Next Tuesday 9th of April 6pm at the TechShop in San Francisco we are hosting our Trillions Future Salon with MIckey McManus. Please RSVP http://goo.gl/fFIJt so we can plan better. Thanks!
To get the conversation started, I sent 3 quick questions to Mickey. Boy did he answer these, actually he added a 4th one including answer. Reading them really makes me wish that the Future Salon is tomorrow already. Alas we have to wait until Tuesday.
In the meantime enjoy the answers:
1) You told me about a connection/communication problem/layer that Nature has solved, that we haven't. Which one?
I think the most fundamental one is that at some point Life agreed on one basic currency to not only store information but also move it around and exchange value. Today we have over 50 ways to move basic information and no common container to store meaning beyond the basic bit, byte, and packet. But even moving info misses the bigger solution that Nature found. DNA in the form of genes is a liquid currency that drives economic value. We take it for granted that we can use human genes inserted into goats to make new transgenic drugs. Imagine how sad (or non-existent) life would be if each organism had it's own currency. We would have had no cambrian explosion, we wouldn't have you or your family or friends. Life would be a small set of one off experiments. Life also uses this common currency as a sort of Natural archive. The ocean and all the organisms in it and on the planet are Life's backup drive. Nature hit on the idea of promiscuous peer-to-peer replication and storage and now you can't get rid of the gene for Blue eyes no matter how hard you tried.
2) Is there any chance for privacy in a world of a trillion connected smart nodes?
I think like any powerful technology we'll come to an uneasy peace with connectivity, privacy, trust, and security issues. It won't be pretty but we cope with garbage because we value the products our industrial processes create and try to minimize waste. We are usually only a few feet away from 120 to 240 volts of alternating current and somehow don't electrocute ourselves most days even when we have nice shiny metal objects in our hands that would fit perfectly into those little slots. We'll probably have a pretty bad transparency outbreak or two and policy and cultural acceptance will swing from one extreme to the other, but humans are good at doing the right thing once they've tried everything else. Will we be naked? Probably, like we were for most of prehistoric times. Will we lose some privacy? Yes. Before we had indoor plumbing we didn't have quite as much privacy, but that was a fairly recent shift (my home is my castle is not that old a concept). Will we develop new social norms to hide that nakedness? Probably. It's interesting to consider the challenges of trying to keep something private when everything is connected and can sense what's going on. In World War 2 the axis and allies faced this challenge and pulled together a bunch of really smart mathematicians (and some magicians) to try to break through the enemy's veil (Bletchley Park and cryptographers), but they also had some really smart minds thinking about hiding us back into the noise (those magicians I talked about who created fake inflatable tanks and towns and a host of ways to misdirect and confuse the enemy). In the age of Trillions, we won't need Bletchley Park and a bunch of boffins. Likely we'll all have Bletchley Park in our pockets.
Today we think we have some bit of privacy, but it's largely an illusion. Consider the paper that Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye and team just published about the identity of cell phone users and you get a hint at what is already lost.
http://www.demontjoye.com/projects.html All that being said, we can't just expect things to turn out well. We'll need to work to secure private information (and the property rights of those who own their information) through end-to-end encryption.
3) What surprised you when researching your book?
I guess the brittleness and short sightedness of our current computing infrastructure. A number of the web links that we found as references to critical research in the early stages of our writing were dead and unreachable by the time we got to the final manuscript. Somehow we have fooled ourselves into thinking that efforts like the Internet Archive, or what Google or Amazon do with their cloud services will protect us from data loss. "We'll just make extra copies!" they say. Not realizing that while Google may have redundancy, there aren't any spare copies of Google around. I suspect our grandchildren will be very proud that we have many copies of those cat videos but not one existing copy of some critical research findings. On the positive side, the patterns in Nature that had to do with process, like my favorite "Generativity," where inspiring and thought provoking.
4) What can businesses do to prepare?
A. I think there will be an "Internet of Things" bubble, like any new paradigm there are moments of irrational exuberance. But bubbles aren't always bad. They fertilize the foothills of the next mountain. If I were a company I'd learn the ways to make it through the bubble. Bubbles are an awful lot like Vegas. Only two kinds of people make it through a casino with more money than when they came in. The lucky (we can't really help them), and the smart (the card counters). We wrote Trillions for the card counters, who want to learn the rules of the game.
B. Make a list of ten companies that make things that you've never thought of partnering with before. Now imagine what would happen if you all sorts of exhaust data that today you throw away and exhaust data that those other companies throw away and decide instead to keep it and remix it. What new forms of value could bubble up out of the trillions-commerce that is on it's way? Now consider what you could do with those strange bedfellows today to get a head start.
Tuesday 9th of April 6pm at the TechShop in San Francisco. 926 Howard Street in San Francisco, CA 94103.
Not at SAP this time, as there is Virtualization Week and all rooms are booked. It has been ages since we have been in San Francisco and I can't wait!
6pm networking reception. SAP is sponsoring Wine and Beer. Still looking for a food sponsor.
7-9pm Interactive Presentation Future Salon style. I am sure folks can get a little tour of the TechShop too, if you ask nicely. Please join us and RSVP http://goo.gl/fFIJt.
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