Quote: “Life is what happens to you while you are busy doing other things”, This is certainly true for me. This is why it has been so long since my last blog entry. Anyway, this time I have collected a lot of things that are going to shape the next 10 years. I think they are important if, like me, you are trying to figure out how the path towards technical singularity will progress over the next 10 – 20 years.
Today I tried Google Goggles, which is an image analysis application for Android mobile phones, which allow you to take a picture and it then analysis it and find stuff on the web related to what is in the image. Today it work best with text and logos. You can take a picture of a product, book, DVD etc and find it on the web. But Google is working on making it better, such that it can find people on the web if you photograph their face. Or you can take a picture of your empty product packaging before you throw it out and your phone will let you order a new one with only 2 – 3 clicks. (No need to implement scanners and computers in your fridge, like we talked about just a few years ago). And in addition Google can also help you shop cheaper or more green or more sustainable or more healthy. And at restaurants you can take photos of the menu and of your food and give feedback and rate the foot and service. Thus the web can have realtime updated statistics, menu and price information from every restaurant in the world. When you walk by a restaurant you can take a picture of the restaurant and Google will show you pictures of their food, ratings, pricing. Google may even suggest another restaurant in the neighborhood, in same price range but with better ratings. And a few years later Google may even rate it related to other restaurants and dishes you your self have had recently. Of cause this will not just work for restaurants but for most other things too.
I think this will bring us a big step closer to technical singularity, when your phone help you select and order a large number of products without having to type or speak to your phone. Just a few tabs on the touch screen and it has helped you select and order and pay products and services which with high likelyhood is the product which you would have choose if you have had more time to study alternatives and select the product. I am not saying that we will use it for everything. In the beginning only a small fraction of the population will use it for a few type of products. But in 10 – 20 years the majority of us may use it to help us select or order half of all the products that we buy in a typical everyday life.
During the last week my wife and I spend 30+ hours looking for a summer vacation for the family. I would easily pay 100$ if I could type in my priorities and budget and a system would suggest several alternative packages for me. - And I knew from experience and word-of-mouth that I would not be able to come up with a significantly better list myself by researching for 30+ hours. - And the results had user ratings and maybe even links to persons in my network that had been there, whom I could contact to get a more personal introduction / rating / feedback. Of cause this hold true for many other products and services than vacation.
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This bring me to my next subject: I call it Feedback Production. Today most products are mass produced. Typically a company designs a product or collection. Then they get bids from factories and subcontractors, then they place a big first order and maybe 12 – 18 month after the planning started, the products hit the stores at which time planning of the next product has already started. This is very risky, because it is difficult to predict this many month ahead what customers want, what other competitors will supply and production cost, raw material cost, etc. Because of this big risk it is very difficult or at least very expensive to lend money for a new product and it is also very expensive and often impossible to get 4 or 8 times as many products of the same design manufactures and shipped out to stores in a short time, if the new product turns out to be a block buster. Thus it is build into the way we manufacture and invent products today, that if you want to bring something new to the market we have to start in the small and grow it up slowly. Thus it is very difficult to make any revolution you can only make evolutions. And since patents do not work for most products, it makes very risky to be first movers.
But the good news is that I think this is going to change fundamentally very soon. (very soon meaning: Starting within the next 10 years). The new thing is that IT will help designers get very rapid and accurate feedback from customers. Through channels like Google Goggles and Facebook and Twitter. And we will see new types of production lines, where scaling of production is much more flexible and shipment to the store is less than a month. Thus designers can make small series of products (with a lot less risk) as soon as the first 1000 units hit the stores they can get the feedback from customers and change the product accordingly and adjust the production capacity accordingly. Thus we will start to see products that change not every year but every 2 – 4 weeks. It will be much easier for designers to order more production capacity for block buster products in a very short time.
For us working in IT this is great news, because this requires a lot of new IT infrastructure and this is what the majority of us will build during the next 10 years. In maybe in 20 years from now it will involve very little risk to bring a new product to market (here I am talking about products that does not require a huge R & D effort). Cost of the first series is very small and it can scale fast. If you can keep the feedback away from competitors then you win the race for this new type of products. And the winner is he who can manage the shortest loop from feedback to the next generation of adjusted products. Not like today where risk taking and production price coupling to huge production series make the winner. The feedback production paradigm is coming soon and it is going to remove the risk significantly and speed up production evolution and revolution cycles drastically. (The attentive reader will notice that Feedback production is a fundamental building block for technical singularity)
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Did you know that China is the country in the world with the fastest trains? Did you know that they got this technology after working with companies like Siemens, Frensh TGV and a Japanies company to build a railroad for the Olympics in 2008. When the economic crisis hit in end of 2008 Chinese goverment decided to build a huge number of high speed railroads connecting all the big cities in China. Instead of investing in help packages in the bank sector they invested in infrastructure and jobs.
By the way they also invested $30 billion in a factory to build passenger jets to compete with Airbus and Boing. Trust me, soon (10 – 15 years) they will be a worthy competitor to those two old giants.
And did you know that the Chinese Government has announced that they will build a high speed railroad from Beijing to London before 2020. My first reaction was why? My next reaction was can they really do that? Then I thought who will be the customers? And finally how will they make agreements with the countries which it shall pass through?
It is planned to run average 320 Km / hour and cross 17 countries.
After some research on the topic and thinking a little more about it I realized that this railroad is not for passengers. It is for shipping products from China to Europe very fast. And to get raw materials like oil, iron, steel, cobber, lithium, etc into China fast. China government realized that what is most important to sustain their growth over the next 10 – 20 years is to get the raw materials they need and at a very predictable rate and price. Most of the countries that have these raw materials are actually some of the 17 countries on the planned line between Europe and China. None of these countries has the technical or economical or political strength to build the world fastest railroad and connect their country with 2 of the 3 most powerful regions in the world. So China figured that if they offer to build such a railroad through these poor countries, at no initial cost, they could probably get a good long term deal on raw materials. And the sooner this link would be ready the better for the Chinese economy. Thus over the next 10 years china are going to send a million railroad workers out to build this link. Basically the do what the Europeans did ruthlessly 200 years ago to conquer the world. Exchange technological advantages for world dominance.
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OK, now let me talk about what the changes and growth in China can bring to technical singularity. First of all, I think that it is important that the "Western systems” have alternatives to which we can compare our systems. This will cause us to discuss important questions and bring changes to our system, which has been needed for a long time. Here I am thinking especially about political systems and all the bureaucracy in many of our system. In the west we think we have a real good democracy. But in my mind, the fact is that our type of democracy need rethinking and there are many problems that it does not address well or have a very bad influence on. The Chinese democracy is very different, so different that many people don't think it is a real democracy. But while I agree it has it's flaws too, I think they have some very smart features build into their system.
Another thing that strikes me as very important is the mindset among successful young Chinese. Throughout their entire life they have experienced very rapid growth. In the west we have a mindset that everything changes very-very slowly. The only industry I can think of, where we expect rapid growth is in the silicon industry, where we have learned to expect doubling of processing power and storage capacity every 18 month. This is a fundamental part of our mindset and most of our actions and inventions are tightly coupled with this relation. But in China the young generation has a mindset that they can expect enormous changes in almost all areas of the society within a decade. And what is even more important, contrary to the west, it is less likely that new ideas get rejected because peers and investors don’t believe in them. In China there is an atmosphere where everyone believe in big changes within the next decade and they admire those who push these changes forward. I think this atmosphere will drive many other industries into rapid growth similar to what we know in the silicon industry and consequently china will become the leader in most of these industries.
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