There is an ancient Chinese curse that says “May you live in interesting times”. The implication is that times of change and disruption are “interesting” (and unpleasant) compared to a state of peace and tranquility.
We are certainly living in interesting times right now, and “disruption” is a word being bandied around by the tech media quite a lot. It’s no longer necessarily a bad thing, apparently, and I’ve been reading about the various major disruptive technologies that are changing our world now and will be doing so for the next few decades – and they are not all IT driven. You’ve probably read the comments that 60% of the jobs that our children will do in twenty years’ time don’t even exist yet? And that 70% of the jobs we do today won’t exist anymore? So what are we, as business people and employers, to do to plan for that??
It’s a long journey from Netflix to self-driving cars to robots doing our work, but it’s a journey we’re on. Like the way airlines changed travel to make long journeys take less time, everything going on in the world today takes less time to develop. (Getting across Auckland, of course, takes way MORE time, but that’s a different topic!)
We only need live TV for news and sport.
Netflix used to be a service where you ordered movies online and they sent you DVDs to watch, along with a return-paid courier envelope. As the internet got faster and people streamed more video directly to their PCs (and, eventually, TVs) Netflix could have gone out of business, but it changed its business model and embraced the new technology to deliver movies over your internet connection. That simple move has led to a complete change in the way we watch TV. No longer do we need to wait a week for the next episode of the series were enjoying, we can binge-watch many episodes a night. Ultimately live TV only needs to be there for news and sport and we don’t need to face the horror of sitting in the lounge to find “Married at First Sight” accidentally popping up on the screen.
Self-driving cars are hitting our streets already, and it’s a development that is very much arriving in parallel with usable electric cars, so I’ll just briefly talk about that and the two technologies that underpin it and that are changing our world in so many ways.
The first is the simple rechargeable battery. When I was a teenager I played with radio controlled model aircraft and I hated the unreliable little glow-plug engines that I could never start. I wanted an electric model ‘plane, but the batteries available were just too big and heavy for the amount of power they could supply. The laptop and mobile phone industries have driven the demand for better batteries – lighter, smaller and with more capacity – and the results they’ve achieved are now flowing into everything that uses power.
This is why electric cars have recently become quite viable. And it’s also how, when I found a few years ago that I am still basically a teenager, I could buy an electric radio-controlled model aircraft with enough flight time that I generally crash it before the batteries run out.
The other parallel advance is the exponential development of computing power has reached the point where artificial intelligence is really starting to make an impact. We’re on a curve of development there where we can fit onto a pretty small computer chip the intelligence that is the equivalent of an insect brain. Within the next few years it will be a mouse brain, and then, not too far away, a human brain.
You only need the brain of an insect to drive a car.
An insect brain doesn’t sound that impressive when it comes to wanting to do something useful like, say, driving a car? But just think about what an insect can do! A bee can fly around avoiding obstacles, land neatly where-ever it wants, interact with other bees, find its way home and remember to feed itself. And it’s doing all that in three dimensions, not just on the ground. You don’t need any more computing power than that to drive a car.
I enjoy driving, but I feel lucky to be getting to the age I am knowing that in the future I won’t have to drive. My mobility and independence will remain intact much later in life than my grandparents were. The end result of this is fewer cars on the road and is the subject of a much longer discussion, I will go into that a bit in a future article.
Watching a movie on something the size of an iPad while your battery-powered car drives you along the road was pure science fiction when I was growing up, yet it’s now something I have personally done. That’s just the tip of this iceberg, I’ll talk about the deeper contributions of artificial intelligence, free energy, and other disruptive technologies next month.
PS – “May you live in interesting times” is always referred to as an ancient Chinese curse, but in fact its first appearance was in Britain in the mid 1930s. There’s no evidence anywhere that its origin was Chinese or ancient.
Philip Adamson, Managing Director, Outsource IT
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