he had lost his mind, the men continued running. Dodge then did something even more incredible. He lit a fire.

As expected the dry brush quickly ignited and raced aheadof Dodge. With the larger fire still roaring down upon him, Dodge doused his handkerchief with water from his canteen, stepped into the still smoldering embers of his self-ignited fire, and laid down and began sucking up what little oxygen remained as the larger fire leapfrogged over the small patch of burnt land.

Amazingly, Dodge survived. Unfortunately, thirteen members of his crew did not. They couldn’t outrun the powerful fire.

Out of this disaster was born something positive. On that fateful day, Dodge inadvertently invented the escape fire—a tactic that is today standard operating procedure among forest firefighters—but which was created, literally, “in the heat of the moment.”

The story is relevant to the publishing world because, like a raging forest fire, continued exponential advances from the world of technology are going to continue to wreak havoc on the industry. For example, the first edition of the Amazon Kindle held 250 books. The second version—1500! It’s not going to stop there. Data storage capability is doubling roughly every 6 months. In other words, when Kindle 3.0 comes out, it will store 6,000 books. At this point, it is foolish for K-12 and post-secondary administrators not to use this technology.

Because of continued advances in bandwidth, it is already possible to download an electronic book in a minute. What this implies for textbook publishers is that rather than publishing annual updates, their authors can modify textbooks on the fly as new knowledge becomes available. Of course, this makes eminent sense because scientific and technical knowledge is now doubling every two years.

The changes won’t stop here. Advances in flexible electronics will make e-books easier and more enjoyable to use. The addition of color “digital” ink will make it feasible to include visual animations into books. The net impact is that books can become multi-media in nature. Is there really any reason why the printed word must stay confined to the printed word? No!

Another exciting technological advance I have written about before is Live Ink. The current paradigm for reading the printed word—in straight lines read from left to right (as you are doing right now)—was created because historically paper was a limited commodity. When the written word transfers to an electronic format, however, a new paradigm—such as Live Ink—can emerge.

Wikis, crowd-sourcing and collaboration will also continue to transform the publishing world; as will other unexpected advances in other areas. For a example, consider the following paragraph:

”Dave Striver loved the university--its ivy-covered clock towers, its ancient and sturdy brick, and its sun-splashed verdant greens and eager youth. The university, contrary to popular opinion, is far from free of the stark unforgiving trials of the business world: academia has its own tests, and some are as merciless as any in the marketplace of ideas. A prime example is the dissertation defense: to earn the Ph.D., to become a doctor, one must pass an oral examination on one’s dissertation. This was the test Professor Edward Hart enjoyed giving.”

As a writer, I think it is a fine piece of work and, like most good fiction, it seems to possess an aura of real- world experience. Here’s the problem--especially if you’re in the publishing world or if you are a writer like me—the paragraph was written by a computer program, dubbed StoryBook.

Change is coming to the publishing world and it is unlikely anyone is going to be able to outrun the technological winds fueling the conflagration. Like Wag Dodge, the best strategy is to take a match to your own industry and start thinking of an entirely new strategies for surviving. To do so, it will help if you can first unlearn.

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Social Networking: The Future of Health Care

Social networking is the future of health care for three very simple reasons: It is better for patients; providers; and payers.

Let’s first look at how a variety of social networking tools such as Facebook, Twitter, PatientsLikeMe and scores of iPhone applications are improving people’s health.

Ironically, the power of these tools does not rest so much in their technological capabilities—as impressive as they may be—as they do in their ability to harness and channel one of humankind’s oldest motivators: The desire to do what is right for one’s family and one’s community.

And, herein, lies the real power of social networking tools—they allow patients to share health care information with their family, friends, colleagues and, increasingly, even strangers. This act of sharing information then serves as a powerful mechanism for holding people accountable for performing the very actions which will lead to an improvement in health care outcomes.

Today, any number of procedures, including weighing oneself, taking medications, or checking one’s blood pressure or glucose level can easily be monitored online. This, in turn, allows interested parties to monitor one’s performance. A friendly “atta boy” from a daughter or grandson is more powerful than a chiding from a nurse or doctor.

Moreover, if there is an incentive attached to using a social networking tool to continuous monitor performance, it can serves as an additional motivator. (To gain an appreciation of the opportunity in this area, I invite you to watch this 5-minute video of Vena’s new social networking platform.)

Second, social networking tools, will help health care professionals reconnect with the reason most of them went into the profession in the first place—namely, to care for people. Again, it is somewhat ironic that instead of “depersonalizing” the patient-doctor relationship (as many people fear), social networking tools allow professionals more time to focus more on the human-side of the business—and less on the administrative tasks.

For example, by utilizing tools such as Myca, Medscape and Epocrates, doctors can quickly and accurately research and diagnose diseases. This will leave them more time to explain, educate and treat patients. In the case of Hello Health, patients can use its FaceBook-like application to pull-up a doctor’s schedule, select a time slot, indicate the type of appointment, ask questions in advance, and then schedule the appointment. This simple tool saves the patient from having to sit unnecessarily in the doctor’s office and it allows the provider to be better prepared when he/she arrives for the consultation with the patient.

The third reason the industry will inevitably move toward the rapid adoption of social networking tools is because it will save hospitals, insurance companies and the government billions of dollars. As one doctor recently said, “This is a $2.4 trillion industry run on handwritten notes ... we’re using a 3000-year-old tools to deliver health care in the richest country on this planet.”

Not for long.

To understand the opportunity for savings, it first helps to know that that the Mayo Clinic—now regarded as a leader in employing social networking tools—has spent a total of only $1,500 on the area. The majority of social networking tools are free. In Mayo’s case, its podcasts regularly educate up to 80,000 listeners at a time, and it’s YouTube channel is saving thousands of patients from unnecessary visits. Elsewhere, innovative health care providers in Spain are using the virtual reality site, Second Life, to consult with teenagers about sexually transmitted diseases, while others are using SimulConsult to help generalists make the better and earlier diagnoses of rare diseases and conditions. The net result is that patients are being treated sooner at a lower cost.

One hundred thousand (100,000) doctors are using Epocrates at an average of 6 times-a-day. This and other social networking tools will continue to explode in the years ahead because it is a proverbial win-win-win situation for the patients, providers and payers.

If you are interested in the future of health care from the perspective of everything from robotics, RFID technology and genomics to biotechnology and nanotechnology, check out the following past posts:

The Future of Health Care is as Near as Your iPhone
Healthcare is the “Verge” of Something Big
Here Comes Intelligent Medicine
The Future of Healthcare is Accelerating
Personalized Medicine’s Accelerating Future
The Future of Health Care: Preventing Disease
Health Care Providers Need a Second Life
The Future of Health Care: Part 3 (Robotics)The Robot Will See You Now
Hospitals Robotic Future: Part 2
Hospitals Robotic Future: Part 1
Hospitals Get a Lift

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Want to Understand the Future? Study History.

In his famous speech at Rice University where he declared that it was America’s intention to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, President Kennedy said “the greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds,” adding that “the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.”

Kennedy went on to offer a historical perspective for the magnitude of change society had experienced over the short course of human history. He asked his audience to condense the 50,000 years of man’s recorded history into the span of fifty years. Under this scenario, Kennedy noted that not much happened for the first forty years. Ten years ago, man emerged from his cave, and only five years ago did he learned to write. Christianity appeared two years ago, the printing press this year, and just two months ago the steam engine appeared. Last month electric lights, telephones, automobiles, and airplanes became available, and only last week did we develop penicillin, television, and nuclear weapons. To reach “the stars before midnight tonight,” Kennedy then poignantly added that Americans would have to “dispel old [and] new ignorance.”

Since achieving Kennedy’s goal in 1969, progress has continued exponentially. (Ironically, perhaps, with the exception of space exploration which, as Monday’s 40th aniversary of the moon landing reminds us, has not made much progress.) Taking his historical analogy a little further, however, in the last proverbial “day” computers, biotechnology, the Internet, and the sequencing of the human genome have all appeared on the scene.

What Kennedy’s analogy reminds us it that will need to continue to ‘dispel old ignorance”—or continuously unlearn if you will—only on a faster scale because the future is about to change in the “blink of an eye.”.

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To Prepare for the Future Take a Course on Unlearning

At the end of yesterday’s post on learning to unlearning (on my other website, Unlearning101.com), I posed the following question: How does one learn a new gestalt? To begin a person must start by unlearning some things. But what things do we unlearn? For our purposes, a good place to start might be to imagine what a course on unlearning what might look like.

One place to start is to imagine where the course would take place. Initially it will be--and already is--online. In 2007 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it was putting all of its courses online for free--for anyone in the world to access.

And let’s remember, the online, virtual classroom of the future is only going to get better. The Internet of the future will be streaming incredible amounts of data-rich information anywhere in the world, students will be capable of wirelessly downloading the latest information from flexible electronic books that display both the written word and video files, and new software programs will be capable of translating text from Mandarin Chinese, French, or Farsi into English--and vice versa. (See ”The Future of Reading.")

Another place a course on unlearning might gravitate toward is 3-D virtual-reality environments such as Linden Labs’ Second Life--a site where anyone can create a personal avatar of himself, meet other virtual avatars, and engage in online training sessions. As of this writing IBM, Dell, Intel, Circuit City, and Sears have all created a virtual presence in Second Life.

Interestingly, one of the initial motives of this move was not to create a stronger presence on the Internet (although that is certainly a factor), it was to achieve cost savings on employee education.

What is more interesting from the perspective of unlearning is how Second Life and other virtual-reality sites can be exploited to provide people with different perspectives. In a virtual environment, people can take on any appearance they want. While some people will undoubtedly use it for escapist fantasies, it could also be a powerful tool to help people unlearn certain habits. Imagine, for example, customer service representatives or managers being required to act as customers in one of their own online stores. The experience could provide a unique and refreshing perspective. (And, as I recently wrote, we could all benefit on occasion from unlearning everything from your perspective of color to your view of a stranger standing across the street.)

Longer term, the classroom of unlearning will likely become even more immersive. Perhaps Second Life will morph into Third Life. Among the technologies this environment are likely to incorporate will be enhanced visual, auditory, voice and speech recognition, and haptic technologies. Doctors and service technicians could use these tools to practice operations and repairs in silico before being allowed to ply their trade in the real world.

These tools will also be a boon for learning, unlearning, and relearning. People are often classified into one of three broad categories of learning: visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. Visual people learn by seeing or reading something, auditory learners by hearing it, and kinesthetic learners learn by doing it with their hands and muscles. (It is not quite this simple. Many people use a combination of different techniques for different things, but in general, most people tend to favor one of the three methods over the other two.)

A course on unlearning could exploit these natural tendencies and help people absorb new ways of doing things. For instance, instead of just reading about how a new drug works on a cancer patient, doctors could watch how it interacts with and disables a cancer cell. Other businesses could use such immersive technology to gain a deeper appreciation of what an elderly person experiences and create products that better address their needs. (See ”Unlearning Your Age.")

Many courses on unlearning won’t have a teacher. They will rather be open source in nature, and the content will not be provided by a single “expert” but rather it will be continually added to and improved upon by a vast collection of people. To this end, a relatively new wiki called Curriki has recently been created. Its goal is to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational material to anyone who needs it--anywhere in the world.

But far from being a shoddy collection of disjointed or inferior ideas, the result of these wikis will be vastly superior to anything a single expert could pull together. In the case of business wikis, they will contain advice and insights from employees, suppliers, and customers.

Among the adjustments this will require is that managers will need to unlearn their own reliance on experts. People will need to unlearn the idea that money and quality are synonymous. In the future, many of the best products will be the creation of open-source methods and wikis.

Another thing people will have to unlearn is that there isn’t always an answer. This is because so many fields are constantly evolving. An admission of one’s own ignorance may well be the first step most people will need to take upon entering the unlearning classroom of the future. Exponential executives may even have to go a step farther and accept that ignorance will be the largest element in their future educational needs.

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The Future of Manufacturing: An Interview with Futurist Jack Uldrich

Related Posts

The Future of Manufacturing
Robots: A Major Game Changer
15 Ways Nanotechnology is Making Your Life Better Today
3-D Printing the Shape of Things to Come
The Future Lays in Convergence

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Jump the Curve at Half the Price with the Latest Supercomputer

Last fall, in this article (Businesses Latest Tool: The Supercomputer) I explained how a variety of businesses were using Cray’s lsupercomputer to not only fundamentally transform their business processes but also save millions of dollars. Well, in yet another example of exponential growth, Cray has now cut the price of its latest supercomputer in half to $12,000. This is still expense but ask yourself the alternative: If the device can help you save big, big money can you afford not to use it? The answer is obvious.

Related Posts

The Future of Manufacturing

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Algae’s Growing Future

As a professional futurist, I spend a great deal of time reading the back sections of newspapers looking for small trends which could grow larger in the future. Yesterday, I happened across two articles suggesting that algae—for the production of both oil and ethanol—may have a promising future.

First, in an item that should have attracted more attention, Exxon announced that it would be partnering with Craig Venter and his new company Synthetic Genomics in a $600 million R&D effort to develop genetically modified strains of algae that can both suck up excess carbon dioxide and secrete oil. If the companies can pull off this feat—and I’ll be the first to admit that significant technological challenges remain—they can make money two ways. First, they could sell the oil to refineries. Secondly, in the likely event the federal government imposes some sort of regulation on CO2, they can benefit by pulling the greenhouse gas out of the environment.

The second item was equally intriguing. Dow announced its was partnering with Algenol Biofuels on the creation of a new demonstration plant to efficiently produce ethanol from algae. If successful, the ethanol will be used by Dow to make plastics.

As I am fond of saying, the future is already here ... it just isn’t evenly distributed. In perhaps five to ten years time, Algae’s potential to produce oil and ethanol could explode as fast as scum can sprout on a pond during a hot summer day.

Related Posts

The Future of Energy: A Sustainable Carbon Economy?
Synthetic Biology: Creating a New Form of Life
Craig Venter: Exponential Executive

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Your Future Personal Assistant Is In Your Pocket

Have trouble remembering peoples names? Or perhaps you just want to learn a little more about that attractive person standing across the room. Well, soon, the smartphone in your pocket will make you a little smarter. (Whether the person across the room will find you any more attractive, well, that depends on you. Hint: Just don’t create a fake online personality much longer, you’re gonna get busted.)

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Jack Uldrich Videos

To help potential speaking clients better understand how I present complex information in an insightful, entertaining and informative manner, I have compiled a series of recent video samples. Enjoy ... and have a wonderful weekend!

Jack Uldrich

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Prolonging the Future

”Aging is, unequivocally, the major cause of death in the industrialized world and a perfectly legitimate target of medical intervention.”

The above quote by Aubrey de Grey was taken from this interesting article (Two Mammals’ Longevity Boosted) in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

I written about both de Grey (here) and the topic of aging (below), and I am convinced that de Grey’s theories will continue to pick up supporters in the scientific and medical communities. The result being that many of us can expect to live a lot longer than we are currently planning. The implications of shifting the paradigm of aging from something that is inevitable (our current paradigm) to something that is treatable will be huge.

Related Posts

10 Reasons We Will Live to 1000
Unlearning Death
The Future of Aging

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The Future of Manufacturing

“If you’re in the manufacturing business and you’re not worried, really concerned about what the future will do to your company, you’re not really cognizant of what’s going to be coming down the pike.” Peter Diamandis, Co-founder of Singularity University

I love the above quote. It is a message that I constantly emphasis with my corporate clients and it is why I recently put together this short 4-minute video explaining why business leaders need to unlearn their worldview. For additional information on how fast the manufacturing world is changing, I refer you to the articles below.

Related Posts

Robots: A Major Game Changer
15 Ways Nanotechnology is Making Your Life Better Today
3-D Printing the Shape of Things to Come
The Future Lays in Convergence

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Jump the Curve with a Nice, Cool Corona

It isn’t often that a company can successfully revive a decade old television ad but that is precisely what Corona is doing with its commercial “Lagoon.”

You may recall the original commercial—which I have posted below—showing a relaxing executive sitting on the beach with a nice, cool Corona beer when his beeper begins vibrating. His way of dealing with this unwelcome disruption is to skip the device into the coral blue ocean.

What is funny is that the commercial is only 8 years old—just think of the advances modern communication technology has made in that relatively short amount of time. I have written before about the startling changes we have witnessed in the past decade (here and here) and this is just another example. Still, in 2001, it would have been difficult to imagine iPhones, SmartPhones, Facebook, text-messaging, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

Now, if you want to jump the curve, try to imagine what communication devices, methods and social networks might look like in the year 2017. At a minimum, I would begin by considering how advances in flexible electronics, computer algorithms and haptic technology will continue to transform our world. (It may be enough to make you want to drink!)

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The Power of Zenzizenzizenzic

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A New Stage of Evolution

Last year, I wrote a piece arguing that evolution is exponential. Stephen Hawking’s has reached a similar conclusion and now believes society has arrived at the era of self designed evolution. If one tracks the advances in the field of genomics alone—as I do -- it is difficult to avoid reaching a similar conclusion.

The great question before us now is whether we humans, as a species, will handle this transition wisely. I’d welcome any feedback people have on either the wisdom of “self designed evolution;” the possibility of unintended consequences; or even your ideas on how a more optimistic, transhumanist future might unfold.

Related posts

Exponential Evolution
Is Evolution Exponential?
The Coming Healthcare Revolution

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When the “Unusual” Becomes Usual

It was recently reported that US life expectancy topped 78 years as a variety of diseases—including heart disease, diabetes and flu—decreased this past year.

More interestingly, life expectancy—which has been increasing about two or three months from year to year—jumped an impressive four months this year. This caused one demographer to note that the increase was “an unusually rapid improvement.”

It was “an usually rapid improvement,” but I’d like to argue that such rapid improvements will become “usual” for the foreseeable future. If one tracks the amazing rate of progress in biotechnology, genomics, stem cell research and nanotechnology; it is hard—barring a devastating calamity that kills thousands or millions of people—to envision how life expectancy will do anything but continue to increase at an accelerating rate.

At a minimum, given the existing pressure on such social programs as Social Security and Medicare, it seems only prudent that we should at least begin preparing for life expectancies in the neighborhood of 100 within the next few decades.

Related Posts

Healthcare is the “Verge” of Something Big
Here Comes Intelligent Medicine
The Future of Healthcare is Accelerating
Personalized Medicine’s Accelerating Future
The Future of Health Care: Preventing Disease
Health Care Providers Need a Second Life
The Future of Health Care: Part 3 (Robotics)The Robot Will See You Now
Hospitals Robotic Future: Part 2
Hospitals Robotic Future: Part 1
Hospitals Get a Lift

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Intel Jumps the Curve

In the interest of open and honest disclosure, I am investor in Intel. One of the reasons I am a long-term investor is because I like how the company constantly and relentlessly engages the future—as this recent article entitled A glimpse at Intel’s futuristic gadgets suggests.

For anyone interested in where the future may be headed, I encourage you to read the article.

A few things caught my attention in the article. First, I was attracted by this quote from the company’s chief technology officer Justin Rattner, “We believe our mission is to take risks.” It is common for executives at many large companies to say such things but Intel puts its money where its mouth is. Consider, for example, the fact that the company is working on something called a “Dispute Finder.” It is essentially a smart software program that will call “bullshit” on an article or blog posting you may be reading if it contains erroneous (or even contradictory) information. Or, last year, the company announced it was working on a shape-shifting human-computer interface. The article also suggests it is aggressively investigating emerging opportunities in the field of robotics which, as I have written about numerous times, is a very promising field.

The second thing that caught my attention was mention of a poster displayed at the conference. It read, “Your kid’s kid’s kid won’t think what we’re doing is crazy at all.” Personally, I’d love to get my hands on a copy of that poster but, regardless, it is a perfect example of developing a future bias. Intel is not simply content to focus on incrementally improving its existing products, it is actively engaging the future in an attempt to “jump the curve.”

As an investor and a fan of the future, I wish them all the best.

Interested in reading about other corporations and organizations who are jumping the curve? Check out these past articles:

Google Jumps the Curve
The CIA Jumps the Curve
BMW Jumps the Curve
Mars Jumps the Curve
IBM Thinks Small
Lockheed Martin Jumps the Curve

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The Future of Energy—A Sustainable Carbon Economy?

I have written about carbon capture technology before (here) but one of my favorite websites, Crave, is now reporting on the same technology. What I like about the article is that it refers to the technology as a “synthetic tree.” From this perspective, I believe it is easier for the average person to envision how truly beneficial the technology might be if it can deliver on its promise to capture—or pull out like a sponge if you will—a 1000 tons of CO2 every year. (A real tree needs 100 years to accomplish this same task.)

More broadly still, if innovative researchers at such places as Sandia’s National Lab and Georgia Tech can learn how to “reenergize” this carbon it is possible that carbon could become a “sustainable” fuel. In other words, our automobiles and coal plants will still spew out CO2 but we may soon be able to recycle and reuse it.

I know environmentalists and “Greens” might not warm to such an idea but the future often has a funny way of playing out. The vision of a “sustainable” carbon economy may not hold as much appeal as, say, a zero-carbon hydrogen economy but it has one large and distinct advantage—it won’t require people or large industries to change. And if there is one thing everyone needs to keep in mind when contemplating the future it is this: People don’t like to change unless it is absolutely necessary.

Related Posts

Georgia Tech Jumps the Curve

Goodbye Global Warming?

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