Category: Collaborative Age

How Each Social Group Has Its Own Vernacular Tongue

Have you realized that each social group, be it a local community, a sports club a particular industry or a specific company, has its own vernacular tongue. In particular, it tends to use words and acronyms whose sense is only understandable by the initiated. We often underestimate the community power created by this shared understanding – and the exclusion power for those that don’t understand it.

Which means that an outsider’s first focus should be to learn that specific tongue, so as to be integrated. The power of integration brought by the capability to speak the community tongue is incredible and underestimated.

As a consultant I do enter many different client organizations and learning the specific words, expressions and acronyms is the first priority. Once they are known and used properly, I feel integrated in the community, and they feel I am part of them, which is quite useful.

Hat tip to Alain Carcassès for the discussion and the original idea

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What Resilience Management Approaches Should Include

In a follow-up of our post ‘How Risk Management Must Evolve into Resilience Management‘, let’s examine what are the approaches that would be required in a new discipline of Resilience Management.

First, Resilience Management should be an extension, a complement of Risk Management. Risk Management works and this foundation should not be dismissed.

Resilience Management should focus on the ‘unknown-unknowns’, developing scenarios generally believed to be highly unlikely or too extreme, to examine how the system would respond. Resilience Management is the appropriate response to unpredictable complex systems.

In addition, Resilience Management should measure the capability of the system to adapt by reconfiguring itself, reassigning resources or seeking additional resources, adapting its structure.

To be effective, Resilience Management should also address a higher level system than the one too often examined. For example, it should consider airspace safety management and not just individual aircraft safety; or the entire capability of a society to respond to major industrial accident instead of the sole safety of plant.

The main focus of Resilience Management should be the capability for the system to effectively respond (and not just react) at all times.

Resilience Management is a new discipline to be invented and developed for the Collaborative Age. Are you ready to take the challenge?

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How Brain-Computer Interfaces and Brain Implants Are Already Effective

The very interesting Bloomberg post ‘Brain-Computer Interfaces Are Already Here‘ describes graphically and in a compelling manner the progress of brain-computer interfaces today.

The most promising technology, it seems, involves an implant in the brain that can be plugged in the computer (instead of non-invasive technologies). The results that are mentioned in the post are quite amazing. “The past year has been particularly impressive. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center connected touch sensors from a robot’s fingertips to a paralyzed man’s sensory cortex so he could feel what it was touching. At Case Western, scientists linked a paralyzed man’s motor cortex to a computer that electrically stimulated muscles in his arm, enabling him to bring a forkful of food from a dish to his mouth. At Brown, Borton’s team implanted electrodes and a wireless transmitter in a monkey’s motor cortex and connected it to a receiver wired to the animal’s leg, restoring its walking motion.”

Although confined today to remediation of people with motorsensory problems, the technology might well soon become mainstream. The potential is quite difficult to envisage, in particular if that can enhance some of our physical and brain capabilities.

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How Wearables Will Change our Lives

In this excellent article (in French) ‘and if tomorrow your watch was to replace your shrink‘, the potential benefits of wearables and ongoing monitoring to deal medically with psychological issues is highlighted.

In particular for people with borderline psychological troubles, feedback from smartwatches and other wearables depending on the location, situation, ambient noise and physiological factors such as heart rate could be a nice way to deal with excessive anxiety and other difficult situations.

And it would provide 24/7 monitoring, not just more or less frequent encounters with a psychologist.

When I searched for a picture for this post about smartwatches I could almost only find pictures of people doing some form of sport. But in the very next future, these devices and their monitoring capability will find their way in our daily lives and may be coupled with personalized feedback systems that might intervene in certain situations.

Of course on some aspects this might seem a bit annoying to be monitored continuously, on the other hand as any new technology we will need some time to tame it and learn how to live with it, taking the benefits and avoiding the shortcomings.

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How Critical Developing Artificial Empathy Is

I strongly recommend reading Charlene Li’s post on ‘Artificial Intelligence is Nothing Without Artificial Empathy‘.

artificial_empathyHer point is that “if we want our AI to truly understand and engage with us, it will need to develop “artificial empathy.” Artificial empathy is possible only if true empathy and the desire to understand customers lies at the center of the algorithm’s design.”

Of course this has not been taken into account at all in the first Artificial Intelligence algorithms design, and that probably needs to be fixed in a second generation of algorithms.

I find this idea of artificial empathy quite troubling and transforming, in any case worth following up for the future. It definitely gives a new viewpoint into the development of Artificial Intelligence.

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How Government Needs to Shift with the Collaborative Age – Influencing the Digital Sphere

Government’s role needs to shift significantly with the Fourth Revolution. In the past it used a lot of resource for data capture and crunching, which is now done automatically and more quickly using digital tools. In a series of post ‘Teaching Digital at the Kennedy School of Government: A Road Map‘, David Eaves outlines some principles.

His main point is that “It is the digital sphere?—?and the rules, norms and structures that come to define it—that will, in many cases, control the physical sphere. This is why digital’s impact on the economy, democracy, and society should not be underestimated. It is also why understanding, shaping and engaging in those rules, norms and structures is essential to a policy school.”

Some key questions remain to be resolved: “What government can and should look like in a digital age is a real and pressing question“. ” Can governments become learning organizations that move at the speed of digital?“. It needs a fundamental rethink of how government conducts its operations and what value it adds to the People. The issue of regulation of the digital world is also acute.

Solutions are not yet available in a standard format but this area is certainly a very interesting field to watch as experiments are conducted in certain countries!

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How to Value Big Data?

Right now Big Data is the trend and the promise, but the reality is that it is very hard to squeeze value of it. Based on current information, we are still in the very learning curve and not all experiments have held their promises in this area.

It seems that it really takes a lot of data to produce something really useful, and even with vast amounts of data, it is difficult to make sense and produce applications that can really be of predictive use. Compared to the predictions just a few years ago, the real breakthrough does not seem to have really happened.

It is therefore still very difficult to value the actual troves of Big Data. Their value should ultimately be derived from their usefulness and the applications they allow. At the same time there is a (low) cost associated to maintaining all this data and there might be a point where decision-makers might have to balance this cost with the value it provides in the short term.

I would be interested to have hints about how to value data from the readers of the blog to see how this area progresses.

 

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How User-Generated Data Should be Better Valued

The excellent Economist article ‘The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data: the data economy demands a new approach to antitrust rules‘ raises a superbly framed question.

Railway, phone and oil tycoons of the late 19th century saw their empires dismantled by anti-trust laws to create competition and better prices for consumers. Anti-trust laws are still being applied strictly in the US and in Europe, looking mainly to the global market position.

“What has changed? Smartphones and the internet have made data abundant, ubiquitous and far more valuable. […] Meanwhile, artificial-intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning extract more value from data. […] This abundance of data changes the nature of competition. […] By collecting more data, a firm has more scope to improve its products, which attracts more users, generating even more data, and so on. […] Access to data also protects companies from rivals in another way [preventing new upcoming startups to have access to the vast troves of data]”

The fundamentals of the recommendations to follow in the paper is to give value to data and user access. This is valued in the rare transactions to acquire companies, but not really valued as part of a market by authorities.

Availability of data on users should be better valued in the economy as this becomes the driving force of the Collaborative Age. And this should be part of authorities’ decision-making. The question remains: beyond advertisement, how to value troves of data generated by users?

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How Technology Creates Induced Wage Transfer and Overall Well-Being Improvement

This extremely interesting article in Medium ‘The Robots Have Taken Over (Our Brains)‘ offers quite a different view of the impact of technology on wages and well being.

The well documented Baumol’s cost disease shows that when “real wages in low productivity industries actually rise like those in high productivity industries, as workers leave low-productivity industries for higher productivity industries. This simultaneously increases their income, as well as forces the employers in the lower productivity industries to raise salaries to retain and attract replacement labour.”

Further, the author view is that “what Baumol called a dilemma, and what we have come to describe as a disease, is actually precisely the salve for technological productivity gains to be distributed, even to parts of the economy that aren’t experiencing productivity growth. The real disease would be if Baumol’s dilemma didn’t exist?—?but it does.”

Therefore when looked at the global level, technology creates an improvement of well being for the entire society by an induced redistribution of wage and thus value. The author explains the apparent dilemma of lower apparent wage growth versus productivity observed in recent years.

This is an interesting subject which shows that we don’t still quite understand what happens when such a transformation happens like the Fourth Revolution.

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Why History Needs to Start Being Written by Nomads

One of the key transformations of the Fourth Revolution is that nomads will take over the sedentary in terms of economic leadership. This never happened before. And History has always been written by the sedentary.

“Never did history understand nomads” wrote Gilles Deleuze. It would be about time that History could be written by nomads.

The point of view of the nomad is different: it is not about how things get built over time, it is how we interact with our environment and how we travel to meet other people, and build something out of these interactions. It is how we interact with what mankind builds, it is not about how we own things and protect them.

I am not quite sure how History will be transformed when it will be written by nomads, for sure this will be a substantial paradigm shift for many of us!

Hat tip to Anne Laure Fréant from the site retourenfrance.fr for French expats returning to France and the inspiration from her email newsletter.

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How Machine Learning Will Lead to More Conformity and Less Creativity

One thing most people forget is that machine learning, the essence of today’s Artificial Intelligence (AI), is basically about reproducing the same patterns than the ones fed during the learning process.

A typical machine learning neural network
A typical machine learning neural network

Therefore, the introduction of AI will first lead to an increase of conformity. Anything outside of the ordinary (i.e. outside of the set of circumstances used for the learning process) will cause problems, misbehavior and defects.

If we draw this observation further, it will not be possible to have AI achieve any kind of disruption. Disruption can be created by the human mind, as history shows. So, for a while there will be a significant difference between AI and the human mind: the ability to think out of the box and to create disruptive patterns. Or, what is exactly is generally covered under the word ‘creativity’.

The massive irruption of AI in our lives will force some amount of conformity on us and that is a danger. At the same time, creativity will remain an unrivaled feature of the human mind.

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How the Collaborative Age Abundance May Change our World

Cory Doctorow excellent Locus column ‘Cory Doctorow: The Jubilee: Fill Your Boots‘ raises interesting questions about the ultimate evolution of society in the Collaborative Age – what I would call the Abundance utopia.

The point Cory Doctorow makes is that it should be possible to live in a world of abundance leveraging on the rhythms of nature to minimize our environmental impact. The point is then to accept that things don’t necessarily work all the time. This drawback can be compensated by technology coordination.

“Technology hints at another model, one that hybridizes the pre-industrial rhythms of work and play and the super-modern ability to use computers to solve otherwise transcendentally hard logistics and coordination problems.”

“Using bright green, high tech coordination tools, we can restore the pastoral green, artisanal autonomy that privileges mindful play over mindless work. The motto of Magpie Killjoy’s Steampunk zine was ‘‘love the machine, hate the factory.’’ Love the dividends of coordinated labor, hate the loss of freedom we suffer when we have to coordinate with others.”

I strongly encourage the read and the thought that freed from the needs to coordinating large organizations, we could live a life far closer to the rhythms of nature while enjoying abundance.

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