Category: Future

A top GE executive says organizations must prepare for the “Emergent Era” — Quartz

we need new frameworks to understand and anticipate what’s coming next.

One of those frameworks is known as emergence. Up until recently, it’s been used primarily to explain natural systems. Basically, the term describes how, when individual agents interact en masse according to a set of simple rules, highly complex structures and behaviors emerge.

Bureaucracies were necessary when information was scarce. But in The Emergent Era, bureaucratic structures act as bottlenecks for information and inevitably throttle change. Organizations should instead use these six concepts to adapt to life in The Emergent Era.

  1. Organize around information flows; ditch hierarchy and bureaucracy.
  2. Empower individuals
  3. Replace long lists of rules with a good M.O.
  4. Establish feedback loops. They are critical.
  5. Get Used to Living in the “In Between.”
  6. Tap into the power of minds and machines together.

Source: A top GE executive says organizations must prepare for the “Emergent Era” — Quartz

Who Will Command The Robot Armies?

The obvious question as these systems improve is whether there will ever be a moment when machines are allowed to decide to kill people without human intervention.
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I think we’ll see a similar evolution in autonomous weapons. They will evolve to a point to where they are fully capable of finding and killing their targets, but the designers will keep a single point of control.

And then someone will remove that point of control.

Technologies that we develop to fight our distant wars get brought back, or leak back, into civilian life back home.
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The militarization of our police extends to their behavior, and the way they interact with their fellow citizens.

A lot of what we consider high-tech startups work by repackaging low-wage labor.
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It’s odd that this human labor is so invisible.

Wealthy consumers in the West have become enamored with “artisanal” products. We love to hear how our organic pork is raised, or what hopes and dreams live inside the heart of the baker who shapes our rustic loaves.

But we’re not as interested in finding out who assembled our laptop.
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So is labor something laudable or not?

I wanted to end this talk on a note of hope. I wanted to say that ultimately who commands the robot armies will be up to us.
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The real answer to who will command the robot armies is: Whoever wants it the most.

And right now we don’t want it. Because taking command would mean taking responsibility.

What we need to do is grow up, and quickly.

Like every kid knows, you have to clean up your old mess before you can play with the new toys. We have made a colossal mess, and don’t have much time in which to fix it.

Source: Who Will Command The Robot Armies?

Dismissing Google Fiber (GOOG) as a failure is the same mistake we made bringing electricity to rural America — Quartz

It’s too expensive. No one wants to buy it. Laying cables is unprofitable. The government is overreaching. Objections to high-speed fiber broadband today sound like those facing rural electrification during the 1900s. History suggests they’ll prove wrong today as well.

Source: Dismissing Google Fiber (GOOG) as a failure is the same mistake we made bringing electricity to rural America — Quartz

 

Are there still enough people in rural areas?

The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was created by executive order as an independent federal bureau in 1935, authorized by the United States Congress in the 1936 Rural Electrification Act, and later in 1939, reorganized as a division of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.

– Rural electrification – Wikipedia

 

  • 1930 US rural population = 54M, 43.9% of total
  • 1990 US rural population = 61M, 24.8% of total
  • 2010 US rural population = 59M, 19.3% of total

– Population: 1790 to 1990 – US Census Bureau
– US Census Bureau – Frequently Asked Questions
So although the percentage of the population in rural areas has dropped about in half, the total number is actually about 10% more.

 

Is rural netification much more expensive than electrification was?

Before the establishment of the Rural Electrification Administration the reported cost of rural lines, depending on consumer density and on terrain, ranged from $1,500 to $1,800 a mile. The average total cost of R.E.A.-financed lines is now less than $800 a mile. The average estimated construction cost of these Unes has been declining each year, from $904 in 1936 to $858 in 1937, $768 in 1938, and $583 in 1939.

– “Rural Electrification” by Robert T. Beall, Economist, Rural Electrification Administration – US Department of Agriculture
$1,800 in 1934 = $32,430 in 2016
$583 in 1939 = $10,126 in 2016
– CPI Inflation Calculator – US Bureau of Labor Statistics

 

According to data compiled by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the per-mile costs on all new projects in the United States from over the past 15 years have ranged from $6,800 to as much as $79,000.

– “What is the real cost of fiber networking?” The Firetide Blog

 

Broadly speaking, the total cost per home ranged from more than $20,000 per location to about $5,000 per location, for densities of up to about 2.5 homes per linear plant mile.

Broadly speaking, when a telco can pass five to 65 locations for every mile of outside plant, the cost per home ranges between $4,000 and $5,000 per location.

– “How Much Does Rural Fiber Really Cost?” Performant Networks Blog
So, actually, 1930s rural electrification and 2016 fiber look to be approximately as expensive after accounting for inflation.

I would hope and expect that a wireless solution (e.g. microwave / WISP internet) should be even cheaper for rural netification (much less digging, much less physical material to produce, move, and place… how could it possibly be significantly worse?). I couldn’t find good numbers though.

 

Do rural areas even want greater connectivity and the jobs it would enable?

while they’re suspicious of big government, more than three-quarters of the respondents supported a government role in job training, renewable energy, and loans and grants to jumpstart economic development

Only 18 percent of the respondents said they rely on agriculture, farming or ranching for the bulk of their household income.

Nearly 90 percent of the respondents backed job training for the working poor, and loans, tax credits and training to help small businesses and farms prosper.

Seventy-eight percent said they strongly support developing wind, solar and other renewable electric generation in rural areas through tax credits, and investing in new transmission lines.

– “What does rural America want?” Illinois Country Living
. source: The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA)
. survey: conducted for the Nebraska-based Center for Rural Affairs by the bipartisan team of Lake Research Partners and The Tarrance Group

Is the Self-Driving Car Un-American?

Our republic of drivers is poised to become a nation of passengers.

The experience of driving a car has been the mythopoeic heart of America for half a century. How will its absence be felt? We are still probably too close to it to know for sure. Will we mourn the loss of control? Will it subtly warp our sense of personal freedom — of having our destiny in our hands? Will it diminish our daily proximity to death? Will it scramble our (too often) gendered, racialized notions of who gets to drive which kinds of cars? Will middle-aged men still splurge on outlandishly fast (or, at least, fast-looking) self-driving vehicles? Will young men still buy cheap ones and then blow their paychecks tricking them out? If we are no longer forced to steer our way through a traffic jam, will it become less existentially frustrating, or more? What will become of the cinematic car chase? What about the hackneyed country song where driving is a metaphor for life? Will race-car drivers one day seem as remotely seraphic to us as stunt pilots? Will we all one day assume the entitled air of the habitually chauffeured?

the dialectic between the old-fashioned automotive freedom and the newfangled freedom from cars.

What exactly is that freedom worth? In answering that question, we as a society will schism in curious ways. For those of us who see driving as a kind of imprisonment — which, spatially speaking, it quite literally is — an extra hour to work or play (or eat, or read, or meditate, or fix our hair and do our makeup) will be cherished. But for those who see driving as a physical expression of freedom — which, spatially speaking, it also quite literally is — the end of driving will feel like confinement.

The question will become even more complicated once it becomes entangled in the sticky web of partisan politics, which it inevitably will be — another sign of just how loaded the car is as a pack mule of American symbolism.

Source: Is the Self-Driving Car Un-American?

 

To a large extent I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea — freedom.

— novelist J. G. Ballard

Today’s Innovations Are Tomorrow’s Baseline · Collaborative Fund

Innovation works like compound interest. Today’s group uses yesterday’s hard work and discovery as a starting point to build off of, rather than a finish line.

a lot of pessimism about the future comes from being incredulous that today’s generation is producing, say, another Bill Gates, Henry Ford, or Tony Hawk. This misses a critical point: We now get to use all of those people’s discoveries as a starting point, a foundation to build off of. Never underestimate the power of someone armed with the accumulated trial and error of every genius who came before them.

[my emphasis]

Source: Today’s Innovations Are Tomorrow’s Baseline · Collaborative Fund