The future of analogue people in a digital world

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I recently gave the keynote at Bridge Point Forum on Future Directions in the Digital Age, the title riffing off the conference’s theme of The Rise of the Digital Age.

I opened by making the critical point that, while the digital world is rising around us at an extraordinary pace, humans are completely analogue. Nothing about humans is digital. While we can conceive of and enact digital processes and thoughts, these are created from fully analogue neural networks.

This means that one of the most important frames on our future is understanding the interface between analogue humans and our increasingly digital external environment.

I illustrated the idea with segments of this movie of three Geminoids – essentially robot replicas of humans – together with their human models.


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Critical issue: Will the fertility rate in the developed world continue to increase?

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I recently appeared on the Morning Show being interviewed about the future of the family. Click on the image below to see a video of the segment.

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One of the interesting topics we discussed was trends in the fertility rate.
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A new world of (lack of) privacy: Here’s looking at you with Google Glass

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The discussion is heating up around the forthcoming Google Glass augmented reality glasses and what will almost surely be a wave of similar devices from other companies.

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Much of the conversation focuses on the ability of Google Glass to continuously capture video of wherever its user is looking. Following an insalubrious bar in Seattle announcing Google Glass-wearers would be banned from its premises, we are seeing the launch of handy Google Glass Ban Signs for whoever else wants to ban Google Glass, along with its potential for pervasive video capture.

A nice piece in Sydney Morning Herald titled Through the looking glass into the future does a nice job of reviewing the state of the nation on the topic.

The article quotes me:

Australian futurist Ross Dawson said that people largely accepted widespread video surveillance, but ”the idea of individuals recording video wherever they go is more pointed and uncomfortable”.

He said the technology may be the final straw in the erosion of privacy that sparked a social uprising and new legislation, but it was more likely that people would become used to ”a world in which almost everything they do is visible”.

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Our future depends on the humanization of work

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One of the reasons that my focus is increasingly shifting to the future of work is that it is in fact a large part of the future of humanity. And if we don’t get this right it might not look pretty.

The two primary drivers of a changing work landscape in coming years remote work and work automation. Almost all work will be able to be done anywhere, and a growing proportion of today’s jobs will be supplanted by machines.

The replacement of human workers by machines is of course a large part of human history, and so far we have consistently created new jobs faster than old jobs have disappeared.

However machine capabilities – including robotics, spatial cognition, and natural language processing – are developing so fast that there is a real chance that there will be insufficient new jobs to replace the ones that disappear.

In the ebook Race Against the Machine, authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, both of MIT, describe the challenge of the inexorable rise of machines in the workplace, concluding with a rather gloomy view of our ability to respond.

John Hagel of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge has made a great video responding to the book’s ideas.


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Judging the best visualizations of the future: Enter the BBC What If? competition

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This year BBC is focusing on the future under the theme What If? and has just launched its What If? Visions of the Future competition.

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Image source: BBC News/ Glenn Hatton
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Creating a better world through apps: the power of mobile in catalyzing networks for good

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I was recently invited to attend the presentations and awards for the Vodafone App Aid competition and to interview Guy Kawasaki, who was one of the event’s judges.

App Aid selected 10 charities who saw the need for a mobile app. App developers signed up for teams that developed apps from scratch in 48 hours for each of the charities. The winning teams received prizes to help them complete and launch their apps. The video below shows brief snippets from the winners.

What struck me while I was watching the charities’ presentations was that the underlying premise of almost all the apps was connecting resources to where they can do the most good.
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The global brain is like a child’s brain – let’s nurture it

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In my book Living Networks I wrote about how the networks in which we live are coming to life, making us all part of what we can quite accurately think of as a global brain.

I wrote an extended introduction to the book that went into this concept in depth. However this was not included in the final published book, so I later shared it as an article, Autopoiesis and how hyper-connectivity is literally bringing the networks to life.

One of the wonderful outcomes of that was that the film-maker Tiffany Shlain, who has long thought on very similar lines, reached out to connect.

Tiffany has just released a marvellous 10 minute movie, Brain Power: From Neurons To Networks, that reflects these ideas. Watch it below, preferably on full screen.


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6 mechanisms that will help create the global brain

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One of the many reasons humanity is at an inflection point is that the age-old dream of the “global brain” is finally becoming a reality.

I explored the idea in my book Living Networks, and at more length in my piece Autopoiesis and how hyper-connectivity is literally bringing the networks to life.

Today, my work on crowdsourcing is largely focused on the emerging mechanisms that allow us to create better results from mass participation.

Some of the best work being done in the space is at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. A few of their researchers (including founder Thomas Malone) have just written a short paper Programming the Global Brain.
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Zynga’s new game The Ville takes virtual sex to the masses

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This article was originally posted in Future of Sex magazine.

Social gaming giant Zynga, purveyor of Facebook games such as CityVille and FarmVille, is making things a little racier with its latest product The Ville, launched today.

As the video shows, users can build the “home of your dreams” and invite their Facebook friends over to have fun there. The fun can start with talking, cooking, and dancing, and then go a little further.
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We have a choice whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about the future

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Below is a brief interview I did when I spoke at TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam recently.

Some of the points I cover:
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