Tag Archives: future

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?

Data hoarders

I have thousands of photos on a computer that I can’t turn on. I have files on floppy discs. I still have tape cassettes, records, and CD’s. I have videos of my kids on digital tapes that I can only play on the camera I filmed them on, although I’m sure I can still get them on to my computer if I tried.

And I have thousands and thousands of digital photos that will never make it into a frame. They will never see ‘the light of day’, and many of them might not even be seen by me again.

Talking with my buddy, Dave Sands, he mentioned that we have become data hoarders. But unlike those TV shows about outlier people that hoard physical things and clutter their homes and lives, we are all becoming digital hoarders!

Our phones used to be fancy if they could take half-MB images and now some phones are approaching 10MB. My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20 with 20k of memory (and I was excited to buy the 16k adaptor to get me to 36k), and now I wouldn’t buy a computer with less that 350G. We used to buy 250MB backup drives, now we are buying multiple Terabyte backup drives.

But will these drives be easily retrievable in 30 years? Or will we be searching for an equivalent to a tape cassette recorder, or an 8-track player, to somehow get our data back? Or, how easy will it be for others to access this data as we share more and more of it in the cloud?

Beyond the fear of others getting access, will we even want this data? When was the last time you looked at a backup file or drive that has data you no longer have on your computer or phone?

We have become digital hoarders, all of us. What implications does this have for us, or more specifically, for our future selves?

‘Watching’ you

Here is an interesting article I read a few months ago:

Apple CEO: Watch is saving lives – Business Insider

Apple COO Jeff Williams:

Apple has gotten “a ton of emails where people say the Watch actually saved their life,” he says.

“The only thing on the Apple Watch from a medical standpoint is the heart rate sensor,” he says.

And while anyone can talk their own wrist pulse anytime, “having the information readily available and passively tracked in the background has proved to be profound, in a way we didn’t anticipate,” he adds.

“We’ve gotten so many emails where people or their cardiologist have written us and said, ‘This person detected something on their Watch and came in and they had a life threatening situation. If we had not intervened, they probably would have died.”

So, continuous heart rate monitoring can be very valuable, and the article also mentions a Fitbit detecting a woman’s sleep apnea… What’s next?

I can remember my mom having a health issue and she had to carry around a heart monitor for several days. It was bulky, strapped on to her, and needed to be unplugged from her when she showered. It was an inconvenient interruption to her life, but it provided important information for her doctor.

Imagine a few years from now when you go to your doctor and say, I’ve noticed an issue where my heart starts racing even though I’m not exercising… and your doctor says, that’s interesting, will you please download your last month’s data onto my tablet? A couple clicks later your doctor knows when this happened, your step count for the day, the last time you exercised, your blood pressure, your heart rate, your sugar levels, the oxygen levels of your blood, and a whole host of other data that she has at her finger tips.

She won’t have to say, I think I need to run some tests, but rather she will have a plethora of historical data that actually extends beyond what she might have tested for. She might have advice to share that she would not have known to share if you hadn’t provided her with this data. Maybe she injects a small sensor under your skin so that your watch can provide her with more information. And then you can set your watch to ping your doctor the next time you have an issue.

And then the next time the health issue does happen, your phone actually warns you before you feel your heart racing. As the sensation hits you, you get a text message from your doctor saying, “Don’t worry, it will pass, set an appointment with me next week, we will work to settle this down”… or, “Are you with someone that can drive you to the hospital? I’ll meet you there.” This might be a bit scary, but not as scary as the text message not happening and you having a medical issue that is much better or far worse than you think.

Yes, there are some worrisome questions like ‘who owns this data’, and privacy is a concern, but this is really exciting and can become something that saves your life more than once. The issue of private data being shared is something we will all have to figure out. People are already working on this, listen to CBC Spark with Nora Young to learn more: How to empower patients with medical data.

On a lighter side, maybe this watch that you wear (or maybe it’s a cyborg-like addition to your body rather than something you wear) can actually help you maintain a better lifestyle. Maybe it knows you are on a diet and locks the fridge when you try to get into it after 8pm, or it beeps incessantly and annoyingly when you are eating something unhealthy. Or it reminds you that you have missed your scheduled workout and prompts you to set up a ‘make-up’ time.

We are entering an interesting time of wearable technology and some time soon, accessories like watches might be watching us far more than we are watching them!

Luke Skywalker's Hand - May The 4th Be With You! :)

Luke Skywalker’s Hand – May The 4th Be With You! 🙂

Thinking about positive thinking

I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking today. I recalled my sister telling me about a Japanese Scientist who froze either pure or distilled water drops to examine the ice crystals… except that first he treated the water in a special way. He would ‘apply’ thoughts, and words, to the water containers first: things like ‘joy’ and ‘happiness’ or ‘sorry’ and ‘anger’. The results were remarkable! Beautiful patterns with positive thoughts & words, and patternless, blocks or ‘broken’ patterns with negative thoughts & words.

It makes me wonder about all this talk I hear about broken schools and our ‘failure’ to prepare our students for the future?

It makes me wonder about all the negative self-talk our media perpetuates… We aren’t pretty enough, we are too fat, we look too old, we aren’t rich enough, we can buy happiness, our future is bleak!

How much of this is real, and how much of it is unintentionally willed by our own (weak?) thoughts?

If we could accumulate a day’s worth of thoughts and place that on a frozen water sample, what shapes would we get? Beautiful patterns or broken formations?

What if we did this for our family, community, city, nation or world?

I know what it would look like for every newspaper & news media stream that exists, and find this disturbing… a reason why I avoid the news altogether!

There are some amazing things happening in this world. Kindness, generosity and love can be powerful and potent catalysts in changing what our daily thoughts accumulate to.

At the end of today, think of what the crystallized accumulation of your daily thoughts would look like. If you see something beautiful, congratulate yourself! If you see something less than beautiful, know that you have the power to change that, and also know that begins with acceptance, not blame… with forgiveness, not anger… with love, not self-loathing.

Gandhi was right, we really do need to be the change we want to see in this world. And that starts with our thoughts that drive us.

Think good thoughts,
Say good words,
Do good deeds.

Two old but not too old links | Year-end Food for Thought

I have two sources of inspiration for you.

One is a video… Brave New World Wide Web.  It compares 20th century learning with 21st century learning.  It was originally posted in 2008, but is still relevant today.  I hope it gets you thinking about one small change you can make to bring yourself forward.  I can help and support you in that process.

 

 

http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/

The second is a blog post from December of 2009, but it’s still fitting and good food for thought…

21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020.

via dasdlisd.wordpress.com

I was planning on sharing the link to Shelly Blake-Plock’s, @TeachPaperless’, post (a year old today and still very insightful), ’21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020′ anyway, but here it has been put together with my Brave New World Wide Web video on the DeDorest Area School District blog.

It amazes me that on blip.tv where it was first posted, the video has never in 2 years and 2 months had a ‘zero’ day… it has had a long-tail audience and every couple months it gets a spike in viewings as someone else shares it. All told, at several sites, it has probably been viewed over 40,000 times and downloaded over 500 times since I put it online. I realize that a cat sneezing on YouTube can get 150,000 views in less time than that, but this story of a personal journey into the world of edtech, and what it offered to me as an educator, has a very specific audience and I’m humbled by it’s reception… even 2 years later.