Tag Archive: consumer


Systemic Considerations For The Future of Technology – Artificial Intelligence

Filed under: Systems Theory by systemsprinciples — Leave a comment
3 July , 2012

Most futurist experts believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to play a key role in the development of technology. Some of those believe that AI will ultimately provide the quickest route to a ‘technological singularity’, past which no further technological innovation will be possible. This article will use the rich picture we have built, as well as some of the considerations we have made in previous articles, to assess the possibilities for the future of AI.

AI in virtual personalities

We’ve asserted previously that virtual personalities enable users to interact in a contented manner with multi-function devices. Critical to the development of virtual personalities is the evolution of AI. To accurately simulate anthropic entities, these virtual personalities require a degree of autonomy similar to human personalities. That is, if asked a question, the virtual personality must be at least capable of replying in a similar variety of ways.

This is a trickier problem than it might seem. Though most questions asked of people are guided in to restrictive ‘answering frames’ that limit the number of possible responses by individual’s emotional reference points, the nature of selecting the right ‘frame’ is complicated. So, AI must be developed not only as a logical engine running a program to discriminate human from non-human responses – the quickest route to effective AI seems to be in simulating the human brain itself.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil believes this will be achieved by 2020. That’s eight years’ time. At that point, what can we expect?

Individual AIs 

As we discussed in the previous article, companies will need to develop ‘avatar personalities’ that represent the characteristics of their corporate ethos. In doing this, then, they will need to really get to grips with the human psychology behind developing ‘human’ AIs. So, I anticipate a boom in research fields around neuroscience, cognitive psychology and, eventually, ‘machine psychology’ – the art of coding the human brain in to a logical device. Through careful study, corporate entities will be able to create machine personalities that are representative of their defining characteristics. Governmental entities may also pursue this line of thinking, but (as evidenced historically) on a slightly less progressive timeline.

Cross-communication 

Recall that consumers are, in general, driving towards a single unified ecosystem of content and procedures. This is mirrored in various global drives for integration and ‘end-to-end’ control.  A company that produces its own printer now make its own paper. It’s possible to run your whole life using only products and services from Virgin.

What does this mean for the development of AIs? There are two clear paths here: a singular common ecosystem is established before the development of ‘human-level’ AI, or a singular common ecosystem is not established at all. In the second case, one could imagine cross-compatibility to be of little relevance: any cross-functionality will be achieved via interactions of high-level AI, consolidating the need for various communication frameworks in a common, natural, language. The first case is, to my mind, less likely (given the timescales involved). We have seen that there are multiple large entities pursuing the R&D dream – and all are succeeding to various extents. Market competition prevents them from collapsing together to form a single entity, and patent protection prevents their innovation from following identical lines. So, it is this author’s belief that the future is one of multifarious and multipersonalitied AIs communicating via a common, natural, language. At that point, I suspect the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ personalities to be much, much less of an issue.

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Systemic Considerations For Future Technology – The Evolution of the Cloud

Filed under: Systems Theory by systemsprinciples — 1 Comment
26 June , 2012

As connections to the internet have begun approaching local connections in terms of data transfer speed, it’s become increasingly obvious that we could harness this for remote computing. Back in 1985, Steve Jobs answered questions about what he saw for the future of computing and confirmed even then that the ability to remotely retrieve not only his files but his whole working environment and run it on a local machine was something he saw getting big. And it has. ‘Cloud computing’ now refers to any sort of computation where you operate only a ‘client’ machine – what you see on the screen, and any computation – that’s done potentially thousands of miles away, and shipped to you via a complex network of cabling (and, probably, wirelessly – more on this in a later article).

There are two main approaches to Cloud computing – three, if you’re being generous. In this article we’ll take a look at the extant fare, and see how they play ball with fragmentation, consumer demand and company ethos.

1.    You can do it in your browser

The browser has moved from being a nice addition to the most critical application installed on many machines. It no longer simply retrieves information and displays it; modern browsers offer a host of additional ‘cloud-based’ features to synchronise your information-manipulation experience across any number of machines. This is one of the attempts we spoke of to unify user experiences across OSs – take, for example, Google Chrome’s vast functionality adapted to nearly all user environments.

But browser technology is merely following the trend, not leading it – and that’s something I see changing significantly (see point 3 for more). Remember, the future is likely to involve consumers being led by anthropically-aware, crowd-psychology gifted and academically creative designers and strategists.

The real magic of browsers are their adherence to certain networking standards. So, we come up against patent litigation again; but, luckily, a large chunk of information on the web is in the ‘public domain’, at least for viewing. Browsers act primarily as a window on to this content. Legislation attempting to subvert this, such as SOPA and PIPA, is having difficulty gaining traction due to the overwhelming collaborative ability of dissenting web denizens.

So what’s up against browsers?

2. You can suck common content in to your ecosystem

Apps are a more natural way to browse specific kinds of contents. In a 2007 interview Steve Jobs asserted that custom interfaces provided by a wealth of apps would eventually supersede the one-size-fits-all approach of the modern browser. Currently, he looks to be right – but introducing app-specific interpretations of that content requires both a hardware layer (typically fragmented) and an OS layer (by nature, fragmented). While the data may draw from the same source, it can be tricky to share information cross-platform – so fragmentation is introduced.

Why do users go for apps? Typically, because they provide a more efficient and – crucially – pleasant information-retrieval or management process. In other terms, it has more to do with the principles of human-computer interaction than it does content. That’s a big area of our rich picture to colour in, yet – and we’ll need to dip in to anthropological, philosophical and psychological perspectives to build a holistic picture of interaction between these different fields. What makes an capacitor a capacitor? There’s something to tickle your brain.

3. You can get adaptive

Google’s recently produced line of Chromebooks foreshadow a new age of computing, if they catch on. While the hardware itself is unspectacular – a bunch of PCBs, Molex connectors, screen and keyboard – the theory behind the Chromebook is that a browser can form the basis for an entire Operating System. That’s a legitimate claim – if browsers become more adaptive, more ‘app-like’, there could be a happy medium for cross-platform browsers to become the new OS. What would that mean for fragmentation? Well, if the browser capability doesn’t receive preferential treatment for its creator’s own ecosystem, it could signal the end of fragmentation as is. Think what you can do using a browser already – word processing, printing, network configuration, server administration, programming – Google’s move seems to be eerily suggestive of a move away from fragmentation, at least on the software side. The hardware side, though – that’s where cloud access protocols and networking standards are going to have to play a big role. More on those next time.

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Systemic Considerations For Future Technology – Fragmentation

Filed under: Systems Theory by systemsprinciples — Leave a comment
26 June , 2012

A few weeks ago, Apple unveiled a whole new breed of computer. They claimed to have rid the machine of ‘legacy hardware’ – optical drives, Firewire ports, Ethernet connections. Microsoft Windows has, in the last few iterations, tiered itself in to professional and consumer sub-brands. In this article we’re going to delve a little in to the complexity of fragmentation, and have a look at the state of play. Later, we’ll use the notion of fragmentation to predict the course of some key future technologies.

Me vs You

The biggest and most glaring fragmentation in the complexity is the divide between company ecosystems. Around the mid-nineties, companies became increasingly aware that they could maintain control over a far greater swathe of users by managing their entire content ecosystem. Apple’s an obvious choice – by maintaining exclusive rights to its OS licensing and supplying media, content, applications and hardware that is designed for exclusive attachment to this OS, they can maintain a content ecosystem all to themselves. Similarly, Google’s Android OS, though licensable, is not designed to function in the same way, with the same ethos or indeed with the same content as in the Apple ecosystem. So also for Microsoft.

Ironically, most of this commercial fragmentation seems to be based around avoiding fragmentation, not creating it. Apple asserts that complete control over the user experience is the only way to maximise cross-compatibility and user-friendly interfaces. It has deep internal unification, even between desktop and mobile OSs, and provides a host of simple adaptors that can ensure ‘legacy’ compatibility. However, it’s pretty far from perfect – the recent unveiling of iOS 6 sees fragmentation creeping in to devices that aren’t limited simply by their hardware – for the first time, it seems that Apple is overtly fragmenting its product lines for commercial gain. That’s a frightening concept, and something we as the consumer have little or no power over. Since they have managed it once with little uproar, it’s fair to say that this is a strategy Apple will likely pursue in the future.

‘Cross-compatibility’, though, is not just a buzzword to give legacy hardware owners a warm, safe feeling – it’s integral to the idea of fragmentation, and how industries are working to prevent it. There are already extensive efforts to unify OS approaches to things like networking and data sharing (which we will look at in a future article), UI feel and cross-platform applications. An oscilloscope app designed to work on PC, Mac and Chromebook sharing data freely across platforms? It’s under development. Similar actuator interfaces between Windows and Android? It’s available. As ever, you have to know where to look, but these attempts are being made by companies like TE Connectivity and others.

So, fragmentation as it currently stands seems to be driven by ‘consumer capture’ and, oddly enough, a desire to avoid fragmentation at the consumer level by introducing it further up. As a wild prediction, I would suggest that sooner or later consumers are going to begin requiring a cohesive ecosystem as a matter of course, and it’ll become essential to the survival of these larger corporations to make concessions and agree on at least a common interface method. One common interface method is that of cloud computing – and we’ll take a look at that in the next section.

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Systemic Considerations For The Future Of Technology

Filed under: Systems Theory by systemsprinciples — 1 Comment
20 June , 2012

Principles of systems thinking have wide and far-reaching applications within a variety of complex situations. The only real requirement is complexity: any number of entities moving in what can be assumed to be a weakly-interacting or independent way (similar to statistical approaches in modern physics). If there is any field that qualifies as complex, it is that of emergent technological trends. We’re going to take a look at the state of affairs, building up a verbal rich picture over the next few articles, and then considering a cause-and-effect diagram to analyse where the positive and negative feedback loops are that will likely impact future technological development.

Where are we now?

This is a big question. We’ve moved well beyond analog systems, but digital systems more often attempt to imitate them (at least anachronistically). Resistors, capacitors and so on are still indispensable, though their technology is vividly different to how it was in the past. Since the invention of the Integrated Circuit, we’ve seen a drive for miniaturisation driven by both evangelistic Research and Development departments and consumer demand for integrated products. So, that’s a trend well worth picking out – all signs lead toward miniaturisation and integration. The two factors pushing and pulling that are consumer expectation and market-independent research interests.

Twenty years ago, the idea that companies might invest freely in researching product lines never intended for market would have been madness. At least, it was regarded as a tendency exclusive to Universities. If someone came up with something good, it was probably best to licence it or hire them for an exorbitant fee. Nowadays, progressive big companies like Apple and Google actively encourage employees to pursue research purely for interest. Google, in fact, recently responded to shareholders’ concerns at the expense of such marketless R&D by expounding the systemic benefits unlocking individuals’ creativity could have. This is commendable – right from the software engineer who comes to work refreshed and ready to code over to the product line manager who pinches that logo to increase brand-awareness, it’s plain to see that the effects of winning at the knowledge economy – and trying to predict its future direction – go further than this year’s bottom line.

So, from this initial consideration we have looked at two key areas of our rich picture – where we’ve come from analog and bulky systems and where companies seem to be heading – more academic and creative research avenues. Next time, we’ll look in a little more detail at the other big factor in driving technology development – consumer demand.

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