Casual displays

I had a new idea. If I was adventurous or an entrepreneur, I’d develop it, but I’m not, so I won’t. But you can, before Apple patents it. Or maybe they already have.

Many people own various brands of pads, but they are generally expensive, heavy, fragile and need far too much charging. That’s because they try to be high powered computers. Even e-book readers have too much functionality for some display purposes and that creates extra expense. I believe there is a large market for more casual displays that are cheap enough to throw around at all sorts of tasks that don’t need anything other than the ability to change and hold a display.

Several years ago, Texas Instruments invented memory spots, that let people add multimedia to everyday objects. The spots could hold a short video for example, and be stuck on any everyday object.These were a good idea, but one of very many good ideas competing for attention by development engineers. Other companies have also had similar ideas. However, turning the idea around, spots like this could be used to hold data for a  display, and could be programmed by a similar pen-like device or even a finger touch. Up to 2Mb/s can be transmitted through the skin surface.

Cheap displays that have little additional functionality could be made cheaply and use low power. If they are cheap enough, less than ten pounds say, they could be used for many everyday purposes where cards or paper are currently used. And since they are cheap, there could be many of them. With a pad, it has to do many tasks. A casual display would do only one. You could have them all over the place, as recipe cards, photos, pieces of art, maps, books, body adornment, playing cards, messages, birthday cards, instructions, medical advice, or anything. For example:

Friend cards could act as a pin-board reminder of a friend, or sit in a wallet or handbag. You might have one for each of several best friends. A touch of the spot would update the card with the latest photo or status from Facebook or another social site. Or it could be done via a smart phone jack. But since the card only has simple functionality  it would stay cheap. It does nothing that can’t also be done by a smartphone or pad, but the point is that it doesn’t have to. It is always the friend card. The image would stay. It doesn’t need anything to be clicked or charged up. It only needs power momentarily to change the picture.

There are displays that can hold pictures without power that are postcard sized, for less than £10. Adding a simple data storage chip and drivers shouldn’t add significantly to cost. So this idea should be perfectly feasible. We should be able to have lots of casual displays all over our houses and offices if they don’t have to do numerous other things. In the case of displays, less may mean more.

Next generation small computers

One of my posts two years ago suggested it would be a great time to bring back the Spectrum computer or something like it:

http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/bring-back-the-spectrum/

The new Raspberry Pi is pretty much exactly what I asked for (though I don’t think it came from my request) . For about £22, you get a computer. You plug in a keyboard and a TV and comms, then start programming. I am amazed it has been so long for someone to do it, but better late then never. Now a new generation of kids can learn how to program by messing about, instead of falling victim to the formal teaching that is provided by schools and university. I have always believed that learning how to hack programs together is the best way to understand what you are doing. You can learn formal methods later if need be. I don’t think hacking is the source of bad habits. Rather, it is more likely to show you the workings of the machine so you can exploit it better. I have seen too many taught programmers make good impressions of being mentally crippled after being forced to think in just one way, any fee-thinking and originality purged.

The Raspberry Pi isn’t the only tiny computer around though. FXI also have one, the size of a USB memory stick, and pretty impressive capability, albeit five times the price. It is easy to imagine how devices like this could really change how we work. I like to travel very light and haven’t carried a laptop for years – even the latest are still heavy and big and just aren’t worth the trouble. I won’t even use an iPAD because it is still obese, power-hungry, and altogether too primitive.Turning up at a conference with a memory stick containing your presentation has been fine as an alternative, but you are reliant on the conference laptop having the right setup. If you could bring a full PC memory stick and run everything from that, that would be better. At home it will be good to put media straight onto your TV without cluttering the room up with big boxes. A Slingbox has done that for years, and smart TVs now do it built-in, so it isn’t new, but this makes it a lot easier and cheaper to provide web and media on more conventional TVs.

On the go, you need some sort of visual display of course but soon we will have visor based head up displays that work with fingertip tracking or virtual  keyboards. Then these compact devices will come into their own. You’ll be fully connected and IT capable, but carrying hardly any weight.

Both of these new devices are small but capable, and most of the size they still have left is really interfacing to other devices. The processing guts is much smaller still. There is room to shrink further, and it is clear from these that the era of digital jewellery is almost with us. Imagine the enormous environmental benefits too, if we hardly need any resources to provide for all our IT needs.

It is the curse of futurology that you are never really happy with the stuff available today because you know what is round the corner. But when I can easily fit all my IT into my pocket as a memory stick and wear a lightweight visor as my interface, I’ll be pretty near content. Can’t be long now

The world is more complex than it seems. AARRGGHH!

Thanks @AKPosthuman for the title. I’ll be largely preaching to the converted here, but never mind.

Life seems to be cyclical in all sorts of ways. The one phasing me today is that all of a sudden I feel less sure about lots of things I was certain about a few years ago. Science, political allegiance, world order, basic values, even basic questions like who the hell am I really?

You start of as a child and know sod all, but by the time you’re out of nappies you persuade yourself (and fail to persuade your parents) that you know everything. Then you go to school and discover there are deeper problems than counting to ten. At each stage of qualifications you get to a point where you start thinking you understand stuff, or at least must be getting close. But it is an illusion. You only ever get to understand the answers to some of the questions you’ve been made aware of so far. A bit more education and a whole new range of questions appears. A garden snail is probably confident that it understands the world fine. And it does, it has answers to all it wonders about, it just doesn’t ask deep questions (guessing a bit here, I don’t really know what a snail thinks). It may well be true that ignorance is bliss. It certainly needs less effort.

After graduation, you get chucked in at the deep end in work, and are exposed to the full reality that you are a mere novice in a world of experts. A decade later, you’re starting to catch up and hopefully pushing ahead in at least some tiny areas. A decade after that, you’re flying high, in your own head at least. You’re confident in your field, understand how the world works, the arguments for and against X,Y and Z, and which is right. You have a well stocked basket of opinions on just about everything of importance to you, you know which flag to salute, who you are, what matters, what you believe and what you know to be trash. You know who to look up to, and who is full of crap. You know there is more to learn, that the world is much bigger and more complex than you thought, but that just drives you on, it’s what life is about.

And then you start to realise it isn’t even that simple. Just as you thought you realised the world was more complex than you thought, but you could allow for that, but you were at least starting to get the beginnings of a grip, you discover it is actually far more complex than you thought. Well, that’s where I realised I am this morning. Another cycle of discovery, starting all over again. I have to re-evaluate the whole damn thing from scratch again with revised thinking.

AKposthuman assures me that this is becoming wiser. God I hope he’s right. I’d hate to think my brain is decaying and yesterday’s easy problems now look hard because of that. If I can persuade myself  that what I’m seeing is just a glimpse of the next level of questions, and see how damned frightening it is, then I’ll be fine.

Thanks AK. Wonder if I’ll live long enough to see the start of the next cycle?

Futurizon Sustainability Report Part 3: Population Growth

World population is growing rapidly, and will continue till it levels off around 9.5 billion by about 2050, after which it will start to fall. (9.5 billion is a lot of people, but let’s not treat it as if it will be a major catastrophe. Some doom-mongers are already predicting mass starvation, riots and so on, but the numbers need put in perspective. I live in the South of England. I can easily go on a walk and meet few people on the way; mostly it will be empty countryside and most of the time we won’t be able to see a single building or road. I do not feel it is terribly overpopulated here yet, even with the second highest population density on Earth, at 470 people per square kilometre. Other countries with massive populations are actually less densely populated. India only has 345 people per square kilometre, even with its massive population. China has even less at only 140, while Indonesia has 117, Brazil just 22, and Russia a mere 7.4 people per square kilometre. Yet these are the world’s biggest populations today. So there is plenty of room for expansion perhaps. If all the inhabitable land in the world were to be occupied at average English density, the world can actually hold 75Bn people. There would still be loads of open countryside, still only 1 or 2% covered in concrete and tarmac. So let’s stop first of all from imagining that we are running out of space any time soon. We just aren’t!  We panic in the UK because we see the extreme inequality of distribution of people, but that will self limit. If it becomes too dense, people will stop immigrating.

Secondly, westerners’ (i.e. relatively wealthy people’s) houses typically provide 5 or 6m deep of living space. They live on top of 6000km deep of materials, a million times more, and much denser. So do their neighbours. Not all of it is useful, but it is really hard to see why there is so much panic about physical resources when they lie so deep under our feet. When we discard them, they are still there, just repositioned. If you buy stuff, your house quickly fills up and you have to throw something out to make space before you buy more. It gets recycled or thrown on landfill, which may become a future mine if materials ever did become scarce enough. A few spacecraft have left the earth forever over the years, but space dust occasionally lands too, so actually there are more physical resources on Earth than there were before people came into being. Asteroid mining will also come into use in a few decades, bringing us any essential materials that are in short supply. Organic resources such as forests and fisheries are a different matter, but they can be managed and farmed sustainably.

But of course, all other things remaining the same, if everyone wants to live to westerns standards, the demands on the environment will grow as the poor become richer and able to afford more. If we try to carry on with existing technology, or worse, with yesterday’s, we will not find it easy. Those environmental activists who preach that technology and economic growth are enemies of the environment, and who therefore want to lock us into today’s or yesterday’s technology, would condemn not only billions of people to poverty and misery but also force those extra people to destroy the environment to try to survive. Poverty is one of the greatest causes of environmental destruction. The result would be miserable future for humanity and a wrecked environment. Those people are the true enemies of the earth, and of humanity. Thankfully, most environmentalists are not so extreme. If we ignore such lunacy as we should, and allow progress to continue, we will see steady global economic growth that will result in a higher average income per capita in 2050 with 9.5Bn people than we have today with only 7Bn. The technology meanwhile will develop so much that the same standard of living can be achieved with far less environmental impact. Before modern engineering, structures had to use far more resources than today’s, but now we can make materials with known and consistent strength, and can model the forces precisely, so we need far less material to do the same job. With nanotechnology and improved materials, we will need even less in future. The environmental footprint of each person will be far lower in the far future if we encourage technology development than it would be if we restrict growth and technology development. It will almost certainly be less even than today’s, even though our future lifestyles would be far better.

Take TVs as an example. TVs used to be hugely heavy and bulky glass monsters that took up half the living room, used lots of electricity, but offered relatively small displays to show a few channels. Today, thin LCD/LED displays use far less material, consume much less power, take up far less space and offer bigger and better displays offering access to thousands of channels via satellites and web links. So as far as TV-based entertainment goes, we have a higher standard of living with lower environmental impact. The same is true for our phones, computers, networks, cars, fridges, washing machines, and most other tools. Better materials enable lower use. New science and technology has enabled new kinds of materials that can substitute for scarce physical resources. Copper was once in danger of running out imminently. Now you can build a national fibre telecommunication network with a few bucketfuls of sand and some plastic. And we have plastic pipes and water tanks too, so we don’t really need copper for plumbing either. Aluminium makes reasonable cables, and future materials will make even better cables, still with no copper use. There are few things that can’t be done with alternative materials, especially as quantum materials can be designed to echo the behaviour of many chemicals.

Oil will be much the same story. To believe the doom-mongers, our use of oil will continue to grow exponentially until one day there is none left and then we will all be in big trouble, or dead, breathing in 20% CO2 by then of course. Again, this will prove nonsense. By 2030, oil will be considered a messy and expensive way of getting energy, and most will be left in the ground. The 6Gjoules of energy a barrel of oil contains could be made for $30 using solar panels in the deserts, and electricity is clean. This solar energy can be generated in deserts, where it is actually sunny, where land is cheap, because it isn’t much use for anything else. The energy will get to us via superconducting cables. Sure, the technology doesn’t yet exist, but it will. Oil will only cost $30 a barrel because no-one will want to pay more than that for what will be seen as an inferior means of energy production.

By 2050, fusion power should be up and running, alongside efficient solar power, thorium-based nuclear, shale gas power generation, and various other forms of energy production, proving a huge energy glut that will help with water supply and food production as well as our other energy needs. Our technologies will be so advanced by then that we will be able to control climate better too. We will have environmental models based on science, so we will know what we’re doing rather than acting on guesswork and old-wives’ tales. We will have excellent understanding of genetics and biotech and be able to make far superior crops and animals, so will be able to make foods to feed everyone. While today’s crops deliver about 2% of the solar energy landing on their fields to us as food, we will be able to make foods in labs far more efficiently, and will have crops that are also far more efficient. In the long term, there is absolutely no need to worry about feeding everyone. And no need to worry about the impact on the environment either, because we can make more food with far less space. No-one needs to be hungry, and with steady economic growth, everyone can afford food too. This is no fanciful techno-utopia. It is entirely deliverable and even expectable.

And how can we be sure it will be developed? Well, for one thing, there will be more people. That means more brains. Those people will be richer; they will be better educated; many will be scientists and engineers; many will have been born in countries that value engineers and scientists greatly, and will have lot of backing, so will get results. And some will be in IT, and will have developed computer intelligence to add to the human effort, and provided better, cheaper and fast tools for scientists and engineers in every field to use. The total intellectual resources available to solve problems will be far greater than they are today. So we can be absolutely certain that technological progress will continue to accelerate. And as it does, the environment will become cleaner, healthier, because we will choose to make it so. We will restore nature. Rivers today in the UK are cleaner than 100 years ago. The air is cleaner too. We look after nature better, because that’s what people do when they are affluent and well educated. In the far future, when far more people are wealthy, we will see that care being even more widespread. The rainforests will be flourishing, species will be being resurrected from extinction via DNA banks. People will be well fed. Water supply will be adequate. But it can only happen if we stop following the advice of doom mongers who want to take us backwards.

And that is really key: more people means more brain power, more solutions, better technology. And for the last million years, that has meant steady improvement of our lot. In the un-technological world of the cavemen hunter-gatherers, the world was capable of supporting maybe 60 million people. If we try to restrict technology development now, it will be a death sentence for humanity and nature. People and the environment would both suffer. No-one wins if we stop progress. That is the fallacy of environmental dogma shouted at us by doom mongers. They would go back to yesterday, rejecting technology, living on nature and punishing everyone who disagrees with them. They can indulge such stupidity when there are only a few of them, and the rest of us make their lifestyles possible, but we can’t all live like that. Again, without technology, the world can only support 60 million. Not 6 billion or 7 billion or 75 billion. There simply aren’t enough nice fields and forests for us all to live that way. It is a simple choice. We could have 60 million miserable post-environmentalists living in a post eco-catastrophe world where nature has been devastated by the results of stupid environmental policies invented by environmentalists with contempt for science. Or we can stop the nonsense, get on with our ongoing development, and live in a richer, nicer world where 9.5Bn people (or even far more if we want) can be happy, well fed, well educated, with a good standard of living, living side by side with a flourishing environment, where our main impacts on the environment are positive. Technology won’t solve every problem, and will even create some, but without a shadow of a doubt, technology is by far nature’s best friend. And ours. Not the ‘environmentalists’, many of whom are actually among the environment’s worst enemies, at best well meaning fools.

And there is one final point hat is always overlooked in this debate. Every new person that is born is another life, living, breathing, loving, hopefully having fun, enjoying life and being happy. Life is a good thing, to be celebrated, not extinguished or prevented from coming into existence just because someone else has no imagination. Thanks to the positive feedbacks in the development loops, 50% more people means probably 100% more total joy and happiness. Population growth is good, we just have to be more creative, but that’s what we do all the time. Now let’s get on with making it work.

The full report is completely free and can be found at http://futurizon.com/articles/sustainingtheearth.pdf

We need to rethink capitalism

Sometimes major trends can conceal less conspicuous ones, but sometimes these less conspicuous trends can build over time into enormous effects. I think that is the case now with automation versus economic turbulence. Global financial turmoil and re-levelling due to development are largely concealing another major trend towards automation. If we look at the consequences of developing technology, we can see an increasingly automated world as we head towards the far future. Most mechanical or mental jobs can be automated eventually, leaving those that rely on human emotional and interpersonal skills, but even these could eventually be largely automated. That would obviously have a huge effect on the nature of our economies.

Sometimes taking an extreme example is the best way to illustrate a point. In an ultra-automated pure capitalist world, a single person (or indeed even an AI) could set up a company and employ only AI or robotic staff and keep all the proceeds. Wealth would concentrate more and more with the people starting with it. There may not be any other employment, given that almost anything could be automated, so no-one else except other company owners would have any income source. If no-one else could afford to buy the products, their companies would die, and the economy couldn’t survive. This simplistic example nevertheless illustrates that pure capitalism isn’t sustainable in a truly high technology world. There would need to be some tweaking to distribute wealth effectively and make money go round a bit. Much more than current welfare state takes care of.

Some argue that we are already well on the way. Web developments that highly automate retailing have displaced many jobs and the same is true across many industries. There is no certainty that new technologies will create enough new jobs to replace the ones they displace.

We know from abundant evidence that communism doesn’t work. If capitalism won’t work much longer either, then we have some thinking to do. I believe that the free market is often the best way to accomplish things, but it doesn’t always deliver, and perhaps it can’t this time, and perhaps we shouldn’t just wait until entire industries have been eradicated before we start to ask which direction it should go.

So here is the key issue: Apart from short-term IP such as patents and copyright, the whole of humanity collectively owns the vast intellectual wealth accumulated via the efforts of thousands of generations.Yet traditionally, when a company is set up, no payment is made for the use of this intellectual property; it is assumed to be free. The effort and creativity of the founders, and the finance they provide, are assumed to be the full value, so they get control of the wealth generated (apart from taxes). 

Automated companies make use of this vast accumulated intellectual wealth when they deploy their automated systems. Why should ownership of a relatively small amount of capital and effort give the right to harness huge amounts of publicly owned intellectual wealth without any payment to the other owners, the rest of the people? Why should the rest of humanity not share in the use of their intellectual property to generate reward? I think this is where the rethinking should be focused. I see nothing wrong with people benefiting from their efforts, making profit, owning stuff, controlling it. But it surely is right that they should make proper payment to everyone else or jointly share profits according to the value of the shared intellectual property they use. With properly shared wealth generation, everyone would have income, and the system might work fine.

There are many ways this could be organised, and I haven’t designed anything worth writing about yet. Raising the issue is enough for this blog.

Time for the 13″ pad

800M people now have e-book readers, iPads or various other tablets. Most are around 7″ or 10″ screen size. The next obvious step upwards is magazine tablets.  There are a few very large format magazines out there, but Time magazine comes in at 13″ and I’d place my money on this being the next size for popular tablets. People can read books, papers and magazines on pads already, or even iphones for that matter, but with middle-aged eyes, I am not alone in wanting a bigger display and even the ipad feels cramped.

Smart-phones fit in your pocket, current pads are designed for taking out and about, but the 13″ pad will live mostly on the desk, coffee table or kitchen table. It is a better substitute for the laptop, and this is an important niche of course, but enabling new services in the home will be the big market for it. People who are used to reading paper magazines are more likely to buy a large format pad if the price is right. Games will look better on a bigger display, and so will videos. Even books can feel cramped on a 7″ pad, and in the home some will prefer to read them on large formats with bigger text instead of having to squint or juggle different pairs of glasses.

The 13″ format is more likely to be a shared device then the smaller formats. It is the natural home of home messaging, calendars, magazines, books, general web access and information services. Some of these are personal and will live on individually owned smaller pads, but the shared ones will move up.

I am expecting the phone to ring any minute as newspapers start producing their “what will happen next year then?” articles. Well, the 13″ pad will be top of my prediction list for 2012.

 

Science teaching

If I have learned anything over my years of lecturing it is that teachers don’t like being told they are doing it wrong. And certainly not when they know you are right. Google’s chief is making headlines today doing just that, http://goo.gl/bF62s. Good luck to him, he is saying what a lot of us have before, but he might just have the clout to have an effect.

However, I suspect he is probably too late. Even if notice is taken, by the time the school system changes and universities rippled through the new students resulting from it, the world will have moved on a lot, and much new science and technology will be done by smart machines. I’m afraid that he is right, but the damage is already done, and it is just too late to recover now, unless AI moves on slower than expected.

New book on the future of everyday life: You Tomorrow

My brand new book is called You Tomorrow, and now is available at http://t.co/yPcRwdY . It is all about the future. I started by collecting a lot of the ideas from my blogs and papers over the last few years, but found loads of gaps and filled them in, updated and rewrote a lot of stuff, sorted it, and finally was happy with a contents list for 2 books. Then I started writing them. The one that I just released is about everyday life and for ordinary people in ordinary language and is called You Tomorrow. My next one is for business and will be a full PEEST analysis – politics, economy, environment, society and technology, and is a bit like a long overdue update of Business 2010. If it gets too big, I may split off the technology and environment bits into a third book. It will be much more jargonny, if that’s an acceptable word, but still aimed at intelligent people from pretty much any discipline so will explain terms where I think they need it.

Meanwhile, buy this book about your own normal everyday life. I made it cheap enough to be a casual purchase and easy enough reading for bedtime or the beach. It is £5.74 inc tax and delivery in the UK. It is approximately 86,500 words.

It looks at how technology will change the ways we make kids, the life stages they will go through, from pre-design to electronic immortality. Then it looks at just about every aspect of everyday life, then the ways careers will change, then the sort of stuff we own, and finally the nature of our surroundings, real and virtual. Although aimed at pretty much anyone, it is I think still a useful guide for anyone in strategy or planning.

It is only available so far as an e-book, and a few comments here and there are UK-specific. But USA and German versions will come soon, and if it sells well, I will also issue it on paper, though at a higher price.

I hope you enjoy reading it, while I get on with the next one.

 

Why do we let stupid people make important decisions?

OK, rant mode active, constructively I hope. More and more of my time seems to be wasted by other people’s stupidity, and since life is short and time limited, it annoys me. I think it is getting worse and is undermining what could otherwise be a very pleasant life. We all experience lots of things every day where someone has been empowered to make decisions who really shouldn’t have been, due to either incompetence, bias or even malice. Things often seem to be going backwards, in spite of access to more wealth and better technology. It is one step forwards and one back.

One aspect of the problem is the seemingly ubiquitous replacement of common sense by sets of petty rules and box-ticking, possibly to avoid litigation. Too many abide by rules instead of using their own judgement, and it costs us all dearly in wasted time, sorting out the mess. In an age where people should really be trying to differentiate themselves from machines, it seems many want to behave like robots and discard their human advantages. What should be their ability to judge individual situations on their merits is often discarded. Consequently, their behaviour falls far below a standard that should reasonably be expected, and in doing  so they hold everyone back and prevent quality of life from reaching its full potential. The state is certainly one of the guilty parties here, disincentivising personal initiative and punishing free thinking.

It isn’t just in authority that people just don’t seem to activate their brains a lot of the time though. It applies in shopping and food preparation, where  decades of exposure to bad programming and examples from  advertising, health scares and sell-by dates appears to have brain damaged us and removed much of our natural ability to discern what is good for us or what is safe to eat.

And in an age where we know is quite some detail how the universe works from a physics and chemistry perspective, we know surprisingly little about some of the really important stuff. Surely after 150,000 years, we should have figured out how to bring up kids and educate them, but people still disagree passionately in these areas. Where is all the accumulated wisdom gone? In areas like science, knowledge builds up over time. But not here, where it is really important.

But we are collectively dumb too. There have always been smart people and less smart people, nice people and not so nice. But we often give decision-making powers to idiots instead of ensuring that those things that affect us are designed or decided by people with at least a modicum of competence and sound judgement. Why? When people get to a point where they can do damage with their decisions, we really ought to make sure they are competent beyond the point of simply ticking boxes and blindly following instructions. But we don’t. We just put up with the consequences and occasionally moan.

Planners especially seem unable to learn from their mistakes. For example, in the last few years, we have seen a huge rise in the numbers of traffic lights, in many cases where it was obvious to everyone except the planners that they would make things worse. The planners seemed surprised that they didn’t make things better, and that turning them off temporarily actually improves traffic flows again. Now they will remove many of them again. Money was wasted, along with countless hours of people’s time, and huge frustration resulted, because the wrong people were empowered. And this isn’t the first time planners have collectively made such mistakes, they did it all before with speed bumps, chicanes and other ‘traffic calming’ measures. They make major errors again and again. We all suffer as a result, but no-one ever gets punished for it. Town and road planning sometimes seems to be staffed entirely by idiots, generation after generation. And it certainly isn’t the case that no-one else could do any better. Planners cause problems that almost anyone living in the area would have expected immediately and yet  large amounts of money are wasted on their ideas, time after time. Estates are built that provide little or no infrastructure, expensive ornaments are bought that almost no-one likes, apartment blocks need demolished because no-one wants to live there, cinemas open and close again because they were built in the wrong place. Planning is a huge concentration of applied idiocy. We can’t expect everyone to be geniuses, but we shouldn’t put people in important roles if they aren’t capable enough to do them properly. Doing so is collective stupidity.

Even the private sector is affected, even though stupidity reduces profits, and it isn’t for lack for examples of good practice. Companies seem actively to introduce stupidity. We see many companies annoying their core customers again and again by trying to mislead them with ‘up to’ offers, misleading bulk buy pricing, auto-renew contracts, and deliberately misleading advertising. Many quite deliberately employ obnoxious people on customer service desks who perhaps save pennies for the company by refusing to help at a much greater subsequent cost in lost business. Whatever short term gains any of these achieve are far outweighed by the loss of long term revenue, since annoyed customers will soon look for competitors to move to, taking their cash elsewhere.

I will stop the list here, otherwise it could fill a book easily. We are all familiar with the high level of stupidity ingrained in things we encounter everyday, even though mentioning such daily things quickly gets you grumpy old man status.

The problem isn’t that everyone is stupid – just that more stupid people are allowed to make the decisions now. There always have been stupid people, but we didn’t always put them in charge. In some countries even today, important decisions seem to be made by relatively smart people. And in terms of overall level of stupidity, it sadly does appear to be the case that people are getting worse. More people seem willing now to abide by silly, petty or abitrary rules as if there is some merit in doing so, and more willing to abdicate any personal thinking in favour of ticking boxes and following official guidelines without any use of discretion or judgement. In some cases, it is almost a religion substitute, achieving a sense of being holy by making sure you follow all the rules rigidly, regardless of any sense. In many cases, a moment’s thought would indicate that the rule should not be applied in that situation, or should be interpreted differently. That’s what I really mean by stupid (albeit a bit late to define it), steadfast refusal to apply even a modicum of intelligence to a situation. In a few cases, the person may not have the raw intelligence, but usually they have, they just don’t bother to use it.

If it is true that society as a whole is getting worse, the future will be terrible, in spite of any scientific and technology advances. Then, other people will always mess it up, however good it could be. But somehow we must escape the spiral into such a state.

Of course, most people have observed these same issues from time to time, even if they don’t bother to blog about them. They are common conversation material. Some people blame the education system, others blame the nanny state, others modern lifestyle. Human nature is partly to blame, and makes its presence felt via all these routes. When people are given an easy path, they tend to take it. If the state provides simple rules and financial incentives to tick appropriate boxes, while punishing mistakes, then personal initiative is deterred. If driving carelessly and inconsiderately but staying below a speed limit leaves you unscathed, whereas briefly exceeding what may well be too low a speed limit is punished more severely than shoplifting, then it is no great surprise that roads are populated by inconsiderate and incompetent drivers who stick to speed limits but cause endless congestion, traffic jams and accidents.

Education too has become very much more a process of learning to tick boxes. Having to push kids through exams that confirm to a rigid syllabus has squeezed out much of the free thinking that society ultimately depends on. Fixed knowledge is already documented well and easily accessible by machine based intelligence. We don’t need people to do work that depends on existing knowledge, computers and robots can do it. We need people who can go easily beyond what they have been told, or we will cease to be able to add real value to anything, which of course is the whole basis of any economy. Again offering rewards for sticking to rules and punishments for free thinking runs counter to this need. Education needs to move away from the rigid syllabus and once again development of thinking skills.

But the core issue is putting people in charge who are not suited to such positions. Part of this is self selection, where people go for jobs that they want to do, even if they are not suited to them, (and may even know they aren’t) and somehow they get through the selection procedure. Part is deliberate placing for party political reasons, even when it is known that the person is unsuitable. Part of the cause of that is poor interviewing, part is luck. The skills needed to win in interviews are not always, or even often, the same as those required to do the job. Appearance and interpersonal skills play too large a part in recruitment, at the expense of other areas of competence. And part is being lucky enough to get asked questions that suit you better then those given to the competitors – luck plays a much bigger part in getting to the top of an organisation than people give credit for. If the timing of the vacancy being advertised means you are up against weaker opponents, you are more likely to get through. And differences between competitors may be very small so tiny differences in interview might make a big career difference. So, given the high degree of randomness and scope for errors built in to such a system, it is sometimes the case that some people get to the top even when there are far more able people in the organisation. So we end up sometimes with less able people in power. So part of the problem is deliberate misplacement, some is luck, some poor judgement or other errors.

But it doesn’t even need these problems. Organisations tend to promote people who think like those above them – people who fit the mould. Once a bias for a particular kind of person or mindset exists in an organisation, it tends to be reinforced, as years of ongoing natural wastage and selection gradually replaces those who don’t fit it. Boards are notoriously bad at this, picking new members just like themselves even when it is obvious that new challenges need new thinking. Once again, we end up with people unsuited to the job in hand, but who accumulate others around them equally unsuited to their roles too.

In order to break the mould, to get to a state of competence, the cycle of reinforcement of poor performance has to be broken. This cannot be implemented by existing structures which have been proven not to work, it has to come from outside, either by regulation or replacement of an entire system.

Maybe we need to end the long term employment expectations we tend to use today. It is often very hard to get rid of someone from a job even if they are obviously unsuited to it. Fixing that would enable a feedback mechanism that could actually work, based on feedback. But feedback from whom? Customer, end users, other stakeholders? It isn’t going to be easy fixing it. We are in a real mess and it will be hard to find solutions that will work, but before we can even start to do that, we need to recognise the problem is genuine and not just a topic for discussion in pubs. I am not sure we are even close to that yet.

Population growth is a good thing

Been tidied and updated. See:

http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2012/07/13/population-growth-is-a-good-thing-updated-july-2012/

Older original version follows:

I am noticing lots more panicky articles about increasing population in the media this last week, probably because people have noticed that we are set to break the 7Bn mark this year. I am not panicking at all, and refuse even to be particularly concerned. I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing to have a high population. And to use the doom-monger’s favourite term, sustainable, I think it will be entirely sustainable. OK, so, point by point, here is why.

Population is certainly growing rapidly, and will continue till it levels off around 9.5 billion by about 2050. Then it will start to fall. But let’s not treat 9Bn as if it is a major catastrophe. Doom-mongers are already predicting mass starvation, riots and so on. But is it so bad? Let’s put it in perspective a bit. I live in the South of England. I am about to go on a walk with my wife and will might meet a few people on the way, but mostly it will be empty countryside and most of the time we won’t be able to see a single building or road. I do not feel it is terribly overpopulated here yet, even with the second highest population density on Earth, at 470 people per square kilometre. India only has 345, even with its massive population. China has even less at only 140, while Indonesia has 117,  Brazil just 22, and Russia a mere 7.4 people per square kilometre. Yet these are the world’s biggest populations today. Room for expansion perhaps. If all the inhabitable land in the world were to be occupied at average English density, the world can actually hold 75Bn people. There would still be loads of open countryside, still only 1 or 2% covered in concrete and tarmac. So let’s stop first of all from imagining that we are running out of space any time soon. We just aren’t!  We panic in the UK because we see the extreme inequality of distribution of people, but that will self limit. If it becomes too dense, people will stop immigrating.

Secondly, westerners’ (i.e. relatively wealthy people’s) houses have typically 5 or 6m deep of living space. They live on top of 6000km deep of materials. So do their neighbours. Not all of it is useful, but it is really hard to see why there is so much panic about physical resources when they lie so deep under our feet. When we discard them, they are still there, just repositioned. If you buy stuff, your house quickly fills up and you have to throw something out to make space before you buy more. It gets recycled or chucked on landfill, which may become a  future mine if materials ever did become scarce enough. A few spacecraft have left the earth forever over the years, but space dust occasionally lands too, so actually there are more physical resources on Earth than there were before people came into being. Organic resources such as forests and fisheries are a different matter, but I’ll look at that another time. It doesn’t change the argument here.

But of course, all other things remaining the same,  if everyone wants to live to westerns standards, the demands on the environment will grow as the poor become richer and able to afford more. If we try to carry on with existing technology, or worse, with yesterday’s, we will not find it easy. Those who consider technology and economic growth to be enemies of the environment, and who therefore would lock us into today’s or yesterday’s technology, would condemn not only billions of people to poverty and misery but also force those extra people to destroy the environment to try to survive. The result would be miserable future for humanity and a wrecked environment. Ironically, they have the audacity to call themselves environmentalists or greens, but they are the true enemies of the earth, and of humanity. If we ignore such lunacy as we should, and allow progress to continue, we will see steady global economic growth that will result in a higher average income per capita in 2050 with 9.5Bn people than we have today with only 7Bn. The technology meanwhile will develop so much that the same standard of living can be achieved with far less environmental impact. Bridges hundreds of years ago used far more resource than today’s need, because technology is better now. With nanotechnology and improved materials, we will need even less in future. The environmental footprint of each person will be far lower in 2050 than it would be if we restrict growth and technology development. It will almost certainly be less even than today’s, even though our future lifestyles would be far better.

Take TVs as an example. TVs used to be hugely heavy and bulky glass monsters that took up half the living room, used lots of electricity, but offered relatively small displays to show a few channels. Today, thin LCD/LED displays use far less material, consume much less power, take up far less space and offer bigger and better displays offering access to thousands of channels via satellites and web links. So as far as TV-based entertainment goes, we have a higher standard of living with lower environmental impact. The same is true for our phones, computers, networks, cars, fridges, washing machines, and most other tools. Better materials enable lower use. New science and technology has enabled new kinds of materials that can substitute for scarce physical resources. Copper was once in danger of running out imminently. Now you can build a national fibre telecommunication network with a few bucketfuls of sand and some plastic. And we have plastic pipes and water tanks too, so we dont really need copper for plumbing either. Aluminium makes reasonable cables, and future materials will make even better cables, still with no copper use. There are few things that cant be done with alternative materials, especially as quantum materials can be designed to echo the behaviour of many chemicals.

Oil will be much the same story. To believe the doom-mongers, our use of oil will continue to grow exponentially until one day there is none left and then we will all be in big trouble, or dead, breathing in 20% CO2 by then of course. Again, nonsense. By 2030, oil will be considered a messy and expensive way of getting energy, and most will be left in the ground. The 6Gjoules of energy a barrel of oil contains could be made for $30 using solar panels in the deserts, and electricity is clean. Not on our UK rooftops as current incentivised by our green-pressured government, but somewhere it is actually sunny. And where land is cheap, because it isn’t much use for anything else. And the energy will get to us via superconducting cables. Sure, the technology doesn’t yet exist, but it will. Oil will only cost $30 a barrel because no-one will want to pay more than that for what will be seen as an inferior means of energy production.

By the 2050 world and 9.5Bn people, fusion power will be up and running, alongside efficient solar and wind and other forms of energy production, proving a huge energy glut that will help with water supply and food production as well as our other energy needs. Our technologies will be so advanced by then that we will be able to control climate better too. We will have environmental models based on science, not eviro-religion. So we will know what we’re doing rather than acting on guesswork and old-wives’ tales. We will have excellent understanding of genetics and biotech and be able to make far superior crops and animals, so will be able to make foods to feed everyone. While today’s crops deliver about 2% of the solar energy landing on their fields to us as food, we will be able to make foods in labs far more efficiently, and will have crops that are also far more efficient. The Unilever chief complaining in today’s papers about food production is only right in the short term. In the long term, there is absolutely no need to worry about feeding everyone. And no need to worry about the impact on the environment either, because we can make more food with far less space. No-one needs to be hungry, and with steady economic growth, everyone can afford food too. This is no fanciful techno-utopia. It is entirely deliverable and even expectable.

And how can we be sure it will be developed? Well, there will be more people for one thing. That means more brains. Those people will be richer, they will be better educated, many will be scientists and engineers. And many will have been born in countries that value engineers and scientists greatly, and will have lot of backing so will get results. And some will be in IT, and will have developed computer intelligence to add to the human effort, and provided better, cheaper and fast tools for scientists and engineers in every field to use. So total intellectual resources will be far more abundant than they are today. So we can be certain that technological progress will continue to accelerate. And as it does, the environment becomes cleaner, healthier, because we can make it so. We will restore nature. Rivers today in the UK are cleaner than 100 years ago. The air is cleaner too. We look after nature better, because that’s what people do when they are affluent and well educated. In 50 years time we will see that more widespread. The rainforests will be flourishing, species will be being resurrected from extinction via DNA banks. People will be well fed. Water supply will be adequate. But it can only happen if we stop following the advice of doom mongers who want to take us backwards.

And that is really key: more people means more brain power, more solutions, better technology. And for the last million years, that has meant steady improvement of our lot. In the un-technological world of the cavemen hunter-gatherers, the world was capable of supporting a maximum of 60 million people. If we try to restrict technology development now, it will be a death sentence. People and the environment would both suffer. No-one wins if we stop progress. That is the fallacy of environmental dogma that is shouted loudly by the doom mongers. Extremists in the green movement would go back to yesterday, rejecting technology, living on nature and punishing everyone who disagrees with them. They can indulge such silliness when there are only a few and the rest of us support them, but everyone simply cant live like that. Again, without technology, the world can only support 60 million. Not 6 billion or 7 billion or 75 billion. There simply aren’t enough nice fields and forest for us all to live that way. So it is a simple choice. We have 60 million miserable post-environmentalists living in a post eco-catastrophe world where nature has been devastated by the results of stupid policies invented by so-called environmentalists, and trying to make a feeble recovery. Or we can stop the nonsense, get on with our ongoing development, and live in a richer, nicer world where 9.5Bn people (or even far more if we want) can be happy, well fed, well educated, with a good standard of living, living side by side with a flourishing environment, where our main impacts on the environment are positive. Technology won’t solve every problem, and will even create some, but without a shadow of a doubt, technology is by far nature’s best friend. And ours. Not the ‘environmentalists’, many of whom are actually among the environment’s worst enemies, at best well meaning fools.

And there is one final point hat is always overlooked in this debate. Every new person that is born is another life, living, breathing, loving, hopefully having fun, enjoying life and being happy. Life is a good thing, to be celebrated, not extinguished or prevented from coming into existence just because someone else has no imagination. Thanks to the positive feedbacks in the development loops, 50% more people means probably 100% more total joy and happiness. Population growth is good, we just have to be more creative, but that’s what we do all the time. Now let’s get on with making it work.