Category: Collaborative Age value production system

How GPS Became Irreplaceable While Free

We don’t think much anymore how miraculous the Global Positioning System GPS is. Still, it takes a lot of high technology (including relativist time corrections on satellites!) to provide us with what is now an everyday service we depend on. Actually we take it for granted when we would be quite lost without it.

Is GPS now part of the minimum infrastructure that we need as humans, like internet access? It has certainly drastically changed the way we navigate. It started as many technology before from the Cold War military efforts, but has been progressively opened to the civilian uses. For free. Until we can’t now part from it.

Let’s imagine for a minute what would happen if the system went to be fully unavailable. We are all using it one way or the other in our daily lives, and even more so in certain industries like logistics. A lot of the efficiency gains in many activities come from GPS availability.

Still this service is available for free as many services we now take for granted, as a by-product of something developed for military purpose. There is an issue about the US controlling the signal, which is being addressed by other blocks of nations that are launching their own system. This will provide redundancy. It is still amazing that something so useful is available for free.

In the Collaborative Age, a lot of the basic infrastructure becomes increasingly available for free or cheap. Maybe we should be careful not to take it too much for granted and have some backup solutions if they suddenly disappear.

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How Internet Can Also Be Used to Foster Democracy

This worthwhile Guardian article ‘How Taiwan’s ‘civic hackers’ helped find a new way to run the country‘ describes the important gOv experiment carried out there. Using a platform focused on areas of agreement rather than tending to split communities around disagreement it seems that they have built a platform that gives hope that internet can be used to really foster democracy (g0v.asia).

Of course this experiment could only come from Taiwan where the need for democracy is particularly essential due to the ambitions of its mainland neighbor.

The Guardian article explains how this started in 2014, and how important it is now in the local political landscape, with even a minister stemming from this movement.

Interestingly, a cornerstone of the approach is radical transparency about everything in the public sphere – making information and data much more accessible to the citizens.

But the most interesting I find is that “the discussants found themselves in an entirely new kind of online space – exactly the opposite of a social media platform that encourages strife“. “As people expressed their views, rather than serving up the comments that were the most divisive, it gave the most visibility to those finding consensus – consensus across not just their own little huddle of ideological fellow-travellers, but the other huddles, too. Divisive statements, trolling, provocation – you simply couldn’t see these.“

So it quite possible to use Internet in a way that fosters agreement instead of the traditional social networks we have grown used to, that do rather the contrary. This is quite an important message, and I am looking forward to this type of platforms to become increasingly widespread.

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How Office Space Remains Essential

There are lots of opinions on how office space will evolve as a result of the Covid-19 crisis (which is probably an accelerator of trends more than a trigger). In this interesting post ‘The Case For Space (Office Space, That Is)…‘ Mich Joel, who worked mainly in the advertising industry, explains why office space is definitely not obsolete.

In creative endeavors that require creative teamwork, nothing will replace working together physically. And moreover, “In the agency world, your office is your culture.” Building a strong, differentiated culture requires physical contact.

“Offices are where innovation happens. Offices are where we socialize to build better work. Offices are where new ideas get sparked. Offices are where we learn more about ourselves by watching others. Office are where culture is born and thrives.”

Future offices may be different, and some professions may more decidedly into more virtual offices, but nothing will replace physical offices for many professions in particular for creativity or where teamwork is essential (engineering, projects for example). Virtual work cannot emulate the informal interactions of the physical office and it will remain essential several days a week. It is extremely visible when it comes to the difficulty of onboarding newcomers since the start of confinement.

The office space is not obsolete or dead. It may need to evolve, but remains essential to value and culture creation.

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How Building Companies Is Still Needed Beyond Freelancer Networks

In today’s collaborative economy, there is a real question in certain service industries of the interest of building corporations instead of just relying on a network of freelancers. This post by Valeria Maltoni ‘Why Build a Company‘ sheds some light on this important question: in fact, only established companies can act in a longer timescale, and this remains a social requirement.

Corporations are of course needed when substantial capital investment is required like in the heavy or light industry of the Industrial Age; but in the services economy where capital investment is minimal, the question remains open and controversial. I know quite a number of organisations that rely mainly on animating freelancers to deliver services. On the other hand, I have build my own service companies as being mainly companies with partners and employees, and if we do use freelancers, it is only sparingly to complement rare competencies.

Valeria Maltoni makes an excellent point about timeframes. “The destiny of our species depends on our ability to survive on different time scales.” And companies have a different scale (years) compared to freelancers (days, months). Their project is to developing something over years and even sometimes generations.

She quotes “Corporations are entities that can transform and dissipate socially useful energy throughout society“. “Building a company is creating the vessel to hold value“, and this value can have many dimensions beyond the financial. In building my companies I certainly take a longer time view to deliver some kind of long standing value to the world.

Even in the Collaborative Age, the core of corporations to develop and keep value on the longer term will remain required. There may be more freelancers and people flowing from project to project, but some longer-term value receptacles must remain.

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How is USA Is Growing Different From the Rest of the Western World

The infographics of this excellent New York Times opinion ‘The U.S. Is Lagging Behind Many Rich Countries. These Charts Show Why.‘ are quite enlightening about some trends that make the USA stand apart from the rest of the developed world.

The US appear to be very specific on such aspects as life expectancy, ratio of added value going to workers vs CEOs, healthcare expenditure (the double in terms of share of GDP!), incarceration rate (more than double again, even 3x or 4x!), or income inequality.

It seems quite clear that there is apparently something broken in the way the US socio-economics work. The question is out whether this situation is actually sustainable even if the US economy is quite self-sustaining. I am convinced however that despite the powerful US softpower, we need to be careful when we are importing in our societies typical US issues, which are not necessarily valid in our societies.

The USA is clearly an outlier in may socio-economic aspects. It is a very large outlier of course, but let’s not necessarily make it a model or try to adopt its solutions, which may not be adequate for the rest of the world.

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How Most Internet Services Are Poor at Helping You Discover New Things

This thoughtful blog by Seth Godin ‘Who is good at discovery?‘ remind us that most internet services are poor to help us discover new things. Some are better like Netflix, but many are really poor.

“Google built its entire business on the mythology of discovery, persuading millions of entrepreneurs and creators that somehow, SEO would help them get found, at the very same time they’ve dramatically decreased organic search results to maximize revenue.”

Intrinsically, and increasingly, internet services tend to propose new things that fit our preferences in order to keep us hooked. I find that it is increasingly difficult to get a connection to something new. And it is not the case for traditional press and magazines, my personal network of peers and connections, references in the books I read which continue to allow me to discover new things much more than all internet united.

When you search on internet you’d better know what you’d like to find, because serendipity is not going to happen by itself. Worse, on “YouTube–if you follow the ‘recommended’ path for just a handful or two of clicks, you’ll end up with something banal or violent.“

Don’t rely on the internet to find new things to discover. Rather rely on your network and traditional sources!

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How a Stock Echange Could Effectively Be Fostering Long Term Strategies

An attempt has been made recently – and quite widely publicized – to launch a Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE) to foster long-term value creation by companies. The principles are accessible at this page: ‘A principles-based approach‘. It basically requires companies listing there to adhere to principles protecting stakeholders and the environment, and developing long term growth strategies.

While the principle is absolutely commendable, I see a contradiction between the concept of stock exchange and the concept of long term growth and capital stability. In all times, markets to be liquid require a high amount of transactions which then expose to all sorts of psychological effects from traders. On the other hand, it allows quicker reallocation of capital when the economic fundamentals change.

Some companies effectively deploy long term strategies only when a substantial percentage of their capital is held by shareholders that have the same intent, such as family-owned businesses. They may struggle more to adapt to an evolving environment in that case (sometimes family-owned business get stuck in old-fashioned approaches), but this provides stability that can also be beneficial.

At this stage I fail to see how the LTSE can be more than an exchange of stocks specifically picked for some strategic qualities, and effectively foster a longer-term intent from traders and clients. We’ll see!

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How Internet Activity Does Not Seem to Increase Exponentially Any More

I have recently looked at those graphs produced every year about everything that happens on internet in a minute. This is the graph for 2020. What is interesting is to compare to similar graphs from previous years.

The absolute numbers are overwhelming (4.7 million videos viewed on youtube every minute, 59 million messages on messenger and whastapp), in particular when one remembers that it takes 1,440 minutes to make a day. At the same time they have evolved somewhat linearly in the past 4-5 years (doubling over the period) at least based on similar representations. There seems to be a physical limit to our online activity!

Of course, each video or message itself may have become heavier with higher definition or improved content, so that may not represent the actual growth of traffic. Still, it is interesting to observe that we don’t seem to be in the exponential growth that was observed when digital started to spread at the start of the century.

Maybe an important thought to have in terms of context for new online services that would intend to penetrate the market in particular where it seems to be quite mature (developed countries).

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How Social Network and Facebook Backlash Should Not Have Let Down

In is quite interesting to note that the strong backlash against Facebook end 2018 / early 2019 has let down, while Facebook has not visibly changed its operating model. Articles from the time are still quite relevant such as for example: ‘Facebook must decide: Is it for the mob or for democracy?‘ or ‘Is It Wrong To Feel Bad For Facebook?‘.

It is increasingly clear that the revenue drive of social networks like Facebook is built on increasingly targeted advertising, and stickiness of the network itself to capture more attention for adds; and this, in turn, has the consequence of having the network show us what we’d like to see, creating relatively isolated communities of similar interest which sometimes lose touch with reality.

Still, it is amazing how the social network backlash has disappeared from front concern when the basics have not changed, people are still addicted to social networks, and the risk of manipulation linked for example to elections, has rather increased through AI generated content and the current possibility to target people at the individual level. Effective regulation has not really been implemented. So why don’t we hear so much about it now? Is that the result of effective lobbying? Is that because people have more pressing concerns? Is that because we resign ourselves to the situation?

I hope that the current debates about election manipulation will come up again around the US presidential elections, and that the subject will be tabled again to finally provide a strong regulation of social networks. We should not lose sight of the need to tackle this issue to protect democracy and our societies from excessive manipulation.

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How We Need to Increase Efforts to Protect Against Inadequate AI Generated Content

Following up from the previous post ‘How We Underestimate the Availability of AI Generated Content‘, this interesting post ‘AI-generated fake content could unleash a virtual arms race‘ goes one step further looking at the consequences of this technology.

“[the exercise of generated a fake AI-generated website provided] a glimpse into a potentially darker digital future in which it is impossible to distinguish reality from fiction.“

“Such a scenario threatens to topple the already precarious balance of power between creators, search engines, and users. The current flow of fake news and propaganda already fools too many people, even as digital platforms struggle to weed it all out. AI’s ability to further automate content creation could leave everyone from journalists to brands unable to connect with an audience that no longer trusts search engine results and must assume that the bulk of what they see online is fake.”

The issue is really that machines can generate content much faster than humans, and that all social networks rely mainly on humans to weed out inadequate content. Those tools could thus be “weaponized […] to unleash a tidal wave of propaganda could make today’s infowars look primitive“.

There is thus a definite urgent need to develop “increasingly better tools to help us determine real from fake and more human gatekeepers to sift through the rising tide of content.”

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How We Underestimate the Availability of AI Generated Content

Just take 1 minute to visit ‘This Marketing Blog Does Not Exist‘. Looks like a genuine blog, just as this one, right? Wrong, it has been entirely AI generated including the head shot of the supposed writer. And the texts do seem to make sense at first glimpse.

We are coming to a situation where we not any more in a position to distinguish AI generated content from human content. Speech generators produce real-sounding audio. Soon we won’t be able to distinguish deep-fake videos from real videos (the picture represents a snapshot from a deep-fake video of Obama compared to a real video extract).

For end-users, there is a definite need to clearly identify content that is AI generated. For some people, this also creates an unprecedented opportunity to swindle or otherwise abuse the confidence of readers or viewers at an unprecedented rate.

In a year where AI-engines are now being put widely at the disposal of the public, I believe we widely underestimate the impact of those technologies in the current world and how an increasing portion of what we read, hear and watch is AI-generated fiction. A wake-up call could be needed!

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How Diversity Is Shown to Increases Academic Research Results

This Nature article ‘These labs are remarkably diverse — here’s why they’re winning at science‘ makes the point that diversity is fostering creativity and academic outcomes, based on a study of scientific papers.

Of course, this study that shows that diversity is beneficial is based on citation count of scientific papers vs the names of contributors, which may not be fully representative of the importance of the research. Still, it is interesting to see a full fledged research based on data demonstrate the benefits of diversity.

The diversity of experience, cultures and viewpoints is quite essential for creativity and the article gives quite a few examples, in particular with the input from Maori culture into research, and other multi-cultural research teams such as an Okinawa setup that requires diversity and multi-culture to be part of the team. The article also mentions challenges of working in diverse teams such as language and cultural behavior.

Another stone in the field of demonstrating how diversity is beneficial for creativity and value creation.

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