Wanted: A Personal Growth Engine

You may have heard about the controversy over Facebook's new Graph Search feature: some people have shown how it could expose embarrassing information that Facebook users had thought would be largely private.

I find it interesting that most commentators skipped right to the potential privacy concerns and ignored what ought to be the central question: what is the benefit of being able to search your extended social network for what your friends "like" or are otherwise interested in? (I'm assuming, here, we're talking about individuals and not businesses. Plenty of people have talked about what business might get out of Graph Search.)

I think there is the seed of something valuable in what Graph Search offers, but it is fundamentally crippled by the logic of Facebook. Furthermore, the interest in this type of personalized search points the way towards a potentially massive business opportunity. (If anyone reading this goes on to get rich off this thinking, throw me a bone, will ya?)

What Graph Search offers is the chance to search for people by their accumulated Likes, Shares, Profile interests and other Facebook activities. So, in theory, if I wanted to find men near me to play basketball on the weekends with, I could search for "Men in Maplewood who like basketball and have children." (I'd throw in that last bit to make sure I found the other old farts.) But here's the catch: I can only see results from people who have shared all that info publicly. So I might not be able to find enough guys to get a game if too many local hoop enthusiasts are restrictive in their privacy settings. Or, even worse, I could contact some guys only to have them react negatively to the invitation because they didn't realize that information was public.

Maybe Facebook can overcome these issues: they certainly have enough money to try. But I think Facebook is limited by the fact that people generally don't use it to meet new people, they use it to keep tabs on the people they already know. What's needed is something else: a digital hub that we go to for personal growth, to encounter new people and ideas that can push us.

I'll call this hub, for the sake of simplicity, a Personal Growth Engine. The idea is simple: it would be a place were you'd set goals, learn skills, and connect with people who can help you on the way. Think of it as a digital life coach or mentor. If we built an online destination with the objective of growth instead of sharing, it would look very different from Facebook. Let me sketch out a few potential features of a Personal Growth Engine:

1. Instead of building a profile around who you are today, you would start out by defining where you want to be. What do you want to get better at? What do you want to learn that you don't know today? How do you want to change your life? You'd share what you already do and know, too, so people who want those skills can connect with you for advice.
2. The Engine would encourage you to work with other people you already know who share your goals, since the best knowledge we have about goal achievement says it is easier in groups.
3. Next, you would be given resources to help you achieve your goals. One of my goals is to be a better father, so the Engine would connect me with, for example, an online class from Coursera on child psychology, highly rated activities for kids in my area, popular daddy bloggers, and other parents in my area or my social network with the same goal.
4. Another key feature would be a goal achievement plan. If I wanted to learn Spanish, the Engine would lay out available instruction and give me a timeframe to complete the levels in. It would compare my progress with other people who started on that goal at about the same time, because we are spurred by competition. And if I failed, it would suggest an alternate path to achieve my goal, for example by switching from individual lessons on YouTube to a group practice forum.
5. Finally, the network effects would let you find the right tool to achieve your goal. For example, I might search for weight loss tips for guys who have kids, work in an office and like beer. Instead of generic advice, I would find diets that still let me have some brew and I can make work between work and kid time.

Facebook, for the most part, is online junk food. We visit it when we have a free moment to see what our friends are up to or to share a (hopefully) interesting bite-sized nugget of our lives. It isn't meant to take us anywhere or help us grow. Now, generally speaking, junk food is the business you want to be in: people would much rather get candy than be told to eat their vegetables. But the popularity of online classes from Coursera and other sites, as well as online advice about everything from raising children to staying healthy, tells me people do in fact spend a lot of their online time trying to improve themselves. I don't think Graph Search is the right tool to make self-improvement social and personalized, but the demand for that tool is there.

A Bit More on Online Education and the Future of College

I often wait a week or two between when I find a topic and when I write about it, in large part because there are so many other interesting perspectives on any topic that I want to get a more complete picture. But my last post, on the ways online courses will change the way we think about education, went from seed to sprout more quickly, and I didn't get a chance to consider this post by Benjamin Lima. He writes about the unbundling of higher education (and uses the term the same way I use disaggregation), and makes some great points. First, that education is much more than a bundle of courses, it is a bundle of different benefits and experiences: 

A college education has traditionally bundled several different kinds of goods together: 

1. The curriculum: mastery of specific knowledge and development of more general reasoning, analytical, and communication skills.
2. The extra-curriculum: a network of friends and contacts, and experience gained from clubs, sports, internships and other activities.
3. The signaling process: validation of general talent or status by completing all of the above at a “better” or highly ranked college.
4. The college experience: everything that is personally interesting, enjoyable or rewarding about living in a certain place with certain people, and having experiences that are personally valuable to the college student, regardless of their value to anyone else or to society at large—everything from late-night conversations about the meaning of life, to road trips, to pranks, sports rivalries, and “school spirit.”

Traditionally, colleges provided all of these goods in a bundle, simply because the best way to provide them was to expensively gather a lot of students, faculty and resources in one place for several years at a time. But now, with the internet, is the logic of bundling starting to break down?

I think this is a great summary of why we consume college, and he goes on to note that the Internet can probably do a good job of unbundling #1 from the other three benefits, but those other three benefits still retain significant value. He additionally notes that the second and third benefits (arguably, at least) have value to society and are thus worth supporting in some way, while "the college experience" is essentially personal consumption, comprable to travel. Therefore, it is unlikely society will continue to subsidize it once it is unbundled from the other benefits. His conclusion, then, is worth noting:

Top colleges might be able to continue to use their vast resources (in the words of Kevin Carey: wealth, prestige, and exclusivity) to provide an expensive, valuable college experience (category 4) that helps attract top students, high-paying students, top faculty, and donations, in a self-reinforcing cycle as the rich get richer. This self-reinforcing cycle might very well increase the stratification among colleges, as fewer and fewer colleges are able to “play the game” and attract scarce “stars” among students and faculty. Over recent years, one could argue that this has already been happening, as top public universities in the U.S. are less and less able to compete with top private universities.  These top universities provide their students with bundle that includes both a lot of “college experience” to consume, and a high return on their human-capital investment.

If I was an administrator at, say, Providence College, this would terrify me. My alma mater is a good school, that offers a solid combination of the four benefits listed above. But it doesn't have the massive endowment of many schools in the Northeast, and it doesn't offer any elite academic programs, its alumni can't necessarily open a lot of doors for new graduates, the name doesn't cause HR directors to stop and take notice, and Providence, while wonderful, can't compete with Boston as a host for the full college experience. So how does it continue to fill its classrooms when those same students can virtually enroll in Ivy League courses? (If they hired me to do their strategy, I'd give a long look at doubling down on their Catholic identity, on the theory that there will always be parents who want their children to be morally educated and will steer them away from schools that indoctrinate their students in liberal secular humanism.)

Elsewhere, Walter Russell Mead, who inspired the original post, notes that studies indicate students learn as much from online courses as they do when they park their butts in the classroom, removing one obvious objection to online learning.

Online Education and Student Psychology

The always thought-provoking Walter Russell Mead wrote a little ways back about the coming revolution in education. (He also points out the challenge of building a viable economic model around online courses.) His thesis is that the advent of high-quality online courses and the ubiquity of the technology needed to access them will make education cheaper, more readily available, more customizable...just BETTER, for the most part. In his words: 

Online ed will accelerate rather than retard the transformation of American higher ed. Education needs to be cheaper and higher quality than most of it now is; there is no way universities can meet that demand without fundamental change.

 Mead has written about the topic at length, and sees expanding online education as a solution to the problem of the "higher education bubble" pointed out by Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) and others. The absurdity of paying so much for a degree that may not even reliably provide opportunities for well-compensated employment is now undeniable, but so is the reality that moving to online courses may dissolve the business model of bricks-and-mortar higher education, with unpredictable results.

However, the economics of online education is not my primary interest, it's the psychology. How will our perceptions of the value and importance of higher education change if it moves into cyberspace? (And how often do you hear anyone use that term anymore? I miss cyberspace...) A few thoughts:

1) The perceived value of an online education is likely to be lower even if, and maybe especially if, you earn your online degree from a prestigious school. Live attendance is likely to become a status marker, as well as enhancing the social bonds between those who did so while making them resentful of others who took what they will perceive as shortcuts. You can imagine an interviewer probing a candidate who lists MIT on their resume to see if they literally went there.

2) Pretty much every generation after World War II was brought up to function within an institutional setting. The basic model is that the institution (school, corporation, etc.) sets the rules by which success is judged, and the best rule followers succeed. But online education promises to take away the guiding role of institutions. Don't like what Harvard says a well-rounded education entails? Then take just the class or two from Harvard that you really have interest in, and don't worry about their degree. Feel constrained by what you need to do to get a psychology degree? Some university will probably help you design your own curriculum, pulling from a variety of sources, to help you achieve the education you want. This is a variation of the same disaggregation that has devastated newspapers, the music industry, and anyone else who makes money by bundling content. So what's the problem? We'll all be able to get our custom-fitted educations, and be more fulfilled, right? Well, while we might be comfortable mixing news from a bunch of different sources, educational institutions have a much more powerful claim to authority than the media does: their role is to teach us what we need to know. How, then, can we choose what classes we prefer without leaving holes in our education? My prediction is that students and professors will look for new ways to create virtual institutions that still set norms and aggregate classes into coherent programs of study. The alternative turns education into an overly self-centered exercise.

3) In an online educational world, we will see an odd race to the bottom to attract students with money to spend on education but without the wisdom to know what they really need to learn. Get ready for students taking classes on critical television analysis and the like. While many educators will no doubt look to online education as a way to positively influence more young minds, there will be many more who see that creating courses that pander to students' existing knowledge and interests is a quick way to make a buck. After all, a professor probably needs only a few hundred enrollees to make an online course a profitable venture. The division, already so familiar to anyone who goes to college, between people who are determined to push themselves (the minority) and those who navigate the easiest path to their degree, may be exacerbated.

4) The long-term psychological shift that is likely to play out is to greater, but more sporadic, consumption of education, with more value placed on utility and less on the badge value of the institution hosting the course. I'll use myself as an example. I went to a reasonably well-respected Catholic college, majoring in English, with the intent to be a journalist or writer. I'm now a marketer, and while the skills I learned have broad application to my work, I was never formally schooled on the ins and outs of my craft. I have no strong interest in an MBA and no ability to suspend my career to pursue a masters degree in Anthropology, which I'm otherwise interested in. Now, imagine I was living in a world of disaggregated higher ed. I may well have gotten an English degree, and maybe, if I could afford it, would have spent some time physically on campus. But at some point I might well have switched to taking classes online while I took my first steps into marketing. Then, periodically, as my career advanced, I would be likely to seek specific knowledge that might aid my advancement (and I'd feel pressure to take courses because a lot of other people would be doing it). Eventually, I might work with an institution to define a degree program incorporating some of the one-off classes I already took with a more focused course of study. And if I'm interested in pursuing a new career, I could take a course or two to test the water before I really commit. Suddenly your education becomes scalable to the scope of your ambition, because not everything needs to be oriented towards getting a degree.

In short, the short term reaction to disaggregated online education is likely to be mixed, with people's excitement tempered by online being seen as second rate and with a tendency to create courses that are easily marketed rather than rigorous, challenging options. But as we come to accept that the notion of young adults sequestering themselves on a campus for four years is an arbitrary, and maybe not even ideal, way to deliver education, I think we may see a culture that begins to prize relevant, on-demand learning over a lifetime. In response, traditional educational institutions for young people will be joined by new organizations poised to help adults identify and personalize more results-oriented educational programs.

And, if the casualty of this change is that many colleges cease to exist, or offer traditional on-site education, those campuses will be lovely communities to live in, with many amenities for those no longer burdened by massive student loan debts.

Apple Gets an FDA Letter

April 23, 2012

Mr. Tim Cook
CEO, Apple Inc
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014

Mr. Cook:

As I hope you are aware, under USC Title 15, Chapter 48, Section 2101, Congress has expanded the FDA's regulatory powers to cover all businesses that a consumer could reasonably (or unreasonably) believe are in some way involved in the production or distribution of ingested substances. Obviously, a company named Apple is now well within our purview. (And, if I may be frank with you, the use of a business name that creates the expectation of nutritional value when none is provided may, in and of itself, be the violation of several key regulations.)

However, it is my purpose today to provide a warning about Apple's current non-compliant marketing practices, hereafter to be referred to as NCMPs, and an order to cease and desist all such practices immediately. As these issues may be unfamiliar to a businessman who has not had previous dealings, I would encourage you to discuss the contents of this letter (subject to the counsel of your internal legal department) with executives from any pharmaceutical company, who are more than familiar with these regulations and how to comply with them.

Topic A: Promotion of product feature "Siri" included with Apple iPhone 4s

Our regulators have been deeply disturbed by numerous NCMPs associated with your introduction of "Siri". First, our scientific advisors challenge the often-repeated notion that this application represents "artificial intelligence" in any meaningful way. The literature on AI is well-established, and establishing that a device demonstrates it requires, at minimum, that it pass a Turing Test.  As there is no evidence Siri has done so, you are hereby not allowed to use this phrasing, or any similar phrasing, in promotional messages. Additionally, it is an NCMP to refer to Siri as a "personal assistant", as this implies human characteristics and abilities that it cannot possess. (You may use the word "assist" to describe the applications MOA.) To avoid any possible confusion, all television advertisements depicting human users easily and naturally interacting with Siri are deemed not compliant and must be removed from all media immediately. Finally, there is a lack of fair balance in your Siri-related communications. To avoid future NCMPs, you must include the rate at which Siri misinterprets commands given to it, and any possible safety risks associated with such errors.

Topic B: Promotion of "The New iPad"

First, we find the naming of the iPad problematic, and ask you to find a more suitable name within 90 days to avoid the product being withdrawn from the market and the levying of significant financial penalties. As you should realize, there is a high risk of confusion between the iPad and the iPod, which is a completely distinct product with a different indication. Without being too prescriptive, we would suggest that a name like "TouchTablet" would be more clear, and thus in the best interests of users. Additionally, it is a significant NCMP to use the neologism "Resolutionary" to promote the product. The obvious intent is to imply that this is a revolutionary product, when most experts believe that a sharper screen and better cameras represent, at best, an incremental improvement over previous models

Topic C: The Apple Store

An audit of your retail locations has unearthed a number of violations that must be addressed immediately. First, it seems you have been offering free setup of your products for some time, which is an obvious NCMP. Any incentive to purchase a product other than offering certain permitted discounts is a violation of regulations. Second, you are henceforth no longer permitted to call your technical support area a "Genius Bar" unless you can document that the average IQ of your support staff is over 135.

We find that these are the most severe regulatory violations, although we would strongly suggest you establish a registry to help investigators determine whether, as some initial studies indicate, your iPhone products are in fact addictive.

The attached 274 page form should help you get started in your reply to this letter. We look forward to working with you to clear up these violations, and ensure, for the good of the consumer, that your future marketing efforts are conducted in a more thoughtful and balanced way.

Sincerely,

Dan Reed
High Inquisitor for Ridiculously Regulated Products


Editor's Note: I have fortunately never received an FDA letter myself, and I'm sure they're a bit more nuanced than my parody. But all of these theoretical violations on Apple's part do parallel the type of rules that pharmaceutical companies have to comply with when they want to talk about their products. So here's my question for my readers: do you think strictly limiting communications in this way actually helps consumers? Or, as I believe, do these rules actually makes it harder to communicate clearly about how health products can help people?

Overly Intuitive?

Here's a random thought...what if we are making technology too easy to use? I hear in my line of work that if some tool we design isn't intuitive, it won't get used. I just wonder if perhaps this leads us to follow well trodden paths that don't help us make anything truly great.

In other words, when some tool is complicated and takes effort to master, we might learn more about it and thus figure out new, unexpected ways to use it. But if it is simple and easy to understand, we may never appreciate the possibilities because our use of the tool is purely transactional.

Old computer programs were like pianos...you may not use all the keys for all songs, but you need to know them all to play whatever song you want. Modern 'apps' are more like player pianos, doing the hard work for you. So, are the benefits of convenience worth the loss of discipline and mastery?

Reflections on the iPad

I'm writing this on my sad old desktop computer because I haven't found just the right blogging app on my iPad yet. But I'm sure I will, and then happily abandon this annoying large screen and convenient full-sized keyboard. No, I'll be able to peck out these ramblings from anywhere!

For the last two weeks or so, I have in fact been glued to my new iPad. In fact, I'll probably be reading on it as soon as I'm done here. So obviously I love the darn thing. But why? 90% of the time I use it, I'm within 30 feet of a computer. Typing is undoubtedly slower, although I do have a wireless keyboard I can use with it. The games are good, but I have more advanced games on my Wii and the desktop. It doesn't add any major capability that some other device in my life doesn't have.

But, unless I'm completely irrational (no comments, please), there must be something that has driven me to spend hours a day with the darn thing. So here are three bits of speculation on why the iPad has wormed its way so deeply into my life, and the psychological drivers that have made it so popular.

1) Casualness: Nothing about the iPad feels like work, even when I'm doing something like capturing notes. The ability to pick it up and put it down, to switch to some other task, to close its cover like a book, all give it a less formal feel than plunking away at a laptop. Its weight and size also allow me to take it more places, allowing me to spontaneously use it when I have a need (or a free moment).

2) Bite-sized-ness: Everything feels stripped down and simple, and that translates in part to making it feel like you're not making a big time commitment when you start using any particular application. I can waste hours on a game, but it is not some elaborate epic that requires my whole engagement for long stretches. The successful games offer relatively quick levels or challenges that are almost endlessly repeatable, so each "five minutes" leads into the next, and soon you've lost an hour.

3) Utilitarianism: The iPad is a newspaper, a web browser, a video game console, a camera, an video phone, a notepad, a GPS, a TV, and a bunch of other things besides. People, and men in particular, like feeling that they have s tool for every need. The iPad is an electronic Swiss Army knife.

I'm sure there are other reasons people fall for the iPad, but those are the three that are most important to me. It is a transformative technology that sits at the intersections of productivity and entertainment, of simplicity and power, and of phone and computer. As these devices continue to advance, we will see more and more people experiencing the virtues of having so much of your life always at hand.

A Brief Bit of Self-Promotion

I'm proud to announce the first step has been taken on a path that will undoubtedly have me joining the ranks of the Bard himself as a colossus of English letters. That step comes courtesy of Necon E-Books, which has seen fit to publish one of my (very) short stories as a winner of their March flash fiction contest, and will also include it in their end-of-year anthology.

If you have a second, definitely go check them out. My story took its inspiration from the idea that some of the large computing networks we are creating are for shockingly trivial, and even anti-social, activities. Readers of this blog may also enjoy another story featured: "HEALTH CARE 2016", by Jan Kozlowski. It offers a humorous yet vivid take on where our desire to cut costs in the health system could take us.

Enjoy, and any feedback on the piece is welcome in the comment section.

"I Like Paper": What's Holding Back Healthcare

So I was in the hospital, accompanying my wife for an emergency appointment that ended with the all-clear being sounded. As we were sitting in the triage room at Beth Israel, my wife's doctor, a woman that I would place at between 35 and 40, was inputting some information into the in-room computer system. She stopped, momentarily stymied by some piece of data the program was prompting her to collect. Turning to us, she said, "I hate this thing. I like paper. Don't you like paper?"

We all had a good laugh at that, but a day later that phrase is still running through my head: "I like paper." That sums up a huge problem with our healthcare system in three simple words. Having spent about thirty minutes watching this particular physician work, and seeing her whip out her Blackberry at one point, I can vouch that she was intelligent and reasonably comfortable with technology. Yet she would prefer paper, and by her own account, avoids the computer system as often as possible.

Now, maybe that bit of data the computer wanted to collect was meaningless in the situation. Maybe, in that instance, collecting the information in a paper chart would have been both quicker and more customized to the issue at hand. But one of the great things about computers is that they enable a level of standardization otherwise impossible. Perhaps my wife's next doctor will need that particular data point as part of making a care decision, or at least want to know it was collected to rule out some possibility he's considering. By computerizing medical records, we make it much more likely the right information is going to be collected and made accessible when needed.

As Walter Russell Mead notes yet again in a recent blog post, one of the areas where we have the most to gain economically is healthcare, where there are still great efficiencies to be found. But that can't happen as long as otherwise talented and intelligent professionals resist tools that, once a part of their daily lives, will enable those improvements. Progress on digitizing medical data continues, but it will be resisted until leaders in the field figure out better ways to have physicians embrace these technologies instead of fighting them.

What Are Cell Phones Doing to Us?

The big study that got a lot of media attention this week was one that showed extended cell phone use causes changes in brain activity, presumably due to the proximity of its electromagnetic field. Here's the key bit:

"Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (part of the National Institutes of Health), reports Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that a cell phone's electromagnetic field can cause changes in brain activity. Specifically, she and her team found that the regions nearest to the antenna of closely held mobile devices showed higher rates of energy (or glucose) consumption."

Glucose consumption essentially means that that part of the body is working harder, and using more energy. Is that because we are stimulating the cells in such a way as they could become cancerous? Or is the brain just more active in the area near a signal? No one knows, although those who believe wireless signals cause cancer will not wait for definitive proof to validate their fears.

I highlight the study not because I think we're all about to grow iPhone shaped tumors in our brains, but because it shows how unclear we still are about how the changes we make to our environment impact the human body. When someone wants to build a dam, they have to do detailed studies and show exactly how that the development will impact the river. But if someone wants to sell us transmitting devices that we'll hold up to our ear or keep next to our reproductive organs all day, they go ahead and we figure out later if it is a problem. I think we ask too much in the case of the dam, and too little in the case of the cell phone.

And maybe we should be a bit more humble about pursuing advances in genetic engineering, bio-enhancements, and brain-computer interfaces when we can't even figure out if our phones are doing something nasty to our brains.

The Future of Spray-On Skin

In my last post, I wrote about how an increasing number of complexities in modern society may constrain our collective ability to innovate. Whether it is the existing infrastructure that supports older technologies over newer ones, or a litigious society that exposes those doing something new and unproven to enormous financial risk, we are putting our inventors and entrepreneurs in an ever-tighter straight jacket.

Well, I found an interesting test case for the theory: spray-on skin. What's that? It sounds like some ridiculous thing I just made up? Well, then watch this video and doubt no more, my skeptical friend. For those of you who would rather not see images of severe burns, let me explain: scientists have figured out how to harvest skin cells from the remaining healthy skin on a burn victim, put them in a solution, and apply that mixture through a spray gun to encourage rapid skin growth. They have successfully demonstrated that this works in a number of cases, and it takes a fraction of the time that traditional skin grafts do.

On the surface, this seems like an easy innovation to adopt. It is easier, faster, clinically superior and (once it gets up to scale) probably cheaper than the existing options. Yet I see a number of obstacles to spray-on skin coming to a hospital near you:

1) The procedure uses stem cells, which have the taint of controversy, even though in this case the cells are harvested from the patient's skin, not embryos.
2) The gun will be a capital expense for hospitals, whereas skin grafts don't require any new capital equipment.
3) Surgeons are compensated based on set reimbursement rates for different types of procedures. Spraying on skin would need a code, which can take years. And when it gets one, it may pay physicians much less than the compensation for a skin graft procedure.
4) Skin grafts are big business (check out KCI if you don't believe me) and they are likely to vigorously oppose any disruptive new technologies in their space.

Now, all of these obstacles are surmountable, but it won't be easy. Which is why I view the spray-on skin as a test case of sorts: if it can run the gauntlet and get widespread adoption in the next few years, I will have to revise my earlier opinion and admit that our society, as imperfect as it is, still has room to identify and advance radical, life-improving innovations.

Climbing the Wrong Technological Hills

When I was a kid, I remember being told how amazing it was that the Aztecs built their great cities without the wheel, and thinking: "How the heck did they miss that one?" I couldn't fathom that millions of people had gone centuries without ever noticing that round things roll, and that could be useful for moving things around.

This article, on the development of rocketry as our means of reaching space, made me resolve to go a little easier on the Aztecs. The main point the author, Neal Stephenson, makes several times is that only a highly unlikely series of events led to the development of space-going rockets, and now we are wedded to that technology to the point that newer, better methods of getting off this planet are extremely difficult to develop.

I've always assumed, naively, that once we make discoveries in the basic sciences, that eventually we will appreciate the technological possibilities and make new and better stuff. The theoretical understanding of how to split the atom leads to fission bombs and nuclear power plants in a relatively straight line, because the rewards of technological innovation are so high. But, as the case of rocketry indicates, often technological innovation is haphazard, messy, and driven by the incidentals of history and personality.

So, my first question: how many great technologies could potentially be developed based on the theoretical knowledge we have, but aren't being created because of basic human oversight?

Then, the flip side: once a technological system is sufficiently developed, and bound up with all the other human institutions (government, the law, social expectations, finance and the like), what technologies suddenly become unappealing to develop because their adoption would depend on unlikely changes to these complex systems? I've joked before about wanting my flying car: would we have them if a flying car wouldn't lead to massive challenges to the air traffic control system, to our system of personal and corporate liability, to civic noise ordinances?

Which leads to my second question: how many great technologies will be smothered in the cradle because a society as complex as ours creates insurmountable barriers to certain types of innovation?

We've heard a lot recently about entrepreneurship being the key to revitalizing our economy. But the entrepreneur may be unable to break down the barriers to innovation erected by our laws, our systems, the past decisions of other innovators, and just plain old inertia.

It's the Energy Source, Stupid

For my entire life, the energy of human innovation has been focused on the individual: we have seen the advent of the computer, the cellular phone, and then the infinite improvements, iterations, and combinations of those technologies. When you read a "BLANK of the Future" article, whether that blank is filled in by "Car", or "House", or "Hammer", you can bet it has something to do with the microchip or wireless communication.

In fact, the only other trend that has had a major impact on the things we use has been incremental improvements in materials, allowing us to build things stronger and lighter. (Note, I'm sure someone could find a technology to prove me wrong on this, and I'm purposefully ignoring healthcare innovation because--well, because I want to.)

Now, as I've written before, what we have not innovated on is what I'll call 'collective technologies': things that affect a lot of people, but that individuals rarely 'own'. (Think railroads and other forms of mass transportation, or other infrastructure.) These have been improved in recent years, but there hasn't been anything like a major breakthrough: just incremental gains, caused mostly by improvements in materials and the introduction of the microchip into older technologies.

When I read things like this, then, about the need to establish an economic reason for further space exploration, I'm in complete agreement. But the author is stealing a base: there is simply no way, with the technology we have, that we are going to see space mining or any other sort of economic activity pay off until we have an energy source that makes space transit much, much more efficient.

Think of it this way: the ascension of oil as the dominant energy source (and coal to a lesser extent) made possible every single transportation improvement over the last 150 or so years. Before that we had very inefficient, unreliable wind, water and steam power. Fossil fuels represented an order of magnitude improvement, and it took about a century (until Apollo, arguably) for us to push the limits of where that energy source could take us. Since then, no major breakthroughs on collective technologies. Why? We're waiting for the next energy source that can offer an order-of-magnitude gain on the current standard.

And just so we can skip to the point, that ain't going to be fuel cells, and it ain't going to be wind or geothermal. Maybe solar can step up, if we create much, much, MUCH more efficient panels. Otherwise, it has to be fusion, or something the vast majority of us haven't heard of. But if you want to get humanity off this rock and into a solar-system wide economy, don't worry about what NASA is doing, invest in energy research.

The Future in Assassinations

Every once in a while, when I'm looking to learn something completely new and random, I head over to DARPA's website, to browse around and see the possible technologies of the future. And today I found a little gem: the Extreme Accuracy Tactical Ordinance (EXACTO) program.

By way of a brief summary, DARPA paints the picture of an extremely accurate 50 caliber rifle with maneuverable bullets, which it claims will radically increase the range and accuracy of two-man sniper teams. It vaguely mentions a 'real-time guidance system', but understandably doesn't say more. There's no mention, of course, of how close this technology is to full development. (I'm not the only one to find this fascinating, it also received a write-up at WIRED.

My initial guess is that DARPA hopes to create something like the laser-guided smart bombs that have been used in our recent wars. In this case, I can imagine a spotter who gets much closer to the target and lights him up with a laser (the range of the laser obviously becomes important here). Then the bullet would have some sort of fins that allow slight adjustments to hone in on the spot. However, its also possible the technology would allow the target to be marked in advance (imagine a James Bond type sticking something to the back of a jacket) so the spotter can get away before the shot is fired.

According to a quick web search, the farthest shot to kill a human target ever was about a mile and a half. If this technology can double that and make such long-distance shots more accurate, assassinations would become easier by an order of magnitude. (Imagine being in charge of securing all the possible firing positions within over 20 square miles.) But the interesting question is whether and how we would use this technology if we had it available. Right now, we're using Predator drones to kill a lot of Al Qaeda types. In the future, will we once again opt for the bullet over the bomb? Or is ordering a person shot, instead of a target bombed, a little too real for leaders detached from the fight?

The World in 2200: Part Three

In the two previous posts in this series, I examined some social trends that I believe will be significant drivers of our future, and then hypothesized about the type of events that would happen in a world where those forces were shaping history. In this post, we'll take a look at how this world might appear to a typical citizen of New York City, a physician named Zeke.

At 8:30, Zeke bought a soy bagel and walked to his customary bench in Battery Park, where he would scarf down breakfast. It was Wednesday, so he'd get to see the weekly Mars Cruiser launch from the Jamaica Bay spaceport. Not for the first time, he wished he was on it: the biggest city on Mars, Anconia, was a model libertarian community, and he was increasingly feeling that life in old Manhattan was a little oppressive. He looked at the solid old scrapers of the Wall Street historic district: nothing new had been built there in about 150 years. The streets were closed to vehicle traffic both to preserve its tourist appeal and so no terrorist could bomb the old buildings into rubble. In Brooklyn and Queens, where more new development took place, the buildings were engineered to take a lot more. Just last month, a Bolivarian freedom fighter had driven an old electric van into the base of the Twitter Tower in Long Island City, and the blast had done little more than crack a few lower windows.

Zeke pulled out his thin-screen reader and unfolded it. Its smart cells snapped it rigid after it was fully expanded, and he quickly downloaded the print and video feeds from the Huffington Times. He glanced up as the Mars Cruiser fired its big fusion-powered jet, then went back to reading about a plan for Indian Buddhists to set up "New Tibet" in the asteroid belt. The Chiinese were objecting, as they claimed there was no country named Tibet that it could be named after. Zeke chuckled: he remembered the settlement between India and China after their last scuffle, 20 years earlier, and how China had to keep Tibet because neither side wanted to attract the wrath of the Warriors of the Lama, nor did India want the challenge of an independent base for its dissident Buddhists to rally around. Now, like it had for so many nations with unhappy minorities, it seemed that space would solve the problem.

He then watched yet another debate about the legality of genetic enhancements in children. It seemed besides the point to him. Like most physicians, he saw many patients who had obviously been 'upgraded' in some way or another, and despite the laws he never reported his suspicions or gave evidence to investigators, even when the mods were obvious. (One of his patients, an avid diver, always wore turtlenecks to hide his gills.)

Before he shuffled off to work, he noted that the Southern Autonomous Region was threatening to declare total independence again. The new wrinkle was that now Washigon (he still hated that name) was claiming that if the South went, they would form a new state with British Columbia, which was already independent of Canada. Zeke wondered how long the US was going to hold together: with all the independent space colonies, it seemed like every region with a few million people thought it could and should run itself. "I might be old-fashioned," he thought, "but I still rather like the idea of one big country, even if I don't much care for some of the decisions the government makes."

He folded up his paper-thin screen, threw his trash into a disintigrator (The motto of Waste Repurposing: 'The building blocks of tomorrow's...Whatever!' was cheerfully printed across its side) and headed to his office. His local patients would start arriving at 11:00, for the first two hours, he was required by law to practice vid-medicine for patients in Africa, as part of the Emerging World Grievance Resolution Treaty of 2182. The compromise was that American doctors didn't have to move there. He consulted with a few patients in Great Congo, who all had easily resolved complaints, then finally saw his first live human promptly at 11:00. The poor woman had been suffering from Grant's Syndrome for weeks, and had not been able to get an appointment before now. It doesn't make sense, thought Zeke, that the 'disadvantaged' countries could get better care than the 'modern' ones. He imagined things were better on Mars.

He walked home after work, happy he wasn't one of the people screaming all over the northeast on one of the new MagLev Commuter Trains. Part of the recent "Renewing America" program, they could get a person from Ohio to New York in 70 minutes. But the damned things were still unreliable, and they were packed for almost every run. He supposed they were good for the economy, but they had made New York more crowded than it had been in quite a long time.

In his apartment, his wife had left a holo-message to say she'd be out late with friends, and his son had left for his weekend trip to Moscow. So, with a free evening for the first time he could recall, he played his favorite Virtual Reality war game (relive the epic battles of the great South American wars of the 2080's!) and downed a bit of his illicit scotch. He would be damned if he gave up the occassional drink because he was over 50, and the bureaucrats thought it would increase his medical costs. He was a doctor, and could take care of himself. Eventually, his wife still not home, he drifted off, thinking about how nice Mars sounded.

Dot Connectors Wanted

I read this past week a fascinating exchange by Shane Harris, author of a new book called The Watchers, and Patrick Radden Keefe. Both of them have covered the various controversies over government spying and data collection, and Harris' book takes a deep look at John Poindexter and the Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that created a stir during the Bush administration.

What struck me, as I read the exchange, was their observation that the government has become good at "collecting the dots", without increasing its ability to connect them. TIA was meant to automate this process to some degree, but when they ran tests on its effectiveness it failed. The job of connecting the dots, it seems, cannot be outsourced to computers, at least not yet.

So that begs the question: are we failing to teach human beings to connect the dots? This seems like one of the basic building blocks of both wisdom and creativity, and yet it is a skill in short supply. Part of the problem, I think, is that people are increasingly encouraged to specialize: don't just know advertising, be a strategic planner. Don't just do advertising, do healthcare advertising. Don't just know healthcare, know oncology. (Just to cite a personal example.) While that intense specialization might help a person find the conventional answers within their space faster and better, it does not help them incorporate new knowledge from other areas that might revolutionize their area of focus.

The explosion of knowledge made possible by the Internet rewarded specialization, as there is just more to know in every field. Yet in many areas, the dot connectors have been left out, and each isolated topic has tapped a lot of the value it can get out of specialization and narrow focus. The dots have been collected, and the future will belong to those people who can take the critical step of connecting them.