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This long but interesting article in the New Yorker, ‘One of a kind, what do you do if your child has a condition that is unknown to science‘ tells the intriguing story of how social media and our new communications capabilities have allowed the family of a baby who had an unknown condition to find a community of similar children.

They managed to figure out it was a rare genetic disorder (thanks to the latest progress in genetic sequencing). Through a post that went viral, they managed to find other children that had the same symptoms, showing to the world that it was not an exceptional condition – this would before have taken years as the other children would have been diagnosed differently and the medical community would have had a hard time figuring out the conditions of all these patients were similar. After a few months, a dozen cases of the similar condition had been identified worldwide.

This in turn created the conditions for unprecedented collaboration in the medical community, with a paper co-authored by 33 authors (where usually, medical teams tend to be competitive when they think they have identified a new sickness to keep the ownership of the discovery).

The final word comes from a medical researcher, the first who found the issue with the first patient: Vandana Shashi believes that such communities [of parents] represent a new paradigm for conducting medical research. “It’s kind of a shift in the scientific world that we have to recognize—that, in this day of social media, dedicated, educated, and well-informed families have the ability to make a huge impact”. “Gone are the days when we could just say, ‘We’re a cloistered community of researchers, and we alone know how to do this.’ ”

Hat tip to Quartz news for the link

“The technium contains 170 quadrillion computer chips wired up into one mega-scale computing platform. The total number of transistors in this global network is now approximately the same as the number of neurons in your brain. And the number of links among files in this network (think of all the links among all the web pages of the world) is about equal to the number of synapse links in your brain. Thus, this growing planetary electronic membrane is already comparable to the complexity of a human brain.” – explains Kevin Kelly in a great book, What Technology Wants (published 2010!).

This amazing statistics reminds us both that:

• We are incredibly complex creatures
• We have created with the internet a technological marvel that starts to equate the complexity of thinking people.

Now this just comes as Elon Musk the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, tweets that artificial intelligence is dangerous: “Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital super-intelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable“.

It is quite frightening and exciting to anticipate what artificial intelligence will create. Because artificial intelligence will soon be a reality, there does not seem to be any doubt in the minds of specialists. The futurist Ray Kurzweil is quoted in the same article as declaring: “It will not be us versus the machines … but rather, we will enhance our own capacity by merging with our intelligent creations“. What will really happen? Terminator or enhancement of our capabilities? In any case, change is coming!

I am very proud to announce that my new book, the Practical Cost Control Handbook for Project Managers, has just been published. It is not a all-publics book like the previous ones, still it results from significant effort and continuous improvements in the past 3 years. It is the public version of a book that has been already produced as an internal handbook for a few clients, selling more than 1,000 copies already of previous versions.

It is available worldwide through all online bookshops, and is also available as a Kindle version! Here are the links to Amazon.com for the paperback version and for the Kindle version.

This must-have practical handbook for Large, Complex Projects originated in the trenches of actual project execution.
It is not a heavy and detailed bible, but rather a practical reference for project practitioners to understand the principles and traps of Cost Control and Forecasting and be able to raise the right challenges to their teams.
Proper Cost Control and Forecasting must support the Project Manager’s decision making; unfortunately, that is still rarely the case. This handbook explains how to better implement these key processes, thereby improving significantly the odds of maintaining projects under control and taking the right decisions at the right time.

If you are interested, here is an exclusive link to the table of contents and index and to the foreword and introduction.

For those keen on project management, I will publish two more books in the next 12 months or so: a book about project risk management, and a book about schedule management in large projects.

‘Middle class’ disappears as a result of the Fourth Revolution. In this post we will try to describe the society issues we are facing with  the disappearance of ‘middle class’ and how we can resolve them. In a next post we will examine the consequences of this event from an individual perspective.

As ‘middle class’ shrinks the outcome will be a higher inequality, which will result in a higher number of people having a lesser and less secure income. This might result in significant social imbalance that needs to be resolved for our societies to enjoy harmony. If not managed carefully, in particular in our democratic societies, it could be the source of significant social troubles, which could create a very difficult transition. Also, from the economy perspective, a lot of our traditional economy still depends on massive consumption and investment (for example in real estate) by middle class; if that was to falter, the entire economy could be jeopardized, at least temporarily, or have to undergo a dramatic shift with widespread consequences.

How is it then possible to maintain sufficient buying power for a large proportion of people, as well as sufficient visibility and stability as to future income? Possible collective solutions include:

• Redistribution policies, which could include a minimum guaranteed income for everybody or a negative tax system,
• Income security schemes between employment periods (funded by fees paid during employment),
• Comprehensive social security schemes.

One of the major issues is that these collective systems  need to be governed carefully, and require sufficient financing. This financing will depend on a newly established taxation system where the value from the creativity of the Collective Age will need to be taxed adequately so as not to stifle the economy, and in a fair manner. This is the most pressing issue to be resolved today.

In a previous post on the “visual demonstration of the revolution in manufacturing” we showed how 3D printing can create incredibly complex and clever objects.

Be seated for that one: 3D printing of human organs using cells – or how to print a human kidney in 7 hours… An incredible and deeply moving video from TED, a presentation by Anthony Atala that you need to spend 16 mins to watch:

Here is the link to the video if you can’t see it above. Watch at the end when a young patient that received an engineered bladder 10 years ago comes on stage!

This nice infographic about the digital divide in the US raises the interesting question of the Digital Divide in society, as the Fourth Revolution expands. Will it slow down the Revolution?

Interestingly as much as it was high on the political agenda in the middle of the 2000’s in many developed countries, this subject does not seem to receive as much attention today. Many developed countries have fostered the development of broadband connections in rural areas.

Internet connectivity, in the meanwhile, has dramatically expanded in the developing world, although it still remains very low for some countries. A map of internet availability in the word in 2010 is for example available here, or a list of the most and least connected countries here.

For the least developed countries we can probably expect that in the few years to come, internet availability will increase through mobile networks exactly as the phone did expand as it is a cheaper infrastructure to build.

So, there is still a large share of the population that does not have access to internet, both in developed and developing countries. Yet, the amount of people worldwide that can connect together is unprecedented, creating huge amount of value.

Historical analysis shows that a communication technology becomes ubiquitous, changing society, when it reaches 10-20% penetration. It is the case today in most developed and emerging countries. At this penetration level, everybody can access the communication technology, even if that means borrowing or renting access to a terminal, and having access only episodically.

That’s why we do not share a pessimistic view of the situation. Today in developed country, even if everybody does not own an access to internet, everybody can access it. It is also the case in emerging countries. It creates tremendous opportunities for a large share of the world population.

Yes, the issue of Digital Divide needs to be tackled and access to internet needs to be progressively included in the basic needs as are water and power. No, the Digital Divide is not any more a big issue except in the poorest countries.

Social media allows us unprecedented insights into sociology. The following graph, from the New-York Times article “Twitter study tracks when we are :)”, shows what specific analysis, looking at the words people use, can tell us about how people are feeling.

Similar studies have also sought to predict how the stock market would open based on the overall mood of the traders (as reflected by the twitter terms used).

Some of these studies appear a bit anecdotal but the lesson is that new fields of study are opening thanks to all this available data. Think about it – some of us put literally their entire life on social networks. The Fourth Revolution gives researchers the possibility to analyse through the data of thousands of people worldwide. A true treasure trove for generations of sociologists.

We can expect that in a few years time, new unprecedented insights about sociology will appear. I can’t wait to see what it will be.