ABCtech #95 06-OCT-17 Change – Learn – Create

ABCtech #95 06-OCT-17 Change – Learn – Create

We are receiving – as you may be, hundreds of “insights” about technology and how it is changing everything with no end in sight. We have selected three articles that reinforce the reality that continuous learning is the best prescription to manage and anticipate change and measures for increasing creativity.  Enjoy! – Editor

Technology is changing everything from an interview of the head of Daimler Benz (Mercedez-Benz).  Also of interest – the quarterly report of McKinsey & Company “Where is technology taking the economy?” by Brian Arthur

Mercedez competitors are no longer other car companies, but Tesla (obviously), and now, Google, Apple, Amazon ‘et al’ – change agents of the 21st Centry.

Software: will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years.

Uber is just a software tool, they don’t own any cars, and are now the biggest taxi company in the world. Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don’t own any properties.

Artificial Intelligence:  Computers become exponentially better in understanding the world.  This year, a computer beat the best Go player in the world, 10 years earlier than expected.

In the U.S., young lawyers already can’t get jobs.  Because of IBM Watson, you can get legal advice (so far for more or less basic stuff) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans.

So, if you study law, stop immediately.  There will be 90% less lawyers in the future, only specialists will remain.

Watson already helps nurses diagnosing cancer, 4 times more accurate than human nurses.  Facebook now has a pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans. In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans.

Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self-driving cars will appear for the public.  Around 2020, the complete industry will start to be disrupted.  You don’t want to own a car anymore.   You will call a car with your phone, it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination.   You will not need to park it, you only pay for the driven distance and you can be productive while driving.   Our kids will never get a driver’s license and will never own a car.

It will change the cities, because we will need 90-95% less cars for that.  We can transform former parking spaces into parks.

1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide.  We now have one accident every  60,000 miles (100,000 km), with autonomous driving that will drop to one accident in 6 million miles (10 million km).  That will save a million lives each year.

Most car companies will probably go bankrupt.  Traditional car companies will try the traditional approach and try to build a better car, while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will take the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels.

Many engineers from Volkswagen and Audi are completely terrified of Tesla.

Auto Insurance companies will have massive trouble because without accidents, car insurance will become much cheaper.  Their car insurance business model will slowly disappear.

Real estate will change.  Because if you can work while you commute, people will move further away to live in a more beautiful neighborhood.

Electric cars will become mainstream about 2020.  Cities will be less noisy because all new cars will run on electricity.  Electricity will become incredibly cheap and clean:  Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, and now you can now see the burgeoning impact.

Solar energy: Last year, more solar energy was installed worldwide than fossil.   Energy companies are desperately trying to limit access to the grid to prevent competition from home solar installations, but that can’t last.  Technology will take care of that strategy.

With cheap electricity comes cheap and abundant water.  Desalination of salt water now only needs 2kwh per cubic meter (@ 0.25 cents).  We don’t have scarce water in most places, we only have scarce drinking water.  Imagine what will be possible if anyone can have as much clean water as he wants, for nearly no cost.

Health innovations:   The Tricorder X price will be announced this year.  There are companies who will build a medical device (called the “Tricorder” from Star Trek) that works with your phone, which takes your retina scan, your blood sample, and you can breath into it.

It then analyses 54 biomarkers that will identify nearly any disease.  It will be cheap, so in a few years everyone on this planet will have access to world class medical analysis, nearly for free.  Goodbye, medical establishment.

Manufacrturing: The price of the cheapest 3D printer came down from $18,000 to $400 within 10 years.  In the same time, it became 100 times faster.  All major shoe companies have already started 3D printing shoes.

Some common spare airplane parts are already 3D printed in remote airports.  The space station now has a printer that eliminates the need for the large amount of spare parts they used to keep in the past.

At the end of this year, new smart phones will have 3D scanning possibilities.  You can then 3D scan your feet and print your perfect shoes at home.

In China, they already 3D printed and built a complete 6-storey office building.  By 2027, 10% of everything that’s being produced will be 3D printed.

Business opportunities:  If you think of a niche you want to go in, ask yourself:  “In the future, do you think we will have that?”, and if the answer is yes, how can you make that happen sooner?

If it doesn’t work with your phone, forget the idea.  And any idea designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st century.

Work: 70-80% of jobs will disappear in the next 20 years.  There will be a lot of new jobs, but it is not clear if there will be enough new jobs in such a small time.

Agriculture:  There will be a $100 agricultural robot in the future. Farmers in 3rd world countries can then become managers of their field instead of working all day on their fields.

Aeroponics will need much less water.   The first Petri dish that produced veal is now available and will be cheaper than cow produced veal in 2018.   Right now, 30% of all agricultural surfaces is used for cows.  Imagine if we don’t need that space anymore.

There are several startups who will bring insect protein to the market shortly. It contains more protein than meat.   It will be labeled as “alternative protein source” (because most people still reject the idea of eating insects).

Marketing: There is an app called “moodies” which can already tell in which mood you’re in.  By 2020 there will be apps that can tell by your facial expressions, if you are lying.   Imagine a political debate where it’s being displayed when they’re telling the truth and when they’re not.

Finance: Bitcoin may even become the default reserve currency … Of the world!

Longevity:  Right now, the average life span increases by 3 months per year.  Four years ago, the life span used to be 79 years, now it’s 80 years. The increase itself is increasing and by 2036, there will be more than one year increase per year.   So, we all might live for a long time, probably way more than 100.

Education:   The cheapest smart phones are already at $10 in Africa and Asia.  By 2020, 70% of all humans will own a smart phone.  That means, everyone has the same access to world class education.

Every child can use Khan academy for everything a child needs to learn at school in First World countries. There have already been releases of software in Indonesia and soon there will be releases in Arabic, Swahili, and Chinese this summer.  I can see enormous potential if we give the English app for free, so that children in Africa and everywhere else can become fluent in English.  And that could happen within half a yea

How College Students Should Prepare for Our Automated Future by Joseph E. Aoun, President of Northeastern University and the author of Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Economists across the political spectrum agree that the single biggest threat to future job growth is neither immigration  nor trade — it’s the artificial intelligence revolution already underway. Studies by Oxford University, McKinsey and Pricewaterhouse Coopers forecast that up to 50% of current jobs could be replaced by smart machines within the next 20 years. Already, more than 5 million U.S. factory jobs have been lost to automation since 2000. It’s become clear: If a job can be automated in the future, it will be.

What’s less clear is how educational institutions — the incubators of human talent — will respond to this sea change in the future of work. Despite being the envy of the world, American universities have been slow to modernize — too often educating students for 20th century career fields that will be obsolete by the time they graduate. Beyond simply conferring degrees, the foundational purpose of colleges and universities must be to educate — and that means equipping people of all ages, at all stages of their careers, to build successful and fulfilling lives. This means we need to take several important steps to make our students robot-proof.

First, we must design and implement a curriculum that empowers humans to do those jobs only humans can do. Call it humanics. This curriculum provides students with three literacies: technical literacy, data literacy and human literacy (such as teamwork, entrepreneurship, creativity, ethics and cultural agility). Then it integrates them, allowing learners to develop a creative mindset and the mental elasticity to invent, discover and produce original ideas in the A.I. age. Even as smart machines become smarter, we will still need humans to launch new companies, engage in global diplomacy, and supervise diverse teams of other people.

But a modernized curriculum will not be enough. Students must also gain workplace experience before fully entering the workforce — to deepen their understanding beyond “what” into “why” and “how.” For example, an engineering student might leverage her classroom studies in circuitry design during an internship at Waymo, Google’s autonomous vehicle project. By integrating firsthand experience with intelligent machines with her academic work, she learns agility and adaptability, and, most important, she learns how to continue learning.

We must also recognize that technological progress doesn’t come with a brake pedal. As machines get smarter, the shelf life of a human education gets shorter. It’s time to end to the fiction that four years of college, plus a smattering of graduate studies, is enough to last a lifetime.

For-profit educational providers were early adopters that recognized the growing demand for lifelong learning, as have many employers. Some, like General Electric, have adopted in-house bachelor-completion programs. Others, such as IBM, offer an extensive array of educational badges and credentials. Non-profit universities must embrace the opportunity to serve nontraditional students, who today comprise 85% of all learners.

Lifelong learning must become a central facet of what universities do, not an ancillary endeavor. This means authentic, sustainable partnerships with industry to design courses that fill competency gaps employers actually need. It means going to where the learners are, providing them with an educational roadmap customized for every walk of life. And it likely means access to a multi-campus network, in which learners circulate among nodes across the country and around the globe — where they live and work.

The economic stakes are high. The well-being of societies has long been tethered to vibrant systems of higher education. By rising to the challenge of artificial intelligence, universities with the audacity to change represent humanity’s best chance to win the jobs of the future.

8 Lessons In Creativity by John Cleese supplied by Paul Drury

There no one in the world more qualified to talk about creativity than John Cleese. For those of you that don’t know him, Cleese is the British comedy genius behind Monty Python and Fawlty Towers. He has mused on the creative process at various events over the past two decades, and he is an inspiration for me in my career.

According to Cleese, if the conditions for the creative process are in place, wonders can happen. As he put it: “If you’re racing around all day, ticking things off a list, looking at your watch, making phone calls and generally just keeping all the balls in the air, you are not going to have any creative ideas.” Therefore, I would like to share eight concepts which may help:

Creativity is a mood. It is not a skill or an attitude. You have to create the right conditions for the mood. Just as you can’t force yourself to feel happy, creativity is equally impossible to create artificially. You need to find a “way of operating” that allows your natural creativity to come to the fore.

Let the inner child play. The most creative people allow their minds to get totally immersed in a problem, like a child trying to solve a puzzle. I suppose that you could call it getting “in the zone”, but it is a zone with no rules, where anything goes. When there are no “right answers”, the best solutions pop up.

Give your unconscious mind free rein. I’ll leave this one to Cleese: “I began to see that a lot of my best work seemed to come as a result of my unconscious working on things when I wasn’t really attending to them. We can’t control our unconscious, but we can look at how we can create the circumstance in which it becomes easier for us to work with our unconscious.”

Allow your mind to meander. Creativity is not about linear, logical progression. When you contemplate a problem, you should allow your mind to slow down, to mull it over from multiple angles, almost seeing it in slow motion before coming to a conclusion. You can’t force creativity; you have to let it happen at its own pace.

You don’t have to know where you are going. Being comfortable with uncertainty is crucial when you are in creative mode because a lot of the time you won’t have a clue what is going on. Ideas will bounce around in your head, so let them bounce. Out of the chaos comes inspiration.

Set the boundaries of time and space. All this meandering and playing is commendable, but unless you have a quiet space in which to think and a good amount of time set aside to allow yourself to get into this mindset, your creative unconscious won’t be able to cope. If you dedicate 90 minutes to a solving a creative problem, the stage is yours.

Don’t decide until you need to decide. If you have an unresolved issue, give your mind the maximum amount of time possible to solve it. If you are happy with your discomfort at the question still being “open”, you give your mind the time to simmer and come up with the optimal answer. Be confident that the answer will come.

Be critical, but only at the last minute. With all creativity, there needs to be a rational voice saying “does this make sense?” However, it is all too easy to let this voice take over before you have fully played with the problem. Keep the sensible grown-up under wraps until the inner child has woven his magic.

The Future of Work

Preparing students for the arrival of artificial intelligence.

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