EclecticLip

Recently finished Daemon and Freedom, Daniel Suarez’ two-part semi-dystopic vision of the future.  I say semi-dystopic because they weren’t all bad news.  Loved them both, for the fact that they informed of the capabilities of computational power today — in a seamless manner that didn’t slow the action of the story.  In this feat, they reminded me of Gore Vidal’s Creation, the master’s bracing tale spanning pretty much the entirety of 5th-century-BC Eurasia.  Which, come to think of it, might be deserving of a re-read, about now…

On the surface, Daemon is a story in the “machine turns on its creator” genre.  Like “2001″.  And “Frankenstein”.  And for that matter, the Bible.    Freedom builds on this to reveal a clash between two competing visions for the future.

More profoundly, the dyad explores how our social/societal structures may change in the coming decades, based on the interplay of our current crises and the capacities of new technology.  All wrapped up in a masterful storyline.  With fiction like that, who needs textbooks? 

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note: Suarez has also given a lecture at the Long Now Foundation, well worth the invested time.  It’s available here.  Most intriguing to me was the idea that in a short time, bots will begin to outnumber humans online.  We won’t be the dominant “species”. 

It seems somehow analogous to the apparent fact that mutual funds outnumber stocks, in the investment sector: the derivative species (bots, mutual funds) ultimately flourishing more than the original species it interacts with (humans, stocks).

Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm was chosen as the seventh book for the book club.  I’d come across it in an undergraduate course, and thought its treatment of the technology adoption lifecycle was relevant in light of the book club members being in the tech sector.

Moore’s insight was that, for disruptive innovations, there was a large gap — the titular “chasm” — between innovators and early adopters.  To mangle my metaphors in the manner of Thomas Friedman, many a would-be tech titan has shipwrecked itself trying to cross the chasm to the Shangri-La of profitability.

As usual, if you consider the review useful, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book — or by enlisting his consultancy’s services. 

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Crossing the chasm - summary

(originally written March 17.  Posted March 28) 

The recent issue of TIME magazine included a scribbling by someone named Reihan Salam.  His article “The Dropout Economy” is somewhat sensationalistic and largely unnoteworthy, except for the fact that it directly references the writings of a guy named John Robb, whose ideas on “resilient communities” were footnoted in the article I co-wrote for McKinsey last year, on the future of energy.

Which means that my company’s thought leadership is a full year ahead of the curve of TIME magazine’s ever-shrinking readership.  And based on a quick search of The Economist’s website, they haven’t even heard of the term. 

Robb — a former US Air Force guy who helped mainstream RSS feeds — posits that due to a confluence of factors (financial, demographic, technological) the nation-state is going to be under tremendous pressure in the coming decades.  As a result, communities will reorient themselves to resiliency as opposed to efficiency.  (His blog is here.)

This might be best understood through analogies:

- Redmond’s Technosaurus Rex beat out its corporate competition in the PC era.  But its dominance has eroded in the face of competition from decentralized, ad hoc open-source code.  (Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice and others)

- humans are the dominant animals: with our tools, we can overcome any creature we run into in sky, street or sea.  But we don’t look so kingly compared to bacteria: they can develop immunity to our antibiotics faster than we can invent new ones

- the US is the world’s hyperpower: it can overwhelm all its rival nation-states.  But like all countries, it’s struggling to deal with threats from terrorist cells, which can be small enough to “fly under the radar” of the traditional defense mechanisms (police, armed forces)

In the past half-century at least, there’s been a strong advantage for communities and countries to be organized on the basis of efficiency, at the expense of resiliency.  As such, our world is one of faraway power plants and overseas supply chains.  Like Robb, I think the pendulum is swinging (for at least a couple decades) towards resiliency; it will be seen as advantageous enough, even if it seems more expensive than efficiency.  And *that* creates the kind of opening that fuel cells and other on-site power generation technologies can richly exploit. :)

It might seem strange to talk of Web Classical Studies (net Antiquity?) but it’s been, what, ten Moore’s Law doublings since 1995?

But sticking to the topic of web Classical Studies, this Web 1.0 retrospective made me chuckle.  Especially the part about 36 k modems.  We use Journyx for our timesheets at work, and it sure feels like a 36 k connection…  or maybe even a 14.4…

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A story I’d seen in the Globe and Mail fell by the wayside when I’d first marked it for follow-up.  I rediscovered it when periodically ploughing up old links, searching for overlooked or under-regarded treasure.

(a) the Green Revolution has not, by and large, provided sustainably higher yields than organic agriculture

(b) organic farming can feed the world.

(All but one of the seven links above point to different datasets — and that odd-one-out, from Grist, has additional data cited in one of the first comments.)

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The Vancouver gold show was this weekend. Sadly, the freebies were scant this time around, even worse than during the “great lamentation” of mid-2005. The most creative one was from a company doing work in Australia, giving away monogrammed boomerangs. (Made in China, of course.)

Intriguingly, the free plastic bags featured additives from local company epi; they’re supposed to disintegrate the plastic into powdered pellets, over the course of a few months. I’d run into epi at an environmental show a few years back; they seem to’ve made some progress getting their products out there. It’ll be interesting to follow their business arc over the next few years.

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A couple days ago, I came across two articles about Nippon Oil’s plans to JV their way into solar power and fuel cells production, respectively.  Both projects are with Sanyo (recently taken over by Panasonic, the new official name of Japanese behemoth Matsushita Electric).

This struck me as inspirational, because Nippon Oil is Japan’s largest oil company!  Its core competency, or comparative advantage, is fossil fuels and petrochemicals.  But instead of choosing to fight a bruising, unethical, long rear-guard action to deny global warming or defend its old ways…  management has decided the company needs to evolve.
It’s reminiscient of the decision by pulp-mill / tire-maker Nokia to get into telecommunications.  I’m sure there were doubters — especially since their telco division took seventeen years to turn a profit.  But was it worth it in the end?  I’m sure every Nokia shareholder would now vote “yes”.

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Yes, that’s an attempt at a pun.

In the past twenty-odd years, Microsoft has proven exceedingly good at dispatching business rivals.  They’ve been unstoppable spider-killers.

Even Google’s search dominance is a limited direct threat — Google has captured a new market, they aren’t “eating Microsoft’s lunch”. And open-source alternatives (Linux, OpenOffice) have been the business equivalent of blackflies, as opposed to, say, Viking raiders.
Until now.

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I’ve encountered a major fallacy in two fields, relating to the incorrect application of a steady-state assumption.  So I’m making it a category.

I’m going to say arguments suffer from a steady-state fallacy when they improperly assume that a present-day circumstance will carry over unchanged into the future.  Because over time, most circumstances do change.  People get older.  New technologies emerge.  Empires fall, and new ones rise. And so forth.
A few examples below the fold…

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This semi-recent New York Times post is about DVD’s being unreadable four years after they were recorded.  It ties into one of my musings over the years — whether a medium’s information density is inverse to durability or recoverability. Or phrased differently, is the high storage density of electronic media a crippling strength, because the data becomes too “fragile”?
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The sturdy clay tablets of Sumeria have lasted thousands of years.

Paper and animal hide can store far more information per kilogram, but rarely last as long - if the Nag Hammadi Library or the Dead Sea Scrolls were stored in an area with any appreciable moisture (say, Vancouver, BC, Canada) they probably wouldn’t've survived the nearly two thousand years until rediscovery! Fortunately, copies are easier to make.

And electronic storage is the densest — but least durable — of all.  (Four years?!)

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