Collaborative Age | The Fourth Revolution Blog

How algorithms change our world – the Video of the month on the Fourth Revolution website

VIDEO OF THE MONTH: How algorithms shape our world, a TED talk by Kevin Slavin.

A great video that shows how algorithms now change our world – not just virtually but also physically. The insights are fantastic – and sometimes scary. The Fourth Revolution at work, live!

Discover this resource and others in the …Value Creation System resource page… and other resources in the other thematic chapters in the resource center of the Fourth Revolution website!

Thanks: Thanks to Laurent Riesterer for pointing out the video!

Solutions to the national debt crisis 2/2: reviewing our tax base

Our current tax base will soon be obsolete. It needs to be replaced by taxation of our new collaborative capabilities.

During the Agricultural Age, tax was based on a share of the crops. When the Third Revolution came – which would eventually lead to the Industrial Revolution, a new value system was created that soon dwarfed Agricultural value: Industry. The governments which had relied since centuries on agricultural tax became weaker and weaker. They had to get money lent to them by the new ‘bourgeois’, who created value by trade or industry. The system became less and less stable as the traditional governing elite became relatively poorer and poorer, as industrial value increased orders of magnitude above agricultural value.

Today in developed countries, agriculture represents 2 to 3% of the GDP. Even if it was taxed entirely it would not represent much of the 30-50% which is swallowed by taxes and social security payments!

Today, we are again in the same situation. Our tax system is mostly based on Industrial Age value. A new value production system has been created with the Fourth Revolution that is expanding and that will eventually dwarf the Industrial Age value. The only way to get out of this conundrum is to change our tax base to effectively tax the Collaborative Age value! This is going to be difficult immediately because our accounting systems which date from the Industrial Age do not account for it.

The Agricultural Age example also reminds us that tax is not necessarily only money, it can also be in kind, including the time of people doing certain activities for the public good.

The solution is thus not to increase tax the Industrial Age way. It is to create new ways of deriving a share of the tremendous value created by collaboration for the public good. Because collaborative value is not linked to geography, countries will find it difficult to create such new taxes on their own. The solution needs to be internationally agreed. But that is the only possible way forward to avoid our governments to become relatively poorer and poorer.

The challenge is huge but so important for the stability of our societies that it should be taken upfront. Do you have ideas on the matter?

The national debt crisis is a normal consequence of the Fourth Revolution

No wonder the developed world suffers of a national debt crisis: with the Fourth Revolution spreading, the value production systems shifts. Our traditional government funding and operation are obsolete. As well as the traditional remediation solutions.

Because tax systems are based on an Industrial Age view of the value production system, taxes necessarily shrink relative to the overall economy.

Because social support systems and government operation are based on Industrial Age view of career, retirement, social support, scope of responsibility of government, expenses continue to be huge, and to increase.

With the Fourth Revolution, instant transmittal of information and funds, and globalization, gone is the golden age of the Industrial Age where governments could resolve this dilemma by creating more money, devaluating currencies, playing with trade barriers.

The debt crisis is a direct consequence of the fact that our collective social systems are still operating under the framework of the Industrial Age while the world is already in the Fourth Revolution.

For governments, to continue along the sames lines as before will at best delay the inevitable. But that is what all governments do right now! We need to take the grasp of the fundamental shift of our societies. A Revolution in our social contract is needed. Now.

The Fourth Revolution: grieving the world we understood

It is well known to change practitioners that people, when faced with a significant change that touch them emotionally, go through stages of grief. The classical model involves the following successive stages:

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
Gratefulness

So, the same happens when faced by an earth-shattering transformation like the Fourth Revolution. We are grieving the world we understood, which seemed so stable and so easy to understand.

A large number of people are in still in denial; others are angry of their perceived lack of control over what is evolving. Others try to bargain out of it so as to remain on the side of the road in minimum comfort. Still others are in total depression because they feel they can’t cope with the changes of the world. And some – a minority – perceive this change as an opportunity.

An excellent resource on the particular case of social media is the post by Amber Naslund on Social media adoption and the stages of grief.

So, regarding the Fourth Revolution, at what stage of grief are you?

Soft power – the key to leadership in the Collaborative Age

“Soft power” is a concept which was invented by Joseph Nye in 1990 in the context of international relations.

Here is the definition of “soft power” by Joseph Nye – a definition given in a 2004 article of the Harvard Business Review:

To lead is to help a group define and achieve a common purpose. There are various types and levels of leadership, but all have in common a relationship with followers. Thus leadership and power are inextricably intertwined. I will argue below that many leadership skills such as creating a vision, communicating it, attracting and choosing able people, delegating, and forming coalitions depend upon what I call soft power.

What is astounding is that this definition applies equally to leadership in an organization and to leadership in the world.

For me, effective leadership beyond the Fourth Revolution is grounded in soft power. What do you think?

Modern collaboration tools… going against the Fourth Revolution!

There is an amusing contradiction.

We could think that all virtual collaboration tools should be bringing us toward the Fourth Revolution, into the Collaborative Age. On the contrary, some virtual tools do in fact keep us in the Industrial Age mindset.

distributing work to be done (old fashioned)

Most tools that have been developed to enhance long distance collaboration, in particular when it comes to project management, are in fact deeply ingrained into the Industrial mindset. Look at most tools for virtual collaboration: they enhance this tendency to breakdown the work into tasks and asking individuals to address them based on their competency.

This will never lead to the incredible creativity of people working together, closely, emotionally connected, toward a challenging goal. This makes real, effective teams an impossibility. This makes creating technological ruptures and devising astoundingly clever ideas completely impossible.

Amazingly, a vast array of virtual tools continue to propagate the Industrial Age mindset. When will it stop? When will we understand that these tools are obsolete when it comes to creating the real value of the Fourth Revolution?

The e-brain drain of the Fourth Revolution

I just found out that the world is not flat. The leveling of the world with the Fourth Revolution is a myth.

I’m living in an emerging country, Malaysia. With the Fourth Revolution, I feel a citizen of the world. I can connect to blogs and ideas from anywhere in the world. I can correspond with people from everywhere.

And then I decided to write a book, and self-publish it so that it can be available worldwide, using those terrific modern tools like Amazon, e-book versions etc. It looks so simple to do that!

Well- that’s probably the case – if you live in a developed country!

Worldwide distribution on e-stores is where the problems started. I discovered that you can’t download Kindle e-books in Malaysia and Singapore. That the Malaysian authority delivering the ISBNs (unique worldwide book numbers) apparently was never asked for ISBN’s for e-books (they are still wondering what to do with that request). That you can’t upload a book as a Kindle if you don’t have a bank account in the US, UK or euro zone (which fortunately, I have). etc etc

Let’s look beyond this simple example. If I’m living in a developing or emerging country today, and want to share my ideas, I can open a blog or a Facebook page. That’s fantastic. Now, if I want to publish and distribute a book or something more tangible, I need to use developed countries’ companies – and there are significant hurdles to overcome.

Effectively, the developed countries still drain the brains the world, now on internet.

Entrepreneurs of the emerging countries, raise to unleash the potential of your countries! Join the Fourth Revolution infrastructure!

What do you think? Did you encounter such issues?

The dawn of the World Dream

After the Fourth Revolution, the World Dream will be the dream of billions of individuals.

It will replace the American Dream.

What will be the World Dream?

First, it will state that whatever your origin, color, ethnicity, and wherever you live, you have a chance to be successful. You have a chance to become part of the leadership of the Collaborative Age. And this apply to the entire World, thanks to cheap, long distance interactive communication. This is a revolution for 80% of Humankind!

Second, what will make you successful is not what made you successful in the Industrial Age. In the Industrial Age, compliance, hard work, career, diploma, were crucial. What is important in the Collaborative Age is to develop a unique personal brand, to get noticed on the virtual collaborative universe, to produce a unique contribution to the world, to connect emotionally with many individuals.

Third, the outcome of the World Dream will not only be the materialistic comfort of home – although a minimum satisfaction of basic material needs is still crucial. It will be the feeling to have contributed usefully to the life of a number of other people, to have created a new way of looking at the world, of having opened the eye of a community on a particular issue. Instead of discretion it will be, a strong public presence.

Are we ready to dream the World Dream? Many young people in developing and emerging countries already dream it. Let’s joint them. And act accordingly.

The end of the materialistic American Dream.

This is the end of the American Dream.

At least part of it. The part that was materialistic. The part where middle class workers, if working hard and persistently, could pretend to all the materialistic belongings that the consumption society would offer: a house, a car, a fridge, a TV…

That’s because, being a middle class employee of a large manufacturing company is a concept that is disappearing with the end of the Industrial Age.

That’s because we are not any more in an Age of materialistic scarcity. We are now an era of abundance. Material belongings define much less our identity.

Still so many people are fond of the image of the “American dream”, possibly because it is a secure life of lifelong employment, where plans could be made over decades in a stable environment, where progressive savings would buy the belongings of your dreams.

Stop dreaming. That’s over.
Don’t live in delusion. The world has changed.

It is not getting more unsafe. It is getting different. The Fourth Revolution is there. It will change our image of success.
Tomorrow, the World Dream will be ours.

Quakebook – the Fourth Revolution in action

Just read on Seth Godin’s Domino project blog: Organizing the tribe, teaching, aiding...

I summarize the post and add some content from Amazon.com here:

A new ebook by and for Japanese earthquake survivors.

I’m not sure if you’ve come across Quakebook: it’s a collection of short stories by people who were in the earthquake in Japan on March 11.

quakebook

In just over a week, a group of unpaid professional and citizen journalists who met on Twitter created a book to raise money for Japanese Red Cross earthquake and tsunami relief efforts.

In addition to essays, artwork and photographs submitted by people around the world, including people who endured the disaster and journalists who covered it, 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake contains a piece by Yoko Ono, and work created specifically for the book by authors William Gibson, Barry Eisler and Jake Adelstein.“The primary goal,” says the book’s editor, a British resident of Japan, “is to record the moment, and in doing so raise money for the Japanese Red Cross Society to help the thousands of homeless, hungry and cold survivors of the earthquake and tsunami. The biggest frustration for many of us was being unable to help these victims. I don’t have any medical skills, and I’m not a helicopter pilot, but I can edit. A few tweets pulled together nearly everything – all the participants, all the expertise – and in just over a week we had created a book including stories from an 80-year-old grandfather in Sendai, a couple in Canada waiting to hear if their relatives were okay, and a Japanese family who left their home, telling their young son they might never be able to return.”

People can buy the book at Amazon UK http://amzn.to/qbuk and Amazon US http://amzn.to/quakebkus

They can also follow @quakebook on Twitter, re-tweet the #quakebook hashtag, like the Quakebook page on Facebook http://on.fb.me/htJxCw, or simply express their support at the Quakebook site http://bit.ly/qukbook

WOW! The power of the Fourth Revolution in action where people need most of it! In one month a book is out and people are connected like never before!

Making sense of data: the limits of datadregding

Today as yesterday, making sense of available data to create information and knowledge is as important as before.

The difference is that the available data is way larger and much more accessible to anybody. Statistical analysis tools on Internet-based communication are available for free, like Google Analytics. And a lot of people try to use then to increase their own or their marketing impact.

And there come questions like ‘what’s the best time for me to tweet’? It’s possible to run that analysis, as this blog post by Chris Penn, “when is the best time to tweet”, shows. Now what is the meaning of this analysis? Is it statistically significant? Do we effectively control all the other parameters that influence the result? What are the assumptions – here, the assumption is clearly that people are supposed to live in real time, you want to tweet at a moment they are connected. Is that real? For myself I look at tweeter once a day for all the day’s tweets…

This excellent post by Tom Webster about ‘Social Media data dregding” shows very clearly how these challenges affect the interpretation of the data.

As a conclusion. Running statistical analysis on heaps of data, in the Fourth Revolution, is easier than ever. It makes all the more dangerous the conclusions we get. The good old principles of statistical control and design of experiments are still valid. And more needed than ever. That should be part of the basic literacy in the Collaborative Age.

POD (print-on-demand) and 3-D printing

Did you hear about 3-D printing? Today there are printing machines that are able to print in three dimensions, complex shapes.

They use much less material than conventional manufacturing (which starts from a large chunk of material and removes most of it through machining).

They build objects layers after layers, using perfectly controlled materials.

An article by The Economist on 3D printing highlights the current development status and the potentialities of the technology. By the way, the glove above was 3D printed.

So, let’s now cross the potentialities of 3D printing of objects with POD (print-on-demand). When will be the day where you find a nice new object in a magazine, will download the file and get it printed at the next door 3D printing shop?

No more worries of having to search store after store for that unique object of your dreams. Design it and print it!

Well that might come a few years later than for books POD, but that’ll come. And then manufacturing, in the Industrial Age meaning of mass production, will shrink significantly. Because we want to have unique objects, 3D objects POD will be the response. Only those basic components which benefit greatly from the savings of mass production will remained produced that way.

Are you ready for the revolution of 3-D objects print-on-demand?

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