Augmented reality will objectify women

Microsoft Hololens 2 Visor

The excitement around augmented reality continues to build, and I am normally  enthusiastic about its potential, looking forward to enjoying virtual architecture, playing immersive computer games, or enjoying visual and performance artworks transposed into my view of the high street while I shop.

But it won’t all be wonderful. While a few PR and marketing types may worry a little about people overlaying or modifying their hard-won logos and ads, a bigger issue will be some people choosing to overlay people in the high street with ones that are a different age or gender or race, or simply prettier. Identity politics will be fought on yet another frontier.

In spite of waves of marketing hype and misrepresentation, AR is really only here in primitive form outside the lab. Visors fall very far short of what we’d hoped for by now even a decade ago, even the Hololens 2 shown above. But soon AR visors and eventually active contact lenses will enable fully 3D hi-res overlays on the real world. Then, in principle at least, you can make things look how you want, with a few basic limits. You could certainly transform a dull shop, cheap hotel room or an office into an elaborate palace or make it look like a spaceship. But even if you change what things look like, you still have to represent nearby 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 battles. You may spend ages creating a wide variety of avatars, or may invest 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 to the AIs controlling the passer person’s view and the avatar they see overlaid could be any one of the images you have on offer. Perhaps some privileged people get to pick from a selection you offer, while others you wish to privilege less are restricted to just one that you have set for their profile. Maybe you’d have a particularly ugly or offensive one to present to those with opposing political views.

Except that you can’t assume you will be in control. In fact, you probably won’t.

Other people may choose not to see your avatar, but instead to superimpose one of their own choosing. The question of who decides what the viewer sees is perhaps the first and most important battle in AR. Various parties would like to control it – visor manufacturers, O/S providers, UX designers, service providers, app creators, AI providers, governments, local councils, police and other emergency services, advertisers and of course individual users. Given market dynamics, most of these ultimately come down to user choice most of the time, albeit sometimes after paying for the privilege. So it probably won’t be you who gets to choose how others see you, via assorted paid intermediary services, apps and AI, it will be the other person deciding how they want to see you, regardless of your preferences.

So you can spend all the time you want designing your avatar and tweaking your virtual make-up to perfection, but if someone wants to see their favorite celebrity 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. Augmented reality will literally objectify women, reducing them to no more than a moving display space onto which their own selected images are overlaid. A few options become obvious.

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, using the latest AI to body-fit fantasy images from a porn database. This could easily be done automatically in real time using some app or other. You’ve probably already seen recent AI video fakery demos that can present any celebrity saying anything at all, almost indistinguishable from reality. That will soon be pretty routine tech for AR apps. They could even use your actual face as input to image-matching search engines to find the most plausible naked lookalikes. So anyone could digitally dress or undress you, not just with their eyes, but with a hi-res visor using sophisticated AI-enabled image processing software. They could put you in any kind of outfit, change your skin color or make-up or age or figure, 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 respectfully celebrating your inherent beauty, or flattering you by making you look even prettier, which you might not mind at all, or might object to strongly in the absence of explicit consent, or worse still, stripping or degrading you to whatever depths they wish, with no consent or notification, 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, favorite 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 and even talk plausibly, saying whatever their AI thinks they might like, but it won’t be you. In some ways this might not be so bad. You’d still be reduced to an object but at least it wouldn’t be you that they’re looking at naked. To most strangers on a high street most of the time, you’re just a moving obstacle to avoid bumping into, so being digitally transformed into a walking display board may worry you. 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 really starts to matter. You probably won’t like it if someone is chatting to you but they are actually 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.

Most of the software to do most of this is already in development and much is already demonstrable. The rest will develop quickly once AR visors become commonplace.

In the office, in the home, when you’re shopping or at a party, you soon 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. Whole new levels of harassment will be enabled, much invisible. How can we police behaviors we can’t even detect? Will hardware manufacturers be forced to build in transparency and continuous experience recording

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 or modestly as you like, but if the viewer chooses to see you wearing a sexy outfit, perhaps their behavior and attitude towards you will be governed by that rather than reality. Increased digital objectification might lead to increase physical sexual assault or rape. We may see more people more often objectifying women in more circumstances.

The tech applies equally to men of course. You could make a man look like a silverback gorilla or a zombie or fake-naked. Some men will care more than others, but the vast majority of real victims will undoubtedly be women. Many men objectify women already. In the future AR world , they’ll be able to do so far more effectively, more easily.

 

AI is mainly a stimulative technology that will create jobs

AI has been getting a lot of bad press the last few months from doom-mongers predicting mass unemployment. Together with robotics, AI will certainly help automate a lot of jobs, but it will also create many more and will greatly increase quality of life for most people. By massively increasing the total effort available to add value to basic resources, it will increase the size of the economy and if that is reasonably well managed by governments, that will be for all our benefit. Those people who do lose their jobs and can’t find or create a new one could easily be supported by a basic income financed by economic growth. In short, unless government screws up, AI will bring huge benefits, far exceeding the problems it will bring.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve often written about the care economy, where the more advanced technology becomes, the more it allows to concentrate on those skills we consider fundamentally human – caring, interpersonal skills, direct human contact services, leadership, teaching, sport, the arts, the sorts of roles that need emphatic and emotional skills, or human experience. AI and robots can automate intellectual and physical tasks, but they won’t be human, and some tasks require the worker to be human. Also, in most careers, it is obvious that people focus less and less on those automatable tasks as they progress into the most senior roles. Many board members in big companies know little about the industry they work in compared to most of their lower paid workers, but they can do that job because being a board member is often more about relationships than intellect.

AI will nevertheless automate many tasks for many workers, and that will free up much of their time, increasing their productivity, which means we need fewer workers to do those jobs. On the other hand, Google searches that take a few seconds once took half a day of research in a library. We all do more with our time now thanks to such simple AI, and although all those half-days saved would add up to a considerable amount of saved work, and many full-time job equivalents, we don’t see massive unemployment. We’re all just doing better work. So we can’t necessarily conclude that increasing productivity will automatically mean redundancy. It might just mean that we will do even more, even better, like it has so far. Or at least, the volume of redundancy might be considerably less. New automated companies might never employ people in those roles and that will be straight competition between companies that are heavily automated and others that aren’t. Sometimes, but certainly not always, that will mean traditional companies will go out of business.

So although we can be sure that AI and robots will bring some redundancy in some sectors, I think the volume is often overestimated and often it will simply mean rapidly increasing productivity, and more prosperity.

But what about AI’s stimulative role? Jobs created by automation and AI. I believe this is what is being greatly overlooked by doom-mongers. There are three primary areas of job creation:

One is in building or programming robots, maintaining them, writing software, or teaching them skills, along with all the associated new jobs in supporting industry and infrastructure change. Many such jobs will be temporary, lasting a decade or so as machines gradually take over, but that transition period is extremely valuable and important. If anything, it will be a lengthy period of extra jobs and the biggest problem may well be filling those jobs, not widespread redundancy.

Secondly, AI and robots won’t always work direct with customers. Very often they will work via a human intermediary. A good example is in medicine. AI can make better diagnoses than a GP, and could be many times cheaper, but unless the patient is educated, and very disciplined and knowledgeable, it also needs a human with human skills to talk to a patient to make sure they put in correct information. How many times have you looked at an online medical diagnosis site and concluded you have every disease going? It is hard to be honest sometimes when you are free to interpret every possible symptom any way you want, much easier to want to be told that you have a special case of wonderful person syndrome. Having to explain to a nurse or technician what is wrong forces you to be more honest about it. They can ask you similar questions, but your answers will need to be moderated and sensible or you know they might challenge you and make you feel foolish. You will get a good diagnosis because the input data will be measured, normalized and scaled appropriately for the AI using it. When you call a call center and talk to a human, invariably they are already the front end of a massive AI system. Making that AI bigger and better won’t replace them, just mean that they can deal with your query better.

Thirdly, and I believe most importantly of all, AI and automation will remove many of the barriers that stop people being entrepreneurs. How many business ideas have you had and not bothered to implement because it was too much effort or cost or both for too uncertain a gain? 10? 100? 1000? Suppose you could just explain your idea to your home AI and it did it all for you. It checked the idea, made a model, worked out how to make it work or whether it was just a crap idea. It then explained to you what the options were and whether it would be likely to work, and how much you might earn from it, and how much you’d actually have to do personally and how much you could farm out to the cloud. Then AI checked all the costs and legal issues, did all the admin, raised the capital by explaining the idea and risks and costs to other AIs, did all the legal company setup, organised the logistics, insurance, supply chains, distribution chains, marketing, finance, personnel, ran the payroll and tax. All you’d have to do is some of the fun work that you wanted to do when you had the idea and it would find others or machines or AI to fill in the rest. In that sort of world, we’d all be entrepreneurs. I’d have a chain of tea shops and a fashion empire and a media empire and run an environmental consultancy and I’d be an artist and a designer and a composer and a genetic engineer and have a transport company and a construction empire. I don’t do any of that because I’m lazy and not at all entrepreneurial, and my ideas all ‘need work’ and the economy isn’t smooth and well run, and there are too many legal issues and regulations and it would all be boring as hell. If we automate it and make it run efficiently, and I could get as much AI assistance as I need or want at every stage, then there is nothing to stop me doing all of it. I’d create thousands of jobs, and so would many other people, and there would be more jobs than we have people to fill them, so we’d need to build even more AI and machines to fill the gaps caused by the sudden economic boom.

So why the doom? It isn’t justified. The bad news isn’t as bad as people make out, and the good news never gets a mention. Adding it together, AI will stimulate more jobs, create a bigger and a better economy, we’ll be doing far more with our lives and generally having a great time. The few people who will inevitably fall through the cracks could easily be financed by the far larger economy and the very generous welfare it can finance. We can all have the universal basic income as our safety net, but many of us will be very much wealthier and won’t need it.

 

Guest post: The Future of Management, by new futurist Branimir Trošić

Delighted to host a guest post by a new futurist Branimir Trošić sharing his thoughts on

The Future of Management

Self-management includes concepts like no hierarchical structures (where no one has any coercive power over anyone else) and the concept of accountability which explains that people must keep their commitments to each other (Josh Alan Dykstra, 2014). Many understand that concept, but can not quite understand how this concept could work in practical situations, partly because there is a problem of understanding this concept with a learned mental model: learned assumptions how the organization should be organized: a hierarchical structure where information flows from top to bottom. Not being able to imagine the alternative and the idea of an organization without managers frightens many: who would be in control, who would be responsible for the company’s strategy, who will lead the way? This concept purports that there is one god-like leader that sits on top of the organization and shows the way. And, usually, organizations are currently organized in that way, but the problem of that kind of organization is that not everyone in the organization understands what “The” leader is communicating, nor do people find themselves accountable for the organization to reach the common goal. Natural state of mind of every individual is that he or she will work for their own interest. And interestingly, this is one of the axioms of economy: an organization will flourish only if the individual within the organization can flourish. The problem of a hierarchical organization is exactly in hierarchy: different levels have different goals, meaning that the goal of the CEO (increasing the profits) is not the same as the goal of the worker at the bottom (usually to finish his/hers daily chores, not minding the efficiency of the work and head home). Hierarchical organizations repeatedly fail at motivating different levels to accept shared vision and to act upon it.

If motivating every worker in the organization is the problem of a hierarchical organization, and if exactly hierarchy is the show stopper in implementing that, then the logical solution would be to remove hierarchy from the organization. Solution sounds simple, but another question imposes: how can this be done in real life? If there is no boss to tell you what to do and how to do it, who should be the one to define the direction?  There were many attempt to foster self-management throughout history, and some experiments didn’t work out. Partially because people were not ready for self-management because of  wrong image of self-managing and self-organizing organization – the question of the master manipulator hangs above that idea, and assumptions that emerge from that mental model actually destroy any possibility of creating a self-organizing organization. What helps us understand that concept is to look at other things that are self-organizing, that thrive at self-organization. If we look at manmade systems, we will not find any examples because of artificial surroundings. In his book  “The necessary revolution” Senge claims that seeing systems is the most important concept that helps cultivate an intelligence that we all possess and in that way to cultivate the positive force for systems intelligence to flourish on a larger scale. When people start seeing systems, they begin to understand the basic flaws in prevailing mental models and alternative futures that are possible (Senge, P., 2014). So, if “artificial” is a characteristic of something that is not self-organizing but imposed, then everything that is not artificial should have also the characteristic of self-organization. The answer is in the question: nature is self-organizing and gives us numerous examples how human organizations should be structured. The best example that one can come across when thinking about self-organizing communities is the community of ants. Ants teach us that there is no hierarchy but specialization, and that type of social structure is called eusociality. Eusociality is the ability for the certain group of ants (or insects) to specialize for certain job or work, losing the ability to do anything else, but in cooperation work to reach the mutual goal (rising of offspring, gathering food, etc..)

In those terms, when same principles apply to human society and/or organizations, then we can understand that all the answers are in the nature, because nature is self-organized and self-managed. Nature teaches us that there is really no need for the manager in a sense of having one god-like persona that directs and tells everybody what to do, but a leader who can help individuals develop their abilities and help people find one’s own purpose.  This type of self-organization has numerous implications, both on the organization itself and on the individual.

From the organization perspective: having  fifty without a manager people that work relentlessly on mutual goal is usually more productive than having one thousand people with managers, each one working on their own goals not understanding the mutual goal. This is partly because managers tend to tell people what they cannot do, rather to empower them to do it. Google organized their project teams of three individuals, with project leadership rotating between them. Similarly how ants do it, they put in charge the one whose abilities are appropriate for given situation. Leader is appointed not according to mutual consent by deciding who has the best leader traits, but by looking which ones traits are the best answer to current problem. Furthermore, when people are empowered to take lead according to their abilities, they are put in surroundings in which management still exists, but a different kind of management: the one where behaviors of both leaders and followers are induced, rather than compelled (Hock, D., 2000.).  In such self-organizations, power is never used; at least not the one whose sole purpose is to boost an ego of a manager, but power whose purpose is to solve the problem. By giving up power and coercive control – you get it back and have access to power. The question imposes why managers are not willing to give up their power. The problem is fear, they try to manage things, force them to their will. To do that immense energy is wasted solely on defending themselves. When this control is let go, the manager/leader then frees up huge amounts of energy spent in wrong way (Watts, W.A.1968.). To be able to let go that control, one should trust their subordinates and this main characteristic of a leader: leader has faith in his followers to do the job, and this trust is born out of humility, a feeling that your subordinates are equal to you, the leader. That freed power that is gained through letting go of control, having faith in subordinates and considering them equal is then divided throughout organization, and when power is divided – everybody becomes the leader, vision becomes mutual. In organizations where everybody is equal and does his best to reach the shared vision, productivity rises because workers stop being active and start being productive: problems are communicated and solved in order to reach the mutual goal. At this point, we should stop using the term self-management and start using the term self-organization. At this point the mental model of an old hierarchical organization becomes obsolete, and its alternative: self-organization becomes clearer. In comparison to hierarchical organization, self-organized one is decentralized, or in Clevelend’s terms: uncentralized, it becomes a real network of cooperation between groups of people specialized by their passion and gained power to work and achieve the mutual goal. When a network of passionate and specialized people starts communicating in such a way, a vision becomes a flux and not a rigid non-flexible axiom.  Since it is a flux, and everybody is a leader, everybody is also invited to participate in creation of that flux. When a self-organization reaches that state, it also becomes a dynamic organization, the one that has the freedom to change (or not to change) from day to day, and is as a chaordic organization powered from periphery, not from center. In this way, the vision will be a goal that can be reached, and the one that cannot live up to its plans. This is why hierarchical organizations fail: since there is no possibility for the people to participate in the vision (the god-like creature at the top is the one who communicates the vision), to change it according to its possibilities, since the people are not empowered to become leaders in their own fields, since power is used in coercive way and taken from people, since there is no trust, no faith, and rule of fear, the probability to reach the goals of the vision is rarely high. Or to put it better: the vision is not the one that is communicated, but the one that is known and not communicated, the taboo: to fulfill the wishes and achieve the ideas of workers direct superior, that often (due to lack of specialization) has anything to do with productive fulfillment of the vision. In that way, we should understand that in hierarchical organizations the real customer whom the whole organization is serving is actually – the CEO, which is, to put it in a simple term: wrong.

From the perspective of an individual, we have to recognize that simple acts of minifying subordinates mistakes and empowering them to decide for themselves how they will contribute to a mutual goal actually transforms unsatisfied workers that probably do not sleep at night  and are afraid of what will happen to them because of the hierarchical relationship with their boss  to a highly productive workers that like to talk of different subjects, proactively solve the problems of the company  and are repeatedly praised. This is the model of how leadership should look like. A leader has to understand that the most productive system is a uncentralized system, with every center being specialized for a certain job, every specialization center should take over the lead when an organization faces the problem which can be solved exactly by that specialization center. This type of organization should be backed also financially, and this can be done in two ways: everybody should start with the same pay-check. The work people do should be then categorized in order to define what type of work brings what type of revenue (or any other benefit to the company), and the basic pay should be multiplied with the index of complexity of the productivity (not activity). In that way, people can choose to do a lot of little improvements that will lead towards reaching the same goal or one big innovation that will be the game changer. The difference between the first worker and the lateral is simply in the knowledge. Knowledgeable workers tend to be more productive by applying their knowledge into daily business.  Second way is to build profit centers and gather specialized people around them. Each profit center should be responsible for their own budget they would receive after committing to reach a goal negotiated with other profit centers. The budget would be dynamic, going up or down on every quarterly forecast depending on contribution profit center had to fulfillment of a goal.

Furthermore, from the perspective of an individual, working in chaordic organization has several benefits. First, by pursuing their passion, people are intrinsically motivated to do what they love to do. And this is the holy grail of motivation: how to intrinsically motivate the worker. The answer is simple: let him or her do whatever they want to do, while they pursue the mutual goal. It does not matter how long they stay at work, do they work from nine to five, or even if they are coming to work, while they have their own way of contributing to an organization. Being able to organize one self, and not to feel that the punishment will follow because bosses requirements are not met is the crucial thing in letting the team go (Medinnila, A, 1998.)

In terms of self-organization, management has no future. At least, not what under the word “management” we understand today. Management will become just one of the jobs being done within the company, not putting people who manage businesses above nor below anybody else. The characteristic of the third industrial revolution: decentralization of production and distribution of services will apparently happen also within the organizations. Social structures will be disrupted, since fewer and fewer people are prone to be their own boss, there is not a single reason not to create organizations and companies according to those who make the company: people. And only in the moment when every single employee is a leader within his or hers line of work, when every leader works and collaborates with a goal to reach a mutual goal, then the noun “company” will achieve it’s true meaning. Until then, people will work in slaveries, not companies, being unproductive, unimaginative and unmotivated.

We should doubt that there is any possibility of changing current companies in such a way, but new ones with described structure will arise, become disruptive, more efficient and the same thing will happen that happens with all the companies that refuse to adapt and ride the tsunami of the future: they will go bankrupt.  It is a model in which internet replaced tv and other media, how air b’n’b replaced booking the hotel, Uber the taxi and all other examples how new emerging models had disruptive effect towards old economy of scarcity models.

The disruptive transformation of a company is a transformation of doing business, and also, in a way a transformation of how we live.

Branimir’s contact details:

Branimir Trosic, btrosic23@gmail.com

Stimulative technology

You are sick of reading about disruptive technology, well, I am anyway. When a technology changes many areas of life and business dramatically it is often labelled disruptive technology. Disruption was the business strategy buzzword of the last decade. Great news though: the primarily disruptive phase of IT is rapidly being replaced by a more stimulative phase, where it still changes things but in a more creative way. Disruption hasn’t stopped, it’s just not going to be the headline effect. Stimulation will replace it. It isn’t just IT that is changing either, but materials and biotech too.

Stimulative technology creates new areas of business, new industries, new areas of lifestyle. It isn’t new per se. The invention of the wheel is an excellent example. It destroyed a cave industry based on log rolling, and doubtless a few cavemen had to retrain from their carrying or log-rolling careers.

I won’t waffle on for ages here, I don’t need to. The internet of things, digital jewelry, active skin, AI, neural chips, storage and processing that is physically tiny but with huge capacity, dirt cheap displays, lighting, local 3D mapping and location, 3D printing, far-reach inductive powering, virtual and augmented reality, smart drugs and delivery systems, drones, new super-materials such as graphene and molybdenene, spray-on solar … The list carries on and on. These are all developing very, very quickly now, and are all capable of stimulating entire new industries and revolutionizing lifestyle and the way we do business. They will certainly disrupt, but they will stimulate even more. Some jobs will be wiped out, but more will be created. Pretty much everything will be affected hugely, but mostly beneficially and creatively. The economy will grow faster, there will be many beneficial effects across the board, including the arts and social development as well as manufacturing industry, other commerce and politics. Overall, we will live better lives as a result.

So, you read it here first. Stimulative technology is the next disruptive technology.

 

The future of MBAs

I’ve reached M in my ‘the future of’ series. So, MBAs.

We have all had to sit through talks where the speaker thinks that using lots of points that start with the same letter is somehow impressive. During one such talk, I got bored and produced this one letter fully comprehensive MBA. Enjoy:

The future of walled gardens

In the physical world, walled gardens are pretty places we visit, pay an entry fee, then enjoy the attractions therein. It is well understood that people often only value what they have to pay for and walled gardens capitalise on that. While there, we may buy coffees or snacks from the captive facilities at premium prices and we generally accept that premium as normal practice. Charging an entry fee ensures that people are more likely to stay inside for longer, using services (picnic areas, scenery, toilets etc) they have already paid for rather than similar ones outside that may be free and certainly instead of paying another provider as well.

In the content industry, the term applies to bundles of services from a particular supplier or available on a particular platform. There is some financial, psychological, convenience, time or other cost to enter and then to leave. Just as with the real thing, they have a range of attractions within that make people want to enter, and once there, they will often access local service variants rather than pay the penalty to leave and access perhaps better ones elsewhere. Our regulators started taking notice of them in the early days of cable TV, addressed the potential abuses and sometimes took steps to prevent telecoms or cable companies from locking customers in. More recently, operating system and device manufacturers have also fallen under the same inspection.

Commercial enterprises have an interest in keeping customers within their domain so that they can extract the most profit from them. What is less immediately obvious is why customers allow it. If people want to use a particular physical facility, such as an airport, or a particular tourist attraction such as a city, or indeed a walled garden, then they have to put up with the particular selection of shops and restaurants there, and are vulnerable to exploitation such as higher prices because of the lack of local choice. There is a high penalty in time and expense to find an alternative. With device manufacturers, the manufacturer is in an excellent position to force customers to use services from those they have selected, and that enables them to skim charges for transactions, sometimes from both ends. The customer can only avoid that by using multiple devices, which incurs a severe cost penalty. There may be some competition among apps within the same garden, but all are subject to the rules of the garden. Operating systems are also walled gardens, but the OS usually just goes with the choice of device. It may be possible to swap to an alternative, but few users bother; most just accept the one that it comes with.

Walled gardens in the media are common but easier to avoid. With free satellite and terrestrial TV as well as online video and TV services, there is now abundant choice, though each provider still tries to make cute little walled gardens if they can. Customers can’t get access to absolutely all content unless they pay multiple subscriptions, but can minimize outlay by choosing the most appropriate garden for their needs and staying in it.

The web has disappointed though. When it was young, many imagined it would become a perfect market, with suppliers offering services and everyone would see all the offerings, all the prices and make free decisions where to buy and deal direct without having to pay for intermediaries. It has so badly missed the target that Berners Lee and others are now thinking how it can be redesigned to achieve the original goals. Users can theoretically browse freely, but the services they actually want to use often become natural monopolies, and can then expand organically into other territories, becoming walled gardens. The salvation is that new companies can always emerge that provide an alternative. It’s impossible to monopolize cyberspace. Only bits of it can be walled off.

Natural monopolies arise when people have free access to everything but one supplier offers something unique and thus becomes the only significant player. Amazon wasn’t a walled garden when it started so much as a specialist store that grew into a small mall and is now a big cyber-city. Because it is so dominant and facilitates buying from numerous suppliers, it certainly qualifies as a walled garden now, but it is still possible to easily find many other stores. By contrast, Facebook has been a walled garden since its infancy, with a miniature web-like world inside its walls with its own versions of popular services. It can monitor and exploit the residents for as long as it can prevent them leaving. The primary penalties for leaving are momentarily losing contact with friends and losing interface familiarity, but I have never understood why so many people spend so much of their time locked within its walls rather than using the full range of web offerings available to them. The walls seem very low, and the world outside is obviously attractive, so the voluntary confinement is beyond my comprehension.

There will remain be a big incentive for companies to build walled gardens and plenty of scope for making diverse collections of unique content and functions too and plenty of companies wanting to make theirs as attractive as possible and attempt to keep people inside. However, artificial intelligence may well change the way that networked material is found, so the inconvenience wall may vanish, along with the OS and interface familiarity walls. Deliberate barriers and filters may prevent it gaining access to some things, but without deliberate obstruction, many walled gardens may only have one side walled, that of price for unique content. If that is all it has to lock people in, then it may really be no different conceptually from a big store. Supermarkets offer this in the physical world, but many other shops remain.

If companies try to lock in too much content in one place, others will offer competing packages. It would make it easier for competitors and that is a disincentive. If a walled garden becomes too greedy, its suppliers and customers will go elsewhere. The key to managing them is to ensure diversity by ensuring the capability to compete. Diversity keeps them naturally in check.

Network competition may well be key. If users have devices that can make their own nets or access many externally provided ones, the scope for competition is high, and the ease of communicating and dealing directly is also high. It will be easy for producers to sell content direct and avoid middlemen taking a cut. That won’t eliminate walled gardens, because some companies will still do exclusive deals and not want to deal direct. There are many attractive business models available to potential content producers and direct selling is only one. Also, as new streams of content become attractive, they are sometimes bought, and this can be the intended exit strategy for start-ups.

Perhaps that is where we are already at. Lots of content that isn’t in walled gardens exists and much is free. Much is exclusive to walled gardens. It is easy to be influenced by recent acquisitions and market fluctuations, but really, the nature of the market hasn’t really changed, it just adapts to new physical platforms. In the physical world, we are free to roam but walled gardens offer attractive destinations. The same applies to media. Walled gardens won’t go away, but there is also no reason to expect them to take over completely. With new networks, new business models, new entrepreneurs, new content makers, new viewing platforms, the same business diversity will continue. Fluctuating degrees of substitution rather than full elimination will continue to be the norm.

Or maybe I’m having an off-day and just can’t see something important. Who knows?

 

 

The future of Fridays

F now. Done fairies, food, fashion, never done Fridays, so here we go.

TFIF is a common sentiment for wage slaves. Some of us are very fortunate and manage to earn sufficient income from things we love doing, but most people have to make do with jobs instead. If you don’t enjoy your work, then the weekend often promises a welcome break and Friday is a long emotional run-up or run-down.

Many companies have discovered that staff work better when they are happy, and that people can be very creative when they are having fun. Some of them have introduced formal contractual agreements or at least informal managerial tolerance of their staff working a proportion of their time on their own projects, typically 10%.

Few bother to coordinate or manage such activities, leaving that to the staff themselves. I believe that is a mistake. With a few minor tweaks, this could really become a good source of employee fulfillment and corporate revenue.

Self-managing should be an option for sure, but it should be permitted and even encouraged to rope other people into your interesting projects, consensually of course. An engineer might have some great ideas, but some other staff might have other skills appropriate to bring it through to realization. Lots of staff might welcome being involved in other people’s pet projects if they sound more fun than their own ideas.

Companies should also make the full company resources available in the same proportion. A project probably still needs some expenditure, even if it is for fun.

They should also allow people to join up with appropriate people from other companies where it will provide a benefit. Obviously, there needs to be some reasonable restriction on that, but it is certainly feasible and potentially valuable.

Why? Surely the company employs accountants and strategists and planners and directors to decide what to do and where to allocate funds? Actually, the staff sometimes know better. Senior staff may be marginally better at some things than those below them and therefore managed to get through a few promotion interviews, but that doesn’t make them infallible or omniscient. Every employee probably knows better what they are really good at than their boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. Many will have a pretty good idea how they can make things better, or have an idea for a new technique or product or service. Some might not work, but letting them try will bring in a few valuable wins, and even when it doesn’t, it will still maker the staff happier, more self-fulfilled, and importantly, more loyal and productive. If your staff love you and your company because you let them enjoy themselves, you will find them easier to manage and more productive, so you’ll get rewarded too.

When this is all informal and uncoordinated, it doesn’t achieve full potential. Making Friday, or Friday afternoon at least, a time when everyone plays at their own projects would allow the project team-building and managing to work well. If lots of companies adopt it, there would be a large pool of people from lots of companies to add value to their companies, their own lives, and their communities. It would be fun, it would make everyone happier and we’d all benefit from the results.As part of the ongoing evolution of capitalism into a warmer, more human-centered care economy, it is a natural next step.

So, fun-friday. Not because the weekend is coming, but because Friday’s themselves are fun.

 

Automation and the London tube strike

I was invited on the BBC’s Radio 4 Today Programme to discuss automation this morning, but on Radio 4, studio audio quality is a higher priority than content quality, while quality of life for me is a higher priority than radio exposure, and going into Ipswich greatly reduces my quality of life. We amicably agreed they should find someone else.

There will be more automation in the future. On one hand, if we could totally automate every single job right now, all the same work would be done, so the world would still have the same overall wealth, but then we’d all be idle so our newly free time could be used to improve quality of life, or lie on beaches enjoying ourselves. The problem with that isn’t the automation itself, it is mainly the deciding what else to do with our time and establishing a fair means of distributing the wealth so it doesn’t just stay with ‘the mill owners’. Automation will eventually require some tweaks of capitalism (I discuss this at length in my book Total Sustainability).

We can’t and shouldn’t automate every job. Some jobs are dull and boring or reduce the worker to too low a level of  dignity, and they should be automated as far as we can economically – that is, without creating a greater problem elsewhere. Some jobs provide people with a huge sense of fulfillment or pleasure, and we ought to keep them and create more like them. Most jobs are in between and their situation is rather more complex. Jobs give us something to do with our time. They provide us with social contact. They stop us hanging around on the streets picking fights, or finding ways to demean ourselves or others. They provide dignity, status, self-actualisation. They provide a convenient mechanism for wealth distribution. Some provide stimulation, or exercise, or supervision. All of these factors add to the value of jobs above the actual financial value add.

The London tube strike illustrates one key factor in the social decision on which jobs should be automated. The tube provides an essential service that affects a very large number of people and all their interests should be taken into account.

The impact of potential automation on individual workers in the tube system is certainly important and we shouldn’t ignore it. It would force many of them to find other jobs, albeit in an area with very low unemployment and generally high salaries. Others would have to change to another role within the tube system, perhaps giving assistance and advice to customers instead of pushing buttons on a ticket machine or moving a lever back and forward in a train cab. I find it hard to see how pushing buttons can offer the same dignity or human fulfillment as directly helping another person, so I would consider that sort of change positive, apart from any potential income drop and its onward consequences.

On the other hand, the cumulative impacts on all those other people affected are astronomically large. Many people would have struggled to get to work. Many wouldn’t have bothered. A few would suffer health consequences due to the extra struggle or stress. Perhaps a few small business on the edge of survival will have been killed. Some tourists won’t come back, a lot will spend less. A very large number of businesses and individuals will suffer significantly to let the tube staff make a not very valid protest.

The interests of a small number of people shouldn’t be ignored, but neither should the interests of a large number of people. If these jobs are automated, a few staff would suffer significantly, most would just move on to other jobs, but the future minor miseries caused to millions would be avoided.

Other jobs that should be automated are those where staff are give undue power or authority over others. Most of us will have had bad experiences of jobsworth staff, perhaps including ticketing staff, whose personal attitude is rather less than helpful and whose replacement by a machine would make the world a better place. A few people sadly seem to relish their power to make someone else’s life more difficult. I am pleased to see widespread automation of check-in at airports for that reason too. There were simply too many check-in assistants who gleefully stood in front of big notices saying that rudeness and abuse will not be tolerated from customers, while happily abusing their customers, creating maximum inconvenience and grief to their customers through a jobsworth attitude or couldn’t-care-less incompetence. Where people are in a position of power or authority, where a job offers the sort of opportunities for sadistic self-actualisation some people get by making other people’s lives worse, there is a strong case for automation to avoid the temptation to abuse that power or authority.

As artificial intelligence and robotics increase in scope and ability, many more jobs will be automated, but more often it will affect parts of jobs. Increasing productivity isn’t a bad thing, nor is up-skilling someone to do a more difficult and fulfilling job than they could otherwise manage. Some parts of any job are dull, and we won’t miss them, if they are replaced by more enjoyable activity. In many cases, simple mechanical or information processing tasks will be replaced by those involving people skills, emotional skills. By automating these bits where we are essentially doing machine work, high technology forces us to concentrate on being human. That is no bad thing.

While automation moves people away from repetitive,boring, dangerous, low dignity tasks, or those that give people too much opportunity to cause problems for others, I am all in favour. Those jobs together don’t add up to enough to cause major economic problems. We can find better work for those concerned.

We need to guard against automation going too far though. When jobs are automated faster than new equivalent or better jobs can be created, then we will have a problem. Not from the automation itself, but as a result of the unemployment, the unbalanced wealth distribution, and all the social problems that result from those. We need to automate sustainably.

Human + machine is better than human alone, but human alone is probably better than machine alone.

Will marketing evolve from fiend to friend?

Let’s start with a possibly over-critical view of marketing today, to emphasise the problem that I think needs solved.

Marketing helps to make us aware of new products and services we might want to buy, and provides some well paid jobs. That’s the good side. But marketing saps a lot of money out of the system, skimming off money as it helps move it around – like banking, or car parking fees for shoppers, without giving much back to GDP. It helps companies sell things, but adds costs to the customer that could have been spent on other products and services. We basically pay companies to tell us to buy their products. Of that money, marketers spend far too high a proportion on advertising, which is basically the lazy marketing option. They waste our time as we watch TV, cold call us, send nuisance texts and automated calls, fill our data quotas with video ads, delay downloads, force installation of applications to block them, which all requires extra computer power and maintenance. In short, we pay them to waste a significant proportion of our precious lifetime as well as our money. In fact the financial cost added to every product is dwarfed by the costs of the extra time consumed. All the extra energy used to broadcast ads on TV or the net or the extra paper and bleach and ink to put them in magazines has an enormous environmental impact too. Advertising consumes a huge amount of resources but on a per-advert basis is very ineffective at making us buy. Google makes a fortune from UK companies for its adverts but by diverting the ad sales through Ireland, manages to avoid paying UK tax, therefore pulling off an excellent vampire impression, dressing stylish and looking cool while sucking the lifeblood from industry. By using up so much air time and online bandwidth advertising directly impedes productive uses. On current form, because of excessive reliance on the lazy option, marketers are more fiend than friend.

Marketing has almost become a one-tool profession, too willing to annoy a lot of people to get a few sales. Other components of marketing such as launch events and trade shows are effective and very effectively target those who are likely to be interested, but advertising dwarfs them. Surely there has to be a better way. How do we get marketing to go from fiend to friend?

There is. Pull marketing (if done properly) gives people what they ask for, in the right form, on the right platform, when they ask for it, not what they don’t want, in their faces, all the time. Marketing will evolve from push to pull. However much the marketing industry and advertisers don’t want it to go that way, the potential value for a given spend via pull marketing is so much higher that it is inevitable. Think about it. Only an idiot would employ someone to stand in a doorway blocking the entrance, jumping up and down screaming messages at customers that are actually trying to squeeze past into the store to spend money. That is the difference between push and pull. Unfortunately for marketers, pull needs different skills, so if they don’t have them, they need to retrain or they will eventually be made redundant. They can hide and massage performance figures for a while to hide the ineffectiveness of throwing money down the drain on advertising, but not forever.

People want to know what is available that might be of interest to them. They also want clues to help filter the vast number of potential products down to a manageable choice. They don’t want silence from suppliers, but appropriate and timely information. Branding is aimed at this of course. So is PR. Marketing should be better integrated into ongoing background brand management and public relations, with excellent web sites to provide information when people want it. In that way, people will think of them when they want something, and be able to find the most appropriate product easily.

The task of providing a good website is often allocated to other groups in the company. This is a mistake. The website needs to be extremely well integrated with marketing, PR and brand. In many companies, only the brand people get a strong influence. A potential customer coming to the site from any angle of approach should be faced with extremely easy navigation, immersed in the values and styles they already associate with that brand and assisted as far as possible in what they are trying to do. They should not be bombarded with waves of ads, popups and guano that prevents them from finding what they want. Even if a customer wants to cancel a service, it should be very easy to do so. They are far more likely to come back than if they had to spend ages finding their way through a maze and over barriers to do so.

One way of keeping customers aware without ramming branding message down their throats every day is to integrate into target communities as useful members rather than just seeing them as potential sales. People will always favour their friends, so actually being a friend is a good idea. That shouldn’t be any great revelation. Big companies recognise their relative inability to engage with local communities across their range and harness an army of resellers who can better achieve this local involvement. Social networking provides a good alternative channel to local resellers, but not by using the wasteful and annoying blanket broadcasting that we usually see. It needs to be focused. A reseller wouldn’t waste time cold calling every resident in an area just in case. They focus efforts on targets that are likely to buy. They do the customer’s work for them, identifying those for whom a product is suited and then making contact. Being friends also means giving genuine discounts or exclusive deals to regular customers. It doesn’t mean using them to palm off products that you can’t shift through normal channels.

Lifestyle is an easy route too. Everyone lives differently, but many people reveal their lifestyles via magazines or newspapers that they buy, the places they visit, the things they do, and indeed the products and services they buy. These are obviously high value marketing hooks. People like their existing opinions and attitudes to be reaffirmed. Letting them know they have made a good decision buying your product makes them feel better about the spend. It takes skill to package such affirming in a way that it doesn’t come across like the lazy ‘congratulations on buying this’. Providing favourable reviews, news links and ongoing support would soon become spam if used too much, but sparingly and with appropriate products, it can be useful.

Handled properly, excluding employees with deep staff discounts, the most likely person to buy is someone who has bought from you before, then in second place, someone who has bought equivalent products from a competitor, then someone who has a strong proven interest in that field. Much further away is someone with a casual unspecified interest in the area who just happens to have chosen a particular keyword in a search for any reason whatsoever, and in the very far distance, a total stranger. Yet those last two are where most advertising revenue is spent.

Magazines are an excellent platform to reach targeted groups, but they still need the right approach. An advert in a magazine is more likely to be read than one in a newspaper, but is still likely to be ignored. An article by a trusted writer will be read, and if it mentions your product favourably, the trust in the writer transfers to your product. If they already have it, it builds the feel-good factor. Strongly themed magazines form an important part of the self-selected lifestyle choice, especially since people can only buy a few each month, and this trust and identification with its writers can go far beyond the magazine itself, into their social media and blogs, and soon, into their augmented reality as they wander around. As social media continues to expand into the high street with location-based services, that relationship will grow and winning the favour and approval of writers will become a more important part of marketing. Care is needed of course. Writers will not want to appear partial since that would compromise their trust and their following, but providing exclusive information to them and being honest about defects wins support without threatening impartiality.

As we move into the era of augmented reality, companies are already discovering how to use precise location. Today, location doesn’t just rely on GPS or mobile signal strengths. Image recognition can identify a customer and also exactly where they are, what gestures they are making, even the expression on their face. From those and various other contributing factors is evolving the huge technology field called context. Context is very important in knowing whether to give marketing information at all and if so, how and what. It helps make sure that efforts are spent to make customers want to buy rather then to make them avoid you. A family might be interested in meal vouchers when lunchtime is creeping up. If they’ve just eaten (and paid), the same vouchers may be very unwelcome. If I have just bought a car, the last thing I want is proof that I could have got it or a better one cheaper or had some extras thrown in!

As context technology develops in parallel with positioning, image recognition and augmented reality technology, we will see the air around us essentially digitised, context-sensitive messages pinned to every cubic millimetre of the air. Digital air, or virtual air, will be a major new marketing platform that will offer hugely more potential and value than advertising, with far less cost and customer annoyance. It also offers the potential to bombard customers with unwelcome blanket ads too, so it will be easy for the industry to shoot itself in the foot. Not just easy, but probably inevitable in an industry with some players who think it is smart to deliberately offend people. If that happens, spam filters will block such ads and the potential will be damaged irreparably for everyone.

Word of mouth is one of the best forms of marketing. It is free and natural and goes to companies who provide good products or services. In its simplest form, it is like ebay’s  reputation score on Facebook’s ‘like’ button. At a higher detail level, companies such as Trip Advisor make good income by harnessing the desire people have to tell others about their experiences, good or bad. People will often take guidance from strangers when there is no better alternative, and even though everyone knows some reviews are by friends, competitors or by people who have never even had any experience of the supplier, if there are a lot of strangers giving reviews, the assumed probability is that most will be telling the truth and any bias will be reduced.

Even so, these sites don’t reach the same level of trust that people have in their friends and colleagues. We should expect that to be harnessed far more in the next few years. Innovative Amazon is among the leaders as always, trying to harness this with its ‘I just bought’ social network button. However, I’m not at all interested what my friends have bought. I am far more interested in whether it turned out to be a good or a bad buy, and then only if I am looking for something similar. I certainly don’t want spam every time anyone I know buys anything. A service that lets people review stuff and then allows people to see the reviews, sorted according to social proximity of the reviewer would be far better. If such a site already exists, as it may well do, I am not yet exposed to it, so it has its own marketing to do. So what is needed would be a site like Trip Advisor, but with a social proximity selector that strips away reviews from friends and competitors, restricts to those who have actually purchased, and then sorted according to social proximity with the reader. By linking to your other social network sites, and identifying your friends and colleagues, it would be able to show you any reviews from that group.

Unfortunately, we already see a rising barrier to this kind of development. Too often, companies want access to our social networks to do push marketing to a broader community of relevance, to make personalized ads, and essentially to use our contacts to abuse us even more efficiently. That is an industry destroying its own future prospects. By misusing the potential to do its push marketing today, it is destroying the potential to do far more effective pull marketing tomorrow. It gets a tiny benefit today at the expense of a huge one tomorrow. Most of us have already become wary of allowing access to our contacts lists because we already assume for good reason that they will be abused. Spam filters quickly remove any short-term benefit they may have won, and prevent future mutual benefit.

Most of these areas of future potential share the same threat of destruction by the very industry that can benefit most. Marketing will move from push to pull whether marketers want it to or not. By trying to force the worst practices from the push era onto the areas that offer the best potential in the pull era, they will only ensure that marketing will remain an underachiever. Sadly, a few players today can and probably will ruin it for many tomorrow. The result is that marketers will marginalize themselves, making themselves relatively powerless in a world where they could have been powerful.

People will find what they want, and what their friends think of things, but they will do so via sites and intermediary companies who respect them, respect their privacy, and give them what they want, not what they try hard to avoid getting, not via push marketers. Pull marketing done well will go to new players who have no time for the old practices and values, to people who want to improve the lives of others by helping them make the right purchasing decisions, not trying to make them buy the wrong ones.  The likely mechanism for this is use of social networking sites that have a different business model than selling adverts – perhaps even ones with the primary purpose of helping the community and improving quality of life rather than making money.

Marketing will evolve from fiend to friend. Hopefully it will be by the fiends reforming, rather than simply dying.

And another new book: You Tomorrow, 2nd Edition

I wrote You Tomorrow two years ago. It was my first ebook, and pulled together a lot of material I’d written on the general future of life, with some gaps then filled in. I was quite happy with it as a book, but I could see I’d allowed quite a few typos to get into the final work, and a few other errors too.

However, two years is a long time, and I’ve thought about a lot of new areas in that time. So I decided a few months ago to do a second edition. I deleted a bit, rearranged it, and then added quite a lot. I also wrote the partner book, Total Sustainability. It includes a lot of my ideas on future business and capitalism, politics and society that don’t really belong in You Tomorrow.

So, now it’s out on sale on Amazon

http://www.amazon.co.uk/You-Tomorrow-humanity-belongings-surroundings/dp/1491278269/ in paper, at £9.00 and

http://www.amazon.co.uk/You-Tomorrow-Ian-Pearson-ebook/dp/B00G8DLB24 in ebook form at £3.81 (guessing the right price to get a round number after VAT is added is beyond me. Did you know that paper books don’t have VAT added but ebooks do?)

And here’s a pretty picture: