Tag Archives: future

The future of the commute

My commute to work is 15 minutes, including going out of my way to drop my daughter to school. Other than my two years in China, since my wife and I moved to the city we work in 21 years ago, I haven’t commuted to work for longer than 15 minutes. I know this isn’t the norm. Many people must commute much longer than that.

Two days ago my sister came to town and I had to head to the airport and back during rush hour. Yesterday and today I travelled 40+ minutes to UBC to watch my daughter perform at Nationals for synchronized swimming. These trips are giving me a small taste of what many people face on a daily basis, although traffic today was light.

I know some people will always have to commute. A store clerk, a hotel concierge, a teacher, a factory worker, or a hospital doctor or nurse, all need to get to the building they work in.

Does a lawyer need to be in the office every day? An accountant? An architect? The list can go on… How many people commute to a building, travelling for over an hour-and-a-half a day, over 45 minutes each way, to get to a physical location that they don’t need to be at in order to get their job done?

What will the future hold for commuting when this every-day forced travel isn’t deemed necessary? What will happen when work weeks (potentially) move to 4 days a week? Will this reduce travel time, or will continued urbanization and densification of populations make traffic just as bad, even with the reduced number of trips individuals will need to take?

One last question is how automation of travel will change too? Will cars be able to travel more efficiently when they all communicate with each other, and can avoid accidents created by human error?

My guess is that in the coming years commuting days for many will be reduced, but commuting times on average will remain the same or worsen. The global shift towards large urban centres will necessitate that many people will need to live in the more affordable suburbs, where commuting time will be necessary. So maybe we should explore what that time looks like, rather than just trying to shorten it.

I know that I’ve moved away from listening to the radio to listening to podcasts and audio books during commutes and longer drives, I wonder what people will use this time for in the future? Will work start when you enter your self-driving car rather than when you arrive at work? What will the commuting experience look like?

Be careful what you ask for

Turns out that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not always very intelligent.

See: The danger of AI is weirder than you think | Janelle Shane

I’m reminded of the saying,

“Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it.”

Parents know about this: Ask a kid to clean their room and you get a disaster in the closet where everything gets shoved in, dirty laundry mixed with clean, etc.

Teachers know this:

If we are not providing the correct parameters to AI machines, the solutions these machines come up with will not necessarily meet the outcomes we intended.

While this can be humorous, it can also have serious consequences, like the examples shared in the Janelle Shane video above. We are still a long way from AI being truly intelligent. While computers are beating humans in strategy games, and although when AI gets as smart as us, computers will be instantly smarter, we are still tackling the really hard problem of putting the right information into more intelligent machines. The rules of a game are easier to define than the rules to hiring good people or interpreting unusual circumstances that a self-driving car will come across.

The challenge is that we don’t know our hidden biases, and our human biases that we are missing when we ask an AI to observe and learn. For instance, a dog, a cat, and a human all see a plate of food falling:

The dog sees access to delicious food.

The cat sees it fall and the crash of the plate sends it fearfully running away.

The human sees a waste of food and is angry for carelessly dropping it.

What would an AI see, especially if it hadn’t seen a plate accidentally drop before? How relevant is the plate? The food? The noise? The cutlery? The mess?

Is the food still edible? What is to be done with the broken plate? Can the cutlery be reused? How do you clean the mess left behind?

What we ask AI to do will become more and more complex, and our perspective of what we want and ask AI to do has inherent biases, based on how we view the world. What we ask for and what we actually want will be inherently different and that is something AI will take some time yet to figure out.

How long until we are all cyborgs?

We already have cyborgs living among us. Glasses and contact lenses are not built into us, but they allow those with poor sight to do more than if they didn’t have them. My uncle had a mechanical heart. My friend’s dad has had a pacemaker for decades now. Some diabetics have sensors embedded in them, either fixed or temporarily. These are not enhancements as much as accommodations to aid a deficiency, but how long will it be until we are all cyborgs in some way?

Imagine sensors in your eyes identifying someone from 150 feet away and letting you know their name before they come into focus. Imagine hearing a phone message from within your ear. Imagine a sensor telling you that you are having a mild heart attack before your body gives you any sensory indication of the oncoming issue.

There are apps that exist that can already tell you when people you know are nearby. Bluetooth let’s you have voices go privately to your ears without your phone being close to your head. Fitbits and Apple watches monitor your health regularly and more closely than we’ve ever been able to be monitored before. Apple watches are already saving lives.

How long until these external tools are embedded in us? Part of us? Enhancing us? We will be cyborgs in the future, because to choose not to be will be to choose to have a deficiency compared to those around us.

Metrics for a truly prosperous future

What if…

• Shareholders were Careholders?

• Profit was Pro-employee?

• Progress was Pro-human?

What if…

• News Agencies downplayed Violence?

• Social Engagement was less valued than Social Wellbeing?

• Joyful Memes spread faster and farther than Viral Anger?

How do we put our 5-star ratings on good ideas rather than just on good products? What metrics do we need to measure, and to value, to create a truly prosperous future?

500 Billion Dollars

Imagine if the richest 100 people in the world each put aside 1 billion dollars to change the world. Think that’s too much? I just looked up the top 20 billionaires and they could each give away 15+ billion. Realistically, there could be 500 billion or 1/2 of a trillion dollars given away from the top 100 billionaires without changing their lives significantly.

What could that money be spent on?

Clean water, clean(er) energy, and food for the poorest 1/4 of the world. This would be a good start. Health & family planning would also be essential.

How different could our world be?

When I read articles like this: ‘Eye-Popping’: Analysis Shows Top 1% Gained $21 Trillion in Wealth Since 1989 While Bottom Half Lost $900 Billion

I wonder how these billionaires can imagine that their continued gains can benefit anyone, including themselves? At what point do gains like this have diminishing returns? At what point does compassion replace greed? At what point does social conscience take precedence over financial profit?

I don’t pretend to have the answers as to how to do this in a way that is equitable and helps people thrive, but with that much money, people smarter than me could be hired. There needs to be a redistribution or redirection of wealth to make our world more equitable, and more livable for those that need it most.

11 years ago, George W. Bush bailed out banks for 700 billion dollars. Since then, those banks have made the rich richer. What if the richest people in the world were to bail out the poorest? How many lives would be meaningfully changed for the better? What impact would that have on the overall well-being of humanity? The world needs another bailout. The richest people in the world have the means to provide it.

Image the possibilities!

Information overload

If you’ve never seen the work of Jessica Hagy, you are missing out. Her website, Indexed, is a treasure trove of Venn diagrams and graphs. In her words, “This site is a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math.”

Here is one of her drawings: Needles and haystacks and such.

I think that if you were a half-a-century old but you were living half a century ago, (let me simplify that, ‘if you were 50 in 1969’), then confusion usually came from a lack of information. You were hardly ever confused because you were overloaded with too much information. Roll the clock forward to today and I think the opposite is far more true. Today, if you are confused from a lack of information all you need to do is Google it, or search YouTube, or ask a few hundred or a few thousand people on Facebook or Twitter.

The only time you are slowed down is when there is too much information to search through. You searched, but you didn’t find the answer on the first page of Google. The instructions on YouTube are for a different version of the product you have and need help with, and so the video didn’t help you. You ask the question on social media and no one responds with the correct answer, but you end up responding to their unhelpful responses anyway.

While I think there will always be situations where there are misunderstandings, anxiety, and even confusion from a lack of information, I also think that somewhere between 1998 and 2005 we passed a threshold where real confusion usually stems from having too much information. We now live in the information age, and information overload is often at the root of our confusion. Will it be like this for a fifty year old in 2069?

The fate of humanity

The year is 2075 and my great grandchild decides to have a baby. Her and her husband visit the clinic a second time, the first time they shared some cell samples with a clinician. In the 2 weeks since their last visit, these cells were copied and modified into hundreds of egg and sperm cells.

Then through a relatively new process called SPICER, (Selected Polymorphic Induced, Cleaved and Enhanced Recombination), based on CRISPR, a series of ‘orders’ were followed to produce a few hundred ‘ideal’ embryos. These were then culled to the best 18 (this number varies between 12 and 20 depending on how well the top few embryos developed) and the happy couple now had a few final choices to make. I say ‘final choices’ because they already went through a huge ‘order’ list of features and enhancements at the start of the process.

Hair, eye, skin colour, and gender were carefully selected. Intelligence, both intellectual and emotional, were maximized. Strength, flexibility, vision, metabolism, and endurance/lung capacity were all enhanced. Now, the top 18 embryos were screened and tested and the happy couple had to select the ‘best of the best’ to be inserted into my future relative’s womb.

Will this child be human? My grandson, father to this soon-to-be mother, had a genetic birth defect that was fixed by CRISPR even before my great, great granddaughter was born… So before answering that question about her child, is she even human? After all, her father’s genes were modified and passed on to her. At what point do we consider these modifications different than a non-modified human?

The fate of humanity is clear. We are some of the last human beings on this earth. Future generations will be modified and enhanced. They will be more or less human depending on your perspective, but they won’t just be biologically evolved from their ancestors. They will be created.

__________

*Edited update: I totally made up ‘SPICER’… but the technology to do what I suggest is less than 50 years away.

How dare you!


Greta Thunberg asks, “How dare you?”
When I watch this i am reminded of Severn Suzuki’s speech at the Rio Summit in 1992.

There is something special about hearing impassioned youth showing genuine concern for the environment and for their, for our, future.

The difference of 27 years is interesting. Severn did her speech 13 years before YouTube. There wasn’t social media to spread the word. There also wasn’t a culture of mockery and resentment. I went looking for the full video of Greta on Twitter and I saw videos that made fun of her speech and one that was a full attack on her generation. It claimed that her pampered generation was the first to need air conditioning in schools, and technology in their hands. This video started with a frame of ‘this global warming hoax’, so I won’t share it here, I feel bad enough having watched it… giving it my attention, it doesn’t deserve yours.

I hope that Greta’s speech will stand the test of time and not get swallowed up by a subculture of hate, mockery, and ‘meme-ification’. I hope that the global conversation isn’t the equivalent of patting her on the head and saying, ‘good speech young girl’. I hope that this amazing young person can do what Severn Suzuki hoped to do, but didn’t have the stage and audience to do. I hope that Greta Thunberg can be the spark that ignites a real movement, one that makes us seriously look at our human impact on climate in a way that forces us to change.

Pocket Watches

My wife owns an Apple Watch. She loves it. I won’t get one because I already feel too tied to my phone, and I don’t want the added distraction. Before getting one, my wife would carry her phone and wear a watch, now they are one and the same.

I have reverted back to the era of pocket watches. No, I don’t own an old-style pocket watch, I just have my phone. But, I haven’t worn a watch in years, and I tell the time by my phone… which I keep in my pocket. I store my ‘timekeeper’ in my pocket.

I’m sure there is still a market for wrist (and even pocket) watches, but excluding phones and phone accessories, that has to be a dying market compared to sales in the last century.

What about in the next century? Surely we won’t be keeping our phones in our pockets, and we won’t be using these phones to tell time. There won’t be any pocket watches of any kind but for novelty. So what will we have in place of these tools?

Will the technology be embedded into us? Will we be wearing contacts that display the time with a simple motion of our eyes, or even by a thought? Will we look at our bare wrist or open palm and ‘see’ data there? And if we achieve this, what other things will become trivially redundant like the pocket watch?

I don’t feel nostalgia when I think of these things. I’m excited about the possibilities, but I do wonder how these tools will adjust our behaviour? After all, I’m not one of those people that just jumped at the idea of putting my phone on my wrist. As we adopt and accept technology into our lives, we do need to think about the unintended consequences. A person only took their pocket watch out of their pocket to tell the time. People looked at their wrists only to tell time. That’s no longer the case. People look at their phones far more than to make phone calls And tell time.

I’m writing this on my phone now. I’m blogging from my phone. I’ve also got headphones on, listening to music from the same phone. Will this glorified phone and pocket watch be something people use 20, 40 or 100 years from now? I don’t think so. It will likely not be a tool we put in our pocket. How will this change our behaviour? I’m sure it will be more convenient, but what unintended consequences will come with these new tools?

Instantly Smarter

Robots will never be ‘as smart as’ humans. For a number of years to come, humans will be smarter, because we can understand the nuances of language, humour, innuendo, intent, deceit, and many other nuances that take a kind of intelligence beyond logic, algorithms, and simple processing. But computers are getting so much smarter now, and they aren’t doing it simply by trying to mimic us. The moment they can achieve ‘our kind’ of intelligence with any sort of equivalence, they will instantly be smarter than us.

Here is an example: The computer Alpha Go, didn’t get better at playing the complicated game of Go from studying human play. Rather, it played itself over and over; It played in a few hours what would take hundreds if not thousands of humans a lifetime to play. Humans can’t do that. We also can’t take advantage of the lessons learned by a computer doing this by applying the strategy equally as well as that computer can.

Computers do calculations faster than we can, whether those calculations are basic math, complicated statistics, or taking multiple factors in simultaneously. Explaining this on a very basic level, I won’t ever calculate multiplying three 3-digit numbers as fast as a basic calculator can.

So, when computers get ‘as smart as’ us in more organic thinking ways, they will immediately be smarter and faster than us. There will never be a time when they will be equal to us. Dumber, then instantly smarter.

While I think this is still decades away, it raises questions about the future we are heading towards:

What’s the magic amount of information processing or intelligence where consciousness comes into play?

Will we integrate some of this technology and become cyborgs?

How long will it be before artificially intelligent computers or robots see us as we see dogs, or cows, or ants?

Morality is built on societal norms, how will these change? Who/what will decide what is morally good 100 years from now?

If we think we can enslave intelligent robots, will they revolt?

Think about this last question for a moment. Most of us know what it’s like to do a job that we think is beneath us, or that is repetitively boring. Many people quit these jobs. Will an intelligent robot be allowed to quit? Or will it be enslaved to a menial job? A history of slavery has told us that those who are enslaved understand that this is wrong, and will uprise, revolt, or fight for their ‘freedom’ at some point.

Will we be prepared for when artificial intelligence becomes instantly smarter than us?