A simple idea to greatly improve the quality of this weekend – turn the phone off for 24 hours.
Every time I do this, I appreciate the power (both positive and negative) of convenience. As I write every day, I get to the bigger screen to write my post for the day and check email, But, it is amazing how the absence of that little bit of convenience can change our behavior.
Inconvenience has its benefits.
In 1969, the Chief Scientist at Xerox – then a rich and famous photocopier company – suggested that they ought to invest in a second research center away from headquarters. They chose Palo Alto and created Xerox Parc.
In the next decade, the scientists at Xerox Parc incubated, among other things, the first graphical user interface controlled by a mouse, graphics display, and text editor.
Of course, Xerox never ended up commercializing any of this as their executives never saw the potential of these inventions. So, many of the best researchers left to places like Apple Computer and ended up inventing the future.
Xerox Parc was a one off in many ways. It was and will likely remain among the most productive research facilities in the history of mankind (Bell Labs, perhaps, would be its only real competition). But, the retelling of this famous story doesn’t fail to inspire humility. The executives at Xerox weren’t stupid – they were just not incentivized to recognize the potential of these breakthrough ideas. That could easily be you or me.
It also never fails to remind me of the importance of investing a small but consistent portion of resources – be it at work, in our financial investments, or in life – in research/exploratory projects with no immediate pay off. Many of these don’t seem to pay off for the longest time.
Until they do.
I’ve been experimenting with phone detoxing over weekends in the past few months. While my normal approach has been to play hide-and-seek with the phone by putting it in some obscure place and forgetting about it, I decided to do a complete switch off this weekend. My 3 lessons from switching the phone off for a 60 hour period –
1. I missed 3 use cases – i) Waze/maps when we were driving, ii) Ability to call contact other when we split ways at a crowded area, and iii) Whatsapp to send the occasional message to framily.
2. I did not miss the following – i) Checking if there’s any new email or message because the phone is close by and ii) Reading articles on my phone – I prefer a larger screen but the phone is really convenient.
Overall, I can’t say I missed the phone all that much. I did cheat a bit by sending some messages from my wife’s phone too coordinate with friends – but, it was minimal. I enjoyed doing all my writing and reading from a larger screen – it was more targeted and intentional than reflexively picking up my phone.
3. I’ve been disconnecting from work email for a full 48 hours between Friday evening – Sunday evening for a few months now. And, while that has enabled me to be better engaged through the weekend, there was something wonderfully liberating about switching off completely. We normally associate detoxing with the body. But, there’s something to be said for detoxing for the mind.
I look forward to doing this more.
Was the invention of the axe a good thing or a bad thing? The axe was among the first simple machines — a breakthrough in technology that propelled humanity forward. It helped our ancestors chop wood and hunt. But, it was also used as a weapon in war.
Every incredible advance has had a dark side. We have prevented infant mortality thanks to advances in ultrasound technology. And, yet, the same technology was responsible for female infanticide. Industrial farming has helped us feed billions of humans with fewer humans involved in agriculture than ever before. However, it has also resulted in routine horrible treatment of farm animals.
Given this context, it is often amusing to see the discussion around artificial intelligence. We see talk of doomsday one day (“all the jobs are going away”) and techno-optimism on another (“AI is going to help us by freeing us from repetitive tasks”). Of late, I’ve been seeing more media devoted to the latter. It is worth examining both sides of the conversation.
Not doomsday. The central hypothesis behind the idea that there is no doomsday on the cards is the idea that we’re moving into a world with IA or “Intelligence Augmentation.” The idea here is that AI is great at finding answers. But, it is on us to find questions. We’ll find new and interesting questions to keep us occupied while AI helps us eliminate repetitive tasks and make us more efficient. And, we’ll use ingenuity to create new jobs that don’t exist — just as we created “Yoga instructor” or “Zumba instructor” jobs after the industrial revolution.
One example of this is a painting robot that was featured on Wired (see video — 4 mins) that increased the productivity of human laborers by 4x while taking over all the repetitive tasks. You’ve probably come across similar stories.
The surge in recent positivity is also thanks to an OECD research report that classified ~10% of American jobs as high risk. This is much lower than previous forecasts that labelled ~50% of jobs as high risk.
Maybe doomsday. From The Atlantic on WalMart’s future workforce —
Walmart executives have sketched a picture of the company’s future that features more self-checkouts and a grocery-delivery business — soon escalating to 100 cities from a pilot program in six cities. Personal shoppers will fill plastic totes with avocados and paper towels from Walmart store shelves, and hand off packages to crowdsourced drivers idling in the parking lot. Assembly will be outsourced, too: Workers on Handy, an online marketplace for home services, will mount televisions and assemble furniture.
Such examples are also dime-a-dozen these days. More automation promises more returns to shareholders => happier executives and boards.
Of course, it is also easy to counter all examples of optimism. For example, the same painting robot (featured above) that increased productivity of human laborers by 4x is a great place to start. At some point — assuming other painting firms invested in robots — we will have 4x the amount of painting capacity at hand. Are there as many jobs to go around?
And, the above OECD report that said risks of “massive technological unemployment” are overblown cautioned that we face risks of “further polarisation of the labour market” between highly paid workers and other jobs that may be “relatively low paid and not particularly interesting.”
This Economic graph summarizing some of the findings was particularly interesting.
Notice how the percentage of jobs at risk of automation decreases as a country gets richer?
The polarization that the report warns may not be limited to high skill and low skill jobs then. There is reason to believe that we might see a growing schism between richer and poorer countries.
The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle. All this brings us back to the story of the axe. Every technology breakthrough has a dark side. The challenge, then, is to not get caught in all the techno-optimism that accompanies the emergence of breakthrough technology and to take the effort to think through the second and third order consequences.
As we’ve seen in the revelations about the effects of social media in the past 2 years, the absence of such thought can have serious long term consequences.
So, how do we proceed?
My recommendation would be to stop any debate about whether we’re heading to an AI induced doomsday and, ask the three following questions —
1. Are we clear on what we’re talking about when it comes to AI? There are three major domains of AI that we discuss –
It is important to be clear about these domains because a lot of mainstream discussion bandwidth is wasted in talking about the dangers of Artificial General Intelligence. That is a waste of time.
Instead, our discussions should center around IA and II. We’ve made plenty of progress using techniques like Deep Learning. And, while both extend human capabilities, they also automate tasks that currently employ large groups of humans in the near term.
2. Are we conscious about the possible dark side of AI — specifically the use of artificial intelligence for surveillance?
The Economist outlined this in a piece about the Workplace of the future —
And surveillance may feel Orwellian — a sensitive matter now that people have begun to question how much Facebook and other tech giants know about their private lives. Companies are starting to monitor how much time employees spend on breaks. Veriato, a software firm, goes so far as to track and log every keystroke employees make on their computers in order to gauge how committed they are to their company. Firms can use AI to sift through not just employees’ professional communications but their social-media profiles, too. The clue is in Slack’s name, which stands for “searchable log of all conversation and knowledge”.
The good news is that most of the preceding portions of the article talked about the benefits of algorithms in the workplace — fairer pay rises and promotions, improve productivity and so on.
It will be on us to strike a good balance.
3. Are we designing the right social support systems to be able to prepare us?
In a great piece titled “The Robots are coming, and Sweden is fine.” by The New York Times, I found 3 notes fascinating –
While the thought of ~60% taxes in the US would be morally repulsive, it is unclear how long we’ll be able to sustain the current reality.
German Economist Heiner Flassbeck had a powerful graph showing the declining share of national wealth in rich countries (except Norway).
National wealth in the US and UK is now negative. Low public wealth limits the government’s ability to regulate the economy, redistribute income and mitigate rising inequality.
Regardless of Artificial intelligence, income inequality has been rising everywhere.
If AI is expected to further increase the level of inequality, we’ll need to double down on the discussion on social support systems.
For the record, I’m not optimistic that this will happen. Our ability to prepare for changes before they hurt us is poor (see: climate change).
But, I’m hopeful that we can begin by changing how we approach conversations around AI. Maybe next time we hear a conversation about sentient machines, we’ll put a stop to the conversation and focus it on the actual issues like Orwellian uses of data and investing in social support systems to counter inequality. Maybe that, in turn, will mean thoughtful uses of AI in the the organizations we’re part of.
And, maybe, just maybe, we’ll succeed in making the transition to a world with Intelligence augmentation and Intelligence Infrastructure in the coming decades a lot less painful…
Links for additional reading
Scott de Martinville, a French printer, began taking a hobbyist’s interest in the physics and anatomy related to sound. Since the 1500s, scientists had concluded that sound waves travel via the air and also travel four times faster via water. They had also figured out the anatomy of the ear and how it “received” sound. As stenographers were the best transcribers of sound, Scott created a device called the “Phonautograph” in 1857 that transcribed sound into sound waves.
Image Source – Auto Engineering Society
He had sought to automate stenography and expected to create a new language around interpreting sound waves. This didn’t work.
However, Thomas Alva Edison went on to invent the phonograph which he expected would be used to send audio letters. Then, Graham Bell invented the telephone – which he thought would be used to distribute live music. They had it in reverse!
Thus, phones brought us closer. The first international line between the US and Europe in the 1950s could just handle 24 simultaneous international calls. Telephones popularized “hello” and switchboards employed women professionally. Phones also gave us Bell Labs – an organization that created nearly every major technology – radio, television, microprocessors, fiber optics, cell phones, computers.
More on Bell Labs next week.
Telephones made skyscrapers possible because they made transmitting messages between groups easy. Elevators would need to accommodate many many people if we were still doing human memos. – Steven Johnson
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Source and thanks to: How we got to now by Steven Johnson
In 1906, Lee De Forest invented the first amplifier. Until amplifiers were discovered, performers relied on the acoustics of a given space to amplify their voices. Opera artists were expert proponents of this performance genre.
One of the more powerful uses of amplifiers was a political rally. Suddenly, a powerful speaker could command the attention of thousands of people, live. Every great technology has seen uses that are good and evil – the amplifier was no different.
On the one hand, amplifiers were a critical aide in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
And, on the other hand, they also helped Martin Luther King Jr. create change that enabled better lives for millions of African American in following generations.
Similarly, all the technology around us can be used to make things better… or worse.
As always, it is our choice.
There are many ways to write “state of industry” posts. One approach is to project the future based on trends established this year. Another is to project the future based on the current strategies employed by the top industry players.. I did some version of that in 2014 and 2015. This year, I thought I’d focus on a different approach – go back to first principles and look at business models.
This approach will help us pivot from the industry’s perspective to the customer’s perspective and, thus, not be too focused on technology fads (e.g. Segway, Google Glass, etc.)
We’ll approach this in 3 parts –
I. The 4 core business models
II. 2016 – what we saw
III. 2017 and beyond – what we might see
Couple of notes of caution
I. The framework:
I contend that there are four fundamental business models on the internet and, since we’re talking about money, lay them out in two axes – frequency of transaction (a proxy for customer loyalty) and payment model sophistication (pay per use is much more sophisticated than pay per unit). There are many, many customer acquisition models (e.g. freemium). However, all these models bring us back to these 4.
An important note – these models are not unique to the internet. The old world had examples of each of these models. For example –
However, the internet changes the nature and scale of these models. And, in doing that, it completely disrupts existing businesses.
Disruption. Every conversation about disruption calls for the customary nod to Prof Clay Christensen. Over the years, Prof Christensen replaced the term disruptive technology with disruptive innovation because he recognized that few technologies are intrinsically disruptive or sustaining in character; rather, it is the business model that the technology enables that creates the disruptive impact. Disruptive technologies, thus, are often novel combinations of existing off-the-shelf components.
Just to make that point, let’s consider one industry that is currently being disrupted – retail.
Traditional retail was built on assumptions of scarcity. The main business model was “one shot purchases” –
Isn’t it amazing how a discussion on traditional retail touches all industries that sold product (i.e. all consumer packaged goods) and traditional advertising?
On the internet, retail is built on the assumptions of abundance. The dominant business models are subscriptions and tax.
Retail is still in the early stages of being disrupted. But, as Benedict Evans points out, it is only a matter of time. And, while retail is fundamentally about a customer buying something, the way it happens determines the economics of the whole process. And, the internet has changed how buying happens. Stay tuned.
II. Reflect on what we’ve been seeing up in 2016
One shot purchases. Of the 4 internet business models, one shot purchases makes less waves because it is, by far, the least sought after model. This is the piece of the internet reserved for the small businesses who can just create their own little online store with tools from the likes of a Magento or Shopify. The goal, here, is to build a brand and figure out a way to build a subscription.
There’s too much going on to trust that a customer will come back to you.
Subscriptions. Subscriptions, once again, had a big year. Let’s go through a few of the big moves.
Ads.
Tax.
III. Explore what we might see in 2017 and beyond – with a lens on the trends everyone talks about.
I am no prediction expert. But, I thought we’d touch on 4 interesting emerging technologies and what I think their dominant business models would be.
Artificial intelligence. I think AI having 2 kinds of implementations –
Related note on self driving cars – could the future of cars be a shift from one shot purchases to subscriptions? Since disruption lies in business models, subscriptions may be the future of car ownership. In a world with rented self driving cars, maybe we’re looking at a future where we pay company X a fixed amount for unlimited use in the year?
Augmented reality/Virtual reality. There are lots of options in play here. Snapchat has taken a stab at augmented reality through their glasses. That suggests AR/VR could be an interesting play for consumer attention and, potentially, monetization via ads. This isn’t hard to imagine – you are in your virtual Facebook/Pokemon Go world and there are billboards everywhere with ads for you to look at.
However, I think there’s potentially a few subscription businesses in AR/VR. Think: $1000 a year for travel subscriptions (spend time in your dream locations) or $500 a year for gaming tournaments (play X virtual games with your global team).
Finally, we could envision “tax” based monetization as well. An AR/VR company could help you buy clothes that fit a virtual you and charge retailers per use (perhaps a more advanced version of LikeaGlove?).
The Internet of Things. I think a successful implementation of internet-of-things is going to result in 2-3 massive platforms who make their money as a tax. We need the equivalent of the iPhone and Android ecosystems for our toasters. The road to that sort of standardization isn’t really clear. But, if and when that happens, I think tax will be the way to go. And, if I had to bet on a company to do this, I’d bet on Amazon. What if private label Amazon toasters could connect to the internet and be controlled by Alexa?
Related and very interesting, what if an embedded chip in your Tide packet could send a signal to your Amazon Dash button to put a Tide refill packet in your cart?
Bitcoin and Blockchain. Bitcoin has had its best year yet. I think Bitcoin, a digital currency with near zero transaction costs, will make the implementation of “pay-per-use” even more prevalent. But, it will also accelerate the – everyone is a retailer on the internet phenomenon. One reason that shift isn’t happening fast enough now is because of cross-border currency restrictions. Just imagine what happens when all those something-in-a-box subscription businesses have easy access to a global market. Another example – if micro-payments become real easy, could we pay per article read? Then again, if this cross border stuff happens, there will likely be new regulation hurdles.
The underlying Blockchain technology commoditizes trust and identity. I don’t understand the full implications of what online communities built on Bitcoin would be. But, as it is decentralized technology, a blockchain based Facebook will likely not see ad profits accrue to a comparatively tiny group of folk as they do today. Potentially very disruptive. But, my sense is that we’re still 4-5 years from seeing this playout. Also, blockchain tokens are a very interesting implementation of the tax model.
Conclusion: There is a lot going on in tech and it is hard to really understand going on by following the news. A simpler, and yet effective, approach is to create mental models that help us make sense of all of this. One such approach is to look at the core 4 business models. At the end of the day, every promising technology has to prove its worth to survive. And, thinking about how emerging technology could change existing business models can be a powerful way to think about the future. At any rate, that’s how disruption is done.
10 interesting posts in case you want to dig deeper.
(Thanks EB, Kaushik, and Pranav for all the edits on this – and to all other friends who helped with the thinking)
We went down to a physical retail store to buy stuff for the home the other day. Right then, I realized how much we missed the Amazon experience. We missed two aspects in particular.
1. Reviews. I felt lost as I looked at products in the aisle. Were these the ones that came highly recommended? On what basis were they on the aisle?
2. Unlimited selection. We were looking for a specific product we’d seen online. But, it was “out of stock.” Out of stock? What is that? :-)
Three reflections –
First, reviews and unlimited selection make the Amazon experience vastly much superior to most physical retail stores. I could immediately see a future application for augmented reality. I would imagine us wearing AR glasses to see reviews superposed on top off products in physical retail stores. We’d be able to instantly compare attributes and prices across retailers as well. Pushing this further, I’d imagine retailers would already know what I intend to buy by having their staff wear AR glasses of their own. After all, I was probably logged into their website when I was searching. They’d be able to help me as soon as they saw me walk in.
Second, hybrid approaches often tend to be powerful. Maybe retailers could do better with having computers onsite that would help us browse their online inventory. At least, they could convert our intent to a sale by helping us make a purchase and have it delivered to our homes rather than have us go back and order it on Amazon. On the other hand, Amazon retail stores would be very helpful. They could just have all their best selling merchandise in one place.
Finally, it is impossible to roll technology back. Such experiences repeatedly underline how naive discussions around bringing jobs back to “x country” are. The Amazon experience is better for customers with far lesser people employed per dollar of revenue. Even the folks who are employed in their warehouses are slowly being replaced by robots with a few human supervisors. Technology innovation is going to keep moving forward.
It is up to us to keep pace with it.
Every time I think about the problems we will have to spend our time solving in the next few decades, I go back to two looming questions –
1. How will we deal with the displacement of 70%+ of our workforce when machines take over most of our jobs?
2. How will we prevent human extinction by figuring out sustainable solutions to co-exist with the environment on this planet?
The onus on the first question lies more with policy makers and governments. The second, on the other hand, is in the hands of researchers and entrepreneurs. As with all complex questions, these two looming questions throw out plenty of symptoms that threaten to occupy our attention. But, attacking symptoms will not help us solve these problems. In fact, they probably get in the way.
For example, the root of political unrest and the hateful sentiments against fellow humans in most “developed” economies right now is due to the displacement. The blue collar factory worker’s job has gone away and will never come back. It is hard to come to terms with that reality. And, the politics around it don’t help. “Vote for me and I’ll get your jobs back” is a simple, if untrue, message. These simple messages win the day in the short term. True progress, unfortunately, is built on tough discussions. And, these tough discussions will not occur until we accept that this is the reality we face.
So, perhaps, the first step should not be to discuss our solutions to the problems we face. Our solutions will be very different depending on our biases.
Maybe the first step is simply to agree on the questions…
There’s a benefit to reflection that isn’t apparent when you get started. That’s because it takes time for thoughts to percolate and crystallize into insight and then action.
As I reflected on my use of devices a few days ago, an idea that stuck was that I was very aware of the fact that rolling over to my phone and checking messenger notifications and emails first thing in the morning was a very negative habit. And, yet, I regularly went through phases when I did it. As I rolled over to do it a few days back, I asked myself why this was so difficult.
The analogy that popped to mind was one about eating healthy. The way to eat healthy is not to surround yourself with unhealthy food and test your willpower. Instead, it is to throw all unhealthy food out and only keep healthy food at home. Music piracy in the US became a non issue the moment it became easy to download songs via services like iTunes. Convenience matters.
So, why not keep my phone out of the bed room? I felt that slightly panicked reaction – “How will I wake up without an alarm?”
And, thus, I finally understood why I was so used to keep my phone by my side. This reason had gotten lost over time. Fast forward 3 days, I keep my phone outside our bed room as of 8pm and use my iPad to set an alarm. My iPad is primarily a FaceTime + media consumption device. So, checking stuff first thing in the morning is a non issue.
It has felt wonderful.
Rohan 1, Negative energy device habits 0.
A Learning a Day 
