The unapparent immaturity of the online world

It was good to meet and discuss technology with people yesterday at a Breakfast Seminar I was invited to give in London. One of the topics that came up many times in the Q&A was the way people use online technology, sometimes well and sometimes in ways that could be improved.

This is a topic that applies to so much technology. But it really isn't obvious to many people. If you talk to Tim Berners-Lee about the World Wide Web, he will tell you that although it is so widely used by so many people for so many purposes and therefore it appears to be a mature technology which we all understand, actually it is not even a toddler on the development scale. It seems as if it has been with us for so long that it must be entirely well understood but in fact that is just not true. We understand very little especially about its development, its effect on people and society and are all still learning a great deal about it.

And this is true of much technology in the online world. Many people have eventually learnt that although anyone can create a website and publish information, it is better if much of that is done by people/organisations who actually have responsibility for the information source ... so I remember in the early days of the web that there were lots of sites where individuals would list what programmes were on tv for example, even though it is the BBC and other broadcasters or schedules publishers that should do this, and are able to do it. It takes people quite a long time for many people to decide what to use Twitter and similar services for. All of these innovations are actually very new. It does take time for both individuals and organisations to understand and decide what to use them for and what not to use them for. And especially to decide where the value is. And in organisations, it is often not the people most familiar with or able to exploit the new technology/services for maximum value that decide the policy on technology use for that organisation!

Email has a particular problem ... and often acts as the fallback for all, rather than being reserved for the best purposes it is suited to. There are millions of messages in emails sent every day that would be better sent as Instant Messaging for example. But this is another example of the innocent ignorance associated with the early stages of life of anything.

While we have to strive to uplift people's understanding of the new technology and help bring some maturity to the use of it, we should also be patient that the mistakes some will inevitably make are simply part of the process of learning and in the case of the online world, we shouldn't forget how young the concepts and tools we have still are.

The Privacy thing again...

Quite a lot has been happening in the privacy debate recently. There was the froth about Apple iOS and Google Android based mobile phones tracking users' every moves. Well of course the smart device in your pocket knows where you are and stores it internally from time to time. Anyone who has either owned one of the early standalone GPS units (and knows how long it took to get a decent accurate reading) or who understands the idea of 'assisted-GPS' will realise that more information is required than simple GPS from Satellites to instantly show you your location on a map on your smartphone. People also need to understand how much of their movements are tracked in all sorts of ways in the modern age (ATM machines, CCTV, credit card payments, etc.) in addition to their mobile phones.

Of course there is a debate to be had about how this information is stored, where it is used and who can get access to it. But users have to understand that in order to benefit from technology they have to give something up too. And most people won't worry about this; they have nothing to hide and their location information is not leaked to anyone, and certainly not to anyone they would be concerned about. But some US senators seem to be having a good time asking representatives of Google and Apple to explain themselves. I suppose it's an easy way to look as if they are attempting to protect the people who elected them.

Then in the UK recently we have had examples of how privacy afforded by secret court injunctions has been shown as farcical when 70,000 people have twittered online about something which national newspapers have been barred from printing to their readers. It demonstrates nicely how the legal system and current legislation is outdated in all sorts of ways, due to the changes that new technology and the Internet has brought about. This will continue to get worse as more cases of irrelevance happen in law. It's a part of the social change which is happening in society and which is leaving the established old laws of the land behind.

Flying cars ... a social step?

I was asked recently about the prospect of flying cars. This often happens to futurologists! And it's so often the case that people are interested in the technology angle. However the technology is not really the major factor in when we will have these. We are already capable of building cars that can drive themselves. For the masses to fly/drive, this is in my view pretty much a pre-requisite. The technology needs not only to keep the "car" in the air and navigate it to where it needs to end up, but also prevent the average driver from doing daft, undesirable or dangerous things. We have seen the same thing happen in traditional cars, where technology has been incrementally introduced to prevent such things as skidding, collisions, parking accidents etc. Once vehicles take to the air then there are further undesirable actions to guard against.

We already have a test that people undertake before being given a licence to drive on the public highway. There needs to be something equivalent for individuals who will be ultimately responsible for vehicles that leave the ground, however automated the vehicles might be. And as with driverless cars, the infrastructure doesn't really support the concept. Infrastructural development always takes more time and money than the technology that operates within it. An analogy here is the development of cellular network technology consistently failing to be deployed to keep up with the smartphone devices that could utilise them.

Yes, personal transport that can leave the ground will be developed, but it won't be soon so don't hold your breath ... and the delay is unlikely to be due to the technology needed. And in the current climate, it would need a very green propulsion system to gain traction in the marketplace. We are likely to see radical changes in the fuels used for cars before the latter take to the air. This is because of where we are today, not because of the technology required.

Privacy - Facebook shows future

The recent furore in some camps over privacy issues on Facebook is unsurprising in some ways, but indicative of the future trend and key new ways that people will need to adapt in how they behave with new technology, how they select providers of services, and how they take responsibility for sharing information online. The future world will be alive with information-passing mechanisms, be they sensors, online servers, databases, or other devices. It isn't a case of trying to ban things, nor to over-regulate so that the benefits are restricted and innovation inhibited, but rather that people learn how to act and make sensible choices, just as humans have historically done in other technology areas.

Firstly, in the same way that most people have learnt what is acceptable in terms of using their mobile phone in a meeting for example, they will learn how to behave with devices that are either giving out information about them or managing information sharing on their behalf. Secondly, in the same way that many people choose suppliers of services based on reputation and sound ethical principles etc, they will learn to choose online providers with similar criteria, possibly with the help of light regulation which makes sure relevant criteria is available. Thirdly, in the same way that people are learning how to take responsibility for monitoring their offspring's use of the Internet, they will learn how to take responsibility for what information they choose to make available about themselves and to whom. They already do this in other areas (most people are pretty clear about who they would give their private bank details to and who they wouldn't) and will learn to do this more generally.

The mechanisms will be in place in the future to allow people to control the inevitable increase in information gathering, sharing and socialising. It will just take time for people to learn that they should (and how to) use them. Facebook's recent issues have simply demonstrated a very small, early step in this education process.

CILIP 2010 conference, Wales

Just back from Llandrindod Wells in mid-Wales where I was pleased to be invited to give a keynote speech on the second day of the CILIP conference. I covered many technologies in my talk but part of one was about the disruptive revolution (or not) of social media and service provision and experience. It was great to be speaking to an audience many of whom were simultaneously using social networking tools such as Twitter to take the messages further afield. Currently this use is mainly communicative, however in the future it will become more important in service provision and delivery. Thanks to the audience for listening (should they be reading this blog) and especially those who were tweeting during and afterwards. I'm always pleased when technology is demonstrated rather than simply talked about!

Medicine or Modification?

Biotechnology is advancing at significant speed. There is plenty of scope for helping people who are blighted by disease or disability through new technology. New and better prosthetics are on the cards as are other means of helping people move, see, hear, or talk to others. However it will soon be a case of getting into the greyer area of whether we are fixing problems that people have or simply enhancing what people lack.

Society will need to make decisions which were previously unnecessary; decisions such as which body parts should be replaced and which should not. Does society want some people to have super-human power, while others do not. Brain implants will be possible. Will that change who a person is and what they can be held responsible for? When do we judge people to be human or simply a machine with some human characteristics? Personal enhancement may be much more than just cosmetic surgery in future. Some employers may want to enhance their employees to allow them to perform better. There will be a new way to categorise people as haves and have nots.

Corporate employee provision

In the future, it is likely that the workforce will be much more fluid than today. Each individual will be more likely to time share between different employers at the same time. Just-in-time skills provision will be a competitive edge for companies. Social networks may support the matching of near-real-time skills provision. Policies in HR departments will need to change to accommodate multiple employers per employee.

Consumerisation of IT provision will enable people to obtain their Information Technology tools personally but yet attach to multiple corporate networks, and for organisations to pay something towards the cost of provision while eliminating duplication. While some of this happens already, it will be far more widespread and commonplace in future.

How will employment be measured?

Many people now believe those countries who have felt the most recent global economic crisis and subsequent recession have now reached the bottom and are now on the road to recovery, however long that proves to be. As with previous recessions, we have seen employment statistics fall and consequently unemployment figures rise. Previous recessions took more toll on manufacturing and manual workers, such as mineworkers and print workers; the most recent has affected more office and knowledge workers. Could this recession be the last in which we can sensibly use the traditional employment figures approaches, especially for this latter group of workers?

In the future, many more highly skilled people will be employees of more than one company at a time. Both organisations and individuals will expect flexibility in employment conditions to ensure efficiency. Technology will make it simple for people to manage their time and contributions to each. Time-shared employees will make their skills available to more organisations at a time. So when the next recession comes the measure of employment should probably account for these multiple employments.

Media rubbish?

In all sorts of contexts, there is high end and low end, expensive and cheap, and high quality and poor. Some laggards of the Internet often just say things like "well it's all rubbish on there isn't it" and similar. I realise that I am preaching the wrong audience here in that since you are reading a blog, you are probably more pro-Internet than not. But I think it's up to all of us to tell it like it is to the doubters we meet.

Sure there is a lot of rubbish on the web. And what is and what isn't is very subjective. But if you look at TV for very long, you find it's much the same there too. Some of the programmes and many of the adverts are just awful. They do nothing to innovate nor advance the media industry they are part of. They are just used as low quality cheap-to-make schedule fillers for 24 hour TV. But most people see through it to the good stuff on TV and don't generalise or denigrate it to such an extent. After all it has been around a lot longer than the Net. It's another example of social changes instilled by technology. It's another example of the relative immaturity of the Net as a media channel. So next time you hear someone say that they don't use the Net because it's all rubbish ... just tell them how it works for you!

Reducing the size of the world...

As this blog has now clocked up visitors from 50 countries around the globe I would like to give my thanks for all those who read it, especially those far from the shores where I am normally resident. I have seen so much technology innovation when in places like Japan and MIT in the USA, and look forward to visits to the emerging China and India when the time comes.

The Internet has enabled the globe to seem local. It will continue to do this and provide the backbone of a system that enables distributed democracy and global economic access to the smallest and remotest retailer. The net is enabling young people to build social networks from an early age, becoming a part of that global but seemingly local community. Organisations are beginning to wake up to the new ways that their young customers want to do business with them. And individuals are becoming empowered by the devices they carry around which keep them connected almost all of the time.

Information is being accessed and acted upon faster and in bigger quantities than ever before, effectively decision making in place of laissez-faire. What people didn't know they didn't worry about nor did they care. In the future the amount of information and the decision making processes that come with it will be totally dynamic. And then machines will be making more of the decisions before the human users have to worry about it! Now that will be fun... will people continue to complain of information overload when machines relieve them of the problem?

Talking to a machine?

I am well used to using speech control handsfree of the phone along with control of the air conditioner, radio and sat-nav system in my car.  But good as these systems are, it is still only voice commands in lieu of pressing buttons.  This weekend however I have been fortunate enough to have a robot pet stay at home with us, one of the original Aibo dogs from Sony, purchased  before they were discontinued a few years ago.  The experience has been more interesting than I expected.   Certainly Aibo is a good example of a high technology product too ahead of its time.

Although one knows that it is just a collection of plastic and electronic parts, because it resembles a dog, and behaves like a dog, one tends to be drawn into treating it like a dog!  In fact the way it responds to attention, and specifically that of someone it learns to regard as its owner, reinforces human behaviours towards it.  It learns the owners face, voice and picture.  The sensors on its back and head cause typical dog like reactions when stroked.  And in autonomous mode, it decides what to do, where to wander and explore and how to behave.  All of these features mean that one can soon feel like you are living with a real dog!  In addition it does tricks like dancing which animate dogs would struggle to compete with.  What is interesting is that many people who at first laugh at others talking to the robot dog, gradually get drawn in to trying their own luck at human-robot communication, once they see the reactions that Aibo can generate. 

I shall miss Aibo being around when the time comes to hand him back!  Meantime, he has certainly influenced my thinking about how people may respond to robots in the future. 

Deeper immersion in the virtual

Today I had the pleasure of presenting some futures ideas to an audience at the BT Tower in London.  Despite the recent UK snowy weather, today there were some fantastic clear views of the city from the revolving restaurant where we dined, and the sun even made an appearance!  One popular topic of conversation was the potential of virtual worlds in future, coupled with advances in hardware such as wearable displays which will permit a deeper level of immersion in such worlds.  

Major organisations and blue-chip companies are already experimenting with virtual world environments for training, product testing and focus groups amongst other things.  And this is when the level of immersion is rather limited and basically using mainly 2D visual and audible interaction.  The addition of tactile sensing via haptics, and 3D visuals may help this further.  

Once again, many extra decisions will have to be made by individuals who have access to this environment, about how they are prepared to use the extra capabilities it offers.  This will include an element of what they believe is socially acceptable as well as desirable by the individual.  I suspect the behaviours will evolve to be very different, in an analogous way to how the use of mobile devices in meetings and other social environments already has evolved since the technology became widespread. 

Give them a bit of Latitude...

So Google's marketing department must be pleased with the coverage it is getting since announcing Latitude, its new people (or rather phone) tracking service, even if the news reporters are concentrating on privacy issues. Any publicity is good publicity as they say.  Another company, Loopt, has been offering this sort of service already for some time. 

It's actually quite a good idea to have something else in the news which gets people used to the idea of being tracked and what privacy might mean in the future.  Increasingly we are going to have all sorts of sensors around the environment, or carried about our person, or in the buildings we frequent, which capture a variety of information, some of which will allow our position to be tracked.  A great deal of other information about people will be available through such networks of sensors.  The idea of privacy will be better expressed by specifying what information you want to share and who with, and what information you don't.  This is another example of the extra decision making that individuals will need to make in the future. Of course giving people control of these decisions is one thing ... whether they trust the infrastructure and more importantly the organisations that operate it is something else.  But there is technology to assist with that too! 

Icy Highway Madness

This week has seen some of the worst snow in the UK for 18 years.  Many roads were in a treacherous condition.  I had a necessary journey to make early one morning to an airport and home again before the main snow arrived.  It was absolutely incredible how fast the odd driver was prepared to try and go on very patchy icy surfaces.  I have written here before about the future of automated cars which will take much of the responsibility for driving away from human beings.  On snowy and icy days like this week, such automation cannot come quick enough.  

One of my cars has computer control of the throttle as well as steering (for automatic reversing).  The traction and stability systems are able to judge much better than many drivers the exact optimum acceleration to apply to climb hills on a slippery surface, to make progress without wheelspin.  We already have auto speed limiters on larger vehicles like lorries.  It shouldn't be so difficult for the same sort of system to be applied to other vehicles when the road conditions demand it.  In general I have reservations about giving up the pleasure of driving to technology, because I actually enjoy driving.  However it may just be worth the sacrifice if the mad individuals who drive at wreckless speeds in poor road conditions are prevented from doing so by automated vehicles, reducing accidents, delays and injuries to themselves and others. 

Future responsibility and decisions

A common question when I talk to audiences of all types about future technology and change is whether it will all lead to information overload and more stress for human beings.  Examples of this might be ubiquitous networking and being contactable, managing complex virtual world avatars and profiles, or thought controlled machines.  Well, I believe humans will need to get better at taking responsibility and making decisions, because more choice will be enabled and more decisions will need to be made.  One example of this is already happening with work styles.  

Devices in your pocket now can keep you in contact by voice, by text and by email 24/7.  For many people, this enables them to work much more flexibly.  Work is now an activity not a place.  In the past when people went to a place of work they were working, and when they went home most of them were "off-duty".  But now they may home-work but also receive messages about work when they are at home in leisure time.  I am one such person, and certainly my job is not 9-5!  My work email is delivered to the same device I use for personal email.  The consumerisation of IT has already begun for me.  My work and personal life are converging due to the technology I carry.  So I have to make the decision about whether I will read and act on work when I receive it ... I have to decide when I am on duty or not.  And that is an extra decision that I along with many others never had to make before that device was in my pocket. 

I am happy to make that decision.  We may have to ensure that others can make a sensible balance of such decisions in the future.  Some people will be better or worse at this than others.  A few people in society may need significant support.  Decision support systems may evolve to a quite different meaning in the decades to come. 

Internet power rebound?

One of the biggest adopters and innovators on the Internet has been the BBC.  I am a great fan of their website and was pleased to be a part of their 10th anniversary news website celebrations in 2007.  Today, a debate is raging about the BBC's decision to not to screen an appeal for the people of Gaza on the grounds of preserving impartiality, instead preferring to give the charity even greater publicity by featuring its decision in its news broadcasts.  One observer, the ex-broadcaster and politician Martin Bell suggested it was now worried about being blamed for things and demonstrated against even before doing something, partially because the power of the Internet now allows such opinion to gather momentum and publicly focus criticism very fast and very widely.  It seems slightly ironic that such a great innovator of the net is itself being buffeted by it.  We are seeing more and more organised campaigns which exploit the Internet ... this will only increase in future.  Organisations and Governments are very well aware how powerful this new Internet democracy is ... this BBC episode is just one more example!

Thumbs up for the revolution!

My parents and their generation often point out that my own generation have always been used to computers, usually after we pull off some seemingly baffling operation with them.  Indeed I have needed to type on a keyboard since my early teens, whether to play games (just simple PacMan in those days!), teach myself programming and then to communicate with people as well as machines.  So I am a finger person.  I use a finger to press a lift (elevator - for my US readers!) button.  Well doesn't everyone?  Actually no!  The younger generation have reverted to using thumbs more than fingers.  The texting generation have developed an amazing speed and dexterity with just their two thumbs.  Many young people use their thumbs to push lift buttons!  The faster way to use the iPhone onscreen touch keyboard is to use two thumbs although I still revert to fingers.  The thumb revolution is here ... :)

Fit for Success

In a previous posting here, I recently described my second impressions of the Wii games console from Nintendo.  Although impressed with the amount of effort required to play the sports games at a consistently high level, my wife and I have yet to feel the urge to invest in the Wii Balance Board in order to get even more exercise in front of the big screen!  But in the harder economic times, Nintendo is introducing  My Fitness Coach, which offers a similar fitness regime without any additional hardware necessary.  The success of Wii Fit is being cleverly followed up.  

In future, we will have many options for machines around the home that promote good healthy activity and allow us to monitor our condition.  This will be followed by nano-technology lab-on-chip devices that can live inside the body giving an even better indication of what is happening to us.  So perhaps its not such a bad idea that people are getting used to a health and fitness programme from a machine in their lounge?

Will people cope with change?

Today I had the pleasure to present a glimpse of the future at the 7th SOLACE Graduate conference in London.  There were around 100 people in the audience and some really interesting questions were raised afterwards.  

One person in the audience asked about how far should things actually go and whether people would be able to cope with the change.  The psychology is very important.  Some of the things that I presented perhaps seem very far fetched and in some cases scary.  But then so would some things today have seemed far fetched in the past despite the fact that we now take them for granted.   People do adapt to change, some better than others and some faster than others.  There will be people who will need services to help them (e.g. managing multiple avatars online)  and others who need people extra help to understand and cope with change.  

Innovation in a Material World?

While driving this afternoon I was listening to the BBC's Book Club programme on the radio.  This edition featured psychologist Oliver James, and his book "Affluenza".  He defines this as a virus sweeping through the English-speaking world, where the emotional attraction of material things possible through affluence is deeply harmful to social cohesion and people's well-being.  Indeed he points out that a general increase in affluence in such societies has led to people feeling less happy and to more sickness.  

Some of the examples he gave were interesting anecdotes from his travels interviewing people from different cultures and contrasting the English-speaking world from others.  One such was whether women look at themselves in the mirror and ask if they are happy with what they see, or whether they are more concerned if others and especially men will like what they see. 

Another example contrasted the iPod type consumer gadget adoption in a place like the UK and USA with that in somewhere like Denmark.   He pointed out that hardly anyone will pay for a new luxury device like that until it becomes mass market and cheap enough for most people to buy in the Danish culture.  Unfortunately he omitted to remind people that such innovation would never become that cheap if there were not people (perhaps from particular cultures) who will buy at the leading edge and be early adopters.  Companies that launch innovative products need to charge a premium at first until the scale of return allows for a lower price point at a later date, as the component costs reduce.  Perhaps I need to read the book to see if this and other market related truths are explained.