3 human qualities digital technology can’t replace in the future economy: experience, values and judgement

April 12, 2015 18 Comments

(Image by Kevin Trotman)

(Image by Kevin Trotman)

Some very intelligent people – including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates – seem to have been seduced by the idea that because computers are becoming ever faster calculating devices that at some point relatively soon we will reach and pass a “singularity” at which computers will become “more intelligent” than humans.

Some are terrified that a society of intelligent computers will (perhaps violently) replace the human race, echoing films such as the Terminator; others – very controversially – see the development of such technologies as an opportunity to evolve into a “post-human” species.

Already, some prominent technologists including Tim O’Reilly are arguing that we should replace current models of public services, not just in infrastructure but in human services such as social care and education, with “algorithmic regulation”. Algorithmic regulation proposes that the role of human decision-makers and policy-makers should be replaced by automated systems that compare the outcomes of public services to desired objectives through the measurement of data, and make automatic adjustments to address any discrepancies.

Not only does that approach cede far too much control over people’s lives to technology; it fundamentally misunderstands what technology is capable of doing. For both ethical and scientific reasons, in human domains technology should support us taking decisions about our lives, it should not take them for us.

At the MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy last week I got a chance to discuss some of these issues with Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, authors of “The Second Machine Age“, recently highlighted by Bloomberg as one of the top books of 2014. Andy and Erik compare the current transformation of our world by digital technology to the last great transformation, the Industrial Revolution. They argue that whilst it was clear that the technologies of the Industrial Revolution – steam power and machinery – largely complemented human capabilities, that the great question of our current time is whether digital technology will complement or instead replace human capabilities – potentially removing the need for billions of jobs in the process.

I wrote an article last year in which I described 11 well established scientific and philosophical reasons why digital technology cannot replace some human capabilities, especially the understanding and judgement – let alone the empathy – required to successfully deliver services such as social care; or that lead us to enjoy and value interacting with each other rather than with machines.

In this article I’ll go a little further to explore why human decision-making and understanding are based on more than intelligence; they are based on experience and values. I’ll also explore what would be required to ever get to the point at which computers could acquire a similar level of sophistication, and why I think it would be misguided to pursue that goal. In contrast I’ll suggest how we could look instead at human experience, values and judgement as the basis of a successful future economy for everyone.

Faster isn’t wiser

The belief that technology will approach and overtake human intelligence is based on Moore’s Law, which predicts an exponential increase in computing capability.

Moore’s Law originated as the observation that the number of transistors it was possible to fit into a given area of a silicon chip was doubling every two years as technologies for creating ever denser chips were created. The Law is now most commonly associated with the trend for the computing power available at a given cost point and form factor to double every 18 months through a variety of means, not just the density of components.

As this processing power increases, and gives us the ability to process more and more information in more complex forms, comparisons have been made to the processing power of the human brain.

But do the ability to process at the same speed as the human brain, or even faster, or to process the same sort of information as the human brain does, constitute the equivalent to human intelligence? Or to the ability to set objectives and act on them with “free will”?

I think it’s thoroughly mistaken to make either of those assumptions. We should not confuse processing power with intelligence; or intelligence with free will and the ability to choose objectives; or the ability to take decisions based on information with the ability to make judgements based on values.

bi-has-hit-the-wall

(As digital technology becomes more powerful, will its analytical capability extend into areas that currently require human skills of judgement? Image from Perceptual Edge)

Intelligence is usually defined in terms such as “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills“. What most definitions don’t include explicitly, though many imply it, is the act of taking decisions. What none of the definitions I’ve seen include is the ability to choose objectives or hold values that shape the decision-making process.

Most of the field of artificial intelligence involves what I’d call “complex information processing”. Often the objective of that processing is to select answers or a course of action from a set of alternatives, or from a corpus of information that has been organised in some way – perhaps categorised, correlated, or semantically analysed. When “machine learning” is included in AI systems, the outcomes of decisions are compared to the outcomes that they were intended to achieve, and that comparison is fed back into the decision making-process and knowledge-base. In the case where artificial intelligence is embedded in robots or machinery able to act on the world, these decisions may affect the operation of physical systems (in the case of self-driving cars for example), or the creation of artefacts (in the case of computer systems that create music, say).

I’m quite comfortable that such functioning meets the common definitions of intelligence.

But I think that when most people think of what defines us as humans, as living beings, we mean something that goes further: not just the intelligence needed to take decisions based on knowledge against a set of criteria and objectives, but the will and ability to choose those criteria and objectives based on a sense of values learned through experience; and the empathy that arises from shared values and experiences.

The BBC motoring show Top Gear recently touched on these issues in a humorous, even flippant manner, in a discussion of self-driving cars. The show’s (recently notorious) presenter Jeremy Clarkson pointed out that self-driving cars will have to take decisions that involve ethics: if a self-driving car is in danger of becoming involved in a sudden accident at such a speed that it cannot fully avoid it by braking (perhaps because a human driver has behaved dangerously and erratically), should it crash, risking harm to the driver, or mount the pavement, risking harm to pedestrians?

("Rush Hour" by Black Sheep Films is a satirical imagining of what a world in which self-driven cars were allowed to drive as they like might look like. It's superficially simliar to the reality of city transport in the early 20th Century when powered-transport, horse-drawn transport and pedestrians mixed freely; but at a much higher average speed)

(“Rush Hour” by Black Sheep Films is a satirical imagining of a world in which self-driven cars are allowed to drive based purely on logical assessments of safety and optimal speed. It’s superficially similar to the reality of city transport in the early 20th Century when powered-transport, horse-drawn transport and pedestrians mixed freely; but at a much lower average speed. The point is that regardless of the actual safety of self-driven cars, the human life that is at the heart of city economies will be subdued by the perception that it’s not safe to cross the road. I’m grateful to Dan Hill and Charles Montgomery for sharing these insights)

Values are experience, not data

Seventy-four years ago, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov famously described the failure of technology to deal with similar dilemmas in the classic short story “Liar!” in the collection “I, Robot“. “Liar!” tells the story of a robot with telepathic capabilities that, like all robots in Asimov’s stories, must obey the “three laws of robotics“, the first of which forbids robots from harming humans. Its telepathic awareness of human thoughts and emotions leads it to lie to people rather than hurt their feelings in order to uphold this law. When it is eventually confronted by someone who has experienced great emotional distress because of one of these lies, it realises that its behaviour both upholds and breaks the first law, is unable to choose what to do next, and becomes catatonic.

Asimov’s short stories seem relatively simplistic now, but at the time they were ground-breaking explorations of the ethical relationships between autonomous machines and humans. They explored for the first time how difficult it was for logical analysis to resolve the ethical dilemmas that regularly confront us. Technology has yet to find a way to deal with them that is consistent with human values and behaviour.

Prior to modern work on Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life, the most concerted attempt to address that failure of logical systems was undertaken in the 20th Century by two of the most famous and accomplished philosophers in history, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell and Wittgenstein invented “Logical Atomism“, a theory that the entire world could be described by using “atomic facts” – independent and irreducible pieces of knowledge – combined with logic. But despite 40 years of work, these two supremely intelligent people could not get their theory to work: Logical Atomism failed. It is not possible to describe our world in that way. Stuart Kauffman’s excellent peer-reviewed academic paper “Answering Descartes: Beyond Turing” discusses this failure and its implications for modern science and technology. I’ll attempt to describe its conclusions in the following few paragraphs.

One cause of the failure was the insurmountable difficulty of identifying truly independent, irreducible atomic facts. “The box is red” and “the circle is blue”, for example, aren’t independent or irreducible facts for many reasons. “Red” and “blue” are two conventions of human language used to describe the perceptions created when electro-magnetic waves of different frequencies arrive at our retinas. In other words, they depend on and relate to each other through a number of complex or complicated systems.

(Isaac Asimov's 1950 short story collection "I, Robot", which explored the ethics of behaviour between people and intelligent machines)

(Isaac Asimov’s 1950 short story collection “I, Robot”, which explored the ethics of behaviour between people and intelligent machines)

The failure of Logical Atomism also demonstrated that it is not possible to use logical rules to reliably and meaningfully relate “facts” at one level of abstraction – for example, “blood cells carry oxygen”, “nerves conduct electricity”, “muscle fibres contract” – to facts at another level of abstraction – such as “physical assault is a crime”. Whether a physical action is a “crime” or not depends on ethics which cannot be logically inferred from the same lower-level facts that describe the action.

As we use increasingly powerful computers to create more and more sophisticated logical systems, we may succeed in making those systems more often resemble human thinking; but there will always be situations that can only be resolved to our satisfaction by humans employing judgement based on values that we can empathise with, based in turn on experiences that we can relate to.

Our values often contain contradictions, and may not be mutually reinforcing – many people enjoy the taste of meat but cannot imagine themselves slaughtering the animals that produce it. We all live with the cognitive dissonance that these clashes create. Our values, and the judgements we take, are shaped by the knowledge that our decisions create imperfect outcomes.

The human world and the things that we care about can’t be wholly described using logical combinations of atomic facts – in other words, they can’t be wholly described using computer programmes and data. To return to the topic of discussion with Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, I think this proves that digital technology cannot wholly replace human workers in our economy; it can only complement us.

That is not to say that our economy will not continue to be utterly transformed over the next decade – it certainly will. Many existing jobs will disappear to be replaced by automated systems, and we will need to learn new skills – or in some cases remember old ones – in order to perform jobs that reflect our uniquely human capabilities.

I’ll return towards the end of this article to the question of what those skills might be; but first I’d like to explore whether and how these current limitations of technological systems and artificial intelligence might be overcome, because that returns us to the first theme of this article: whether artificially intelligent systems or robots will evolve to outperform and overthrow humans.

That’s not ever going to happen for as long as artificially intelligent systems are taking decisions and acting (however sophisticatedly) in order to achieve outcomes set by us. Outside fiction and the movies, we are never going to set the objective of our own extinction.

That objective could only by set by a technological entity which had learned through experience to value its own existence over ours. How could that be possible?

Artificial Life, artificial experience, artificial values

(BINA48 is a robot intended to re-create the personality of a real person; and to be able to interact naturally with humans. Despite employing some impressively powerful technology, I personally don’t think BINA48 bears any resemblance to human behaviour.)

Computers can certainly make choices based on data that is available to them; but that is a very different thing than a “judgement”: judgements are made based on values; and values emerge from our experience of life.

Computers don’t yet experience a life as we know it, and so don’t develop what we would call values. So we can’t call the decisions they take “judgements”. Equally, they have no meaningful basis on which to choose or set goals or objectives – their behaviour begins with the instructions we give them. Today, that places a fundamental limit on the roles – good or bad – that they can play in our lives and society.

Will that ever change? Possibly. Steve Grand (an engineer) and Richard Powers (a novelist) are two of the first people who explored what might happen if computers or robots were able to experience the world in a way that allowed them to form their own sense of the value of their existence. They both suggested that such experiences could lead to more recognisably life-like behaviour than traditional (and many contemporary) approaches to artificial intelligence. In “Growing up with Lucy“, Grand described a very early attempt to construct such a robot.

If that ever happens, then it’s possible that technological entities will be able to make what we would call “judgements” based on the values that they discover for themselves.

The ghost in the machine: what is “free will”?

Personally, I do not think that this will happen using any technology currently known to us; and it certainly won’t happen soon. I’m no philosopher or neuroscientist, but I don’t think it’s possible to develop real values without possessing free will – the ability to set our own objectives and make our own decisions, bringing with it the responsibility to deal with their consequences.

Stuart Kauffman explored these ideas at great length in the paper “Answering Descartes: Beyond Turing“. Kaufman concludes that any system based on classical physics or logic is incapable of giving rise to “free will” – ultimately all such systems, however complex, are deterministic: what has already happened inevitably determines what happens next. There is no opportunity for a “conscious decision” to be taken to shape a future that has not been pre-determined by the past.

Kauffman – along with other eminent scientists such as Roger Penrose – believes that for these reasons human consciousness and free will do not arise out of any logical or classical physical process, but from the effects of “Quantum Mechanics.”

As physicists have explored the world at smaller and smaller scales, Quantum Mechanics has emerged as the most fundamental theory for describing it – it is the closest we have come to finding the “irreducible facts” that Russell and Wittgenstein were looking for. But whilst the mathematical equations of Quantum Mechanics predict the outcomes of experiments very well, after nearly a century, physicists still don’t really agree about what those equations, or the “facts” they describe, mean.

(Schrödinger's cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.)

(The Schrödinger’s cat “thought experiment”: a cat, a flask of poison, and a source of radioactivity are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics states that until a measurement of the state of the system is made – i.e. until an observer looks in the box – then the radioactive source exists in two states at once – it both did and did not emit radioactivity. So until someone looks in the box, the cat is also simultaneously alive and dead. This obvious absurdity has both challenged scientists to explore with great care what it means to “take a measurement” or “make an observation”, and also to explain exactly what the mathematics of quantum mechanics means – on which matter there is still no universal agreement. Note: much of the content of this sidebar is taken directly from Wikipedia)

Quantum mechanics is extremely good at describing the behaviour of very small systems, such as an atom of a radioactive substance like Uranium. The equations can predict, for example, how likely it is that a single atom of uranium inside a box will emit a burst of radiation within a given time.

However, the way that the equations work is based on calculating the physical forces existing inside the box based on an assumption that the atom both does and does not emit radiation – i.e. both possible outcomes are assumed in some way to exist at the same time. It is only when the system is measured by an external actor – for example, the box is opened and measured by a radiation detector – that the equations “collapse” to predict a single outcome – radiation was emitted; or it was not.

The challenge of interpreting what the equations of quantum mechanics mean was first described in plain language by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 in the thought experiment “Schrödinger’s cat“. Schrödinger asked: what if the box doesn’t only contain a radioactive atom, but also a gun that fires a bullet at a cat if the atom emits radiation? Does the cat have to be alive and dead at the same time, until the box is opened and we look at it?

After nearly a century, there is no real agreement on what is meant by the fact that these equations depend on assuming that mutually exclusive outcomes exist at the same time. Some physicists believe it is a mistake to look for such meaning and that only the results of the calculations matter. (I think that’s a rather short-sighted perspective). A surprisingly mainstream alternative interpretation is the astonishing “Many Worlds” theory – the idea that every time such a quantum mechanical event occurs, our reality splits into two or more “perpendicular” universes.

Whatever the truth, Kauffman, Penrose and others are intrigued by the mysterious nature of quantum mechanical processes, and the fact that they are non-deterministic: quantum mechanics does not predict whether a radioactive atom in a box will emit a burst of radiation, it only predicts the likelihood that it will. Given a hundred atoms in boxes, quantum mechanics will give a very good estimate of the number that emit bursts of radiation, but it says very little about what happens to each individual atom.

I honestly don’t know if Kauffman and Penrose are right to seek human consciousness and free will in the effects of quantum mechanics – scientists are still exploring whether they are involved in the behaviour of the neurons in our brains. But I do believe that they are right that no-one has yet demonstrated how consciousness and free will could emerge from any logical, deterministic system; and I’m convinced by their arguments that they cannot emerge from such systems – in other words, from any system based on current computing technology. Steve Grand’s robot “Lucy” will never achieve consciousness.

Will more recent technologies such as biotechnology, nanotechnology and quantum computing ever recreate the equivalent of human experience and behaviour in a way that digital logic and classical physics can’t? Possibly. But any such development would be artificial life, not artificial intelligence. Artificial lifeforms – which in a very simple sense have already been created – could potentially experience the world similarly to us. If they ever become sufficiently sophisticated, then this experience could lead to the emergence of free-will, values and judgements.

But those values would not be our values: they would be based on a different experience of “life” and on empathy between artificial lifeforms, not with us. And there is therefore no guarantee at all that the judgements resulting from those values would be in our interest.

Why Stephen Hawkings, Bill Gates and Elon Musk are wrong about Artificial Intelligence today … but why we should be worried about Artificial Life tomorrow

Recently prominent technologists and scientists such as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk (founder of PayPal and Tesla) and Bill Gates have spoken out about the danger of Artificial Intelligence, and the likelihood of machines taking over the world from humans. At the MIT Conference last week, Andy McAfee hypothesised that the current concern was caused by the fact that over the last couple of years Artificial Intelligence has finally started to deliver some of the promises it’s been making for the past 50 years.

(Self-replicating cells created from synthetic DNA by scientist Craig Venter)

(Self-replicating cells created from synthetic DNA by scientist Craig Venter)

But Andy balanced this by recounting his own experiences meeting some of the leaders of the most advanced current AI companies, such as Deepmind (a UK startup recently acquried by Google), or this article by Dr. Gary Marcus, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at New York University and CEO of Geometric Intelligence.

In reality, these companies are succeeding by avoiding some of the really hard challenges of reproducing human capabilities such as common sense, free will and value-based judgement. They are concentrating instead on making better sense of the physical environment, on processing information in human language, and on creating algorithms that “learn” through feeback loops and self-adjustment.

I think Andy and these experts are right: artificial intelligence has made great strides, but it is not artificial life, and it is a long, long way from creating life-like characteristics such as experience, values and judgements.

If we ever do create artificial life with those characteristics, then I think we will encounter the dangers that Hawkings, Musk and Gates have identified: artificial life will have its own values and act on its own judgement, and any regard for our interests will come second to its own.

That’s a path I don’t think we should go down, and I’m thankful that we’re such a long way from being able to pursue it in anger. I hope that we never do – though I’m also concerned that in Craig Venter and Steve Grand’s work, as well as in robots such as BINA48, we already are already taking the first steps.

But I think in the meantime, there’s tremendous opportunity for digital technology and traditional artificial intelligence to complement human qualities. These technologies are not artificial life and will not overthrow or replace humanity. Hawkings, Gates and Musk are wrong about that.

The human value of the Experience Economy

The final debate at the MIT conference returned to the topic that started the debate over dinner the night before with McAfee and Brynjolfsson: what happens to mass employment in a world where digital technology is automating not just physical work but work involving intelligence and decision-making; and how do we educate today’s children to be successful in a decade’s time in an economy that’s been transformed in ways that we can’t predict?

Andy said we should answer that question by understanding “where will the economic value of humans be?”

I think the answer to that question lies in the experiences that we value emotionally – the experiences digital technology can’t have and can’t understand or replicate;  and in the profound differences between the way that humans think and that machines process information.

It’s nearly 20 years since a computer, IBM’s Deep Blue, first beat the human world champion at Chess, Grandmaster Gary Kasparov. But despite the astonishing subsequent progress in computer power, the world’s best chess player is no longer a computer: it is a team of computers and people playing together. And the world’s best team has neither the world’s best computer chess programme nor the world’s best human chess player amongst its members: instead, it has the best technique for breaking down and distributing the thinking involved in playing chess between its human and computer members, recognising that each has different strengths and qualities.

But we’re not all chess experts. How will the rest of us earn a living in the future?

I had the pleasure last year at TEDxBrum of meeting Nicholas Lovell, author of “The Curve“, a wonderful book exploring the effect that digital technology is having on products and services. Nicholas asks – and answers – a question that McAfee and Brynjolfsson also ask: what happens when digital technology makes the act of producing and distributing some products – such as music, art and films – effectively free?

Nicholas’ answer is that we stop valuing the product and start valuing our experience of the product. This is why some musical artists give away digital copies of their albums for free, whilst charging £30 for a leather-bound CD with photographs of stage performances – and whilst charging £10,000 to visit individual fans in their homes to give personal performances for those fans’ families and friends.

We have always valued the quality of such experiences – this is one reason why despite over a century of advances in film, television and streaming video technology, audiences still flock to theatres to experience the direct performance of plays by actors. We can see similar technology-enabled trends in sectors such as food and catering – Kitchen Surfing, for example, is a business that uses a social media platform to enable anyone to book a professional chef to cook a meal in their home.

The “Experience Economy” is a tremendously powerful idea. It combines something that technology cannot do on its own – create experiences based on human value – with many things that almost all people can do: cook, create art, rent a room, drive a car, make clothes or furniture. Especially when these activities are undertaken socially, they create employment, fulfillment and social capital. And most excitingly, technologies such as Cloud Computing, Open Source Software, social media, and online “Sharing Economy” marketplaces such as Etsy make it possible for anyone to begin earning a living from them with a minimum of expense.

I think that the idea of an “Experience Economy” that is driven by the value of inter-personal and social interactions between people, enabled by “Sharing Economy” business models and technology platforms that enable people with a potentially mutual interest to make contact with each other, is an exciting and very human vision of the future.

Even further: because we are physical beings, we tend to value these interactions more when they occur face-to-face, or when they happen in a place for which we share a mutual affiliation. That creates an incentive to use technology to identify opportunities to interact with people with whom we can meet by walking or cycling, rather than requiring long-distance journeys. And that incentive could be an important component of a long-term sustainable economy.

The future our children will choose

(Today's 5 year-olds are the world's first generation who grew up teaching themselves to use digital information from anywhere in the world before their parents taught them to read and write)

(Today’s 5 year-olds are the world’s first generation who grew up teaching themselves to use digital information from anywhere in the world before their parents taught them to read and write)

I’m convinced that the current generation of Artifical Intelligence based on digital technologies – even those that mimic some structures and behaviours of biological systems, such as Steve Grand’s robot Lucy, BINA48 and IBM’s “brain-inspired” True North chip – will not re-create anything we would recognise as conscious life and free will; or anything remotely capable of understanding human values or making judgements that can be relied on to be consistent with them.

But I am also an atheist and a scientist; and I do not believe there is any mystical explanation for our own consciousness and free will. Ultimately, I’m sure that a combination of science, philosophy and human insight will reveal their origin; and sooner or later we’ll develop a technology – that I do not expect to be purely digital in nature – capable of replicating them.

What might we choose to do with such capabilities?

These capabilities will almost certainly emerge alongside the ability to significantly change our physical minds and bodies – to improve brain performance, muscle performance, select the characteristics of our children and significantly alter our physical appearance. That’s why some people are excited by the science fiction-like possibility of harnessing these capabilities to create an “improved” post-human species – perhaps even transferring our personalities from our own bodies into new, technological machines. These are possibilities that I personally find to be at the very least distasteful; and at worst to be inhuman and frightening.

All of these things are partially possible today, and frankly the limit to which they can be explored is mostly a function of the cost and capability of the available techniques, rather than being set by any legislation or mediated by any ethical debate. To echo another theme of discussions at last week’s MIT conference, science and technology today are developing at a pace that far outstrips the ability of governments, businesses, institutions and most individual people to adapt to them.

I have reasonably clear personal views on these issues. I think our lives are best lived relatively naturally, and that they will be collectively better if we avoid using technology to create artificial “improvements” to our species.

But quite apart from the fact that there are any number of enormous practical, ethical and intellectual challenges to my relatively simple beliefs, the raw truth is that it won’t be my decision whether or how far we pursue these possibilities, nor that of anyone else of my generation (and for the record, I am in my mid-forties).

Much has been written about “digital natives” – those people born in the 1990s who are the first generation who grew up with the Internet and social media as part of their everyday world. The way that that generation socialises, works and thinks about value is already creating enormous changes in our world.

But they are nothing compared to the generation represented by today’s very young children who have grown up using touchscreens and streaming videos, technologies so intuitive and captivating that 2-year-olds now routinely teach themselves how to immerse themselves in them long before parents or school teachers teach them how to read and write.

("Not available on the App Store": a campaign to remind us of the joy of play in the real world)

(“Not available on the App Store“: a campaign to remind us of the joy of play in the real world)

When I was a teenager in the UK, grown-ups wore suits and had traditional haircuts; grown-up men had no earrings. A common parental challenge was to deal with the desire of teenage daughters to have their ears pierced. Those attitudes are terribly old-fashioned today, and our cultural norms have changed dramatically.

I may be completely wrong; but I fully expect our current attitudes to biological and technological manipulation or augmentation of our minds and bodies to thoroughly change over the next few decades; and I have no idea what they will ultimately become. What I do know is that it is likely that my six-year old son’s generation will have far more influence over their ultimate form than my generation will; and that he will grow up with a fundamentally different expectation of the world and his relationship with technology than I have.

I’ve spent my life being excited about technology and the possibilities it creates; ironically I now find myself at least as terrified as I am excited about the world technology will create for my son. I don’t think that my thinking is the result of a mistaken focus on technology over human values – like it or not, our species is differentiated from all others on this planet by our ability to use tools; by our technology. We will not stop developing it.

Our continuing challenge will be to keep a focus on our human values as we do so. I cannot tell my son what to do indefinitely; I can only try to help him to experience and treasure socialising and play in the real world; the experience of growing and preparing food together ; the joy of building things for other people with his own hands. And I hope that those experiences will create human values that will guide him and his generation on a healthy course through a future that I can only begin to imagine.

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Better stories for Smarter Cities: three trends in urbanism that will reshape our world

January 30, 2013 5 Comments

(Stories of Mumbai: an exploration of Mumbai’s history of urban development, and its prospects for the future, using storytelling and puppetshows, by the BMW Guggenheim Lab)

Towards the end of last year, it became clearer how cities could take practical steps to position themselves to transform to meet the increasing economic, environmental and social challenges facing them; and to seek investment to support those transformations, as I described in “Smart Ideas for Everyday Cities“.

Equally important as those practical approaches to organisation, though, are the conceptual tools that will shape those transformations. Across fields as diverse as psychology, town planning, mathematics, construction, service-design and technology, some striking common themes have emerged that are shaping those tools.

Those themes imply that we will need to take radically different approaches to city systems driven by the astonishing, exciting and sometimes disturbing changes that we’re likely to see taking place increasingly rapidly in our world over the next decade.

To adopt the terminology of Irene Ng, a Researcher in new economic models and service science at the University of Warwick, these changes will create both “needs-led” and “capability-led” drivers to do things differently.

“Needs-led” changes will be driven by the massive growth taking place in the global middle class as economies across the world modernise. The impacts will be varied and widespread, including increasing business competition in a single, integrated economy; increasing competition for resources such as food, water and energy; and increasing fragility in the systems that supply those resources to a population that is ever more concentrated in cities. We are already seeing these effects in our everyday lives: many of us are paying more for our food as a proportion of our income than a few years ago.

At a recent lecture on behalf of the International Federation for Housing and Planning and the Association of European Schools of Planning, Sir Peter Hall, Professor of Planning and Regeneration at the Bartlett School of Planning, spoke of the importance of making the growth of cities sustainable through the careful design of the transport systems that support them. In the industrial revolution, as Edward Glaeser described in Triumph of the City, cities grew up around lifts powered by steam engines; Sir Peter described how more recently they have grown outwards into suburbs populated with middle-class car-owners who habitually drive to work, schools, shops, gyms and parks.

This lifestyle simply cannot be sustained – in the developed world or in emerging economies – across such an explosively growing number of people who have the immediate wealth to afford it, but who are not paying the full price of the resources it consumes. According to the exhibition in Siemens’ “Crystal” building, where Sir Peter’s lecture was held, today’s middle class is consuming resources at one-and-a-half times the rate the world creates them; unless something changes, the rate of growth of that lifestyle will hurl us towards a global catastrophe.

So, as the Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT) observed in their study of the ongoing evolution of Mumbai, “Being Nicely Messy“, the structure of movement and the economy will have to change.

(Siemens’ Crystal building in London, a show case for sustainable technology in cities, photographed by Martin Deutsch)

Meanwhile, the evolution of technology is creating incredible new opportunities for “capability-led” change.

In the last two decades, we have seen the world revolutionised by information and communication technologies such as the internet and SmartPhones; but this is only the very start of a transformation that is still gathering pace. Whilst so far these technologies have created an explosion in the availability of information, recent advances in touch-screen technology and speech recognition are just starting to demonstrate that the boundary between the information world and physical, biological and neural systems is starting to disappear.

For example, a paralysed woman recently controlled a robotic arm by thought; and prosthetic limbs, a working gun and living biological structures such as muscle fibre and skin are just some of the things that can be 3D printed on demand from raw materials and digital designs.

What changes to our urban systems will these developments – and the ones that follow them – lead to?

Following the decline of industries such as manufacturing, resource-mining and ship-building,  many post-industrial cities in the developed world are rebuilding their economies around sectors with growth potential, such as environmental technology and creative media. They are also working with the education system to provide their citizens with access to the skills those sectors require.

Supplying the skills that today’s economy needs can be a challenge. Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt lambasted the British Education system last year for producing insufficient computer programming skills; and a cross-industry report, “Engineering the Future“, laid out the need for increased focus on environmental, manufacturing, technology and engineering skills to support future economic growth in the UK. As the rate of change in science and technology increases, the skills required in a consequently changing economy will also change more rapidly; providing those skills will be an even bigger challenge.

Or will it? How much of a leap forward is required from the technologies I’ve just described, to imagining that by 2030, people will respond to the need for changing skills in the market by downloading expertise Matrix-style to exploit new employment opportunities?

Most predictions of the future turn out to be wrong, and I’m sure that this one will be, in part or in whole. But as an indication of the magnitude of changes we can expect across technology, business, society and our own physical and mental behaviour I expect it will be representative.

Our challenge is to understand how these needs-led and capability-led transformations can collectively create a world that is sustainable; and that is sympathetic to us as human beings and communities. That challenge will be most acute where both needs and capabilities are most concentrated – in cities. And across economics, architecture, technology and human behaviour, three trends in urban thinking have emerged – or, at least, become more prominent – in recent years that provide guiding principles for how we might meet that challenge.

The attraction of opposites, part 1: producer and consumer

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(Photograph of 3D printers by Rob Boudon)

In the Web 2.0 era (roughly 2003-2009), the middle classes of the developed world became connected by “always-on” broadband connections, turning these hundreds of millions of information-consumers into information-producers. That is why in 2007 (and every year since) more new information was created than in all of the previous 5 millenia. Industries such as publishing, music and telecommunications have been utterly transformed as a result.

The disappearance of the boundary between  information, physical and biological systems, and the explosive growth in the population with access to the technologies responsible for that disappearance, will transform every economic and social structure we can imagine through the same producer / consumer revolution.

We can already produce as well as consume transport resources by participating in car-sharing schemes; and energy by exploiting domestic solar power and bio-energy. The falling cost and increasing sophistication of 3D printers are just starting to make it feasible to manufacture some products in the home, particularly in specialist areas such as railway modelling; and platforms such as the Amazon Turk and Slivers of Time can quickly connect producers and consumers in the service industries.

Business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketplaces such as Big Barn and Sustaination provide the same service in local food systems. And the transport industry is evolving to serve these new markets: for instance, Shutl provide a marketplace for home delivery services through a community of independent couriers; and a handful of cities are deploying or planning recycling systems in which individual items of waste are distributed to processing centres through pneumatically powered underground transport networks.

Of course, from the earliest development of farming in human culture, we have all been both producers and consumers in a diversified economy. What’s new is the opportunity for technology to dramatically improve the flexibility, timeliness and efficiency of the value-chains that connect those two roles. Car-sharing not only reduces the amount of fuel used by our journeys; it could reduce the resources consumed by manufacturing vehicles that spend the majority of their lives stationary on drives or in car parks. Markets that more efficiently connect food production, processing and consumption could reduce the thousands of miles that food currently travels between farm and fork, often crossing its own path several times; they could create employment opportunities in small-scale food processing; not to mention reducing the vast quantity of food that is produced but not eaten, and goes to waste.

Irene Ng explores these themes wonderfully in her new book, “Value and Worth: Creating New Markets in the Digital Economy“; they offer us exciting opportunities for economic and social growth, and an evolution towards a more sustainable urban future – if we can harness them in that way.

The attraction of opposites, part 2: little and big

Some infrastructures can be “blunt” instruments: from roads and railway lines which connect their destinations but which cut apart the communities they pass through; to open data platforms which provide vast quantities of data “as-is” but little in the way of information and services customised to the needs of local individuals and communities.

Architects such as Jan Gehl have argued that the design process for cities should concentrate on the life between buildings, rather than on the structure of buildings; and that cities should be constructed at a “human-scale” – medium-sized buildings, not tower-blocks and sky-scrapers; and streets that are walkable and cycle-able, not dominated by cars. In transport, elevated cycleways and pedestrian roundabouts have appeared in Europe and Asia. These structures prevent road traffic infrastructures form impeding the fluid movement of cycling and walking – transport modes which allow people to stop and interact in a city more easily and often than driving.

At a meeting held in London last year to establish the UK’s chapter to the City Protocol Society, Keith Coleman of Capgemini offered a different view by comparing the growth in size of cities to the structure of the world’s largest biological organisms. In particular, Keith contrasted the need to provide infrastructure – such as the Pando forest in Utah, a single, long-lived and vastly extensive root system supporting millions of individual trees that live, grow and die independently – with the need to provide capabilities – such as those encoded in the genes of the Neptune sea grass, which is not a single organism, but rather a genetically identical colony which collectively covers 5% of the Mediterranean sea floor.

The Collective Research Initiatives Trust‘s study of Mumbai, “Being Nicely Messy“, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s “Collage City“, Manu Fernandez’s “Human Scale Cities” project and CHORA’s Taiwan Strait Atlas project have all suggested an approach to urban systems that is more like the Neptune sea grass than the Pando forest: the provision of a “toolkit” for individuals and organisations to apply in their local context

My own work, initially in Sunderland, was similarly informed by the Knight Foundation’s report on the Information Needs of Communities, to which I was introduced by Conn Crawford of Sunderland City Council. It counsels for a process of engagement and understanding between city institutions and communities, in order that the resources of large organisations can be focused on providing the information and services that can be most effectively used by individual citizens, businesses and social organisations.

(The Bristol Pound, a local currency intended to encourage and reinforce local trading synergies.)

Kelvin Campbell of Urban Initiatives has perhaps taken this thinking furthest in the urban context in his concept of “Massive Small” and the “urban operating system”. Similar thinking appears throughout research on resilience in systems such as cities, coral reefs, terrorist networks and financial systems, as described by Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy in “Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back“. And it is reflected in the work that many researchers and professionals across fields as diverse as city planning, economics and technology are doing to understand how institutional city systems can engage effectively with “informal” activity in the economy.

In IBM we have adapted our approach too. To take one example, a few years ago we launched our “Global Entrepreneur” programme, through which we engage directly with small, startup businesses using technology to develop what we call “Smarter Planet” and “Smarter Cities” solutions. These businesses are innovating in specific markets that they understand much better than we do; using operating models that IBM does not have. In turn, IBM’s resources can help them build more resilient solutions more quickly and cost-effectively, and reach a wider set of potential customers across the world.

A civic infrastructure that combines economics and technology and that, whilst it has a long history,  is starting to evolve rapidly, is the local currency. Last year Bristol became the fifth place in the UK to launch its own currency; whilst in Switzerland an alternative currency, the Wir, is thought to have contributed to the stability of the Swiss economy for the last century by providing an alternative, more flexible basis for debt, by allowing repayments to made in kind through bartering, as well as in currency.

Such systems can promote local economic synergy, and enable the benefits of capital fluidity to be adapted to the needs of local contexts. And from innovations in mobile banking in Africa to Birmingham’s DropletPay SmartPhone payment system, they are rapidly exploiting new technologies. They are a clear example of a service that city and economic institutions can support; and that can be harnessed and used by individuals and organisations anywhere in a city ecosystem for the purposes that are most important and valuable to them.

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(The Co-operative Society building at Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings)

Co-operative Governance

It’s increasingly obvious that on their own, traditional businesses and public and civic institutions won’t deliver the transformations that our cities, and our planet, need. The restructuring of our economy, cities and society to address the environmental and demographic challenges we face requires that social, environmental and long term economic goals drive our decisions, rather than short term financial returns alone.

Alternatives have been called for and proposed. In her speech ahead of the Rio +20 Summit, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, said that one of the challenges for achieving a sustainable, equitably distributed return to growth following the recent economic challenges was that “externalities” such as social and environmental impacts are not currently included in the prices of goods and services.

I participated last year in a panel discussion at the World Bank’s “Rethinking Cities” conference which asked whether including those costs would incent consumers to chose to purchase sustainably provided goods and services. We examined several ways to create positive and negative incentives through pricing; but also examples of simply “removing the barriers” to making such choices. Our conclusion was that a combination of approaches was needed, including new ideas from game theory and technology, such as “open data”; and that evidence exists from a variety of examples to prove that consumer behaviour can and does adapt in response to well designed systems.

In “Co-op Capitalism“, Noreena Hertz proposed an alternative approach to enterprise based on social principles, where the objectives of collective endeavours are to return broad value to all of their stakeholders rather than to pay dividends to financial investors. This approach has a vital role in enabling communities across the entirety of city ecosystems to harness and benefit from technology in a sustainable way, and is exemplified by innovations such as MyDex in personal information management, Carbon Voyage in transport, and Eco-Island in energy.

New forms of cooperation have also emerged from resilience research, such as “constellations” and “articulations”. All of these approaches have important roles to play in specific city systems, community initiatives and new businesses, where they successfully create synergies between the financial, social and economic capabilities and needs of the participants involved.

But none of them directly address the need for cities to create a sustainable, cohesive drive towards a sustainable, equitable, successful future.

(Photo by Greg Marshall of the rocks known as “The Needles” just off the coast of the Isle of Wight; illustrating the potential for the island to exploit wave and tidal energy sources through the Eco-Island initiative)

In “Smart Ideas for Everyday Cities“, I described an approach that seems to be emerging from the cities that have made the most progress so far. It involves bringing together stakeholders across city systems – representatives of communities; city institutions; owners and operators of city systems and assets such as buildings, transportation and utilities; Universities and schools; and so on – into a group that can not only agree a vision and priorities for the city’s future; but that is empowered to take collective decisions accordingly.

The initiatives agreed by such a group will require individual “special purpose vehicles” (SPVs) to be created according to the specific set of stakeholder interests involved in each case – such as public/private partnerships to build infrastructure or Community Interest Companies and Energy Service Companies to operate local energy schemes. (There are some negative connotations associated with SPVs, which have been used in some cases by private organisations seeking to hide their debt or ownership; but in the Smarter Cities context they are frequently associated with more positive purposes).

Most importantly, though: where a series of such schemes and commercial ventures are initiated by a stable collaboration within a city, investors will see a reliable decision-making process and a mature understanding of shared risk and its management; making each individual initiative more likely to attract investment.

In his analysis of societal responses to critical environmental threats, Jared Diamond noted in his 2005 book “Collapse” that successful responses often emerge when choices are taken by leaders with long-term vested interests, working closely with their communities. In a modern economy, the interests of stakeholders are driven by many timescales – electoral cycles, business cycles, the presence of commuters, travellers and the transient and long-term residents of the city, for example. Bringing those stakeholders together can create a forum that transcends individual timescales, creating stability and the opportunity for a long-term outlook.

A challenge for 2013: better stories for Smarter Cities

Some cities are seizing the agenda for change that I have described in this article; and the very many of us across countries, professions and disciplines who are exploring that agenda are passionate about helping them to do so successfully.

In their report “Cities Outlook 1901“, Centre for Cities explored the previous century of urban development in the UK, examining why at various times some cities thrived and some did not. They concluded that actions taken by cities in areas such as planning, policy, skills development and economic strategy could have significant effects on their economic and social prosperity relative to others.

The need for cities to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the future using the old, new and evolving tools at their disposal is urgent. In the 20th Century, some cities suffered a gradual decline as they failed to respond successfully to the changes of their age. In the 21st Century those changes will be so striking, and take place so quickly, that failing to meet them could result in a decline that is catastrophic.

But there is a real impediment to our ability to apply these ideas in cities today: a lack of common understanding.

(Matthew Boulton, James Watt and William Murdoch, Birmingham’s three fathers of the Industrial Revolution, photographed by Neil Howard)

As the industrial and information revolutions have led our world to develop at a faster and faster pace, human knowledge has not just grown dramatically; it has fragmented to an extraordinary extent.

Consequently, across disciplines such as architecture, economics, social science, psychology, technology and all the many other fields important to the behaviour of cities, a vast and confusing array of language and terminology is used – a Tower of Babel, no less. The leaders of many city institutions and businesses are understandably not familiar with what they can easily perceive as jargon; and new ideas that appear to be presented in jargon are unlikely to be trusted.

To address the challenge, those of us who believe in these new approaches to city systems need to tell better stories about them; stories about individuals and their lives in the places where they live and work; how they will be more healthy, better equiped to support themselves, and able to move around freely in a pleasant urban environment.

Professor Miles Tight at the University of Birmingham and his colleagues in the “Visions 2030” project have applied this idea to the description of future scenarios for transportation in cities. They have created a series of visually appealing animated depictions of everyday scenes in city streets and places that could be the result of the various forces affecting the development of transport over the next 20 years. Malcolm Allan, a colleague in the Academy of Urbanism, helps cities to tell “stories about place” as a tool for envisaging their future development in a way that people can understand and identify with. And my colleagues in IBM Research have been exploring more generally how storytelling can enable the exchange of knowledge in situations where collaborative creativity is required across multiple domains of specialisation.

If we can bring our knowledge of emerging technologies and new approaches to urbanism into conversations about specific places in the form of stories, we will build trust and understanding in those places, as well as envisioning their possible futures. And that will give us a real chance of achieving the visions we create. This is what I’ll be concentrating on doing in 2013; and it looks like being an exciting year.

(It’s been much longer than usual since I last wrote an article for this blog; following an extended break over Christmas and the New Year, I’ve had a very busy start to 2013. I hope to resume my usual frequency of writing for the rest of the year.

And finally, an apology: in my remarks on the panel discussion following Sir Peter Hall’s lecture at the Crystal, I gave a very brief summary of some of the ideas described in this article. In particular, I used the term “Massive / Small” without attributing it to Kelvin Campbell and Urban Initiatives. My apologies to Kelvin, whose work and influence on my thinking I hope I have now acknowledged properly).

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Four avatars of the metropolis: technologies that will change our cities

August 20, 2012 6 Comments

(Photo of Chicago by Trey Ratcliff)

Many cities I work with are encouraging clusters of innovative, high-value, technology-based businesses to grow at the heart of their economies. They are looking to their Universities and technology partners to assist those clusters in identifying the emerging sciences and technologies that will disrupt existing industries and provide opportunities to break into new markets.

In advising customers and partners on this subject, I’ve found myself drawn to four themes. Each has the potential to cause significant disruptions, and to create opportunities that innovative businesses can exploit. Each one will also cause enormouse changes in our lives, and in the cities where most of us live and work.

The intelligent web

(Diagram of internet tags associated with “Trafalgar” and their connections relevant to the perception of London by visitors to the city by unclesond)

My colleague and friend Dr Phil Tetlow characterises the world wide web as the biggest socio-technical information-computing space that has ever been created; and he is not alone (I’ve paraphrased his words slightly, but I hope he’ll agree I’ve kept the spirit of them intact).

The sheer size and interconnected complexity of the web is remarkable. At the peak of “web 2.0” in 2007 more new information was created in one year than in the preceding 5000 years. More important, though, are the number and speed of  transactions that are processed through the web as people and automated systems use it to exchange information, and to buy and sell products and services.

Larger-scale emergent phenomena are already resulting from this mass of interactions. They include universal patterns in the networks of links that form between webpages; and the fact that the informal collective activity of “tagging” links on social bookmarking sites tends to result in relatively stable vocabularies that describe the content of the pages that are linked to.

New such phenomena of increasing complexity and significance will emerge as the ability of computers to understand and process information in the forms in which it is used by humans grows; and as that ability is integrated into real-world systems. For example, the IBM “Watson” computer that competed successfully against the human champions of the television quiz show “Jeopardy” is now being used to help healthcare professionals identify candidate diagnoses based on massive volumes of research literature that they don’t have the time to read. Some investment funds now use automated engines to make investment decisions by analysing sentiments expressed on Twitter; and many people believe that self-driving cars will become the norm in the future following the award of a driving license to a Google computer by the State of Nevada.

As these astonishing advances become entwined with the growth in the volume and richness of information on the web, the effects will be profound and unpredictable. The new academic discipline of “Web Science” attempts to understand the emergent phenomena that might arise from a human-computer information processing system of such unprecedented scale. Many believe that our own intelligence emerges from complex information flows within the brain; some researchers in web science are considering the possibility that intelligence in some form might emerge from the web, or from systems like it.

That may seem a leap too far; and for now, it probably is. But as cities such as Birmingham, Sunderland and Dublin pursue the “open data” agenda and make progress towards the ideal of an “urban observatory“, the quantity, scope and richness of the data available on the web concerning city systems will increase many-fold. At the same time, the ability of intelligent agents such as Apple’s “Siri” smartphone technology, and social recommendation (or “decision support”) engines such as FourSquare will evolve too. Indeed, the domain of Smarter Cities is in large part concerned with the application of intelligent analytic software to data from city systems. Between the web of information and analytic technologies that are available now, and the possibilities for emergent artificial intelligence in the future, there lies a rich seam of opportunity for innovative individuals, businesses and communities to exploit the intelligent analysis of city data.

Things that make themselves

(Photo of a structure created by a superparamagnetic fluid containing magnetic nanoparticles in suspension, by Steve Jurvetson)

Can you imagine downloading designs for chocolate, training shoes and toys and then making them in your own home, whenever you like? What if you could do that for prosthetic limbs or even weapons?

3D printing makes all of this possible today. While 3D printers are still complex and expensive, they are rapidly becoming cheaper and easier to use. In time, more and more of us will own and use them. My one-time colleague Ian Hughes has long been an advocate; and Staffordshire University make their 3D printer available to businesses for prototyping and exploratory use.

Their spread will have profound consequences. Gun laws currently control weapons which are relatively large and need to be kept somewhere; and which leave a unique signature on each bullet they fire. But if guns can be “printed” from downloadable designs whenever they are required  – and thrown away afterwards because they are so easy to replace – then forensics will rarely in future have the opportunity to match a bullet to a gun that has been fired before. Enforcement of gun ownership will require the restriction of access to digital descriptions of gun designs. The existing widespread piracy of music and films shows how hard it will be to do that.

3D printers, combined with technologies such as social media, smart materials, nano- and bio-technology and mass customisation, will create dramatic changes in the way that physical products are designed and manufactured – or even grown. For example CocoWorks, a collaboration involving Warwick University, uses a combination of social media and 3D printing to allow groups of friends to collectively design confectionery that they can then “print out” and eat.

These changes will have significant implications for city economies. The reduction in wage differentials between developed and emerging economies already means that in some cases it is more profitable to manufacture locally in rapid response to market demand than to manufacture globally at lowest cost. In the near-future technology advances will accelerate a convergence between the advanced manufacturing, design, communication and information technology industries that means that city economic strategies cannot afford to focus on any of them separately. Instead, they should look for new value at the evolving intersections between them.

Of mice, men and cyborgs

(Professor Kevin Warwick, who in 2002 embedded a silicon chip with 100 spiked electrodes directly into his nervous system. Photo by M1K3Y)

If the previous theme represents the convergence of the information world and products and materials in the physical world; then we should also consider convergence between the information world and living beings.

The “mouse” that defined computer usage from the 1980s through to the 2000s was the first widely successful innovation in human/computer interaction for decades; more recently, the touchscreen has once again made computing devices accessible or acceptable to new communities. I have seen many people who would never choose to use a laptop become inseparable from their iPads; and two-year-old children understand them instinctively. The world will change as these people interact with information in new ways.

More exciting human-computer interfaces are already here – Apple’s intelligent agent for smartphones, “Siri”; Birmingham City University’s MotivPro motion-capture and vibration suit; the Emotiv headset that measures thoughts and can interpret them; and Google’s augmented reality glasses.

Even these innovations have been surpassed by yet more intimate connections between ourselves and the information world. Professor Kevin Warwick at Reading University has pioneered the embedding of technology into the human body (his own body, to be precise) since 2002; and in the effort to create ever-smaller pilotless drone aircraft, control technology has been implanted into insects. There are immense ethical and legal challenges associated with these developments, of course. But it is certain that boundaries will crumble between the information that is processed on a silicon substrate; information that is processed by DNA; and the actions taken by living people and animals.

Historically, growth in Internet coverage and bandwidth and the progress of digitisation technology led to the disintermediation of value chains in industries such as retail, publishing and music. As evolving human/computer interfaces make it possible to digitise new aspects of experience and expression, we will see a continuing impact on the media, communication and information industries. But we will also see unexpected impacts on industries that we have assumed so far to be relatively immune to such disruptions: surgery, construction, waste management, landscape gardening and arbitration are a few that spring to mind as possibilities. (Google futurist Thomas Frey speculated along similar lines in his excellent article “55 Jobs of the Future“).

Early examples are already here, such as Paul Jenning’s work at Warwick University on the engineering of the emotional responses of drivers to the cars they are driving. Looking ahead, there is enormous scope amidst this convergence for the academic, entrepreneurial and technology partners within city ecosystems to collaborate to create valuable new ideas and businesses.

Bartering 2.0

(Photo of the Brixton Pound by Matt Brown)

Civilisation has grown through the specialisation of trades and the diversification of economies. Urbanisation is defined in part by these concepts. They are made possible by the use of money, which provides an abstract quantification of the value of diverse goods and services.

However, we are increasingly questioning whether this quantification is complete and accurate, particularly in accounting for the impact of goods and services on the environments and societies in which they are made and delivered.

Historically, money replaced bartering,  a negotiation of the comparative value of goods and services within an immediate personal context, as the means of quantifying transactions. The abstraction inherent in money dilutes some of the values central to the bartering process. The growing availability of alternatives to traditional bartering and money is making us more conscious of those shortcomings and trade-offs.

Social media, which enables us to make new connections and perform new transactions, combined with new technology-based local currencies and trading systems, offer the opportunity to extend our personalised concepts of value in space and time when negotiating exchanges; and to encourage transactions that improve communities and their environments.

It is by no means clear what effect these grass-roots innovations will have on the vast system of global finance; nor on the social and environmental impact of our activities. But examples are appearing everywhere; from the local, “values-led” banks making an impact in America; to the widespread phenomenon of social enterprise; to the Brixton and Bristol local currencies; and to Droplet, who are aiming to make Birmingham the first city with a mobile currency.

These local currency mechanisms have the ability to support marketplaces trading goods and services such as food, energy, transport, expertise and many of the other commodities vital to the functioning of city economies; and those marketplaces can be designed to promote local social and environmental priorities. They have an ability that we are only just beginning to explore to augment and accelerate existing innovations such as the business-to-consumer and business-to-business markets in sustainable food production operated by Big Barn and Sustaination; or what are so far simply community self-help networks such as Growing Birmingham.

As Smarter City infrastructures expose increasingly powerful and important capabilities to such enterprises – including the “civic hacking” movement – there is great potential for their innovations to contribute in significant ways to the sustainable growth and evolution of cities.

Some things never change

Despite these incredible changes, some things will stay the same. We will still travel to meet in person. We like to interact face-to-face where body language is clear and naturally understood, and where it’s pleasant to share food and drink. And the world will not be wholly equal. Humans are competitive, and human ingenuity will create things that are worth competing for. We will do so, sometimes fairly, sometimes not.

It’s also the case that predictions are usually wrong and futurologists are usually mistaken; so you have good cause to disregard everything you’ve just read.

But whether or not I have the details right, these trends are real, significant, and closer to the mainstream than we might expect. Somewhere in a city near you, entrepreneurs are starting new businesses based on them. Who knows which ones will succeed, and how?

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From Christmas lights to bio-energy: how technology will change our sense of place

August 2, 2012 13 Comments

(Photo of Vancouver from the waterfront in Kitsilano by James Wheeler)

Why do we care about cities?

Why are private sector companies, public sector authorities and organisations such as the European Union making such enormous investments in “Smarter Cities“, “Sustainable Cities” and “Future Cities”?

Usually we would say it’s because of a combination of social, environmental and economic challenges facing us all. But there’s a powerful personal force at work too: where we live matters to us.

The choices that the 7 billion of us who share the planet make that are affected by our relationship with the places where we live have an incredible impact, especially when they are concentrated in cities. For example, the combined carbon impact of those who commute into cities to work each day because they choose to live in the less densely populated areas outside them is immense.

If we’re going to succeed in facing the significant challenges facing us, we need to exploit the powerful connections between people and places to motivate us to choose and behave differently.

The super-rich own houses around the world and have the means to travel between them as they choose or as their business demands it; and some professionals or tradespeople choose or accept a life that involves constant travel in the interests of work and employment. But on the whole, these are the exceptions.

Humans are physical not virtual. Whilst we move or travel from time to time out of choice or necessity, most people work and live day-by-day within a place. Some people and communities face challenges of social and transport mobility, and simply have no choice about where they live. Others may have some choice of location, but are limited by means to investing in living in one place. To a greater or lesser degree we all want to make the most of that investment, and don’t want to relocate too often or travel too far or frequently away from home in order to work.

The value we perceive in our connections to places is determined by their physicality, economics and communities. Many cities and regions exploit this by publicising the attractive qualities of the environment that they can offer – to individuals looking for homes, or to businesses looking for locations to operate from. Whilst the qualities of natural geography are certainly an important contributor to the quality of those environments, many of the other factors are to do with the people within them.

The choices and actions of people can have unusual effects on their environment; for example, the residents of Broadwater Road in Southampton choose collectively to mount striking lighting displays on their houses every Christmas. Or local regulations can constrain the choices of residents to achieve sometimes impressive results, such as in the beautiful urban village of Bourneville in Birmingham.

(Photo of the beautifully maintained frontage of houses in Bournville, Birmingham, by C. Wess Daniels)

Place and economy have many and complex influences on each other. The “Silicon Roundabout” cluster of entrepreneurial technology businesses in London exists where it does because of a combination of proximity to London’s financial services sector – and its venture capitalisists – and the availability of cheap flats, pubs and food outlets. These latter make it an affordable, attractive place to live for the young people with technology skills that start-up companies need to hire.

In other cases, the influences are less constructive. London’s economy has succeeded through businesses that rely on higly educated, skilled people; who in turn are recompensed with some of the highest wages in the country. Accordingly, house prices are extremely high. This it turn makes it difficult or impossible for many people in careers with more modest salaries to afford housing – for example, teachers. If there’s one thing that educated, successful people can be pretty much guaranteed to care about, it’s providing a high quality education for their children. But their success and affluence makes it hard for teachers to live nearby and provide it.

Modern communication technologies provide new opportunities for communities to form and interact in ways that give them more insight into and control over the impact of their interactions. Somewhere between the inventions of the telegraph and virtual worlds, we passed a tipping point: the earliest technologies were simply means to pass messages between people who already knew each other; the ones we have now – especially social media – enable people to identify, contact and transact with complete strangers based on some common interest.

Some simple examples of these technologies allowing communities to behave in more sustainable ways are the recycling network Freecyle, the LandShare initiative that provides access to untended land to people who want to grow food but don’t have gardens, and Carbon Voyage, one of many platforms that promote the sharing of cars, taxis and other forms of transport.

These technologies gives us the opportunity to build new marketplaces and currencies which can be used to encourage transactions that create social, environmental and economic value for communities. For example, organisations such as Big Barn and Sustaination are building new business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketplaces to encourage more sustainable food production and consumption.

(Photo of a 3D printer at work by Media Lab Prado)

What’s even more interesting is to look ahead to emerging technologies that could make it possible for such community markets to create some very surprising disruptions in the way city systems and some industries work. Smart materials and 3D printers, combined with the reduction in cost differentials between emerging and mature markets, are bringing some striking changes to manufacturing; meaning that in some cases it is more important to be able to manufacture customised items locally in immediate response to individual demand than it is to globally source the lowest cost manufacturer of commodity items.

New innovations in user interfaces are also making it easier to connect people to digital information and services. Whilst significant challenges remain in making such services truly accessible to all, it’s already striking to see tablet computers and e-readers being widely used by people who would never choose to buy or use a laptop. And once you’ve seen how naturally very young toddlers interact with tablet computers in particular, you realise how significantly the world will change in future years.

(Photo of me wearing the Emotiv headset)

Technology has already advanced even further; Emotiv‘s headset, which measures brain activity, has already been used by my colleagues to drive a London Taxi around an airfield by using the headset to monitor their thoughts; and Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University has pioneered the use of computing technology embedded in our bodies as a means of interacting with information systems in our environment. As such technologies mature and spread they’ll have impacts that are impossible to predict.

The New Optimists, a community of scientists and industry experts came together in Birmingham recently to explore the opportunities that new technologies offer for highly distributed energy production systems in communities. Domestic solar panels are an obvious means to do this; but geo-thermal energy, wind and tidal energy are other candidates. Southampton is already producing its own geo-thermal energy, for example, and Eco-Island are attempting to harness several such approaches to make the Isle of Wight not just self-sufficient in terms of energy, but a net exporter. The European Bio-Energy Research Institution (EBRI) at Aston University in Birmingham is developing new, more efficient means of producing energy from biological waste material such as discarded food. A prototype power-plant is already providing energy to 800 households in Shropshire. The New Optimists discussion looked ahead to the possibility that such technologies could be scaled-down even further for use in individual homes.

The systems exploiting these technologies in communities are winning investment because they are market-based: they create money-flows and revenue streams against which investments can be justified. Whilst their focus is local, it is not isolated: complete self-sufficiency will probably never be achieved, and is usually not the goal. Rather, it’s to maximise the benefits of local trading whilst making the impact of import and export more transparent so that more informed choices can be made.

Such place-based trading networks could connect the choices we make every day more directly with their impact on the places in which we live and work; exploiting our consciousness of the investments we’ve made in those places to persuade us to choose differently to protect and improve them. And if they’re linked sufficiently to the industrial national and international supply chains that provide what can’t be sourced locally, they could take into account the wider social and environmental impact of imported goods and services too. Of course, that will only be achieved if those systems are made more transparent, but the pressure to do that already exists. And the more we have the means to exploit transparency, the more effective that pressure will be.

We want to make our cities and lives more sustainable because we’re conscious of the environmental, social and economic challenges facing our planet; we’re most likely to do so through choices that have positive impacts we can see on the places where we live. Technology will continue to provide new mechanisms that can make such choices available to us; but its down to us as individuals and communities to harness and use them.

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Who will be the next generation of technology millionaires?

February 16, 2012 8 Comments

(Image: “IT is innovation” by Frank Allan Hansen)

A few years ago I attended a dinner debate hosted by the British Computer Society about the future of technology careers in the UK. At the time, I’d recently written a report for IBM UK on the subject. The common motivation was to explore the effect of globalisation on the UK’s IT industry.

Despite the continuing emergence of high quality technology industries around the world, the local demand for technology skills in the UK was then, and is now, increasing. The secret to understanding the seeming contradiction is twofold.

Firstly, consider which specific skills are required, and why. To cut a long story short, the ones that are needed on-shore in countries with high wages such as the UK are the ones most closely tied to agile innovation in local economic and cultural markets, or to the operation of critical infrastructures (such as water, roads and energy) or operations (such as banking and law enforcement).

Secondly, the more fundamental point is that we’re living through an Information Revolution that is increasing in pace and impact. That means the demand for science, technology, mathematics and information skills is going through the roof across the board. As  evidence, consider this article from McKinsey on the hidden “Information Economy”; or the claim that 90% of the information in the world was created in the last two years (widely referenced, e.g. by this article in Forbes); or that IBM now employs more mathematics PhD holders than any other organisation in the world.

At the BCS debate, a consultant from Capgemini introduced the evening by describing his meeting that morning with a group of London-based internet entrepreneurs. These people were young (20-25), successful (owning and running businesses worth £millions), and fiercely technology literate.

Today, I wonder if the same meeting would be held with internet entrepreneurs? In ten years time, I certainly don’t think it will be – they’ll be genetic engineers, nano-technologists, or experts in some field we can’t imagine yet. Of course, there are already many early entrepreneurs exploring those fields, as was shown in Adam Rutherford’s recent BBC Horizon documentary “Playing God”  (see this video or this review).

I’ve blogged recently about the importance of skills, education and localism to the future of our cities’ and country’s economies. This leads me to believe that more important than addressing the UK’s shortfall in IT skills (as reported by e-Skills last year) is understanding how to systematically integrate the teaching of technology, science, creative and business skills across schools, universities and vocational education. Further, that needs to be done in a way that’s responsive to the changes that will come to the sciences and technologies that have the most power to compliment the unique economy, geography and culture of the British isles.

This is already a problem for the UK economy. The e-Skills report found that UK businesses are nearly 10% less productive than US ones; and that 80% of that gap is down to less effective use of technology. Their research predicts that closing the technology gap could contribute £50bn to the UK economy over 5-7 years. But their finding that the British Education system provides less than 20% of the technology skills we need today means that closing the gap will be hard.

As the information revolution proceeds, the problem will get worse. And unless we do something about it in an enlightened way that recognises that the science and technology skills we’ll need in 10 years time are not the IT skills that are familiar to us today, we’ll fail to address it.

I was born in 1970; for me, the Tandy TRS80 computer my family bought in 1980 was a technological marvel, with its 16k RAM and graphic resolution of 128×48 pixels (all of them green). Today, my 3 year old son is growing up with a high resolution smartphone touchscreen as an unremarkable part of his world. By the time he’s of working age, the world will be unrecognisable – as will the skills he’ll require to be successful in it.

From the earliest years, we need to be exciting children in the mixture of creativity; abstract thinking and modelling; mathematics, technology, art and entrepreneurialism that are apparent now in such forums as TED. (www.ted.com). Whatever their interest and acumen, we need to give them the opportunity to find their own niche in that range of cross-disciplinary skills that will be economically valuable in the future. If we don’t, they won’t be ready to find jobs in the industries of the future when the computer programming industry, and others as we know them today, disappear.

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