An unsettling reality dawns
I have two teenage children and many friends with similar aged children. I have detected a shared, unsettling question of ‘what will tomorrow be like for them?’ Some friends are heavily pushing their kids into medicine, science or engineering – nothing wrong with that, they are all great professions and offer a degree of job security. However I am kind of different – I am not pushing them but rather I am keen to see my kids chart their own destiny. I look to a future as one filled with boundless possibilities – it is why I have made a career in tech futurism.
Is it the right approach?
There is a reasonable proportion of my children’s classmates that will go on into adult life, to do jobs that don’t even exist today. Now that is scary as hell if you do not have an explorer’s mentality. Whether or not this is the right approach to take – to let the future events create opportunity – is open to great debate. What I will say is that letting people explore the edges of possibility has put us in ground-breaking environments; walking on the Moon; jumping from the edge of space; creating new life forms. I concede that none of this happens without the aforementioned experts in science, medicine and engineering – but I bet some of them got to find their reason for vocational existence later in life. Amongst the boffins and the geeks are the dreamers and the freaks. I applaude them all.
The new new – be warned
Today we face the issue of not really knowing what the future will look like or how indeed we should interact with it. As Don Rumsfeld said; ‘there are known knowns…….and unknown unknowns.” – And a whole lot of stuff in-between. Microsoft have announced Windows 10 – a new interface from the old dog. I ask my children what this will mean for them and they shrug – because in reality they will adapt quickly and efficiently to whatever technical tools are offered in order that they can do what needs to be done. For those generations that are currently in positions of seniority in business – be afraid. They are not coming for your jobs – they will create new jobs, with new tools, to meet the new needs of a yet undefined customer group – and you won’t even know that obsolescence stalks you until it is too late.
The intersection of art and technology
I have this view that how technology is designed has an impact on its uptake – it really floats my boat because good design is progressive. It fuses the basic laws of thermodynamics with the art of the possible and enables creative technicians to suspend disbelief with their ideas. Maybe I think that being part of this rolling, progressive tech revolution will protect my own risk of obsolescence. Aesthetic design should tap into the zeitgeist of a future generations thinking – which is why the most innovative studio and labs are filled with young blood. But along with this voracious appetite for new must come the practicalities of usability, desirability and manufacturability. These are all critical factors in the Value Proposition of any technology companies in the 21st century. I mean come on, noone really made a living from vapourware did they? This is where the experienced older people come in – they care about the detail and intuitively know what will work. Yeah great idea kid – now let’s design this thing with just the elements on the periodic table shall we?
Manic designer and his Jet Set Willy
When I touched and pushed the buttons of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k for the first time in the 1980’s, I unwittingly demonstrated how the kinaesthetic, aesthetic, electronic and mechanical elements play their part in the ultimate user experience. My speccie was ace – I spent hours with my father trying to write code that ran simple games. It was designed by a playful boffin for an age where anything was possible and the pots of money were bottomless. Get the design of a product right and we will learn by doing, enjoy by experiencing and stay through engagement. Which is great because for the most part that is the aim of engagement technology, to get people to spend more time on it right? Well, not always is it the case that a company wants their customers to hang around. Sometimes the customer journey is SAS style: in – done – out. But largely the experience should be lingering, engaging and allow you to take away more than you came with.
Bring Your Own Wearable
But as usual our workplace lags behind. Why is that? Well for a start it can be a hassle getting authorisation on new technology, procurement drag their heels, and integrating it requires the buy in from a whole army of doubting IS/IT gatekeepers. So for the most part companies avoid nu-tech like the plague. This won’t get any easier as the tech gets cheaper and sexier. Bringing your own wearables – or indeed any technology – into a company is slowly but surely becoming accepted. This is usually back office stuff though. Once we bring it to the shop floor – ooooph [sharp intake of breath] we are in a whole different place. For many fair reasons, retail and banking have seen BYOD tech interaction in branch as less than desirable. From uncontrollable showrooming (the art of touch feeling in branch and then buying online for less) to man in the middle attacks (grey hat pranksters getting into your systems via some public interface and leaving doodles of bums and tits on your interactive solution – or worse, the black hat, blow the doors off, hacking with data leeching, insidious worms and tracking malware embedded deeper than a transparent sea creature in the Mariana Trench). It is enough to make us hide beneath the pillow and curse the name of Anonymous forever more.
The retail tech nexus beckons
So we price check with Amazon apps, visualise furniture with Cimagine, redeem QR code coupons, spend with digital wallets, grab geofence coupons like a drunk at a free bar and generally have a 21st century retail experience unfettered by the laws of person to person interaction. Great – found it, bought it, and did one! So here is the big question – is this what you want? Are you happy moving towards this tech future? Do you want retail nano drones hovering over you, carrying your bags and smashing into your head whilst autonomously surveilling the best vantage point to take and upload selfies to your social channels of ‘Me shopping for itch cream in the chemist’? Sure supermarkets are trying – for this I am glad – the likes of Tesco really push the boundaries and I think we are through bashing them up for being successful aren’t we?. But typically on the day that the Tesco Labs announce their new Google Glass app Google themselves announce, to some confusion, that Glass has graduated and is moving on. Intel weigh in with their announcement of a new chipset for Glass v2 – so more fun to come right? For the consumer this is all too confusing – who would invest more in a headset than they would in a short family holiday when the risk of desertion by the inventors is so high? Some people do invest in fad-tech and always will – and it those explorers that drive innovation forward. If aint no-one buyin’ – aint noone makin’.
Gesture as the new normal
Slowly in 2015, but with a quickening pace and maddening din, future tech hoves into view. Few would argue that technology is now at the hearts of our lives. We interface with technology in a myriad of ways and this will only become more intense and interesting. Whether we choose to use the Microsoft Kinect, Intel RealSense or Pointswitch to enable gesture in our interactions this takes a leap of faith on the part of the user in training, familiarisation and finally acceptance. Google and the like suggest that technologies that are currently at the bleeding edge, by virtue of their perceived usefulness, will become common place. Where yesterdays ‘geeks and freaks’ wore Google Glass, tomorrow this will become the new normal as people like Microsoft bring you the much awaited and heavily cloaked HoloLens. The people of tomorrow are ready for an analogue world augmented with a rich interactive layer of contextually reactive graphics and they will adapt to it with remarkable ease. But does it seem scary to think of artificial intelligence dictating, correcting, interpreting, transmogrifying and representing the real world to you – in real time? Please Cortana can you stop correcting my grammar…
Artificially unintelligent
Stephen Hawkins went on record recently stating that beyond the current level of primitive forms of artificial intelligence lay a development path of full artificial intelligence – he believes that this spells doom for mankind. He is not alone in thinking this either – Elon Musk – Space X – sees AI as the biggest existential threat facing mankind in the next five years. OK – but surely we are a long way from this right? I mean we just use a little low-fi AI to enable us to find and buy online – what is the harm in that? Well remember that google search engine is arguably the most intelligent algorithm that, we the consumer, are likely to directly interface with. Every time we search and select we teach it a little more about how our minds work and which of the choice put forward the closest match is. It sounds simple but actually we are training this to get better and we are doing this 40,000 times per second! It is the greatest co-created AI project in the history of human kind. Google of the future will be known for AI, deep learning and robotics – the search bar you currently interface with will be a small part of who they will become. But relax this is not the biggest concern to those technophobes amongst us – no the biggest issue rests with a Deep Learning AI program that can re-write its own source code to become efficient in its own right – no homo sapiens required. All we have to do is keep it in trapped in a box and never let it out – see AI-Box experiment for details. Just as long as this does not end up in the hands of defence we should be able to avoid a future Skynet – oh but wait…
Technology towards a common purpose
Technology is really a tool to enable us to achieve greater things and offer more valuable insight that ought to enrich any experience. Please let’s make sure we don’t scare ourselves to death and miss out on the opportunity to use it to our advantage. We can’t drift aimlessly waiting for opportunity and change to present itself – sometimes we need to seize the moment – any moment and utilise what it has to offer in a common purpose. We owe it to the kids….
About the author
Graeme Laws works with emerging business technology – designing through ideation. He sees people and technology as co-creators in the interface experience. He innovates through interaction and cares passionately about art, manufacturing and the future