Metadata

The instructions

Futurology

• Latin futurum, or future + the Greek -logia (the science of).
• coined by German professor Ossip Flechtheum in 1943 along with H. G. Wells
  • "futurism" an interdisciplinary field combining mathematics, engineering, art, technology, economics, design, history, geography, biology, theology physics and philosophy.
• Organizations that can see trends early enough to take action have the first-mover influence.
  • They can also help to inform and shape the broader context, conversing and collaborating with those in other fields to plan ahead.

202530211713 - Futurist: Skilled at listening to and interpreting the signals talking.

Lizard Brains

Our resistance to change is hardwired in the oldest, reptilian portion of our brains, which is located down the brainstem and cerebellum.

• Controls our fight or flight, vital functions, heart rate, and body temp.
  • When it is forced to make a decision about an unfamiliar topic, it protests by causing us psychological distress, fear, and anxiety.
• Technology has forced us to either make poor decisions or make none at all, and it is causing or will eventually lead to cataclysmic, unwelcome disruption.
• We focus too narrowly on value chains rather than thinking about how what we're doing fits into the bigger ecosystem.

Forecasting is a process

• Forecasting the future requires a certain amount of mental ambidexterity. Just as a piano player must control her left and right hands as she glides around the keyboard playing Monk, you need to learn how to think in two ways at once — both monitoring what's happening in the present and thinking through how the present relates to the future.

Forecasting

Definition

• Simultaneously recognizing patterns in the present and thinking about how those changes will impact the future.
• If we subscribe to the laws of the universe, we must agree from the outset that there is no one, predetermined future, but rather a possibility of many futures, each depending on a variety of factors.

An element of strategic thinking, which informs strategy-making, enriching the context within which strategy is developed, planned, and executed.

The Method - 6 Steps

1. Find the Fringe

• It's at the fringe that all trends are born
• "Building an Organic Computing Device with Multiple Interconnected Brains": Miguel Nicolelis, Director of the Center for Neuroengineering at Duke University
  • Wired a monkey's brain to see if it could send brain signals over a standard internet connection to control a robot arm in another city.
  • Led to A paralyzed man wearing an exoskeleton to be able to kick a soccer ball at the 2014 world cup.

  We were paid to go to the edge and discover what is out there.

  • Finding the fringe thinkers is the first part of the forecasting process
  • If you are looking for the future of something, the first step is to consider the intersecting vectors of change. You need to seek out people who think differently. In short, you need to cast a wider net.
  • Fringe thinkers can push the boundaries of their imaginations without having to worry about

2. Use 202201160957 - CIPHER

• In order to solve the mystery of the future, you need to investigate the present by collecting data, intelligence, and information, adding detail to the fringe sketch
• A Cipher is a method of distinguishing information within text to send a message in secret code. In computing, ciphers are algorithms—a series of defined steps—that encrypt or decrypt an email, a document, or a sensitive file. In order fo a cipher to work, it must use a reliable pattern.
• CIPHER: Contradictions, Inflections, Practices, Hacks, Extremes, and Rarities

Investments in the future

• 20220708 - Google has investments in Uber, Editas Medicine (a genomic editing startup with expertise in CRISPR/Cas9), Kobalt Music (an independent music rights and publishing company), robotics companies including Schaft, Industrial Perceptions, Redwood Robotics, Bot & Dolly, Meka Robotics, Holomini, and Boston Dynamics

Recognizing Patterns

• Reading: { Subliminial: How your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by & Leonard Mlodinow
• Honing your pattern recognition skills enables you to extract meaning from how the relationships, individuals, and organiztions at the fringe are connected to the 202112290117 - A Trend#^7bdee9
• The Kanizsa Triangle illusion: It is important not to focus on just one thing, but to simultaneously observe the motion between objects. Zooming out to observe not just the fringe, but the other sources of change.

20220708 - Google's Patterns

The reason we really created GOOG-411 is becasuse we need to build a great speech to text model that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.

• Google was venturing into voice recognition, which could have wide application across numerous products and services.

  we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off that — by getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we're trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.

3. Ask the right questions

Shredding a trend candidate apart and challenging assumptions and knowledge is the third step and it required starting with one big question: What would have to be true in order for X trend to prove out as a manifestation of sustained change within society?

The Uber for X trend

• Forecasting the future requires us to identify trends and track them as they move from the fringe to the mainstrea. Once you've cast a wide enough net at the fringe for unusual suspects and applied CIPHER to identify trend candidates, you must stop and interrogate your work and what you think you know.
• Uber for X": "X" was any established business sector (such as package delivery) that someone was promising to disrupt with new technology like Uber's.
  - A good example of what happens when we don'y stop to investigate a trend, asking difficult questions and challenging our cherished beliefs.

X Factor - CIPHER

Contradiction: Uber platform relied on mobile tech. At the time, phone sales were up 91% year over year in a 2010 recession.
Inflection: THe job market tanked and myriad developers got to work thinking about and tinkering with new kinds of sharing economy platforms
Practice: Uber was a workaround for a standard practice, threatening the established orthodoxy. Kalanick wasn't just building another car service. His ride-sharing idea was, at its core, about building and advanced, pervasive peer-to-peer network.
Hack: Uber was a clever hack for paying with cash. Its payment gateway used client-side encryption written in a mobile language. It was tremendously easy to use and sparked consumer mindset change around payment for products and services (_Why wasn't every transaction that easy?__)

• The app was so easy to use that its surge pricing was a price to pay for an easy service — it was too good to pass up.
  Extreme: Uber pushed the boundaries of electronic dispatching and better understood consumer demand like no other transportation service.
  Rarity: No company has been able to replicate uber's success on a similar scale — both in the amount of countries it has navigated into and the reliability of consumer behavior.

Cognitive shortcuts and Disads

• In order to understand important events looming on the horizon and forecast what's to come, most people stop looking when they identify (or hear about) a possible trend.
• Availability Heuristic: Our brains make cognitive shortcuts, and we think that the possibility of something happening is higher simply because an example comes to mind easily.
• Shredding a trend candidate apart and challenging assumptions and knowledge is the third step and it required starting with one big question: What would have to be true in order for the "flash sale for "X" trend to prove out as a manifestation of sustained change within society?
• Belief Bias: When a conclusion fits within our existing systems of belief and we don't challenge the facts.
  • Moving past a belief bias requires deliberate disagreement, even if you believe in what you're seeing
  • For every resolution you argued, your team has to break the big concepts down into smaller parts and then see if you could prove each one wrong. These counter arguments are called Disads or "disadvantages," and they broke apart every part of the opposing assertions, bit by bit, in order to show every single way in which the assumptions, evidence, and impact were wrong, untrue, or overblown.

Questions

• What would it take for "Uber for X" to represent a new manifestation of a sustained change within society?
• What is the basic human need being addressed by "uber for X," and is it catalyzed by new technology?
• In what way did the "Uber for X" trend materialize as a series of unconnectable dots that began out on the fringe and moved into the mainstream?
• Could it be that Uber itself is the trend?

Could it be that Uber itself is the trend?

Uber-Powered Potato Farms

• Uber represents a "transportation as a service" trend, and it will eventually market and sell this service to its partners, just as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Adobe sell their "software as a service" to companies and organizations all over the world.

4. Calculate the ETA

Is it really awesome?

You need not only to follow the path of a trend, but evaluate how quickly its moving

• Tracking a tend's trajectory isn't as simple as anticipating when a new techonology might reach critical mass in the marketplace. It isn't a linear process.

ETA=(distance/speed) +/- (events along the route)

• Independent variables can and do affect the speed with which a technology gains enough critical mass to influence business and how society operates.

Trends Timing=(internal tech developments, or I)+/-(external events, or E)

• (E) External events: Adjacent developments and circumstances that will impact the trend's future, even if technology leaps forward, Often these events are completely outside and organization's control.
• (I) Internal tech developments: Technological advances specific to or directly impacted by a trend. These advances often happen within the organization, or as a result of a partnership between the organization and outside researchers.
• In order to calculate where a trend is on its trajectory, we have to resolve our own belief biases and fight against our desire to confirm the existence of a future scenario before we believe in its plausibility. We have to calculate a trend's ETA—its I with E.

A GPS for Trends

• Step 4 of our forecasting methodology informs up that failing to keep watch on a trend, or assuming that it will travel along a straigh path at a set speed, is a mistake that is often made by forecasters and the bysinesses who rely on trends research.

5. Create scenarios and strategies

Step five of out forecasting method is: To use & Herman Kahn's technique of storytelling and put the facts into a narrative context to develop possible scenarios for the future.

• IF (facts, perspectives, framing)...THEN (outcomes)

If this, then that

• Future falacy trap: When your inflexibility on details causes mistakes in your planning for the future.
• The fifth step of the forecasting process: How can we transition from identifying all the elements of a technology trend to taking the right kind of action? There is a better approach — it involves telling a good story
• Data without details won't satiate our instinctive need for a narrative and as a result, we'll have a difficult time analyzing impact in advance.

Details, Not just data

• & Herman Kahn: A physicist at the RAND corporation who was asked in the 1950's to help military planners answer questions no one wanted to think about, such as, "What happens if the soiets strike New York City with a tremendous thermonuclear weapon? How could New York be evacuated safely and on short notice?"
• Kahn and his friend & Leo Rosten, a writer and humorist
• Scenarios: Attempts to describe in some detail a hypothetical sequence of events that could lead plausibly to the situation envisaged.

  "We deliberately chose the word to deglamorize the concept. In writing scenarios for various situations we kept saying 'Remember, it's only a scenario,' the kind of thing that is produced by Hollywood writers."

• "If this, then that" thinking allows us to interpret how trends, and in our case, emerging technologies, will impact an organization, an industry, and even our entire society.
• The logical next step after determining where a trend is on its trajectory is to follow with an "if this then that" statement. Step five of out forecasting method is: To use & Herman Kahn's technique of storytelling and put the facts into a narrative context to develop possible scenarios for the future.
  • Our goal isn't to predict something that will definitely happen. Instead, we must envision all of the possible outcomes and use them to help us make an informed decision about strategy to employ in the present.

Good stories require formulas

• Basic plots for storytelling: the Comedy, the tragedy, the rags-to-riches story, the quest, the voyage, the return, and stories of humans versus humans, monsters, nature, or society.

• IF { The Signals are Talking#^ea5850

• Facts: Data and research
• Perspectives: Who are the characters of our scenario? possible nodes (the characters) and connectors (the relationships they have to each other)
• Framing: Since people make decisions about the future of tech, we need a framing of human emotion: what we wants to happen, what we fee, strongly can't or won't happen, and what we fear might actually come to fruition.
  • Four possible stories: Optimistic, pragmatic, pessimistic, and catastrophic
• Once we unhinge ourselves from the laws of nature as we understand them today (as well as the rules by which society operates), we can dream up possible future scenarios.
• Remember, not too many years ago, people would have thought that readying a book on a paper-thin screen covering a device that is, in effect, a portable library very strange indeed. { The Shallows - What the Internet is doing to our brains impact of Kindles
• In all possible scenarios, we break all the rules and consider tech within the realm of what we can imagine might happen in the farther future.
  **THEN (outcomes)
• The purpose of writing scenarios is to assists those in charge of making decisions.
  • "Which one of these scenarios do you really think will happen?" "How confident are you in that scenario?" "How much confidence do you have in the information you're presenting me with?"

6. Pressure-test your action

The final step of our forecasting process is to pressure-test any strategy created to address a technology trend - don't overlook the questions and details

• Once you've identified and proven out a trend, calculated its eta and developed scenarios and a strategy to address it, you must take on last step to ensure that your strategy is sound-and to force yourself to think through the implications of your actions.

The F.U.T.U.R.E Test

• Foundation: Do you have support from key stakeholders within your organization? Do they buy into the trend, the scenarios, and the confidence scores you've given them? Does your strategy address the issues you've uncovered while researching the trend?

• Unique: Does the action you're planning offer a unique value proposition, and is it clear to your customers? Is your strategy difficult to replicate? As competitors emerge, how will you help others continue to understand what differentiates you?

• Track: Given your organization's current or planned structure, are you able to set meaningful benchmarks and then follow the trend and measure your outcomes? Can you use that data for reliable analysis for customer retention and acquisition, both as you scale and for your long-term development cycle?

• Urgent: Does your trend strategy communicate a sense of urgency, both to your staff and to your intended audience? Will there be continued demand in the marketplace? Can you create demand within your customer base? Will customers see your project as indispensable and invaluable, even as the marketplace evolves and new competitors emerge?

• Recalibrate: The strategy you've created will likely need to evolve. How will you allocate time and money to tracking the trend and its implications?Can your project along with its intended customers as they upgrade their personal and corporate tech?

• Extensible: a design principle where future changes and potential growth are taken into consideration. How extensible is your strategy? Can it accomodate future changes easily? or does your trend strategy rely heavily on any third-party software, tools, services, devices, content, or code that your and your staff cannot control

• Pressure testing your strategy ensures that you aren't making the kinds of mistakes that will render your work ineffectual, cause you to miss additional scenarios, or launch products, services, or initiatives that can't be sustained.

Bots Behaving Badly

• In { De Corpore, a book written by & Thomas Hobbes, human reasoning is described as computation: "By reasoning, and understanding computation. And to compute is to collect the sum of many things added together at the same time, or to know the remainder when one thing has been taken from another. To reason therefore is the same as to add or subtract."
• In 1949, & Alan Turing, said:

"I do not see why it (the machine) should not enter any one of the fields normally covered by the human intellect, and eventually compete on equal terms. I do not think you even draw the line about sonnets, though the comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine"

• Turing proposed a thesis and a test: If someday a computer was able to answer questions in a manner indistinguishable from humans, this it must be "thinking."
• Turing Test: tests whether a given computer can successfully pass a human.

The rules

1. The future is not predetermined, but rather woven together by numerous threads that are themselves being woven in the present.
2. We can observe probable future threads in the present, as they are being woven.
3. We can impact our possible and probable futures in the present.

When Cars fly

• We failed to realize how important they would eventually become for bringing about a whole different paradigm shift. Compounding the problem were:
  1. The paradox of time: the bias of paying most attention to the last few signals you've seen, read, or heard —
  2. The difficulty the human brain has in describing something new using terms and ideas we don't yet understand.

Examples:

1. Flying cars don't represent a failure; they illustrate how the promise of exciting new technologies sometimes obscure real change that's actually underfoot.
2. Moving sidewalks and flying cars were trends in and of themselves> Rather, they were manifestations of something different: a 202112290117 - A Trend in autonomous travel.

Sorting out trends from Red Herrings

• Determine alternative narratives
  • A probable, plausible, and possible — for the future.

Example: Autonomous transportation

1. Senario 1: Probable
   • A hybrid system of semi-and fully autonomous transport utilizing a grid system covering the 3.9 million miles of public roads in the united states.
2. Senario 2: Plausible
   • In the next 100 years, we could have a layer on top of those zones, in the 2,000 to 3,500-foot range, designated for semi-autonomous human transport.
3. Senario 3: Possible
   • Moving around without any vehicles at all: Teleportation

All three scenarios for the future of transportation, and none include a car with wings. This gets to the heart of why, when thinking about the future, it's important to see around the corners of established though, and why we cannot dismiss what appear to be only incremental changes.

We've never needed a flying car. We've just needed a system of transportation that corresponds with the needs of o ur current lifestyles.

The future is a meaningless distinction: it is simultaneously three hundred years, one decade, , twelve months, two days, or forty-seven seconds from this very moment.

202112290117 - A Trend Influencers p.57

• Everyone within an organizations should be aware of trends
• Trends are subjected to and shaped by external forces (not a vacuum). Just as its useful to organize our thinking along a chronological path through time zones, it's important to categorize the various dimensions of our everyday life, with technology as the primary interconnector

1. Wealth distribution: Even as tech becomes more accessible, a ubiquitous, persistent digital divide will impact our future wealth distributions.
2. Education: Tech does not just affect students - teachers and administrators must now use electronic record keeping systems for tests and grading.
3. Government: There isn't a facet of our modern-day government that does not intersect with science and tech trends.
4. Politics: Citizen activists area banding together and using online petitions and social media to make sure their voices are heard.
5. Public Health: Cognitive computing platforms are helping public health researchers predict and map the health of our neighborhoods and communities
6. Demography: Understand how our population is shifting—our birth and death rates, income, population, migration, incidence of disease an other dynamics—is core to managing everything from big business to city government.
7. Economy: Science and tech trends intersect with all of the major economic indicators, whether that's durable goods retail trade, or residential construction.
8. Environment: Tech is both harming and improving our planet.
9. Journalism: How do we learn about the world around us? News gathering, publishing, and broadcasting are inextricably tied to the internet, our computers, mobile devices, algorithms, and the cloud.
10. Media: Our individual and collective use of social networks, chat services, digital video channels, photo sharing services, and so on have forever changed how we interact with each other.

Example

• Anyone seriously concerned about cybersecurity at Sony should have also considered how developments in media, the economy, government, politics, and wealth distributions would play a future role in people's attitudes, behaviors, and actions toward the company
• Terrorism:
  • Modern source of change: Media, Government, Education
  • Context: Terrorist groups are using social media channels to recruit new members in plain sight.
  • Tech Trend: Hactivists, while ofter destructive, are hacking for what they perceive to be in the public interest. Hacker terrorists will use the online world in order to evoke real-world acts of terrorism
  • Implication: Fighting terrorism in the future will mean creating highly sophisticated, algorithmically personalized digital propaganda.
• We misidentify trends (or miss them altogether) when we focus exclusively on technology, when the other factors in play are seemingly unrelated, or when the adjacent sources of change aren't part of a compelling narrative.
• It can be difficult to see trends, and especially challenging when all of the changes leading up to a trend's formation are relatively uninteresting, or when they threaten to upend or established, cherished beliefs.

How Trends Affect Companies p71

Those who intentionally plan for what's next can more easily forecast whats on the horizon and manifest their own preferred futures.

• The first era of computing, marked by machines that could calculate numbers, was giving way to a second era of programmable computers
  • These 2nd gen computers we faster, lighter systems that had enough memory to hold instruction sets.
• J. C. R. Licklider: Head if Behavioral Sciences and Command and Control Programs at DARPA
  • Envisioned "linked" computers using a homogeneous programming language. People might use the system to retrieve a set of data to work on and then share so that others could use it for their own research.
    • Basis for ARPANET: The advanced Research Projects Agency Network

Futurist Olaf Helmer, writing in his seminal 1967 Prospects of Technological Progress said that such a "world-wide network of specialists, each equipped with a console tied to one central computer and to electronic data banks would someday interact with one another via the computer network for the purpose of scientific research."

• D.E.C.: Digital Equipment Corporation
  • Created by Ken Olson and Harlan Anderson
  • Acquired in 1998 by Compaq

There is "no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." "The personal computer will fall flat on its face.
— Ken Olson, 1977

• No one foresaw the real trend: A third era taking a radically different shape as personal computing. They couldn't see how that very same tech might be desirable for everyday people to send messages to each other, to read the news, and to record history.
• Influences: Education, Economy, Media

Getting is right

Technology will advance, it will invariably intersect with other sources of change within society, and trends are the signposts showing us how changes will manifest in real life. Karl Benz's internal combustion engine eventually inspired the Ford Model T, which made Google's driverless fleet possible.

Trends are only useful when we look at them through multiple lenses as we gaze across all six times zones. We must think of trends as signposts that can illuminate the conditions we will likely encounter at some point in the future, even if that future is a century away.

Smart thinkers get trends wrong because of present-day bias and because they fail to think outside their usual frame of reference

Algorithms Don't predict moonshots p86

202201101006 - Algorithm: A set of rules that define a sequence of operations that have to be followed in particular order.

• President Kennedy didn't know with complete certainty that we could land on the moon—much less make it back to Earth safely. However, there seemed to be enough tangible evidence that setting the moon landing as a future goal would be enough tangible evidence that setting the moon landing as a future goal would enable NASA to reverse-engineer the necessary process, systems, and tech to make it possible.
  • Planning fir the moonshot shifted Kennedy's goal from possible to probable, turning his idea into reality when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in 1969.
• The future is not made up of predetermined, structured data alone. It changes as a result of people and what we are learning, breaking, achieving

Terms

• The paradox of time: the bias of paying most attention to the last few signals you've seen, read, or heard —
  • The difficulty the human brain has in describing something new using terms and ideas we don't yet understand.
• The toothbrush test: IF it is something you'd use once or twice a day and it makes your life better—like a toothbrush—it wins approval.
• Availability Heuristic: Our brains make cognitive shortcuts, and we think that the possibility of something happening is higher simply because an example comes to mind easily.
• Belief Bias: When a conclusion fits within our existing systems of belief and we don't challenge the facts. { The Signals are Talking#^fe7cd1
• CNC: Complex number computer—calculating numbers using binary addition.
  • The world's first electronic digital computer created in Sept 1937 by George Stibitz, a mathematician at 202201100932 - Bell Labratories.
  • Created using electromechanical relays, along with some flashlight bulbs, and a switch he fashioned out of a tobacco tin.
• ENIAC: The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer
  • Created in April 1943
  • First machine that could multitask as our computers do today
    • Programmable, could complete calculation, and very fast.
• Colossus Mark 1: Worked on by & Grace Hopper
  • Used to decrypt german radio teleprint messages