Back to the Future?

It's fun every now and again to revisit "classics" of the tech era, like Nicholas Negroponte's seminal "Being Digital" and, as I did last week, Larry Downes' "Unleashing the Killer App" from 1998. At the outset of the digital age, the only thing certain was uncertainty, that tech was turning usual business thinking on its head as radically new business models emerged. Management mantras were learn to embrace doubt, be flexible, learn, ie - nobody had a clue. But perhaps there was some level of determinism in all that flexibility, and as Exhibit A I present Downes' Twelve Principles of Killer App design, parentheticals by me (remember, these "apps" were fullblown, end-to-end applications, not hacks or iPhone games, and this was written way before Web 2.0, BI, et al.) ): 1. Outsource to the customer; 2. Cannibalize your (existing physical) markets; 3. Treat each customer as a segment of one; 4. Create communities of value; 5. Replace rude interfaces with learning interfaces; 6. Ensure continuity for the customer, not yourself; 7. Give away as much info as you can (unless you're in the content business....); 8.  Structure every transaction as  a joint venture (well, maybe not..); 9. Treat your (physical) assets as liabilities (too radical); 10. Destroy your value chain (ditto); 11. Manage innovation as a portfolio of options; 12. Hire the children (ie, digital natives). Hmm - not too shabby for a 14 year old book.

Science, Limitations, Metaphysics

Technology being applied science, I thought these observations (by The Economist magazine) and quote from Sir Bernard Lovell, founder of British radio telescopy, to be quite apt. "On the deepest questions, he believed, cosmology must give way to metaphysics. He said in his final Reith lecture: "I am no more surprised or distressed at the limitation of science when faced with this great problem of creation than I am at the limitation of the spectroscope in describing the radiance of a sunset or at the theory of counterpoint in describing the beauty of a fugue"". Perhaps Sir Bernard is capturing the essence of what I am trying to do in this blog - to show that the point of "limit" may well be the point of human departure, that limitations should be pushed and stretched but not broken, because what lies on the other side may help to define who and what we are.

Clay Shirky meets the Bell Curve

In his book of the same title, Clay Shirky makes much of the digital ability to aggregate "cognitive surplus", ie the ability of people, by digitally cooperating, to take advantage of each others' cognitive abilities or "surplus". Effectively, Shirky praises social media platforms and related digital technologies for enabling greater creativity, cooperation and, hopefully, progress. The idea that social media foster cooperation is true, as far as it goes, but whether we are creating any cognitive surplus (multiplier factor, synergy, call it what you will) is a different question. A few years ago, Charles Murray and Edward Herrnstein got into trouble with their book "The Bell Curve" because certain passages in it were viewed as indicating that African-Americans were intellectually inferior. The uncontroversial point they make is that human intelligence generally  is subject to distribution along a bell-curved structure, like most other human attributes - height, weight, athleticism, etc. The corollary of that is that very few people have much of interest to say (mostly on the right-tail end of the curve) or to substantially contribute to any "cognitive surplus".  How many blogs do you read that are vacuous or repetitive? How many facebook posts or tweets are "going to the mall", "dinner with friends" or other postings which add little to our collective knowledge? The number of people who could create a true cognitive surplus (and I'll leave aside here the issue of Big Data as cognitive surplus, which I do not think Shirky intended by his term) is small, and while social platforms do get them together, they were likely seeking each other out before.  To put it crudely, to the left of that right-side tail, there is very little to be added to cognitive surplus - 50 million times zero is still zero - and Shirky should recognize that limit rather than touting the small amount of progress on the other side. Digital technology is not (yet) making humans smarter.