Global futurist and author Jack Uldrich offers essential strategic information on nanotechnology, robotics, biotechnology, RFID and many other future technologies to help you prosper as exponential trends converge at this unique moment in history.
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Industries: Defense
The CIA Jumps the Curve
Computer World has an interesting article discussing the CIA’s use of Intellipedia—a Wikipedia-like project for its analysts. As a former naval intelligence officer, I think this is a fantastic idea but—perhaps not unsurprisingly—the idea has been met with some resistance from within the intelligence community. According to the article, in fact, the founders of the initiative were originally called “traitors.”
The idea of sharing knowledge and working among different agencies is undoubtedly foreign to many in the intelligence community; but it is unrealistic to expect even the most talented analyst to stay abreast of all the information, data and knowledge that is necessary to track, monitor and anticipate our enemies actions. It is only prudent that we adopt new tools such as Intellipedia—which may help alleviate some of the burden.
However, before the tool can reach its full potential, it is essential that those intelligence officers who are not contributing to the wiki “unlearn” the idea that intelligence can only be analyzed one way or by a small group of people.
Interestingly, some of the most eager users of Intelliedia are older intelligence officers who view it as a way of sharing their vast knowledge with their younger associates before they retire.
(For those interested in better understanding the power of open-source initiatives, I’d refer you to the now classic story of how Gold Corp tapped the power of the Internet to find $3 billion in gold or this intriguing story, which I cite in my book, about how a citizen sleuth used Google Earth to uncover a Chinese military secret.)
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Embrace a New Dimension
It has been said that the reason doctors and surgeons have not embraced simulated training to the same degree as airline pilots is because they don’t “go down” with their patients. The implicit message is that pilots have an incentive to utilize the very best training tools.
This distinction is important because as 3-D display and virtual reality technology continues to improve it will soon reach a point where it is just as good if not better than current training techniques. The U.S. military has already embraced virtual reality training to prepare soldiers before they go into actual battle because it has been demonstrated to save lives. The same will soon be true in the health care industry, but first doctors and surgeons (and the medical institutions that train them) may need to unlearn existing training methods which they have relied on for the past many decades.
This lesson in unlearning, however, is not limited to the health care sector. As this article suggests, innovative leaders in the automotive industry are already embracing the technology. There is no reason educators and professionals in a host of other industries can’t do the same.
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Air Force Needs to Change
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting review of the new book, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel. It is a history of the world’s first machine gun. Interestingly, although the gun was patented during the Civil War and Mr. Gatling urged the Union Army to adopt it—arguing that it would "save lives, wounds and sickness, by lessening the numbers subjected to the perils of war"—nobody listened. It wasn’t until the Spanish-American War in 1898—almost 40 years after its invention—that it was first deployed.
This little lesson in history is directly applicable to a new, modern weapon—unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Recently, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates complained that the Air Force was not adopting the use of UAVs—also known as drones—fast enough. He further argued that the Air Force generals who weren’t adopting the technology were unnecessarily putting airman’s lives at risk.
Gates is right. UAV’s can now fly for hours over enemy territory and, if necessary, fire and drop an assortment of weapons. Perhaps it is time that a great many Air Force generals who learned the importance of using fighters and bombers to engage and suppress the enemy now “unlearn” that behavior. The sooner they do, the fewer American lives the military will unnecessarily put at risk.
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Jack Uldrich Speaks on the Future
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Of Death & Taxes: Government 2.0
Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Well, last week I explained why death’s gripe might be loosening, and this week I’d like to take a quick look at how our tax burden could soon be reduced.
In the editorial section of today’s Wall Street Journal there are two articles that speak to how emerging technologies could dramatically lower government expenditures—and, by extension, help lower taxes.
The first is piece by Brian Carney explains how unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) could soon replace a majority of jet fighters. What is most noteworthy is that in addition to placing fewer pilots at risk, the cost of a UAV (or drone) is $4.2 million as compared to $350 million, which is the cost of a next-generation F-22 fighter. Better still, UAV’s don’t suffer from fatigue nor do they require generous pensions after they are retired.
Advances in robotics offer similar chances to cut our bloated defense budget. Robots are soon expected to be able to drive vehicles and, eventually, even ships and submarines. If so, the rational for our sizeable army and navy will soon be called into question.
Technology’s benefit is not limited only to defense. As Gordon Crovitz explains is his piece, ”From Wikinomics to Government 2.0,” the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies are transforming everything from how citizens are combating crime (and thus cutting down on police budgets) to better managing their neighborhoods.
The real benefits of new emerging technologies, though, can be found in the areas of education and transportation. Innovative teachers are now employing Curriki to constantly update their curriculum; advances in electronics—such as Amazon’s new Kindle—should help render textbooks obsolete; and the open-courseware movement that MIT and other elite universities are pursuing should make education less expensive by making content freely available to anyone with Internet access.
In the area of transportation, roads, bridges and mass transit systems are all expensive to build and operate. The innovative use of sensors and satellite technology might, however, allow users to more efficiently use our existing roads; and super high-speed bandwidth capability—in combination with improved video and virtual reality technology—should make working from home even more practical in the near future.
The bottom-line is that there is absolutely no reason why government should cost more in the future. People, especially government officials, need to start thinking differently about how to innovatively employ technology to better address today’s existing problems.
Looking for some other innovative ideas about how technology can save taxpayers money? Check out these past posts:
Embracing Change
The Future is CheapThe Future of Education is Now!
The Future of College
The Future of Kid’s Health
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
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Don’t Incrementalize Yourself into the Future
Knowledge, it has been said, is the key to success. It is a statement that is hard to disagree with unless you buy into that old adage that ignorance is bliss. Proceeding on the assumption that if you believed the latter you probably wouldn"t be reading this blog, I will go farther out on a limb and state that for years one of the world’s better recognized fonts of knowledge has been the Encyclopedia Britannica--a reservoir of 30,000-plus pages of information replete with titillating tidbits of data about everything from atoms to zettabytes.
In the late 1990s the revered encyclopedia came under assault from a new form of media distribution--the CD-ROM. Able to store vast amounts of information in a more convenient, colorful, and vivid fashion, Encyclopedia Britannica was forced to deal with this new competitive threat and proceeded in good haste to provide its information in a similarly fresh, snappy, and visually pleasing format.
By 2001 the company was back on its feet and headed down the sweet path of profitability. No sooner, though, had that storm passed when another began forming on the horizon. But just as a hurricane begins with a single molecule and is not immediately discernible, so was this one.
The storm was called Wikipedia, and it started in 2001 with nothing more than 100 encyclopedia-like entries drafted by a few amateurs and posted to a Web site. It seemed innocent enough. After all, how likely was it that a bunch of strangers, working for free, could someday produce an encyclopedia that would rival the esteemed Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of depth, breadth, and accuracy. It sounded about as plausible as a few molecules in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean turning into a Category 5 hurricane.
Yet in late 2005 Wikipedia smashed into the Encyclopedia Britannica. That year the prestigious scientific journal Nature announced after a comprehensive study that the average entry in Wikipedia was nearly as accurate as the typical Encyclopedia Britannica entry.
The advantage is still in Encyclopedia Britannica’s favor, but how much longer will it be able to withstand the gale force winds? The answer: not much. That is because we are now living in a world of exponential advances, and the scales are tipped in Wikipedia’s favor.
To begin, the very subject matter of the encyclopedia, which is to say knowledge itself, is growing exponentially. It has been said that human knowledge is doubling roughly every seven years. This leads to the almost ridiculously sounding (but mathematically verifiable) conclusion that by 2050 everything we know today will represent less than 1 percent of the sum total of the world’s knowledge.
Even if one disagrees with this statement, it is difficult not to acknowledge that radical advances in medicine, physics, chemistry, and biotechnology are changing both the content and value of the material in encyclopedias and that the old print-and-publish method of storing and displaying such information is, if not obsolete, at least impractical.
Neither a printed encyclopedia nor even a CD-ROM can react to this volume of change. Only Wikipedia, by posting information directly to the Internet, can respond in a timely fashion.
Wikipedia also has the advantage in terms of human horsepower. Advances are happening so fast, in so many different fields, that it is virtually impossible for the staff at Encyclopedia Britannica to keep pace. The challenge is not nearly so great for Wikipedia because it doesn’t have a staff. Instead it relies on a self-selected universe of experts and enthusiasts to keep track of all of these developments. (To this end, Wikipedia now has over 7 million entries in 200 different languages.)
Third, Wikipedia has a distinct economic advantage. Not only does it not need to print its material in either book or even CD-ROM format, it doesn’t need to pay an army of researchers and writers or underwrite the cost of housing any physical resources or employees.
The final kicker is this: Even if the Encyclopedia Britannica decides to put all of its content online for free, most people will still go to Wikipedia because its content consistently shows up near the top of most search engines.
What Encyclopedia Britannica is facing is a severe reaction to the exponential economy, but it is not alone. In fact, if history is any guide, a number of other companies, institutions, and organizations will soon be facing a comparable amount of change in the not-too-distant future.
What this means is that in order to survive in the Expoential Economy, we should all heed the words of Kurt Yeager, who once offered this sage advice: ”In periods of profound change, the most dangerous thing is to incrementalize yourself into the future.”
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How to Turn 2 Cents into $5.36 Million
Embracing Change
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
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What Could Be Better Than Free Money? Try Exponential Growth.
As a result of my new book, I have been asked on a number of occasions to describe what I mean by the title: “jump the curve.”
It is a fair question and when answering it I like to recall the words of that old sage, Albert Einstein, who once said that if a person—especially a scientist or technologist—couldn’t explain what he or she was working on to an 8-year old child then that person was either a fraud or a charlatan.
It’s an excellent test and because I have both an 8 year-old daughter and a 6 year-old son, I decided to put the topic of my new book to this test. Liking a challenge, I decided to see if my youngest child could comprehend the idea of “jumping the curve.”
Without using an example in the book, I asked my son, who has yet to lose any of his teeth, whether he would rather receive a single dollar for every one of his 20 baby teeth or if he would instead prefer to receive a single cent for his first tooth and then have that penny double for the next 19 teeth?
Being fairly good at numbers and knowing that his dad often likes to trick him, my son selected the second option—the penny doubling.
“Smart boy,” I proudly said. “Now, what if the tooth fairy gave you $5 per tooth?” (I was careful to suggest that I was not implying that the tooth fairy would leave him $5.) He pondered his options for a moment and, after calculating his total would come to $100, he selected the $5 option.
I asked him if he was sure and he confidently shook his head in the affirmative. “Well, son,” I replied, “I’m afraid that you have lost out on over $10,000.”
The look on his face was one of incredulousness, and that is precisely why I told him that he had to learn to “jump the curve.” Here’s how the chart reads:
1st tooth: 1 cent
2nd tooth: 2 cents
3rd tooth: 4 cents
4th tooth: 8 cents
5th tooth: 16 cents
6th tooth: 32 cents
7th tooth: 64 cents
8th tooth: $1.28
9th tooth: $2.56
10th tooth: $5.12
11th tooth: $10.24
12th tooth: $20.48
13th tooth: $40.96
14th tooth: $81.92
15th tooth: $163.84
16th tooth: $327.68
17th tooth: $655.36
18th tooth: $1310.72
19th tooth: $2621.44
20th tooth: $5242.88
Total: $10,485.75 ... or more than $500 per tooth!
To explain the concept of “jumping the curve,” I then drew him a graph and said that before a person can profit from any exponential trend he must first understand where that trend. The skill, I noted, “could be as significant as the difference between getting only $5 for a tooth or receiving $500.”
My broader point, of course, was that exponential advances are occuring in a variety of fields, including information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, brain scanning and even knowledge itself; and if he wanted to position himself for the future he would be wise to internalize this lesson now. The lesson is so important, I’d argue, that it is almost better than free money.
Interested in some other implausible ideas about the future? Check some of these past posts by Jack:
Voiceless Communication: It’s Coming and It’ll Augment Human Intelligence
The Robot Will See You Now
Operate on Yourself
57 Years is Now 41 Days
Death’s Slow Death
Self-Driving Cars
Do the Impossible
Enlarge Our Minds to a Space Elevator
Pong & The Future of the President’s Brain
Could You Really Love a Robot?
Do the Impossible: A Case Study
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
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Future Technology & the Ability to Absorb It
I spend a great deal of time documenting how exponential advances in semiconductors, data storage, bandwidth, gene sequencing, brain scanning technology, robotics, algorithms and nanotechnology will fundamentally alter the business environment in the next decade. I am, however, aware of the fact that technology is already outpacing society’s ability to adapt to it. As such, I am always careful to temper client’s enthusiam about how quickly many of today’s emerging technologies will be incorporated into the fabric of our lives. (Frequently, I need to temper my own enthusiam as well).
To this end, I would like to offer this short history lesson which I pulled from Pip Coburn’s informative book, The Change Function: Why Some Technologies Take Off and Others Crash:
-- The first mobile phone in the U.S. was available in 1946.
-- The first video game was played in 1961
-- The first personal computer was built in 1964
-- The first e-mail was sent in 1971.
Some of this slowness is a result of people’s and society’s resistance to change, some of it is due to legal and regulatory issues, sometimes it is a result over legitimate business concerns over the cost and the effectiveness of early versions of the technology. (For example, iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner is a great piece of technology, but many of us have a hard time coughing up $300 when a $5 broom still does a pretty good job.)
Bottom-line: Change does happen, but often it occurs a lot slower than most people generally recognize or appreciate.
P.S. Because I am a fan of thinking counter-intuitively, tomorrow I intend to write a piece that argues just the opposite—that technology adoption is actually speeding up.
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
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The Future is So Clear … It’s Invisible
The Toronto Star is running an excellent article entitled ”Science has seen the future ... and it is invisible,” which profiles noted physicist, Michio Kaku—the author of the new book, Physics of the Impossible; A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel.
I’ll let the article speak for itself, but I want to highlight two quotes of Kaku’s because they fit quite nicely with the final chapter of my own new book, Jump the Curve. The chapter is entitled “Doing the Impossible” and it explains how exponential advances in technology will soon allow mankind to do a great many things which are today deemed “impossible.”
To this end, Kaku is quoted as saying ”In my own short lifetime, I have seen the seemingly impossible become established fact over and over again.”
He goes on to say that ”science is doubling 10 years.” Now, fans of Ray Kurzweil and exponential growth immediately understand the implications of this statement; but many people do not. So let me spell it out for you in more vivid terms: It’s is saying that everything we know today—about physics, biology, chemistry, the human body, etc—will represent just a fraction of what we will know in the year 2050.
(Here’s how you should think about it: Due to this doubling of knowledge, in 2018 everything we know today about science will represent just half of our future knowledge. In 2028, due to our continued accelerated understanding, what we know today will comprise only 25% of future knoweldge. In 2038, it will again be split in half (to 12.5%) and ten years after that our existing base knowledge (i.e. what we know today in 2008) will comprise just over 6% of future knowledge.
The implication of this is that as a result of all of this new found scientific knowledge, it is inevitable that we will be able to do many things which today seem impossible. Or to paraphase (and twist) the words of that 1980’s hit classic song, “The Future is So Bright, I’ve Got to Wear Shades,” the future will, in fact, be very bright but our technology—including invisible light-cloaking devices—will be so advanced no one will even need to know you’re wearing shades.
Interested in some other implausible ideas about the future? Check some of these past posts by Jack:
Voiceless Communication: It’s Coming and It’ll Augment Human Intelligence
The Robot Will See You Now
Operate on Yourself
57 Years is Now 41 Days
Death’s Slow Death
Self-Driving Cars
Do the Impossible
Enlarge Our Minds to a Space Elevator
Pong & The Future of the President’s Brain
Could You Really Love a Robot?
Do the Impossible: A Case Study
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
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Brain Neural Technology Isn’t Just Monkey Play
Below is a short one-minute video showing how a monkey in the U.S. is able to control a robot in Japan—simply by thinking about it. It is impressive technology and it has a host of future applications. In addition to allowing disabled war veterans the possibility of using their thoughts to control prosthetic limbs, it might someday also be used to help the elderly better navigate their environment.
On the slightly more sinister side, the technology might someday allow a soldier located at an army base in Kansas to control a robot in Afghanistan. (By way of analogy just consider that today young air force personnel are controlling drones over the skies in Iraq from the comfort of air conditioned centers in Omaha).
Anyways, I encourage you to check out the video:
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