ThinkingShift

I struggle with our connected world. Here I am blogging away and if ThinkingShift readers (all two of you!) ever took the time to look for identifying data in what I blog about, you could probably build up a reasonable picture of me. So I am one of millions in the blogosphere leaving trails of information behind. But when it comes to mobile phones, I hate them. I have one for emergency purposes only really. I don’t like receiving calls and I don’t like the idea that I can be tracked or the notion that because one has a mobile, ergo there’s an expectation that you can be reached 24/7.

I have a presence on MySpace and on Facebook, where I think I now have 3 friends, up one from 2 friends. But I don’t use either social networking site because once again I’m a bit reluctant to wade in there and share information about me, which it seems to me is the core of these sites - here I am, this is all the stuff about me, here’s my photos, here’s my friends, here’s where I’m going on the weekend. Too much information out there about me makes me nervous. And I admit I can be quite secretive at times.

And with advances in mobile phone technology, it’s becoming apparent that whilst they can be used as a social mapping device (knowing where you and your family are), they can also mean that you have nowhere to hide. Buddy Beacon is an example of a service that leverages the GPS chips embedded in most mobile phones and uses Google mapping technology. So you can exchange information about your current location with family, friends and business colleagues. Parents can track kids. Loopt is another example - you can locate friends on a map, receive alerts when friends are nearby, share events and favourite places, tag photos with location. All good. No argument. It means that someone like me, with zippo directional sense, can be guided by a GPS in my car to wherever I’m going. It means that parents might have some peace of mind knowing than can track the kid.

But it also means you really can’t hide these days. Sometimes you just want to be alone, safe in the knowledge that your whereabouts is your own business and not known by your 1,794 friends (and are these dudes listed as friends on Facebook really your friends?? you know them all?).

I keep getting back to the fact that we’ve become a voyeuristic society. We like to watch, track, locate. Awhile back I did a post called Are we always alone when we think we are? This was one of my highest rating posts for October. I’d love to think this was due to the subject matter (surveillance cameras and privacy) but I suspect not. In that post, I had a link to a video that rather dramatically showed that you can get caught out in public change rooms - it was a video of a young woman undressing in presumed privacy. Over 2,000 people clicked onto this video link - on this day I had more than 2 readers :)- Now, I’m not suggesting those 2,000 or so people are all voyeurs (although maybe!), but it’s interesting that this was such a popular link. It suggests that as public space continually shrinks we are participating more and more in the private space of others. Some of us I think welcome it - the younger generation (ie those under 20 these days!) seem to have no issue with sharing a wealth of private data in public space. Some of us have issues with it.

Which focuses me back on what I’m supposed to be blogging about! The ability to be tracked by that innocent looking mobile phone in your hands raises all kinds of privacy issues - your boss gives you a work mobile so there is the expectation that you can be mapped even on weekends I suppose if the phone is on; family members you’d prefer to keep at a distance could be a whole lot closer by knowing your whereabouts; that boyfriend you just told to take a running jump could keep tracking you; maybe you’re sitting quietly alone in a park when suddenly a good friend materialises in front of you because they found your location (maybe you just wanted to be alone). Of course, I realise (hope) that the power to invite people into your social network rests with you, so to some extent you can choose who knows what you’re up to. And if you’re meeting friends for dinner and you’re running late, they can check on a map how far away you are and how long they have to wait for you to show up.

But then…let’s keep in mind something. If your friends know where you are, so does the mobile telephone company service you’re using. And while we all probably think such advances in technology are great, there will be implications down the track, new privacy risks, new ways of hacking into private information, security issues and so on.  Source: International Herald Tribune.

I last visited Japan about 10 years ago. Been there; done that. Probably a good thing, as Japan is now off my list of countries to visit. Like the US (and soon Australia with its proposed biometric registered traveller programme), Japan will soon be requiring visitors to submit to photographic and fingerprinting procedures to “help prevent terrorist attacks”. Last time I looked, Japan was the victim of domestic terrorism with the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by members of Aum Shinrikyo.Long time foreign residents will be included in the new measures. Human rights groups are concerned that the perception could be that foreigners equal terrorists. But in my mind, it’s all that biometric data on the loose that concerns me - where’s it stored? who has access? what do they do with it? Apparently, under certain circumstances (not outlined of course) the Japanese Government can share biometric data with other Governments.The new procedures are part of an amendment of Japan’s Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, which contains measures to prevent terrorism.

The measures come into force on November 20. And in a wonderful display of openness and transparency, public comments on the new procedures were invited, but if you can’t speak Japanese you wouldn’t have bothered as comments were only accepted in the Japanese language.Should you decide to stand on your dignity or claim fingerprinting and taking of photographs is an invasion of your privacy - well, forget it, you won’t be allowed in the country. So if you’re a longtime permanent resident, you’ll get rounded up and subjected to fingerprinting and photographs - this reminds me of another country in recent history. From what I’ve read, the new measures could very easily be seen as Japan equating terrorism with foreigners and it could all play quite nicely into the hands of xenophobes. Let’s hope they’ll get busy and fingerprint their own domestic terrorists too. Seems the world is getting pretty small for me - soon I’ll be running out of countries I can visit, because I refuse to go through fingerprinting, iris scanning, facial recognition procedures.Source: Financial Times

In a few days, I should finish Naomi Klein’s very well researched and argued book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. If you haven’t heard of it or read it, do yourself a favour and get a copy. I’ve always thought that Milton Friedman would have a lot to answer for when he argued that businesses’ sole purpose is to generate profit for shareholders. Reading Klein’s book is really an eye-opener and shows how Friedman’s Chicago School economics that push free-market policies now dominate the world. As each country, like South Korea for example, is forced to open up its borders and economies to global (mainly US) corporations, once mighty local businesses and employees are ravaged. The Korean titan, Samsung, for instance, was broken up and sold for a fraction of its worth, with Volvo getting its heavy industry division, SC Johnson & Son its pharmaceutical arm, and General Electric its lighting division. What is often not known is how many once loyal local employees got the shaft as the new owners sought to downsize. Poverty and unemployment are more often the result of rampant capitalism.

The argument goes that globalisation and the opening up of markets will create business opportunities in areas of the world previously untouched. Waves of privatization have taken place and corporations greedily eye-off government services such as health care, telecommunications, energy, transportation and so on. Services for the people, built up by the people, using taxpayer’s money - now being transferred into the coffers of private organisations. And so we see private companies entering new areas - surveillance, the security industry, disaster response, health care. You find situations where a 103 year old woman was evicted from a care home because its owners declined to back down in a wrangle with a local authority over funding her care. The care home owners wanted an extra ₤100 a week because it said she required special care. Local authority assessments found that the elderly woman did not need additional nursing care but in the interests of not forcing a 103 year old woman to move, the local authority offered to meet the extra cost to avoid eviction. The nursing home is owned by a private company (according to what I’ve read) and clearly they prefer to extract the almighty dollar rather than allow an elderly woman the dignity and familiarity of living out her last years in the home she’d resided in since her early 90s. This poor lady died just weeks after being chucked out of the nursing home. You can read the sorry story here in the Guardian.

Privatization of nursing homes is all part of what Klein has outlined in her book and what I think we can all acknowledge if we just sit back and think about it. A nation-state, through state policy, provides for its citizens by educating them in the public school system, protecting borders, providing essential services such as hospitals and fire departments, administering prisons, providing adequate military forces and ensuring disease control. These are the core competencies if you like of the concept of governing. But these competencies are being outsourced and privatized. And so you have the privatization of the US Army - the army provides the soldiers and the weapons - Halliburton provides the infrastructure ie US bases overseas built with every modern comfort. Or you find Lockhead taking over the information technology divisions of the US Government.

With the War on Terror, the homeland security industry boomed, starting off with surveillance cameras: 4.2 million in the UK and 30 million in the US. And with the millions of hours of footage, you then needed analytic software such as facial recognition. And to further ensure homeland security, you needed wire-tapping, email and web surfing surveillance and of course data mining to prospect for all the gems of suspicious activity. Now we have mass state surveillance and the US is surely fast becoming a police state (and Australia is not that far behind frankly).

And if you don’t believe this then here’s a staggering story I’ve come across. The Halle Orchestra is one of Britain’s oldest symphony orchestras. It has not toured the US in more than a decade but they were looking forward to playing at Lincoln Center. But then the 85 musicians ran up against the very secure brick walls of US visa regulations. They were told they all had to travel from the orchestra’s Manchester headquarters to the US Embassy in London. And this was not just for a social chit chat over tea and cucumber sandwiches. Nope all 85 of them were required to be fingerprinted, have a facial recognition scan and suffer through a grilling of an interview. To schlep the whole orchestra to London with hotel costs, visa fees etc would have cost the Halle Orchestra $80,000 and this was before dishing out money for travel costs to New York.

Now the orchestra in my mind did a very sensible thing: they canned the trip to the US. So the US runs the very high risk of becoming increasingly isolated because foreign performers are simply not willing to run the gauntlet for obtaining a P-1 visa. And arts organisations in the US are reluctant to book foreign performers because they know the high risk of bureaucratic snags. But of course should a performing group wish to speed up the process, they can always cough up a $US 1,000 “premium processing” fee.

China’s Golden Dragon Acrobats have toured the US for the last 30 years but this year’s tour is under a cloud because the acrobats could not provide absolute proof that they would return home (hey, you know we don’t all want to live in the US). Even a visiting scholar from Montreal, Canada had a tough time. And some artists applying for visas have been asked to perform at consular interviews (I guess consular officials are pretty good judges of artists!).

And so the modern surveillance state kills off the arts and cultural exchange.

Source: Washington Post

Update: November 4 2007 - check out what happened to some hapless Finnish musicians at Minnesota airport. After 2 hours of what they considered humiliation, the musicians filed a formal complaint with the US Embassy back in Helsinki. Thank goodness they got home and didn’t get shunted off to somewhere like Gitmo!

Well, I’m hoping ThinkingShift good friend, Patrick Lambe over at Green Chameleon, is not quite as depressed as he seemed to be the other day with his post on Do Knowledge Managers Really Want to Share Knowledge? If I may summarise, Patrick was bemoaning the distinct possibility that KM professionals are great at prodding others to share, but perhaps do not display selfless, collaborative behaviour within the profession itself. And with the inexperience that a lot of people in KM seem to have, it’s important to share success stories, failures and lessons learnt so that access to KM experience is gained.

Patrick checked out posts on the ACT-KM forum for a 3 month period - July to September 2007 - and found that vendors (someone who sells KM services or technology) dominate 72% of the forum’s conversation and that 91% of posts are by men. Well, this pretty well plummeted me into whatever depression Patrick was feeling! It’s not that I didn’t know or suspect this - I will confess to being an occasional lurker in a number of KM forums and I rarely post a thing.

Now, this is not because I’m a nasty piece of works or competitive or unwilling to share. Really, it’s because I have become fed up with a couple of things: firstly, the chest-beating and thumping that goes on in the KM space and the navel gazing about theories of knowledge. If KM is going to survive, it needs to step up a notch or two and offer up practical ways KM can assist an organisation. Secondly, the KM conference circuit business: glittering success stories trotted out to say “aren’t we a great company, we share knowledge, come and work for us because we make no mistakes”.

Before you hit the Comment button, yes, I have been on the conference circuit but have largely withdrawn myself because I don’t wish to become fossilized as a “usual suspect”. There are of course some speakers who have a lot of good things to say and conferences are a way for KM people to learn and share. But largely, it’s a process that’s been hijacked by commercial conference organisers or companies trying to attract new hires. Let me tell you a few things - I work in an Australian Government agency and I work with communities of practice. Are they the shining golden CoP examples outlined in Etienne Wenger’s book? Probably not. It’s a bit like law: you study law thinking that you will be able to help the disadvantaged or defeat the unscrupulous with the pristine hand of a high and mighty law. Well, having worked in law for some years, I can tell you the theory and the practice are sometimes worlds apart. So it is with KM. You read the latest KM book, dive into Nonaka and Takeuchi, come up for air and then….you face the reality of an organisation. You are inspired and enthusiastic, but the wheels of bureaucracy are often rustier than you’d hoped for and so KM moves slowly or doesn’t move at all. Working in KM can be a sobering experience; it’s not for the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I believe the main skill for a KM practitioner is that of resilience - in the face of defeat or challenges, how do you adapt, how do you recover quickly from the management blows and keep “soldiering on”? And so back to my CoPs: you try to “sell” a particular idea, it doesn’t work; so you go about it another way until you are successful. KM people have to be a mix of politician, negotiator, influencer, boundary spanner, fox terrier biting the ankle and never letting go. But above all, resilient.

But I have digressed as this isn’t what Patrick was saying. He’s asking what is it about KM professionals that we’re not bold enough, loud enough or generous enough to survive as a profession. Worse, maybe we’re negligent? Where’s our code of conduct and ethics? Where’s our Hippocratic Oath to treat all KM colleagues fairly and preserve the life of KM? .

He talked about the ACT-KM discussion forum. I think this forum is a good space for KM practitioners and I have high regard for how Patrick and Dave Snowden embolden this community and occasionally set the fur flying! Frankly, I don’t know where they get the time as I struggle with work, blogging and teaching. But….maybe if the forum were divided into levels of practice so that there was a special area for the inexperienced KM’er to find easy to understand thought pieces on KM or FAQs or case studies. Another area for the highly experienced KM’er who wants to grapple with theory or debate issues. Maybe a space for sharing articles, books, resource lists. Each space is moderated but above all, there’s a special place for the inexperienced KM’er who won’t perhaps be frightened off by abstract, theoretical discussions. And the moderator could be a highly experienced practitioner acting as an elder for the inexperienced community and this elder role rotates frequently. Obviously, this is what the forum is aiming to achieve anyway, but it’s one big discussion pool in which people can easily sink. I’m not sure this is an answer at all. Because as Patrick says, forums are ideal habitats for display behaviours of those in the KM species who like to preen themselves.

Will KM survive? I believe it will but it needs to lose the “knowledge management” tag. It needs to realise that it’s one of a number of approaches that when combined with other approaches like information management, anthropological techniques, narratives etc forms a powerful menu of offerings that an organisation can leverage according to its context. I think KM has to be less precious about itself and KM people have to realise that they alone do not have the silver bullet. And it is about “selling” - how you choose to present KM to senior management and staff will dictate its success. If its precocious and wrapped up in jargon, it will fail. If it offers easier ways for people to make sense of a complex environment; or if it helps people use tools to collaborate better; or if it works strategically with other areas like Learning and HR to offer a blended solution, then KM will thrive.

Okay off my soap box :)-

The IBM Global Human Capital Study 2008 has just been released. More than 400 organisations from 40 countries across a range of industries participated in the study. I don’t think KM practitioners will be overly surprised by the results, but it does make for interesting reading. The study identified 4 themes that senior executives say need attention and focus: (1) developing an adaptable workforce that can rapidly respond to changes in the outside market; (2) leadership to guide individuals through change; (3) an integrated talent management model that addresses the employee lifecycle; and (4) driving growth through workforce analytics.

Okay let’s look further. Quickly shifting global markets require responsive organisations but only 14% of surveyed companies believe their workforces are very capable of adapting to change. The survey found 3 key capabilities influence a workforce’s ability to be flexible and adaptable: (1) predicting future skill requirements; (2) identifying and locating experts; and (3) collaborating across the organisation and connecting individuals and groups that are separated by organisational boundaries, time zones and cultures.

Here’s a bit of a worry: 75% of the participating organisations cited their inability to develop future leaders as a critical issue. The leadership skills required when organisations face ongoing turbulence and uncertainty are (IMHO) resilience; mentoring and coaching; understanding emergence and working with diversity; understanding the strength of distributed leadership; (dare I suggest) willing to trigger disruptive patterns; creating temporary boundaries until new meaning emerges; working with scenarios for future states; harnessing the power of interlocking clusters and networks. You get the idea.

But (shock, gasp!) those of us who work in organisations are probably all too familiar with the type of leadership that still exists - ego-centric; controlling, monitoring and measuring; leader as decision maker steering the one true course for the organisation (with fingers crossed that it’s the right course!). The slogan for this modernist notion of leadership is Unfreeze/Change/Refreeze ie constantly restructure, try a new strategy, build a new vision.

The study highlighted that organisations are facing changes in employee demographics and need to think about reaching out to alternative labour sources such as older workers, corporate alumni and developing a presence in virtual worlds. Participating organisations also reported a lack of systems integration, which led to an inability to extract data to either analyse or support other functions like Sales or Marketing. Information could not be shared across applications and without consolidated data, the organisations reported they were unable to identify rising stars, reward solid performers or retain desired employees.

Only 13% believe they have a very clear understanding of the skills required in the next 3-5 years and reported they were engaging with future business scenarios. Similarly, only 13% believe they are very capable in identifying individuals with specific expertise within the organisation. And of course there’s more to a successful workforce than merely locating experts. People need to be able to collaborate with others to innovate and share knowledge. The usual suspects were highlighted as barriers to collaboration - 42% of participants cited organisational silos and 40% cited time pressures.

There was an interesting section on how some companies are wading into Second Life. Manpower (a global provider of staff) with over 4,400 offices in 73 countries is targeting the young, technically savvy labour pool and launched an island in SL in July 2007 as a way of bring job seekers and employers together.

You can get the full report here. And for any leaders still stuck in a command and control paradigm, I offer up the ThinkingShift Guide to Living Leadership (particularly Tables 2.1 and 3.1). Enjoy!

Since I was on a bit of a theme earlier this week around death, let’s have a look at what one Egyptologist is up to. Should you be thinking of donating your body to science, you might want to stipulate that you’d like to be placed in the hands of Egyptologists keen to recreate authentic Egyptian mummies and sprinkle you with a mountain of natron.

I’m not sure that a US man who snuffed it 13 years ago had this in mind when he donated his body to the pursuit of science, but he was handed over to Bob Brier, an Egyptologist at Long Island University and Ronald Wade, director of the Maryland State Anatomy Board. Brier and Wade set to work. They removed and pickled all the organs except the heart, buried the body under a ton of natron (which basically dried out the corpse) for 30 days. Then they sprinkled the dessicated body with frankincense and myrhh (an important part of the embalming process as well as making mummies smell pretty good).

Brier and Wade took the whole thing seriously even reciting sacred prayers as they wrapped the body tightly with pieces of linen. Herodotus did a brief sketch in The Histories of the mummification process and of course Hollywood movies were full of hooks going up the nasal cavity to scoop out the brain with Anubis watching over the ritual. But this is the first time in over 2000 years that mummification according to Egyptian techniques has been tried.

Brier examined hundreds of x-rays of mummies to try to reverse engineer things like how to drain the body of blood or remove the organs through a small incision in the belly. I won’t tell you the gruesome details of how they used a coat-hanger device to liquify the brain and inverted the body. The modern day mummy has now been sitting around at room temperature for nearly 15 years with no signs of decay.

In a rather bizarre case of KM in action, Brier offered up the mummy to other researchers so they could learn how to isolate DNA from the body without destroying mummified remains. This helped Angelique Corthals, a biomedical Egyptologist from the University of Manchester in England, determine the best way to isolate DNA from ancient specimens. The Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt (which Egyptologist, Zahi Hawass heads up and I love to watch on the Discovery Channel) was confident enough to let Corthals extract samples of DNA from an Egyptian mummy believed to be that of Queen Hatshepsut. Preliminary evidence suggests that the lost queen of Egypt has been found.

Well, when I go, I might just consider offering myself up as a modern day mummy. Thousands of years from now, when they dig me up, they might just think I was royalty launching myself into the After Life!

Source: Discover Magazine. Image credit: How are Mummies Made?

I have to admit to a liking for possums. Yes, I’m a New Zealander and over in kiwi land we don’t like these furry marsupials. They’re a pesky critter and last time I heard there were around 70 million possums in New Zealand. With 4 million or so people, that’s about 20 possums per New Zealander. In NZ, you can buy possum products, heck you can buy them online if you’re worried about possums wreaking havoc on native bush and birds (yep, they do).

But in Australia, possums are almost a national treasure. They are protected under the provisions of various State laws because they are a native species and it’s quite common to have a possum or two hanging out in your backyard. Because I live in the bush, whenever I turn on the floodlights to illuminate the gum trees at night, dozens of eyes blink back at me (possums, not aliens!). I have a family of possums that live in a large, very beautiful gum tree, adjacent to our top storey balcony.

So I’m rather proud of a particular Australian possum. New Scientist (no 2625, p20) has a report of an eastern pygmy possum (Cercartetus nanus) who stuffed itself full of food in a laboratory at the University of New England, Armidale, then curled up and promptly went to sleep for 367 days. A few mammals, such as squirrels, hibernate for up to six months and a western jumping mouse once konked out for 320 days.

But a little pygmy possum outdid the lot of them. And the little critter could also be considered the world’s first “green possum” because during its 367 day snooze, the possum used just one-fortieth of the energy it does when its awake and active. Clearly, the possum fraternity will do well when Australia is further in the grip of drought and food is less available. They’ll just curl up and wait it out.

Microsoft has great plans - to read your mind to be exact. For the lawyers amongst us, you can read Microsoft’s patent application here on the United States Patent & Trademark site. The patent application is for “Using electroencephalograph signals for task classification and activity recognition”. The real title should be “Microsoft’s mind reading gadget to find out how you interact with computers and at the same time suck your brains”.

Mmmm….okay Microsoft think that if you interview users to find out how they use and think about computers they get distracted and may not give reliable answers. So Microsoft is getting crafty - their patent is for using electroenceplahograph or EEGs to record electrical signals in the brain. I thought that EEG was already patented? Anyway, the problem with EEGs is that involuntary actions like blinking or sweaty palms can interfere with the accuracy of readings. So the patent outlines their ideas for filtering EEG signals so they’ll end up with useful stuff that feeds back into user interface design.

Well, I’m sure not letting them anywhere near me with their mind reading, sucking the brains out of people wizardry! Google is bad enough for me, let alone Microsoft.

Source: Wall Street Journal . Image credit: Mind Hacks. Cat image credit:icanhascheezburger.com

I really have to stop reading future predictions. In yesterday’s post, we read about some of the future predictions that didn’t quite happen. Well, here’s a future prediction that I certainly hope doesn’t happen! Well, it’s not really a prediction; maybe it’s already a reality. I thought I’d stick my nose into transhumanist or post-human stuff - you know, humans enhanced by technologies that eliminate stupidity (well, that would eliminate most business people), disease, ageing and involuntary death (mmmm…think most of us don’t want to voluntarily shuffle off). I discovered that transhumanism is sometimes symbolised >H or H+ okay, I’m probably years behind everyone else, because you knew this already.

Anyway, I’ve read Nick Bostrom’s stuff before. He’s a transhumanist philosopher and I very much liked his article, A History of Transhumanist Thought, which you download here or check out on his site. He makes the logical argument that the human desire to acquire new capacities is as ancient as humanity itself, going back to the Epic of Gilgamesh and the yearning to extend our present life to the work of medieval alchemists transmuting substances.

But in a recent article in the New York Times, Bostrom suggests that “it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation”. Now, I’ve often thought I’m trapped in a Salvidor Dali painting when the weird or the wonderful happens to me, but here’s a thought: maybe one day computers will be so powerful and have more cognitive functioning than all the combined brains of humanity and advanced humans could run ancestor simulations of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems. The virtual ancestors would have no clue whether they were trapped in virtuality or reality and maybe there are so many virtual ancestors because of the super computing power, that an individual thinks “well, I must be real as there are millions of us”. Why not? Who knows what sort of computing power the future will harness? But maybe advanced humans will have better things to do than run ancestor simulations. And would a simulated entity possess the consciousness to know that it is part of a virtual reality simulation?

Bostrom says: “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation” right now. So I guess he’s thinking that our current world is run by God sitting up there with a copy of Sim City? Or some pimply computer geek from the year 8000 is running our world. Or multiple worlds theory might suggest that there is a landscape of realities - the multiverse - and so there will be exact copies of each and everyone of us but with slightly differing realities. Think of Schrödinger’s Cat experiment - you have one reality with a live cat; another reality with a dead cat and each version you exist in. I realise I’m mixing up virtual reality with reality (and the definition of reality is a whole other topic) - but if Bostrom is right (and if I’ve interpreted him correctly) then transhumans would be able to run such perfect simulations that the distinction between virtual reality and reality wouldn’t be realised.

Freaky stuff! Check out Bostrom’s site for some great reading.

As regular ThinkingShift readers will know, I am very interested in future predictions (and I don’t mean the type you get from staring into a crystal ball hoping your soul mate will suddenly pop up in front of you). I mean the type where some heavy weight thinkers outline their thoughts (possibly with glazed eyes) of what the future holds in store. Check out the Future Predictions category of this blog if you want to whizz through some posts with sometimes dire predictions for the future.

I also get a kick out of predictions that didn’t happen - most cringe-worthy for me is Ken Olsen of Digital Equipment Corporation who said in 1977: “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home”. I’m sure Steve Jobs wasn’t attending the meeting Olsen spoke at - the World Future Society in Boston - just as well, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here now with my beloved MacBook laptop.

Growing up, I watched The Jetsons reruns and had visions of whizzing to work in a personal spacecar. I would have special places to store lipgloss as the space car would be automatically zooming along a highway in the sky so I’d have time to apply said gloss. Imagine the thrill for me when I saw Minority Report with those nifty flying vehicles! I also imagined Star Trek like phasers being a reality so I could stun a few work colleagues if they didn’t “volunteer” their knowledge :)- I guess the taser comes close.

So I found The Future piece in Forbes fascinating. There are some interviews with “visionaries” where they talk about what they were sure would happen in the future but didn’t and as it turned out, what totally surprised them. Here’s a taste.

Nicholas Negroponte: placed his bets that sophisticated speech recognition would be in daily use in 2007. But as my recent experience with calling up a taxi company would tell anyone - often the robotic voice doesn’t understand a word you say and you end up flinging the phone out the window. I certainly can’t speak to my car and have it turn on; or open my front door with the dulcet tones of my voice. Negroponte was totally taken aback by LCD screens - must say I was too. And I’m really looking forward to getting rid of laptops and PCs (sorry Apple!) and getting one of those fab screens on Minority Report where you move icons around with your fingers like in this video. Awesome, goodbye mouse!

Esther Dyson (futurist): now, I 100% agree with her - Dyson was sure there would be outrage and people would rise to protecting their online privacy and security much more effectively than they currently do. She is surprised (I am staggered) by people’s carelessness with their personal information. And she’s surprised (a tad naive?) that companies haven’t done a better job of educating the public about what information they collect and how it’s used. Even more, she’s surprised at how people are establishing their online presence, particularly around social networks. I will do a post soon outlining my thoughts on the need to establish a public persona in digital space.

Richard Lamb (another futurist) thought that climate change would be taken more seriously (hey you gotta get by all those deniers out there first) and he’s most surprised at the power shift from government to private sector. I’m not. I’ve been concerned about this for years, particularly with the health sector. I’m currently reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which is all about how free market policies are dominating the world usually after a shock of some sort like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. Freaking me right out.

Rudy Rucker (mathematical whizz): poor dude, he’s as naive as me. We both thought we’d be seeing flying cars a’la Jetsons. He grew up in the 1950s at the start of the space age; I didn’t but I still had that vision. He puts it down to litigation - there’d be a lot of prangs up in air or flying cars hurling into houses. And it’s also more energy efficient to roll vehicles on wheels. He thinks noise pollution would be an issue, but I reckon some smart person would come up with silent flying cars. The Internet took Rucker by surprise and that social networks work heaps better than individual minds (told you he was smart).

Wendell Bell (Prof of Sociology): my personal favourite. All good intentions but I wonder how naive futurists sometimes are. Bell expected that by the year 2000 people on this Earth would be living in peace and would have established strong and effective organisations through the UN to prevent conflict. Mmmm….guess he missed predicting the rise of the fundamentalist religious right in the US and he must have missed out on history classes that have outlined the decline in authority of the UN. He also must have skipped his anthropology classes that tell us that humans are an aggressive lot by nature. He was also hoping for self-governing societies for all people to achieve personal well-being and with equal opportunities. Oh dear.

Check out some of the articles on the site and especially check out five authors who tackle this fictional scenario: “It’s the year 2027, and the world is undergoing a global financial crisis. The scene is an American workplace”. One of the authors is Cory Doctorow, love his stuff.

Now, ThinkingShift readers I think are a pretty smart bunch. What do you think the future holds? How would you respond to this scenario? “It’s the year 2057 and the world is in crisis“. Go on; give it a go!