Augmented reality will objectify women

The excitement around augmented reality continues to build, and my blog is normally very enthusiastic about its potential. Enjoying virtual architecture, playing immersive computer games while my wife is shopping, or enjoying artworks transposed onto walls in the high street are just a few of the benefits.

But I realized recently that it won’t all be wonderful. I’ve often joked that you could replace all the ugly people in the high street with more attractive ones. But I didn’t really consider the implications of that. And now I have, I think it will actually become a problem.

In spite of marketing hype and misrepresentation of basic location based services, AR is only here in very primitive form today, outside the lab anyway. But very soon, we will use visors and contact lenses to enable a fully 3D, hi-res overlay on the real world. So notionally, you can make everything in the world look how you want, but only to a point. You can transform a dull shop or office into an elaborate palace of spaceship. But even if you change what they look like, you still need to represent real physical structures and obstacles in your fantasy overlay world, or you may bump into them, and that includes all the walls and furniture, lamp posts, bollards, vehicles, and of course other people. Augmented reality allows you to change their appearance thoroughly but they still need to be there somehow.

When it comes to people, there will be some small battles. You may have a wide variety of avatars, and may have invested a great deal of time and money making or buying them. You may have a digital aura, hoping to present different avatars to different passers-by according to their profiles. You may want to look younger or thinner or as a character you enjoy playing in a computer game. You may present a selection of options. The avatar they choose to overlay could be any one of the images you have on offer, that you spent so much time on. Maybe some people get to pick from some you offer, or are restricted to just one that you have set for their profile.

However, other people may choose not to see you avatar, but instead to superimpose one of their own choosing. The question of who decides what the viewer sees is the first and most obvious battle in AR and it will probably be won by the viewer (there may be exceptions, and these may be imposed by regulations). The other person will decide how they want to see you, regardless of your preferences.

You can spend all the time you want making your avatar or tweaking your virtual make-up to perfection, but if someone wants to see Lady Gaga walking past instead of you, they will. You and your body become no more than an object on which to display any avatar or image someone else chooses. You are quite literally reduced to an object in the AR world. If you worry about objectification of women, you will not like what AR will bring.

Firstly they may just take your actual physical appearance (via a video camera built into their visor for example) and digitally change it,  so it is still definitely you, but now dressed more nicely, or dressed in sexy lingerie, or how you might look naked, body-fitting any images from a porn site. This could easily be done automatically in real time using some app or other. They could even use your actual face as input to image matching search engines to find the most plausible naked lookalikes. So anyone can digitally dress or undress you, not just with their eyes, but with a hi-res visor using sophisticated software and image processing software. They could put you in any kind of outfit, change your skin colour or make-up, and make you look as pretty and glamorous or as slutty as they want. And you won’t have any idea what they are seeing. You simply won’t know whether they are celebrating your inherent beauty with respect, flattering you and simply making you look even prettier, which you might not mind, or stripping or degrading you to whatever depths they wish, which you probably will mind a lot.

Or they can treat you as just an object on which to superimpose some other avatar, which could be anything or anyone, a zombie, favourite actress or supermodel. They won’t need your consent and again you won’t have any idea what they are seeing. The avatar may make the same gestures and movements but it won’t be you. In some ways this won’t be so bad. You are still reduced to an object but at least it isn’t you that they’re looking at naked. To most strangers on the high street, you were mostly just a moving obstacle to avoid bumping into before. Most people will cope with that bit. It is when you stop being just a passing stranger and start to interact in some way that it starts to matter. You probably won’t like it if someone is chatting to you but looking at someone else entirely, especially if the viewer is one of your friends or your partner. And if your partner is kissing or cuddling you but seeing someone else, that would be a strong breach of trust, but how would you know? This sort of thing could and probably will damage a lot of relationships.

It’s a fairly safe bet that the software to do some or all of this is already in development. Maybe some of it already exists in primitive forms but it will develop quickly once AR display technology is really with us. The visor hardware required is certainly on its way and will be here by christmas.

In the office, in the home, when you’re shopping or at a party, you won’t have any idea what or who someone else is seeing when they look at you. Imagine how that would clash with rules that are supposed to be protection from sexual harassment  in the office, but how to police it?

The main casualty will be trust.  It will make us question how much we trust each of our friends and colleagues and acquaintances. It will build walls. People will often become suspicious of others, not just strangers but friends and colleagues. Some people will become fearful. You may dress as primly as you like, but if the viewer sees you in a slutty outfit, perhaps their behaviour and attitude towards you will be governed by that rather than reality. So we may see an increase in sexual assault or rape. We may see more people more often objectifying women in more circumstances.

It applies equally to men of course. You could look at me and see a gorilla or a zombie or see me fake-naked. I won’t lose any sleep over that because I don’t really care all that much. Some men will care more than I will, some even less. I think the real victims will be women. Many men objectify women already. In the future AR world , they’ll be able to do so far more effectively.

We can still joke about a world where you use AR to replace all the ugly people with supermodels, but I think the reality may well not be quite so funny.

 

Are advertising and Apple expenses we can do without?

If you wage war with someone and he gets a bigger gun, you feel pressured to get one too. It’s the same in the war to take your money. If everyone else spends a fortune on advertising, you are likely to feel forced to do so too. But it costs, heavily, and those costs ultimately have to be recovered in higher prices.

When you click on an ad on a website, an advertising company somewhere typically gets about £0.50. That 50p plus has to be recovered when you buy the product, but many of the clicks are ineffective, and there are other expenses in the whole chain apart from the actual click fee (the seller’s own staff, banking costs, accountancy, management etc). Whether you even notice ads or have ever clicked on one, the money you hand over nevertheless subsidises a great many ads, and the ultimate price you pay is much greater than the price that would be needed without advertising.

Nothing new there, but advertising has become a significant and unavoidable extra cost along with taxes and banking fees (and parking charges if you buy in town). You don’t get a choice whether to pay extra to buy via an advertising route or get it cheaper by somehow buying direct. Add up all the web ads, junk email, text messages, paper junk mail, newspapers and magazines, TV and radio advertising, and the whole advertising mark-up is big.

Advertising doesn’t just increase costs. With the exception of some wonderfully entertaining ads, many involving meerkats, adverts waste our time too. Count up all the hours people waste fast forwarding over the add breaks or even sitting through them, and consider the significant personal stress directly resulting from the irritation they cause, that may have a small but finite impact on health. Add to that the extra demands on landfill from the paper junk mail, plus the wasted time opening and sorting the waste. The negative impact on our lives, the environment, and on  the overall economy is vast. Sure, the ad industry creates jobs, but jobs in advertising don’t generate wealth (though there are obviously cash flows between regions). Like banking and the public sector, advertising is a drain on resources. It syphons money from the productive economy and impoverishes us. 

On the other hand, advertising pays for a great deal of what we use on the web, watch on TV or read in newspapers. Some of that wouldn’t exist if the advertising went away, though some would survive via other business models. We’d still have to pay for the things we want to use somehow, so any notional extra fees and administrative inconvenience can reasonably be offset against advertising’s negative impacts.

But even with that offsetting, we really should challenge the cost:benefit ratio in advertising and see if we can find better ways of letting suppliers make potential customers aware of the merits of what they have on offer.

Advertising is only one strand of marketing of course. Marketers know that people want to learn about their new products when they are potentially interested. Context is key. If I have just eaten, I am not interested in marketing from nearby restaurants. If I haven’t, I might be. Using context makes direct marketing possible, especially knowing the location of the user and their tastes and preferences. I will gladly pull information from companies willing to sell me stuff I am interested in, when I want it. They won’t have to pay anyone. Pull marketing is potentially very low cost to both parties, providing the consumer with the info on suppliers’ offerings so they can make an informed decision on what to buy. If we moved entirely to that sort of model, we could greatly reduce the price of everything we buy while saving time and stress.

It is certainly possible to build such a system and make it work well. The technology exists and we’d all be far better off. The really huge problem is that we have bought into the smartphone model, buying iphones, pads or similar, and were taken in so well by beautiful designs and features that we didn’t look under the covers. What we didn’t consciously buy, but bought nonetheless, were devices that only give us access to things on condition that Apple or another big manufacturer gets a big slice of the price, via a variety of mechanisms. A smartphone is perfectly capable of providing exactly the platform we need to save lots of unnecessary spend, but Apple has used its power to extract its own slice of our spend not just at device purchase but throughout its lifetime. Not only has it not let us avoid the expense of advertising, it has added its own extras on top. It has made the situation even worse. Most other companies also use strategies that are designed to get into the most lucrative position in the value chain, expanding the price increase industry.

As I remember it in the beginning, the web was meant to get rid of intermediaries and save costs, making the economy more efficient. What has happened is that layer upon layer of new intermediaries have become adept at selling us products and purchasing systems that allow them to skim off extra slices of revenue for themselves. Anyone working in IT is very familiar with the many layered system architectures, and each layer is another opportunity for some company to take a slice of the revenue passing through. All add ultimately to the purchase price, and companies like Apple win several times because they control several of the architectural layers that their devices are used in. But we are suckers, and keep buying them. Because the extra costs are cleverly hidden or disguised or renamed, we don’t notice them until it’s too late.

I may sound critical of Apple, but all they are doing is to maximise profits for their shareholders, whilst giving customers products they can’t resist. There is no fault there. The same goes for Google or Facebook or any other intermediary. It is the model that we need to change, not companies, who will always do what they can to make the most money. That’s what companies are for.

I’ve written often about cloud nets and digital jewellery nets and the forces of censorship and surveillance and web-based politics and the consequential likely emergence of sponge networks. Check them out in my recent articles list. Freeing ourselves of parasitic companies and advertising is another potential pressure. It may go two ways. We could simply recreate exactly the same problems all over again, just swapping one set of intermediaries for another. Sadly, that is the most likely outcome. History teaches us best that we don’t often learn from history.

But, and this is a long shot, but one that would really help make the world better, we could make devices that people buy, and are then free. No charges for making apps for them, no push advertising, completely open, highly context aware, and high powered, yet completely free to own and use after purchase. Even the comms could be free. They would be capable of everything that you do now, and more. We could use them to talk direct to suppliers and do business with them without anyone else involved. It is even possible to design a free payments and banking system. We could avoid paying anyone except the device manufacturer, once, and the companies we want to do business with using the devices. And with all the time and money we would all save, none of us would mind paying a fair price for such a device. Many people paid via advertising would have to find alternative support models, but the economy would be better off, the rest of us individually would be better off, and the environment would be better off. It is hard to see a downside.

History tells us we will still pick the other system and pay more for a worse life.

pinterest.com, male and female websites

Men and women are different. Shock, horror.

Their range of likes and dislikes overlaps to a high degree, but the centre of gravity is markedly different in some areas.

A fairly new social website called pinterest is growing very rapidly

http://pinterest.com/

I looked at it and I can see why. It is a very good site. A very nice idea, very nicely done. It deserves to succeed.  But 97% of the followers are women. It is unusual to see such gender polarisation.

So what would a man do if he has lots of images and visual ideas he wanted to share? Well, he would blog them, or stick them on tumblr. Tumblr looks the same as pinterest but without all the chitchat. Social networking sites, blogs and tumblr represent well how men communicate. Social networking sites, blogs and Pinterest represent best how women do.

Strong overlap, but the extremes are pinterest and tumblr. They look like male and female versions of the same idea. There must be lots of other sites that work very well for men or women for which there are gender opposites.

OK, so it’s Valentine’s day. Here is one missing link:

There should be a website that allows people to have a personal board on which people can post notes of affection and affirmation and encouragement for each other. You could limit it to friends to avoid stalkers and nasty comments, but people could give you nice feedback to make your day better. Strokes I think psychologists call them. You can do that with twitter or facebook or email or blogs of course, but it needs brought out, crystallised, just like pinterest does the picture sharing and comment stuff for women. It will be another women 97% site. The pinterest people should build it.

Progress and The Care Economy (btw, the UN is badly wrong)

I’ve often written about the Care Economy, the one that I think comes after the information economy. As new things come over the horizon, it is always worth an update. And anyway, I promised a while back to write further on the future of capitalism: http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/we-need-to-rethink-capitalism/ so time to get on with it I guess. The Care Economy idea is resonating better with the way the word is now than when I first raised it in the 90s. We see a stronger desire to live sustainably, to see human skills valued per se rather than just financial wealth. These are both care economy values.

The primary driver for the care economy is progress in machines. Let’s include large-scale robotics and AI of course, but let’s also recognise that much of the progress now happens at invisibly small scales, in biotech, in synthetic biology, biomimetics, in synthetic neurology.  Taking the most obvious and most easily quantifiable area, the fastest supercomputers now compare to the human brain in overall power (which I estimate at the equivalent of around 10^15 instructions per second and 10^15 bits of storage, though it is a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison). Thanks to the limits on Moore’s Law recently having been pushed back another decade or two, their descendants will carry on getting even better (graphene and molybdenene circuits can be smaller and faster, with lasagne processors not far away, not to mention smart yoghurt, so there is a lot of potential still in the pipeline, but that’s another blog). Eventually, even personal gadgets will have better capability than the Mk1 human brain (unless regulation intervenes).

An ordinary computer doesn’t work the same way as the brain of course, but work is also ongoing in understanding how the brain works, and scientists can produce electronic equivalents to some small brain regions already. Electronics isn’t all digital chips, there are many other sorts of devices too. With a big well-stocked toolbox and detailed instruction manuals, or descendants will be able to do a lot with electronics.

What then for your information economy job? Well, it will eventually be better, faster and cheaper to use some sort of machine instead of you. That will force you to retrain or to concentrate on those areas of your job that can’t still be done by machine, and those areas will be shrinking.

The Care Economy is recognition of this problem, and suggesting that we will focus more and more on the emotional, human interaction, side of work. Social, emotional, interpersonal skills will be relatively more important. Hence, for lack of a better name, the care economy. However, there is absolutely no guarantee that the number of care economy jobs will expand to fill the number leaving the information economy. Today, about 30% of jobs are in what could reasonably be described as the care economy. This can grow, but not indefinitely. So we will have to rework our economy to avoid excessive polarisation between haves and have nots. That won’t be easy. We will need to redesign capitalism.

It isn’t going to be just that a lot of people in information economy jobs will have migrated to care economy jobs. The nature of the economy will change. With machines increasingly doing the physical and intellectual work, it will be like a black box economy, where people put a request into the box, and out comes the required product. The cost of material goods will drop a great deal, as will the materials and energy needed – progress in all branches of science and engineering will accelerate a great deal as AI adds hugely to the available thinking. (Some of us call this the singularity, though that can be a somewhat misleading term, because infinite development speed is not possible.) A small number of people plus a lot of machine power will take basic resources (mined or recycled, it matters not) and add highly to their usefulness, vastly more than previous technology generations could. Nanotech, biotech, infotech and cognotech will converge and will allow tiny amounts of physical resource to yield huge benefits in people’s lives. NBIC convergence includes areas such as synthetic biology, biomimetics, which will adsorb parts of IT and strong AI as well as materials technology and nanotech. And vice versa.

I am not certain whether professional economists call it economic growth if we end up with far more stuff at lower output cost. Reduction in costs reduces prices, which reduces the size of the financial economy if growth in demand doesn’t grow faster. It is certainly a growth in the economy to me, since money is only one factor that indicates wealth and economics isn’t about money, it is about managing resources to gain the greatest benefit. And this benefit will grow spectacularly. In the care economy, we could even see less money but still all have a far higher standard of living. Money simply becomes less important as things become cheaper.

So one of a characteristics of the Care Economy is that it is a time of spectacular growth in material wealth, of plenty, even as it reduces environmental impact and improves the valuation of human interaction. Even if there is less of what we now call money (there may not be less money, I’m just saying it doesn’t necessarily matter if there is).

I find myself agreeing a bit, but mostly disagreeing with the UN’s recent proclamations here. (quick summary here:http://news.yahoo.com/un-panel-says-retool-world-economy-sustainability-164515165.html)

I fully agree that we need to become sustainable, and need to value non-financial things like quality of environment and human social well-being more. I believe strongly that the technology progress route is the best way to achieve it. The UN is very wrong with their approach. They are coming at it from totally the wrong angle, not understanding that technology progress can deliver lower environmental impact than cutting back on standard of living. Whether this is extreme left-wing influence or just bad futurist advice I don’t know. What is clear is that they argue for the opposite philosophy, that growth is bad, that we should trim back our lifestyles because only then can we live sustainably. That is nonsense, we don’t need to do that. In fact, to do so slows down the demand for new products slows down the progress to better ones that are more environmentally friendly. We are faced with a simple choice. Do we want to live in a healthy environment with happy people with a fantastic lifestyle? Or do we want a UN world of relative poverty, using primitive technology sparingly and telling ourselves it is for our own good, polishing our halos to make ourselves feel better?

The care economy will change our value sets as it progresses. If we leap towards the mature care economy, say 2050, where anyone can buy a $100 device with a five-figure IQ, and integrate it so well into their nervous system that it acts as a brain extension, what is the value of being smart? If anyone can use an assembler to create pretty much anything they can imagine (within modest size and resource limits), what is the value of physical skill? If anyone can use technology to reach what is today Olympic class performance in any sport within months, where is the value in being faster or stronger or more precise? Historical advantage has come from being born with a genetic advantage, and using cultural advantage to nurture it to overall benefit. Technology levels the field.

So we will value the most core of human skills, being human. Even if R2D2 can beat you in just about every way possible, it still won’t be human.

2050 is some way off, and the information economy is still running at full speed. However, we already see the increasing focus on human value and reduction of emphasis on financial wealth as indicators of happiness or even national well-being. We already see more demands for human value-add, such as ‘authenticity’, or provenance. Even celebrity is increasing in value. Some new trends will start soon. As people come to value machines less and humans more, companies will find the markets forcing them to become closer to the customer, to become more integrated into their customer communities. Many care economy businesses will emerge from social network sites.

The biggest problem with all of this, and it remains unresolved, is that increasing  efficiency via machine effort reduces the number of people needed in many job areas, and offers no guarantee elsewhere that new jobs will be created in equal measure. We don’t want to end up with many people unemployed and poor. We have to make sure somehow that everyone has access to the very nice life potentially on offer. We do need to redesign capitalism.

I wrote in my capitalism piece about taxing the accumulated human knowledge and infrastructure needed to make all the automated systems – those using them shouldn’t be able to keep all the wealth for themselves if the entire society has contributed, providing capital and effort is important and valuable, but nevertheless is only one of the inputs, and should be valued as such.

One idea that has started to gain ground since then is that of reducing the working week. It also has some merit. If there is enough work for 50 hours a week, it is perhaps better to have 2 people working 25 each than one working 50 and one unemployed, one rich and one poor. If more work becomes available, then they can both work longer again. This becomes more attractive still as automation brings the costs down so that the 25 hours provides enough to live well. It is one idea, and I am confident there will be more.

Concluding, we are one notch closer to the care economy. We can see a bit better where the technology path is leading, and can already see some of the signs of cultural change. We are also becoming more aware of some of the problems along the way, but are starting to produce potential solutions for them.  Sadly, we now have misguided institutions like the UN muddying the waters with policy suggestions that would destroy the potential for good, and make the world a worse place. The UN suggestions are based on poor thinking and bad futurology. They should be ignored.

Web censorship will force next generation nets

Twitter are the latest in a line of surrenders to authority  in the last few years. The web started off nicely and grew in importance and everyone talked of how governments couldn’t censor it, and it would always bypass them. It was the new land of the free. But underneath, we all knew that wouldn’t last forever and governments would use their real world power to force web companies into submission. Actually, the surrenders seem rather spineless to me, and were unnecessary, but I guess the web has become a standard ordinary everyday business platform and the companies behave just like any other business now. The brave explorers pushing out in pursuit of the frontiers have gone, replaced by MBAs.

Napster was the first biggy, forced to stop music sharing on the free and to become a proper commercial front end for the music industry. Then Google surrendered its ‘Do no evil’ principle to commercialism, first in China, now globally. It has since become a Big Brother in its own right, collecting deep data not only for its own megalomania but also for any government department that can make ‘a valid legal claim’ (extracted from their new rules on privacy). I have no real choice but to carry on using their mail and search, and I still like Google in spite of their abuses - no one’s perfect – though I am extremely wary of using Google+ seriously. I barely access my account, just like Facebook, and for the same reasons. Facebook and Apple also both became Big Brothers, collecting far more date than most people realised, wanting their own high-walled garden dictatorships. They have them now, but I keep my distance and only visit them as much as I need to. After a few years of ongoing high-profile collapses and surrenders of principle, now Twitter has surrendered too. So now the web is under government control, pretty much everywhere, and worse still, with a layer of big corporate control underneath. Companies on the web have to do as they are told, follow the rules. But they also impose their own too. It is the worst nightmare for those of us who used to debate whether big companies or governments would end up controlling us, which would have the power? We ended up with the worst of both worlds.

Many would argue that that is what should be. Why should the web have different rules? All companies should obey the law. I’d agree to a point, but I’d agree a whole lot more if we lived in a world with good leaders of properly democratic governments taking us forwards to a life of freedom and health and prosperity for all. What I see instead is a global flock of very poor leaders, a sad combination of the greedy, the corrupt and the stupid, with increasing oppression, increasing polarisation, grabbing what they can for themselves in a less fair world, and more attempts to control our thoughts.

So I tend to lean towards wanting a new kind of web, one that governments can’t control so easily, where freedom of speech and freedom of thought can be maintained. If a full surveillance world prevents us from speaking, then we need to make another platform on which we can speak freely.

I’ve written a number of times about jewellery nets and sponge nets. These could do the trick. With very short-range communication directly between tiny devices that each of us wears just like jewellery, a sponge network can be built that provides zillions of paths from A to B, hopping from device to device till it gets there.

A sponge net doesn’t need any ISPs. (In fact, I’ve never really understood why the web needs them either, it is perfectly possible to build a web without them). Each device is autonomous. Each shares data with its immediate neighbours, and route dynamically according to a range of algorithms available to them. They can route data from A to B so that every packet goes by a different route of need be. Even without any encryption, only A and B can see the full message. The various databases that the web uses to tell packets where their destination is can be distributed. There is a performance price, but so what? You could even route geographically. Knowing the precise geographic location of your recipient, packets can simply use a map or GPS to get there. I’m not aware of any GPS based nets yet, but you could easily build one. I quite like the idea personally.

Self organisation is an easy way of linking processing and storage and sensory capability into massively capable platforms. This is useful in its own right but also enables better file sharing or free speech with reasonable performance. It would be easy to bypass any monitoring if it is detected. Even if it is only suspected, the massively divergent routing that sponges enable would make monitoring extremely hard to do.

The capability to make these kinds of devices is almost here. Given the world that we live in, governments might try hard to prevent them from existing. But there are so many benign reasons to do so that it might be hard for them to resist the pressure. Almost all of the spirit of the early web was aimed at making the world a better place. Sure a few criminals and terrorists got in on the act, but the balance was for good. We lost it, and are worse off for it. Letting it happen again would be good for everyone. Sponge nets can do that. If some government officials don’t like it, well, so what? Right now, I don’t have a lot of respect for government.

Social security and social networking

We often hear the phrase ‘care in the community’ in the UK. Nationalisation of social care has displaced traditional care by family and local community to some degree. Long ago, people who needed to be looked after were looked after by those who are related or socially close, either by geography or association. It could be again, and may even be necessary as care rationing is a strong likelihood.

Wealth is being redefined, with high quality social relationships becoming recognised as valuable and a major contributor to overall quality of life.

OK, in a roundabout way, what I am getting to is that social care costs money, and will be rationed, so why not link it back to social structure as it used to be. Those with social wealth could and perhaps should be cared for by those who love them instead of by the state. They would likely be happier, and it would cost less. Those that have low connectedness, i.e. few friends and family, should then be the rightful focus state care. Everyone could be cared for better and the costs would be more manageable.

We know people’s social connectedness by many means, and every year it gets easier. The numbers and strength of contacts on social networking sites is one clue, so is email and messaging use, so is phone use. Geographic proximity can of course be determined by information in the electoral roll. So it is possible to determine algorithms based on these many various factors that would determine who needs care from the state and who should be able to get it from social contacts.

Many people wouldn’t like that, resenting having to care for other people, so how can we make sure people do take care of those they are ‘allocated’ to? Well, that could be done by linking taxation to the care system in such a way that the amount of care you should be providing would be determined by your social connectivity, and providing that care yields tax discount. Or you could just pay your full quota of taxes and abdicate provision to the state. But by providing a high valuation on actual care, it would encouraged people to choose to provide care rather than to pay the tax.

Social wealth would this be linked to social tax, and this social tax could be paid either as care or cash. The technology of social networking has given us the future means to link the social care side of social security into social connectedness. Those who are socially poor would receive the greatest focus of state provision and those who gain most socially from their lives would have to put more in too. We do that with money, why not also with social value? Sounds fair to me.

BHS and online retailing: delivery of faulty goods should be compensated

I haven’t had a lot of luck the last year buying stuff on-line. I have had a few deliveries of items that have been dead on arrival. In some cases they have been broken in transit, in others they were faulty at the factory. Manufacturers or retailers can obviously save money on testing if they just send any old junk out to anyone, assuming that some will come back. But customers are being used as unpaid testers. They have to unpackage the item, get it up and running, discover it doesn’t work, have to contact the retailer and/or manufacturer, fill in some forms, repackage it, take it back to a post office, check that a refund has arrived and then re-order a new one. This is a substantial amount of work.

This week I bought a lamp from BHS. It arrived in a badly damaged box, obviously having had some severe trauma somewhere, but I couldn’t immediately see the damage to the lamp shade until I had fully unwrapped it, at least 10 mins given the extreme overwrapping. Given the additional tape on the box, I deduced that it must already have been returned and had just been sent out again, with me as the unfortunate recipient. I will have to send it back. They don’t provide a phone number on the documentation that arrives, but loads of instructions about all the things I have to do, just to send it back and eventually get a refund. At the end of all that, I will be no better off then I was before I ever went near BHS but will have wasted a lot of my time and effort. I am furious with them.

I emailed them to complain but have heard nothing.

At the very least, when something is faulty, they should collect it from your home and bring you a replacement at the same time. If they expect me to work as an unpaid quality tester, then they should compensate me for my time – at my standard rates.

As it is, I paid £30. I have a broken light and some packaging to dispose of. I can either write off the £30 or waste £100 of my time to get it refunded. I suspect many people would just write it off, which obviously is of great benefit to the suppliers.

We really need a change in the law so that retailers are fully responsible to collect and make good, with no significant effort required by the customer, or fair compensation to be paid. Until then, companies like BHS will be able to send out faulty goods, with appalling customer service, not even provide proper contact details, ignore customers complaints, and get away with it. The only recourse customers have is the power to embarrass them online.

Futurizon Sustainability Report Part 5: Technology

Caution : this section is long. 5000 words ahead:

Linear Induction Bike Lanes

Electronic bicycle lanes could also be constructed to incentivise cycling. A linear induction motor, laid into or on the cycle lane surface could pull cyclists along if they wanted assistance. Mechanical energy is very cheap, whereas the effort required to cycle long distances or up hills is a strong deterrent to many potential cyclists – they are not all super fit! This linear induction drive would only require a small modification to the bicycle (a simple metal plate affixed to the front forks would probably do), and could easily be switched on and off, could offer variable speeds for individual cyclists. Bikes would be pulled along by the magnetic field. It is quite easy to engineer in various safety precautions to prevent misuse and also to enable charging to make commercial ones viable. With no moving parts, and therefore nothing to clog up, it could be extremely reliable. Tracks could be laid either into the surface, or made as rolls that could be quickly laid out on hills to give extra assistance where it is needed. Of course other technologies such as RFID chips could enable highly personalized control (and payment) systems. Apart from encouraging more bicycle use, it could also be used to increase bicycle speed, which both improves journey time for the cyclist, and reduces the congestion bicycles can cause in other traffic. Making it easier to use bikes, and enabling people to use them to commute without needing a shower as soon as they arrive, would yield system wide benefits through extra bicycle use and increased fitness and because speeds would be higher, they wouldn’t slow down other transport as much or cause so many accidents.

Self-driven Pods

New transport solutions based on electronically driven cars and electronic highways could be developed quickly. The basic technologies are all proven now. Cars in the far future will simply drive themselves. These could dramatically improve personal mobility and social inclusivity, and greatly reduce congestion. People would most likely abandon car ownership if this is done well. If personal driving style is eliminated by electronic overrides, there is far less incentive to personally own a car, and at the same time it will become much easier to implement and manage large fleets of shared cars. Fleets give economy of scale and also far better economy of resource. A car would not spend most of its life idle, but could be in use most of the time. A modest number of cars could cater for a large population, especially since the exact locations of all the cars is known, as well as the destinations and likely arrival times of cars in transit. There are already several instances of car rental systems that allow people to just pick up and drop cars as they wish. This will become much more attractive an option with future technology.

So we may well see large fleets of shared cars, owned by companies, government or social groups. With cars linked electronically into a ‘road train’ for acceleration and braking, they could drive closer together, increasing road occupancy, reducing drag and making road travel more energy efficient. With computers driving the cars, they could be much closer together sideways as well as lengthwise, squeezing more lanes onto the same road area, so it may be possible to increase the number of cars on a stretch of road. Given smaller pods instead of large cars, narrower lanes and closer distancing, it should easily be possible to achieve a factor of 5 in the number on a stretch and since they could all be moving well, overall capacity would improve even more. It also makes it more feasible to run roads with lane direction determined by time of day, with some lanes carrying cars one way in the morning rush, and the other way in the afternoon.

Obviously, lorries need more road space but this can easily be accounted and flow still optimised by a computer driven system. Lorries are already being developed that can work in road trains to save drag and driver fatigue.

Such an electronically controlled system could have a mixture of public and private (large fleet company) ownership. The key feature is that it will have all the flexibility of private transport but be more socially inclusive than current public transport, since older people wouldn’t have to walk to a distant bus stop. All they would do is ask their computer to get them a car.

Car batteries are an obvious storage solution for intermittent energy supplies such as wind or solar energy. However, if direct power pickup from road surfaces is implements, and it is likely, then batteries would not need to be very high capacity, since they would only need relatively short local reach. Using smaller batteries would greatly reduce the need for lithium and other materials, making cars cheaper, lighter and safer.

Buses would be a big spoiler for such a system. Since they have to stop frequently to let people on and off, it would be far better to replace them with individual pods. Each person would get personal service door to door and the reduced size makes it far easier for computers to organise flow around them as they stop. In fact, they may even be small enough to simply use pavement. Few people would miss slow and dirty buses or the risk of having a drunk sit next to you, when faced with the option for comfortable end to end service at probably lower cost.

A public transport system like this would require far less resource than today’s, because far fewer vehicles would be needed, and they would be lighter so need less raw material, and drag would be much lower, so they would use less energy. It would also be safer, cheaper and more socially inclusive by far than what we have today.

Rail use – pod trains

There is really no reason why these self-driven pods or road train technology could not be implemented on the railways too. Rail occupancy can be as low as 0.4% on regional railways. Performance analysis shows that packet switched networks can be safely loaded to 80% occupancy before statistics cause significant performance degradation. So there is clearly a huge opportunity for improving the capacity of railways, perhaps 100-fold, if packet switching based solutions were to be implemented instead of the current system, which allocates a very long stretch of track exclusively to each train because of the safety limits required by the obsolete signalling and control technologies that current railways use. Suppose that electronically driven cars and buses could be taken onto the railways, and interleaved with vans and small rail carriages that spend all their time on railways. For example, cars could be made with dual wheels, as some buses are today. Once on rail, no steering is needed and with the vehicles talking electronically to each other to coordinate braking and acceleration, the driver could do other things while the car drives itself to the destination station, whereupon it would leave the track and use its other wheels to get to its final destination. The cars could be driven very closely, and of course the drag and friction costs would be very low. Furthermore, since most of the journey could be on rail with electric energy easily provided, the car could use an electric motor. Instead of using petrol or diesel, or even fuel cells, it could make very long journeys just on batteries, since the batteries could be recharged during the rail journey. Since railways are simple one-dimensional systems, this would be far less demanding in terms of control systems than the equivalent on the roads. So whereas electronic highways will take some more years to become feasible, rail based systems could be implemented much more quickly, given the will.

Nuclear energy – Thorium

Many environmentalists are in favour of nuclear power compared to a few years ago. Nuclear power has always been a scary option to many people because of the waste disposal problem, and the potential use of some kinds of nuclear power stations to generate material for bombs. Nevertheless, if it does turn out that CO2 emissions are a problem, then it offers an obvious way of reducing them while providing much more stable power than that available from wind, wave or solar.

Today’s nuclear stations mainly use uranium, a few use plutonium, but tomorrow we will probably have many that use thorium, a relatively common element that is cheaper and more readily available than uranium, and produces much less dangerous by products as it decays. The Chinese are currently trying to develop thorium reactors and are likely to succeed. If so, this will provide a great deal of help in achieving a sustainable world that still has enough energy for us all to lead comfortable lives.

In the longer term, fusion based energy is inevitable too, but no-one knows when this is really likely to become reality. The very far future has a glut of potential energy supplies, so it is only the short and medium terms that are threatened with shortages. Long term sustainability is not a problem as far as energy goes.

Nuclear waste disposal

Uranium comes from mines. It is extracted, concentrated, used until it isn’t radioactive enough any more and then we lock it in secure dumps until we figure out what to do with it. One option seems obvious when you remember that it came from a mine originally. If the nuclear waste it replaces were to be extremely diluted by mixing with the refuse from the uranium mine, (or indeed with any other rubbish if it is being used for landfill), then it could all be dumped back in the hole it originally came from, and that would result is a slightly less radioactive mine than the original.

A longer term option lies in the space elevator. Nuclear waste could be flung into the sun, which of course is just a nuclear reactor anyway. It could be an expensive solution compared to burying it or using it up in a thorium reactor, but who knows?

Wind energy

If there is one perfect example of the triumph of green dogma over scientific sense, it would be wind farms. Wind farms can harness superficially free energy but are an eyesore, cause noise and stress, disrupt breeding cycles and kill birds, and may even sap enough of the wind to disturb natural weather patterns. They are ludicrously expensive to build, with little scope for cost reduction requiring heavy subsidies. Because wind doesn’t always blow, they still need other power generation capacity to be provided alongside, and this also needs to be subsidised if the generator companies can’t sell their power all the time. Overall, wind farms as they currently stand are anything but green and should really be a last resort.

There are a few developments that will make wind energy slightly less awful though. One is the use of different kinds of turbines according to the deployment circumstances. Vertical axis turbines may be better in turbulent environments such as housing areas, whereas conventional fans cannot harvest efficiently when the wind direction changes frequently.

Super-capacitors made of novel materials such as graphene offer the prospect of being able to store energy more easily, solving one of the big problems with intermittent energy use.

Plastic capacitor sails

Also on the capacitor side, plastic capacitors change their capacitance as they deform. Wind energy harvesters can be made using large sails covered in millions of tiny plastic capacitors that spin in the wind, deforming and springing back every time they make a rotation. The sails would lie on the surface of the sea, and only become visible when the wind fills the sail. There would be no visible movement from any distance away because of the small size of the capacitors, so this would doubly help visual disturbance. Since the energy would be converted more directly into electricity, there would be no need for a large central generator, no need for heavy engineering. The costs of plastic capacitors today make sail solutions even more expensive than conventional turbines, but materials science often follows Moore’s law cost reductions, whereas mechanical systems don’t. This means that in a few years it may be cheaper to use sails, and the cost benefits would continue to improve thereafter.

Whether such advances will ever make wind energy a good solution is uncertain, but it could be less bad.

Solar farms

Solar farms in equatorial regions are likely to spread, contributing enormously to energy supply, but affecting wealth distribution and already associated with crime and forced people movement. Short term costs are very high but inevitably will fall. They also increase absorption of sun’s energy relative to bare ground. So solar farms would produce a great deal of energy and could be cheap as Moore’s law brings down the costs and increases efficiency of photovoltaics, but it isn’t the clean solution sometimes imagined.

Graphene

Graphene is the new wonder material. Like carbon nanotubes, it is just another form of carbon, the atoms just laid out differently. Having said that, it is far stronger and lighter than steel, is a superb conductor, it can be used as a substrate for electronic circuits, and it is made of carbon, an extremely common element. Its importance in sustainability will come from many angles. To list just a few, it will enable substitution for other materials that are in short supply, expensive or dangerous or resource-consuming to make. It will allow super-capacitors that can replace batteries and store power from intermittent energy supplies. It will make ultrafast computers, better sensors, and many other things we haven’t even imagined yet. Engineers are very excited about its potential and it is impossible to know just how much impact it will eventually have, but it is likely to be huge. As a key pillar in future sustainability, graphene is certainly in there.

AI (artificial intelligence)

If we could produce intelligence synthetically, and therefore provide extra thinking capability to solve problems, this could have a profound effect on technology development rate, in every field. Since it is likely that this will be achieved in the next few decades, AI is a very important sustainability tool, with its enormous potential to invent solutions, increase understanding of the environment, and accelerate research development, but it is rarely mentioned in environment debates. Clearly, smart machines might be used to design smarter machines, which will design smarter ones still, leading exponentially quickly to vastly superhuman intelligence that may well solve many of the problems for us, with new energy technology, and new environmental clean-up and management technology.

We should not rely on AI to save us, but we may reasonably expect that it will, even if some man-made solutions fail. It gives us hope, but not enough certainty to avoid us using other approaches in parallel.

Active contact lens

My own invention in 1991, the active contact lens is a tiny display device that is worn as a contact lens, and contains circuits to project images directly onto the retina. It has already been prototyped in primitive form but in the far future it will offer ultra-high resolution fully immersive 3d images, and will make all other display devices unnecessary (though we may still have some anyway). Any kind of other display could be mimicked as a portion of the active contact lens display area. It is possible therefore to save all the resources and pollution involved in all the others. Given the number of TVs, mobiles, PCs, tablets and so on that could be replaced, the active contact lens can be a significant contributor directly to sustainable resource use.

In addition to replacing other displays, it can also be used for new services such as augmented reality. This allows even a basic environment to be enhanced virtually, and if the display quality is sufficient, it would be indistinguishable from the real thing.

Digital Jewellery

A person wearing a few grammes of digital jewellery in the 2020s will have far more IT capability than someone today with a laptop, phone, PDA, MP3 player, digital camera, GPS navigation system, security alarm, identity card, electronic cash cards, credit cards, voice recorder, video camera, memory sticks, radio, portable TV, a book, magazine, games console and many other gadgets that haven’t even been invented yet. Furthermore, by 2020, billions more people will be able to afford these sorts of things. These can also be the basis for a distributed cloud platform, requiring far less server farm provision and requiring far less power than today’s server farms. It is important that we get greater miniaturisation and lower energy use if everyone in the world is to have access to all the benefits of IT sustainably. Digital jewellery will be key.

Biomimetics

Biomimetics is simply using nature as stimulation in engineering design. Three billion years of natural evolution has come up with some great ideas, still being discovered. Engineers draw inspiration from these. Sometimes natural techniques and designs can be mimicked almost exactly, sometimes a bit of human tweaking is a good idea, but nature-inspired design is often lighter, stronger, faster, or better in some other way than alternatives. Biomimetics is another great sustainability tool. There are some purists in the field who like to stay true to nature, but as far as sustainability goes, it is great to get ideas wherever they come from, and nature is a big source. Even if the end product looks nothing like nature, its initial inspiration can be important.

Biomimetic architecture has been around quite a while, enabling low power air conditioning systems for example, or skyscrapers that can be lighter weight, or use lower drag materials to reduce wind pressure. There are very many opportunities here.

Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology can be seen as a major derivative or biomimetics. Engineers and scientists have been discovering how nature works at microcellular and even molecular levels, and are now copying and using even genetic tools. At first, the major headlines are in modifying DNA slightly or assembling genomes from off-the-shelf chemicals to create synthetic bacteria, but it will undoubtedly progress to designing whole new classes of proteins, genes, and different types of synthetic organisms. It will also allow us to modify and enhance existing ones. Proteins are nature’s machines, and by understanding how to design and build them for our own purposes, this will be a rich seam for future development.

However, it is not without risk. Messing with nature will allow us to fix a lot of environmental problems. But as it becomes better and eventually commoditised, it is also a tool that lends itself well to the military, terrorists and mad scientists. I would say synthetic biology is in the top three tools when it comes to achieving sustainability, but I’d also put it in the top three risk to life on earth. If we can harness its potential while protecting against its threats, we will have a much better world for sure, but that is no easy task.

Bacterial mining

One example already under way is bacterial mining, designing bacteria to break transform a fixed resource (coal in this case) into a gaseous one (methane) so that it can be extracted more easily. Methane also produces less CO2 than coal for a given amount of energy. This clearly would help sustainability, as would many other custom bacteria. Other roles may be mining rubbish tips to recover useful elements from them, extracting resources without digging big holes and ruining ecosystems; processing waste; fixing carbon; making algae fuels; changing the earth’s albedo and many others. Again, the dangers are possible harmful but unexpected interactions with the environment (and it certainly wouldn’t be the first time we have had unexpected reactions), or commoditised advanced uses being perverted for destruction.

Restoration of the environment to health via genetic technology, desert greening programs, weather control technology and so on, are all highly likely to be developed over the next several decades. Synthetic biology could also yield tools to rescue life on earth after environmental catastrophe, by eventually enabling wholesale redesigning of the ecosystem from the ground up.

Carbon Reefs

Most UK householders are already encouraged to separate plastic waste for recycling, and when it reaches the recycling centres, it is usually compressed into blocks for easier handling, which sadly is often done in China. If these blocks were instead to be dumped in the sea and suitably contained, just off the Norfolk coast for example, transport and processing would produce far less CO₂, carbon would be locked up, coastal erosion would be reduced, land would be reclaimed, and landfill would fill up more slowly. The plastic would effectively become a plastic reef and later, reclaimed land. This approach would be carbon negative, while recycling is at best carbon neutral. One of the obstacles to this solution is the move towards biodegradable plastic, which of course returns carbon to the atmosphere, and ironically, was developed to help the environment. Another is EU law which prohibits dumping plastic in the sea. Another obstacle is environmental groups who argue that we shouldn’t try to resist erosion because it will then happen elsewhere, but that is a rather defeatist attitude. Put some of the blocks there too.

The much levied criticism of conventional plastics, that they will stay around in the environment for thousands of years, actually makes them ideal for a carbon sink. Bio-degradable plastic, and current laws that prevent plastics from being dumped in the sea could turn out to be environmentally damaging, by preventing such solutions.

Some other waste could be mixed in too. For example, glass is borderline recyclable, yielding a environmental benefit when recycling it rather than producing it from scratch, but since this full-life benefit is actually quite small, perhaps it could also be included with the plastic, giving extra density to the waste.

Even organic waste could be processed by heating with reduced oxygen so that it carbonises, giving off natural gas in the process that could be used as fuel. The carbon could be added to the plastic reef to help absorb toxins from the seawater, cleaning it up a bit too.

Fabric Technology

New fabrics that don’t need to be washed are making their way onto markets already. It is the norm for clothes to be washed of course, and not everyone will be happy wearing clothes without ever washing them, but gradually acceptance is likely to grow. Washing machines that require far less water and detergent, and wash at lower temperatures are of course already here, and we will see their penetration increase too. All of these are useful tools in the battle for sustainability.

One of the first fabrics to be released is treated cotton. This is quite ironic, since cotton production is extremely water intensive and polluting. But it is still a start.

We can expect more and better synthetic fabrics in the future of course as well as treatments for natural fibres. Some of these will reduce environmental footprints by keeping us warm and dry and clean while reducing consumption of raw materials, water and energy use. Genetic engineering is likely to improve natural fibres too or make them easier to produce without so much water.

Carbon sequestration

Solutions for carbon sequestration can be developed quickly if we need them. As yet, we don’t really know if we do and this could be money wasted.

Farming

Organic farming generally produces less food per hectare of land, which decreases global food production capacity, which increases prices and makes it harder for poor people to survive, forcing them to have more children, which creates a greater population, greater need for aid and so on. It is a Western luxury that is paid for elsewhere.

Organic farming products are often delivered by a different distribution system, which has different impacts and these also need to be accounted. Additionally, marketing for organic produce tends to reinforce other aspects of lifestyle and attitudes that affect the system in many more subtle ways. For example, as well as consuming ‘organic’ food, the same people are likely to prefer natural fibres instead of synthetic substitutes. This increases demand for cotton. Cotton is becoming a hot environmental topic in itself, producing pollution and water stress among many other socioeconomic problems. Again, the transport, CO₂, energy demand and social impact is very different across the whole system and whole lifecycle from synthetic clothing.

Planes and alternatives

Cheap air travel is a strong focal point for environmental hostility, but it is generally better to solve the actual problem than just tackling a few of the symptoms. The real issue isn’t travel, it is the environmental impact of the travel. Future technology can even provide alternatives to planes if need be. And ultimately, there is no law of physics that says that travel has to use any energy. The whole planet travels 1.5 million miles every day without using any energy at all!

The airline industry is currently researching the potential for both battery powered and hydrogen powered planes. If the hydrogen is produced in an environmentally friendly way, then that would certainly be one solution that would keep air travel going without creating major environmental problems. More interestingly, taking futurology back 100 years, we find ideas that may just have been ahead of their time. At the turn of the 20^th century, futurologists were suggesting long tubes through which people could be propelled in vehicles by compressed air. That idea is now making a comeback, with long tubes that use vacuums and magnetic propulsion instead of compressed air. De-pressurising the tubes reduces air resistance. Superconductivity will make these far better than is possible today. We do not yet posses the tunnelling technology to make such solutions viable on a widespread basis, but they may become viable for high speed city links in the not too far future. For overseas journeys, large plastic tubes might even work, suspended not too far below the surface. Again, once an object is moving, in the absence of friction, it will continue doing so with no power consumption. This could be a very low energy transport solution one day, or perhaps it will be still a curiosity in another 100 years.

Yet another novelty is the idea of using super-cavitation to allow supersonic submarines. It has apparently been demonstrated that high speed travel through water can be done with less resistance than through air. This effect has already been used for torpedo technology.

Virtual existence

Estimates of future population generally only include humans, but we won’t be the only intelligent beings on the planet much longer. Advances in AI promise to make sentient AIs in a decade or two and by the end of this century there will be millions or even billions of them, with a  wide range of intelligence levels and characteristics. They will not only exist to serve people. Some will have a purposeful existence of their own, just as we do. They will have their own culture, and we will interwork with them. AI’s are potentially very diverse in nature, just as organic life is. We shouldn’t assume that they will all sit in rooms looking like computers, or even walk around as robots. Some will, some won’t. Some AIs will stay in the same place. But that ‘place’ could be the entire global network and any associated computer. They may roam electronically. They may also consume resources just like we do, for entertainment, research, building, arts, even growing gardens. We should not preclude AIs necessarily from sharing at least some human interests, as well as many we don’t have. But we can reasonable assume that many or even most AIs are produced to serve human interests. They may help a great deal with science and technology development, so may be extremely valuable in the fight to achieve sustainability. But there are some other lines of thought worth listing before moving on.

Science fiction generally presents robots as having their ‘brain’ on board. With cloud working today, this already looks dated. It is highly likely that robots will have a mixture of on-board and remote capability for processing, sensing, storage and communication. Some robots will essentially be empty husks waiting for occupation by any AI that is capable of occupying them. Or human mind for that matter, once our technology is up to the job. Direct links to the brain are extremely embryonic today, but by 2050, remotely occupying a robot and feeling senses as if you were present in it should be feasible, and if not by then, certainly not long after. This is an important factor for sustainability. It opens the possibility that people could carry on in machine form after their biological bodies die, or even have multiple parallel existences in different forms. It also allows an alternative for of travel, where you simply hire a robot at the destination and use remote presence to be there. There is little point in detail here since these technologies are too far away and will happen in a very different world from ours. It is enough just to mention them and move on, as I will now.

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

Cellular automata, social jewellery, and the X Factor

I confess that I was among many who watched the x factor final last night. I know it’s not high culture, but it was fun. During one of the performances (Coldplay in this instance) the lights were dimmed and the cameras showed the effect of many people in the audience wearing glowing electronic bracelets. These were clearly centrally controlled and were either red or green (or was it yellow, can’t remember). There are lots of ways this might have been orchestrated. You can signal using the lights, or by radio, ultrasound, the web, or many other mechanisms. It doesn’t matter which they used, it was a nice touch and worked well. But it did make me realise how little people use electronic jewellery. I predicted LED jewellery particularly would take off many years ago and have been very disappointed how little it has. Apart from novelty Christmas accessories, you hardly ever see LEDs in jewellery. I don’t know why that is, but you can’t argue with the market. Maybe everyone just has less tacky taste than me.

Anyway, to the point.

It isn’t necessary to have central signalling to get nice pretty effects. If each person’s bracelet were to interact only with the nearest ones, you would still get interesting effects, with much more elaborate patterns than you would expect. In the early days of study of evolution in electronic systems, there was much talk of cellular automata. Stephen Wolfram showed that some seemingly complex natural shapes and behaviours could be explained if each cell made its development ‘decisions’ based simply on the properties of its nearest neighbours. If you aren’t familiar with cellular automata, it is worth checking it out on Google, you’ll find it very stimulating and it can easily suck up a day of your time. I loved that theory and greatly enjoyed exploring the patterns on my computer. It worked well. With my own background in finite element analysis it seemed obvious in hindsight, as many great insights do. But he had that insight, not me. I went on to apply it to hardware and network evolution based on digital hormone gradients, but that’s a different story and ancient history now. Since then, a lot of work has been done on the wider class of emergent behaviours, linking strongly to complexity and chaos theory.

I didn’t track down who makes the X Factor bracelets,so I don’t know their full functionality but let’s hope that they will bring out future versions that can talk direct to each other, assuming that these can’t yet. And obviously they could be hats, headbands, bracelets, rings, t-shirts or pretty much anything you can wear. As long as they are easily visible they could work well. It doesn’t even have to be a new piece of jewellery. It would work just as easily with a smartphone app, though I can’t be bothered to write one.

Emergent behaviours will produce interesting effects, many of which can’t be predicted. They could be programmed to behave out of the box with some basic cellular automata algorithms , e.g what is the state of the other devices I can hear best? That would already produce nice patterns to someone watching at a distance, with waves of colour change oscillating wildly around a community as people move around. Many of these would be biomimetic, precisely nature apparently uses similar algorithms. Or they could take manual inputs from their wearers. That would also be fascinating. Users might pick a particular emotional state they want to  project. Then the patterns and colours would evolve according to the social mood in the area. People could play games with the patterns, or use them as an elaborate form of tribal signalling and communication. In today’s age that could be in anything from parties and rock concerts to urban riots. Marketers are unlikely to ignore their potential too.

The X Factor may make debatably good TV, but social jewellery can certainly be good fun, and you can prove mathematically that its effects can’t all be predicted, so we’d get some surprises too. It might not take off, but I really hope it will. In times of economic gloom, we can do with some extra fun.

 

 

Do we need banks?

Every company should think often about the threats and opportunities facing it over the next few years. It is easy to be too narrowly focused, considering only how to protect or gain market share, so look sometimes at the big picture. What if changes mean your whole industry is in danger? When you next think through the future of your industry, one of the best questions you can ask is:

If it didn’t already exist, would we need to invent it?

If the answer is no, you shouldn’t be worrying about your market share, but about your escape plan.

Let’s address the question at banking, topical as The City is threatened by proposed changes in EU regulation and our government is rightfully fighting to protect the  income coming into the UK. Nevertheless, I think that if we didn’t already have the banks, we would have no need to invent them. Do we need banks? No.

Banking earns a lot of money, but ultimately it comes from other companies and individuals (though many are overseas). It is a drain on the rest of the economy, skimming off generous profits from everything it touches. Nice for bankers, but bad for everyone else. If we can find a way of providing banking services  without the high costs, most of us would be better off.

In fact it isn’t just banking but financial services generally that are affected. Banking, insurance, pensions and so on are all essential to today’s everyday life, but that doesn’t mean their current implementations are the best way to provide them. Financial services don’t directly add to overall global wealth, but they do facilitate many things that do.  They are valuable, even essential, but they could now be provided by alternative systems at much lower cost, so we could still get the services, but keep our money. With lower operating costs, the rest of the economy would benefit.

The UK is in a position that it benefits greatly from an industry that isn’t needed, but without which the world as a whole would be better off. The UK’s most cost effective (though selfish) strategy would be to delay its downfall and milk it while it lasts, while still encouraging its replacement within the UK.

All of the services that banks and other financial services provide today could be provided far more cheaply via social and business networks, transactions executed securely in the cloud. This ‘could’ is heading rapidly towards reality already with development of online payments, social networking sites, smartphones and expectation of secure connections.

With easy transfer of money or other financial tokens directly between devices, or across the cloud using Paypal or its descendants and competitors, we are on a good position now. Social networking allows communities to build for self banking or self insurance. It doesn’t take very much to add on the required security and integrate the electronic payments and databases. Secure social networks could then bypass banks for secure storage of money, record keeping, transactions, savings and investments. Linking people direct to others who can lend them cash is one thing, but someone needs to verify their trustworthiness. We should expect that such services will often be provided by the very fabric of the social network. If someone is a friend or a trusted friend of a friend, then you may be willing to take a risk on them. If you don’t know them, then this is a perfectly valid financial service that can be offered by freelance risk assessors and loss adjusters.

So we should watch out for social networks that are establishing networks that are based on trust and know identity. I wouldn’t consider lending to someone with an anonymous user ID. I need to know who they really are and how to get hold of them should anything go wrong. I suspect that in this role, derivatives of Google+ will fare far better than the likes of Facebook.

It won’t be easy to bypass the banks, but companies or web communities will find it easier and easier as the technology gradually develops over the next few years. Banks are in a good position for now, and there is no reason to leave them just for the sake of it. If they offer good service at reasonable price, some at least will probably stay in business. But complacency is never wise. They now do face real existential threats and should be preparing for new competition coming from outside their own community.

Whether we should protect banks or encourage companies to develop ways to bypass them is an interesting question. Competition doesn’t always deliver better services and no solution is ever without its problems. But although they may do a great job at least in some areas some of the time, banks do syphon off a great deal from the economy, and it is possible that we might be able to do something better with that cash. Personally, I really am not sure where the balance lies, but the possibilities are certainly intriguing.