How Modern Identification Technology Proves How Unique We Are

Every other week another technology for personal identification crops up. On the latest ones is based on heartbeat, as explained in this MIT Technology review article ‘The Pentagon has a laser that can identify people from a distance—by their heartbeat‘.

While facial recognition is becoming mainstream and is used in airports and increasingly in the public space, and fingerprints are used almost daily, the stream of unique identification methods continues. Let’s just hope the individual uniqueness is effectively proven and that those methods get certified!

However the point I want to make is that they all show how unique we can be: fingerprints, face, eyes and pupila, DNA, heartbeat… So many aspects that create a unique signature and make us different from other billion individuals…

Soon medicine will also start to become individual based, depending on our genetic variants.

Did you realize how unique you are? And that we all should make better use of this uniqueness instead of trying to get standardized and categorized as cogs of the economy?

Share

How Fake News Reflect Collective Fears and Aspirations

Cory Doctorow takes an interesting perspective in his post ‘Fake news is an Oracle: How the falsehoods we believe reveal the truth about our fears and aspirations‘ (the post also refers to the Locus column ‘Cory Doctorow: Fake News Is an Oracle‘. He considers fake news as the emergence of a collective subconscious issue.

Cory Doctorow analyses in detail the myth of science-fiction literature being deemed to be predictive of actual evolution of society. Of course it has an influence, but Cory Doctorow concludes that it is more like a revealing medium for our hidden subconscious collective aspirations and fears. And, he concludes, so are fake news: if they prosper, they do reflect at some point collective fears and aspirations.

Cory Doctorow continues to show that the fact that the anti-vaccination movement and its fake news is so popular has a point in demonstrating that there is an issue about big pharma and its control, beyond the reaction on vaccines themselves.

His view hence is that “Fake news is an instrument for measuring trauma, and the epistemological incoherence that trauma creates – the justifiable mistrust of the establishment“. Therefore, according to him the issue is to “address the underlying corruption that is rotting our society“.

I believe that fake news and other conspiracy theories have always been around, and are just easier to spread. Still I agree with Cory Doctorow that they are revealing subconscious and more conscious issues and are thus interesting to examine and consider. And the core issues once identified certainly need to be addressed.

Share

How Important It Is to Get Better Clients

In this post ‘Freelancing is a brave act‘, Seth Godin reminds us that the key as a freelancer is not necessarily to work more, but to get better clients. And I find this does apply to any service activity, at least for small companies.

“Better clients demand more, pay more and talk about your work. Better clients make it easier for you to level up, and better clients challenge you to dig deeper and do what you’re capable of.” In short, it may not be more comfortable working for better clients, but it is definitely more challenging and at the end more rewarding.

Working for better clients creates the seed for becoming masters of our work.

As a freelancer, or as a consultant, “You don’t do better by working more hours. You can’t work more hours. You do better by finding better clients.”

How good are our clients? What about dropping the worse ones and look for better ones?

Share

How World Wars reshaped deeply our world and triggered deep changes still felt today

This interesting piece ‘Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping the World‘ is quite interesting about those forces mentioned, and also on the reflection that much of what we live comes from a reset of the world during World War 2.

Those forces identified in this post shaping our world today:

  • the demographic shift reconfiguring modern economies
  • wealth inequality
  • unprecedented access to information leveling social gaps (i.e. the Fourth Revolution)

However the most important part of the article for me is the long description of what our world today owes to WW2. “It’s hard to overstate how much the world reset from 1939 to 1945, and how deeply the changes the war left behind went on to define virtually everything that’s happened since.” As examples: the baby-boom, antibiotics, all sorts of technological advances (nuclear, jet engines, social changes triggered by war economy, GI bill and higher education, and also the social net in European countries…).

Internet at the end was a technology that evolve as a result of Cold War and the need to preserve communication in case of nuclear attack. And Cold War was in itself an intermediate consequence of WW2.

We too often fail to go back sufficiently in time to understand the deep drivers of our societies. It is worth sometimes going back a century to grasp those large trends and what triggered social changes that astonish us today.

Share

How We Need to Set Rules for Biohacking

Biohacking (using drugs and technology to make one’s body/mind function better) is trendy. In this post ‘Biohacking Gone Wild‘, some interesting examples are given – from simple examples we all are actually using, to extreme hacking.

We’ve been doing biohacking in its widest senses for ages, for example when we are wearing glasses.

Some modern examples are quite frightening: “It’s estimated that over 100,000 people already have various types of implants. In Sweden, thousands of Swedes are inserting chips under their skin to speed up their daily routines. They use chips to open locked doors, to store contact information, and to get on to the train“

We do, and we will obviously progressively extend our capabilities using technology of some sort. I do think there are some limits that should only be exceeded with care. For me, anything changing my body chemistry for example, is for me clearly out-of-bounds. Using prosthetics adding capabilities to my body can be discussed as long as it can be shut down, removed, or only put on when needed. Not to mention personal data protection.

Biohacking is just starting, and it will pervade the world of the Collaborative Age. What rules should we put in place to keep it within reasonable bounds?

Share

How We Should Learn to Produce Scrappy

I love this post by Seth Godin ‘‘Scrappy’ is not the same as ‘crappy’‘. Seth is an advocate of shipping fast, as soon as it is presentable (a ‘minimum viable product’ approach of sorts). We should still not ship crappy stuff, but his view is that scrappy is good enough.

scrappy

“The only choice is to launch before you’re ready. Before it’s perfect. Before it’s 100% proven to be no risk to you.”

Seth then introduces the concept of scrappy: “Scrappy means that while it’s unpolished, it’s better than good enough.”

It is always tough to know whether what we put in the spotlight of public interest is good enough or whether we are spending too much time trying to polish it. I love the scrappy approach. Another measure to show to the world what you are doing earlier than what you thought.

Share

How Economic Recessions Are Actually Positive (on the Long Term)

There is a lot written these days about the upcoming recession. There has been already a very long cycle without a recession (the last one in 2008 has been particularly strong though). But is a recession necessarily a bad thing?

From my perspective I do observe currently in the economy some ‘irrational exuberance’ to use the term coined by Alan Greenspan in the 1990s. There is a lot of money thanks to low interest rates, and it is sometimes or even often invested in ventures of dubious success probability. I observe this effect for example in the start-up financing field.

A recession is nothing more than a readjustment of the economy, a clean-up that removes activities that are not any more adjusted to the requirements of new era, and a number of activities that are only just marginally profitable. And from my observation that is probably needed now in a number of economic fields.

Unfortunately, it would appear that the complex economy does not manage to run this clean-up effort more effectively than through an overall recession from time to time.

Of course, this economic clean-up has consequences on employment and on the perspectives of individuals if they are impacted. A strong social support net is needed to amortize the effects of a recession for the individuals. Recessions also tend to remove from employment those whose skills are not adapted any more to the economy, and there needs to be ways to upgrade those skills to give them a new role to play. It can thus be felt negatively across consumption.

All in all I tend to believe that recessions are rather inevitable, a good thing in the longer term and policies that aim to avoid or postpone them will only create stronger and harder recessions at the end.

Share

How the Relative Increase in Asset Value Explains Increasing Social Inequality

Still following up from our previous post ‘How the Current Asset Over-valuation Changes Economic Behavior‘, and referring to the research paper ‘Bubble or nothing‘, the increase in the relative value of assets is also a good explanation for the increase in social inequality: those who have assets see their wealth increase substantially (doing nothing) compared to those who don’t. And it becomes harder for those who don’t have assets to acquire them.

This however comes with a pinch: if most of the increase in wealth of the the richer is based more on asset value than on actual direct income, any economic shock that would decrease substantially asset values would also reduce a large part of this apparent inequality.

On the other hand if the relative increase in asset value is a deeper, longer term trend linked with the Fourth Revolution (see our post ‘How the Increase of Asset Values Could be Linked to the Fourth Revolution Transformation‘), then we should expect this effect to be permanent and even increase in the foreseeable future. Access to ownership of assets will then become a major issue to address inequality (including property, as the family house is the prime asset for most people).

There are deep, multi-decade trends pervading our economy and traditional economic studies may not sufficiently understand them. It seems like the Collaborative Age will require quite a different approach to the economy, and probably to taxation and redistribution.

Share

How the Increase of Asset Values Could be Linked to the Fourth Revolution Transformation

Following up from our previous post ‘How the Current Asset Over-valuation Changes Economic Behavior‘, the question is open whether this historical trend about historically extremely high asset prices and always lower interest rates since the 1980s (the Era of Big Balance Sheets) is a temporary situation, or if it could be representative of a shift created by the Fourth Revolution (a shift to the virtual, global economy).

In the research paper ‘Bubble or nothing‘, the enclosed graph and a few others remind us that there is currently overcapacity in terms of assets compared to the production capacity (this observation seems to apply to manufacturing as well as to offices or any class of asset supporting value production). This can be explained partly by the high value of assets but also by the fact that actual physical production does not increase any more and is disconnected from overall economic growth: the economy becomes increasingly virtual with the Fourth Revolution.

One of the reasons behind asset relative value increase could thus be that value being created virtually in the new economy drives up the value of the physical assets, which are in limited quantity. Therefore, an interpretation of the current overvaluation of assets could be the virtualisation and increased productivity of the Collaborative Age economy. This would be a bit similar to the Baumol effect explaining the relative increase in cost of less productive areas of the economy such as healthcare (see our post ‘How the Relative Increase of Cost for Education or Health Care Can be Explained‘). If that is the case, then we should not expect asset valuations to drop off anytime soon (independently from temporary recessions and readjustments).

I would be quite interested to see whether there has been some economic studies about the impact of the virtual economy on asset valuation. Please contact me if you know of any such study.

Share

How the Current Asset Over-valuation Changes Economic Behavior

I can only recommend to read this enlightening research paper ‘Bubble or nothing‘, produced by an American Think Tank. It may require some time to read, but I believe it is absolutely worthwhile to understand how the current economic situation differs from the 20th century economic situation – and how therefore, history can only be of limited value in understanding future economic behavior.

The point is that “The evolution of the economy’s aggregate financial structure [with a much higher value of assets compared to value production] has, over decades, altered the playing field for financial decision makers throughout the economy, increasingly skewing their available options toward higher risks, lower returns, or both.” Basically, the increase in asset value implies low interest rates. Those low interest rates are much below the return rates expected from financial players (such as retirement funds), and this leads them inevitably to take higher risks than they would have in the past.

The author calls the time since the mid-1980s the “era of the Big Balance Sheets”. According to him, this excessive risk-taking behavior explains situations as the one giving way to the 2008 financial crisis, which stemmed from the property market. “Each successive crisis, with more bloated balance sheets to stabilize, was more difficult to resolve and therefore required the government to engineer dramatic new lows in interest rates, heavy fiscal stimulus, and other measures to stabilize economic conditions. The measures eventually overcame recession and chronic weakness, but in doing so they necessarily caused further expansion of balance sheets relative to income.“

This current situation appears to be quite metastable, with excessive risk-taking happening since the early 2010s, and may lead to another hard recession with substantial asset value decrease. Whether this decrease will be temporary or more permanent is still open (previous recessions have not changed the excessive asset value on the long term).

As a summary, “The U.S. economy continues to face a bubble-or-nothing outlook. Participants in the economy and markets will keep increasing their financial risk until the expansion breaks down, and the bigger the balance sheets are relative to income, the more severe the breakdown is likely to be.”

Take some time to read this instructive analysis, as it provides an interesting explanation of the changes in our economy in the last decades.

Share

How to Develop Realistic Expectations for Mega-Projects

This interesting podcast and post from Freakonomics website ‘Here’s Why All Your Projects Are Always Late — and What to Do About It‘ proposes a good analysis of all the reasons why mega-projects, and particularly public mega-projects, always fall so dramatically behind in terms of expectations.

All the usual fallacies and symptoms applicable to large complex projects are mentioned in a quite good synthesis and summary: the planning fallacy (overly optimism in spite of historical evidence to the contrary); optimism biais; neglecting the time and effort for coordination; student’s effect (procrastination); inadequate expectations set to sell a public project, etc.

The interesting approach mentioned at the end of the post as being possibly a successful approach is to align estimates for time and cost (or overruns) for new projects on the observed history of similar projects. This seems to be applied today in the UK. The post mentions that this approach seems to “be reasonably accurate and the cost overruns to be reasonably small — about 7 percent from the planning stages of a transportation project to completion. All of which suggests that pricing in the optimism bias and using reference-class forecasting are truly useful tools to fight the planning fallacy.” This approach can only work of course if there is a representative database of similar past projects, which is not always the case. For example it is known that some major UK infrastructure megaprojects such as High Speed train lines do still face huge overruns in schedule and cost.

Megaprojects failure to deliver on time and on budget is a major societal issue (and the sunk cost fallacy leads us to finish those projects even if they appear to be grossly failing). I am not sure the solution is as simple as the solution mentioned in the post, but it worth noting that some governments have identified the issue and try to address it proactively.

Share

How to Subtly Shift One’s Mind to Overcome Procrastination

Leo Babauta in his post ‘Mindfully Shifting Your Approach to a Task Can Shift Everything‘ reminds us that to tackle a task that is not easy or nice, and to overcome procrastination, all it takes is a subtle mindset shift.

“So you either run to distraction and procrastinate, or you do it but really don’t enjoy doing it. Neither of these is helpful. So what can we do instead of procrastinating or disliking the task? We can bring some subtle, mindful, powerful shifts to the task. And in fact, we can do this to any activity.”

Many of the approaches then described by Leo Babauta involve more self-consciousness of our feelings and changing our view on this unpleasant task by living more in an appreciative manner, closer to the present. In summary, it requests more presence and self-consciousness about the importance of the task.

In general it is true that it is often effective to change slightly one’s mindset regarding some event or some task to find that it is finally easier to perform than one would expect.

Next time you’re faced with procrastination, try to change slightly your mindset and view about the difficult task you can’t seem to be able to perform!

Share