Houses of the Future – COVID-19 series

If you’re like me, you’re probably thrilled to start seeing something other than the four walls of your own home. The Covid-19 crisis will be a long overdue start to influencing changes to the buildings we spend our time in.

The Merger – Now that information work has finally reached its mobility phase, houses and offices will start to change shape. The major change is that spaces for work and living will start to replicate each other, with differences in size and scale. We can already see it in the home. Technology that used to solely reside in offices has begun to spring up in our homes. The technology we now have in the home is usually as good and often better than what we have at work. Offices are starting to look less like cubicle farms with the arrival of lounge spaces, entertainment zones, eating areas – somewhat replicating what we see in boutique hotels. What’s ironic is that this is how things used to be pre-industrialisation. We lived where we worked. Craftsmen had workshops out the back of houses. Bakers lived on top of their shop front. Now that many of us are becoming modern day digital craftspeople, we are going back to that model.

The first part of the process was the delineation of working and leisure hours evaporated. Now it’s about to happen to our spaces and they’re starting to replicate each other.

Caves with Widgets – We’ve been living in caves for a very long time, albeit these days they come with modern day comforts. It is valuable to remind ourselves of how we got to now by looking at how long some of the current technologies in our homes have been around:

  • Letterboxes – Mail services started encouraging their installation in houses for deliveries in the mid-1800s.
  • Indoor plumbing – In the 1860s, only 5% of American houses had running water. Flush toilets were still uncommon until the mid 1900s.
  • Driveways – Only became a standard inclusion fewer than 80 years old ago.
  • Electricity – Uncommon in suburban homes until the 1930s.
  • White goods (electricity needed) – Rare in modern economies until post WWII.
  • Televisions – In 1956 in Australia
  • VCRs – Early 1980s
  • Home Computers – Mid-1980s
  • Internet – Mid-1990s

So what’s coming?

Zero Energy Buildings: The ZEB movement is a system where a building generates all of the energy it requires. In the near future, the walls and roof of every new or retrofitted building will be capable of generating power. This will be primarily through solar and micro wind turbines, as well as piezoelectric technology that converts kinetic energy generated by raindrops hitting a building to electricity – yes, this already exists. The energy rating of buildings in the future won’t just be about efficient use of energy – it will be about creating an excess, more than it needs. It will become the new normal.

Houses that Change Shape: Walls will be moveable in most apartments to maximise space usage across different hours of the day, like hotels often do in its meeting spaces. They’ll become modular. Houses of the future will be designed with non-permanent room sizes, allowing us to get more from less. Kitchens and eating spaces will be able to expand and converted back into lounge rooms or even cinema rooms.

Delivery Boxes Replace Letterboxes: The letterbox is sorely in need of an upgrade. Our houses now are the recipients of packages, not letters. You’d think e-commerce hadn’t happened yet! In the future, letterboxes will have three sections: dry, fridge and frozen, so it could take all kinds of deliveries. Letterboxes will likely be as big as a fridge and possibly underground, with a button for the courier to press, so it could rise up to take the delivery. When a delivery arrives, the recipient is notified and can view live video footage, to verify the delivery person’s identity. Using a smartphone, the recipient could open the delivery unit and check that the delivery is as ordered, using near field communication readers (RFID) and image recognition cameras. The delivery unit would be secure as a safe for delivery of high value items and be powered under a ZEB doctrine.

Upgraded Home Office and Virtual Reality Room: We can expect the home office to receive a massive upgrade. High-end home offices will be as common as gourmet kitchens, given their importance in generating income for many households. We’ll have virtual reality meeting rooms with travelator floors to make us feel that we are in the same room as someone else on the other side of the world. These spaces will lead us to question why we need to go to the office at all. These video studios will be capable of creating content to make even the most advanced YouTuber salivate. We’ll also use our VR rig, including haptic gloves and suits, to shop online for things we want to touch and experience before purchasing. We’ll also use it to exercise and browse holiday accommodation and experiences, using a treadmill to keep us stationary while we seemingly explore other places.

A.I. Enabled: Automation utilising voice and gesturing will replace traditional interactions and buttons to manage re-ordering of household items. We’ll literally be talking to the walls! This is a battleground Amazon, Google and Apple are already deeply ensconced in. Convenience will be high, but privacy and security concerns will need to be overcome for mass adoption.

Drone delivery and landing pads: Our growing parcel deliveries need to land somewhere. Apartment buildings are already being designed with landing pads on rooftops and your house will be no different. Maybe it will have an automatic opening lid that closes over after the drop off has been made or the package might go straight into a delivery box. We can also expect new houses to have rooftop landing pads for Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) vehicles that will become common within 20 years. In fact, ‘flying cars’ have a high probability of beating autonomous vehicles to deep market penetration, given they don’t have to work around existing infrastructure and pedestrian safety issues.

Smart Toilet: I’ve written about this before. We can expect it to be our health partner in life and since Alphabet had a patent approved on the smart bathroom last year, this is one of those realities which will surprise with its speed of arrival.

Smart shower: One that takes a photo of you every day… not to invade your privacy, but to ensure it knows you have a dangerous sun spot long before you do.

Glass = Screen: If you’ve always wanted a house with a view, it’s about to become a lot cheaper than anyone expects. All the glass in our homes will become web-enabled screens. The resolution of our windows will be indistinguishable from an actual view into the real world. All of a sudden, anyone can have a real-time harbour view that changes perspective on different windows in the house to deliver a very lifelike experience. Maybe owners of actual harbour mansions will monetise their views via a live feed cam? Or maybe nimble entrepreneurs can set up HD webcams in places of great beauty? Live feeds of idyllic vineyards in the Loire Valley, anyone?

Charging Stations in All Driveways: Our driving future is all electric, as is our entire economy. Expect that every place cars stop will have a charging facility on hand. If they ever stop – I’ll probably send mine out to work for me when I’m not using it.

So, if you are wondering how buildings will change, wonder no more. The exciting part is that there’s many more changes we could add to this list. In a changing world, this is where tomorrow’s jobs and industries will emerge. The opportunities created are equal for existing companies and startups. The technology for all of these ideas already exists. It’s not a question of if – it’s a matter of who and when.

I had a fun radio interview on this topic you can listen to here.

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Keep thinking.

Steve. 

Giving Birth to Digital Twins

Imagine trying to repair a car that’s in Sydney – when you’re in Melbourne. Or, worse still repairing a spaceship from earth when it’s 400,000 km away on the dark side of the moon. This is the problem NASA faced 50 years ago with Apollo 13. They fixed it way back then with ‘Mirror Systems’ of the craft they had on earth. In doing so, they unwittingly gave birth to The Digital Twin.

Digital twins will be one of the most important economic technologies of the coming decade.  They’ll affect every single industry and in the long run, the technology will become part of our personal lives too.

Put simply, a digital twin is a virtual replica of any physical thing or process. While the concept is not new, only recently has the implementation been possible and economical, through the emergence of the Internet of Things and advancements in AR and VR . This pairing of the virtual and physical worlds allows analysis of data and monitoring of systems to head off problems before they even occur, prevent downtime, develop new opportunities and even plan for the future by using simulations. But it gets even better than that.

Imagine a large industrial machine for which a digital twin has been developed. Via the twin, anything that goes wrong with physical version will immediately translate back to the virtual version. If any repairs, maintenance or changes are made  to the physical version – the digital twin automatically gets updated. Likewise, eventually we’ll be able to change the physical version without actually touching it – it will all be done via the digital twin. Stop – think about your industry and just imagine the possibilities…they’re almost endless. Shelves in stores, warehouses transport systems, machinery, factories, buildings, supply chains, rail, aviation and eventually, even you.

Yes, you’ll eventually have a digital twin. Advanced cameras, sensors, ultrasound and in-home MRI systems will be inside our smart homes, married up with self quantifying wearables and in body nano-sensors. These will create a a live digital twin of our body which will monitor our well being and know we’re sick long before symptoms arrive, enabling better management of our health and increase longevity of our most important asset – ourselves. It’s gonna get radical. It’s another reason privacy really matters now, while it’s still just sharing photos of coffee!

We can expect every industry over the next decade to start building out the digital twins of everything they own, make, sell do and manage. Every company worth its salt needs to be developing a digital twins – and those who get really good at it – can end up potentially controlling a platform and maybe even being a supplier to their competitors.

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If you haven’t already – please check out the latest Future Sandwich Podcast on the Future of Fashion – it’s rad.

Smart Contact Lenses & the Future of Sport

People seem to be in perpetual fear that technology will take away all the jobs. The bit they always miss is that for every job tech takes away, it invents two. The classic examples of technology inventing new work and new industries are in sport and entertainment. Given it is Football Grand Final week here in Australia – let’s explore where football viewing is heading next.

In the future, watching football, or any sport, will be a much better experience than it is today. Firstly, we’ll have an augmented reality layer on the screen. Not only will you be able to turn on live stats of your favourite players or teams, you’ll also be able to turn them off too. Camera angles won’t dictated by the broadcaster – they’ll be chosen by the viewer via the broadcaster. There will be cameras literally everywhere. There will be super-speed high-definition recording on the goal posts, on the ground and even from the ball so you can watch it sail through the goalposts. You get to choose which replays to watch and when – it will be total director control from the comfort of your sofa. But if you want to get more involved in the game, here is where it gets really cool.

Utilising the latest technology in ‘smart reality contact lenses’, you’ll be able to get the players’ view of the game live while the game is in progress. Log in before the game and you can immerse yourself in exactly how Dusty Martin, Christiano Rinaldo or Russell Wilson experience it – watching the match from their eyes. Of course, you’ll pay for the privilege. It’ll also make sense for players to market themselves to be exciting enough for viewers to log onto, as they’ll be paid per fan log in. But if that’s not close quite enough – then don’t forget to don your football haptic suit. It’s a suit you can wear while watching the game which allows the wearer to to feel in real time the bumps and tussles the players feel on the field. The suit will raise your temperature to match the players’, give you the same palpitations as their heart beats and hear their on-field verbal communications. How is this be possible? These haptic suits can link to players’ uniforms which will be threaded with tiny electronic components to send real-time data across the web using IoT technology. The experience of sport and entertainment in the future will be so real it can almost get dangerous.

But if you think about it – this is the trajectory we’ve been on for a long time. We go from hearing about a football match on radio, to watching a replayed match on a black and white screen, to live HD with slow motion and stats to actually becoming the players. Technology always brings us closer to something far away and allows us to experiences things we otherwise wouldn’t. The opportunities for innovations like this is sport and all forms of entertainment are really limitless.

These possibilities will create jobs, revenue and companies which are yet to exist. The unbelievable part is the technologies already exist to make it happen. My only question is – what are you waiting for?

Cars will own themselves

You’ve probably heard about blockchain, but what we really need to understand is how blockchain can be used to fundamentally change what corporations are and how they can be run. Slight nerd warning for this entry – but I think you’re gonna dig it.

During the Age of Discovery, modern corporations were invented to remove personal risk from people taking financial risk. Ever since then, new forms of sovereignty have emerged. Of course, this confuses who owns what and who is actually responsible. There’s even a question mark over who owns your own face these days, as usage and collection of facial recognition data grows. What’s about to arrive is even weirder than that. Very soon, ‘things’, like cars, will be able to own themselves!

What makes this possible?

There are two innovations that make this possible. The first we all know about – self-driving cars. The tech is already here and it works – no explanation required. The second is the technologies most associated with cryptocurrencies: blockchain and Smart Contracts.

To understand where I am going with this, all you need to know is that we now have a technology which enables us to programme the behaviour of ‘things‘ like cars, to behave in certain ways, financially. So instead of people doing deals with other people and transacting – ‘things‘ will be able to do business with other ‘things‘.

We will be able to programme ‘things’ to interact with the world independently. For example, a self-drive car could be programmed to recharge or refuel with petrol when required, and then transact with another robot programmed to extract the requisite funds from the cars’ virtual wallet.

How will we do this?

In the near future we’ll have anInternet of Things’ kind of trading net. Let’s call it the ‘Tradenet‘. This Tradenet will be a bit like the internet as we know it, but instead of having virtual web addresses we visit online, it will have the actual physical location of real ‘things’ like cars registered to it. It will be an internet where we trade the usage of ‘things’. The Tradenet won’t be for all forms of commerce – only for ‘things’ that are commoditised so we know exactly what we will be getting. Every ‘thing’ on the Tradenet will be self-aware: what it is, where it is, how it’s used, who wants it, what its fees are, how it will advertise itself, and how to make contracts with other people and things, and essentially do contracts or ‘jobs’. ‘Things’ on the Tradenet will be self-employed. This will be a separate kind of internet that sits to the side of what we have now.

The Autonomous Economic Agent

A car on the Tradenet will become an autonomous economic agent. It will have an inbuilt set of instructions in its code which not only tells it what to do, but enables it to learn from its environment, constantly upgrading its knowledge and decision criteria.

So what might a Tradenet car do?

Firstly, it will be ‘born‘ into the market when someone buys it and puts it out to work. This could be a person, a corporation, a foundation, or even a charity. The car comes with a ‘mind of its own’. Even if two models of the same car are put on the market, after a time, like twins, they’ll evolve and behave differently, because of how they have learned to interact with the market.

The car will bid for work on the Tradenet, with the objective of, let’s say in this case, maximising profit. It will find the best routes to maximise profit, know where position iteself and the optimal times to get the most rides. When demand is low for people passengers, it will look for package deliveries or other forms of paid transport the Tradenet needs.

At night, it will go on the Tradenet and look for the cheapest car park to stop in overnight when demand is low. It then hits the road again early in the morning, hoping for long airport trips. It knows when it needs to be serviced and cleaned, as well as where and when it is least costly to perform these tasks.

During school holidays when the city becomes quiet, it drives itself up to the Gold Coast to do business with holiday makers. Around Christmas time when the the trucking industry has excess demand, it does trips between major cities hauling gifts for ecommerce purchases overnight. Zipping from Melbourne to Sydney overnight, the car then works in Sydney the next day… before making the overnight trip back to Melbourne the following day.

The car trades based on what it learns about the best routes with other Autonomous Economic Agent cars – for a fee!

Here’s the real kicker – when the car itself is too busy and market conditions are just right – it gives birth. It uses its excess profits to purchase a new baby car from the Tradenet. It buys the right car for the market, which may well be a different model to itself. When the new baby car arrives, the parent car downloads all that it knows to the child and puts it out to work. Of course, it teaches the child to learn from the mistakes the parent has made and hopes it does even better financially. The cars which learn the most will make the most money, as a quasi-autonomous corporate family. The more babies a car has, the more successful it is.

As the original car ages, it might even put itself into retirement. Or worse, its ‘kids’ collude to send it to the scrapyard as it is dragging down the car family’s profit. 🙁

Next Generation Corporations

Yes, our next iteration of the corporation is ‘things’ that act just like companies do, except there are no people involved in running them. People might have shares in Autonomous Economic Agents and as soon as self-drive cars are affordable and the regulations allow, this ownership model will follow.

The only question is, which entrepreneur will be first to the write the code to make it a reality?

 

Guess what will be the most advanced tech device in your house in 2025?

It won’t be your phone, laptop, television, car, your micro electricity storage grid, your thermostat or your fridge. It will be your toilet.

You may not have expected that. It will be atop of the technology chain looking after the most important thing in our lives – our health. Nothing is more important, and it just so happens that sensor technology is entering an inflection point where dramatic advances will change medicine and health as much as germ theory did.

All forms of technology in our connected world are under going rapid price deflation. Power is increasing and prices are dropping exponentially. The technology inside the technology is also benefiting from the same pattern of accelerating returns. This means that many vital sensors, like those found inside the 2 billion plus smart phones which have already been manufactured, have prices at the disposable level. Mere cents on the dollar. It’s this era of disposable technology that will drive the Internet of Things era. But what it also means is that powerful high end technology is on the same path. Technology that would once have only had a place in a high end laboratory will very soon have a place in our bathrooms. It’s a pattern we’ve already seen with consumer and media based technology and widgets.

You’re toilet will become a micro testing lab which will keep track of your health so that you don’t have to. It will include sensors of every type, measuring every kind of human feedback possible – all integrated and web enabled.  It will have a DNA code of all of the members in a household, their health records and constantly be testing human waste for any anomalies which might not end well if left unchecked. It will know you are sick, or about to get sick long before the symptoms arrive. It will create a tracking timeline of changes in your  health over long periods and provide the ultimate in quantified self.

It will weigh you every time you sit down, and use micro sweat to determine your daily levels of body fat and blood sugars.

It will talk to your doctor, and provide a much better assessment of what’s going on than you do when the doctor asks your those very important questions you can never remember the exact answers to.

It will have a convivial relationship with your fridge and cupboard and know what’s stored in it and what actually gets eaten. It will have a similar relationship with your kitchen and ovens.

It will make auto suggestions to your shopping list when you’re down on vitamin c, or protein or calcium, and post red flags with other items you’ve scheduled for delivery which are not in your best interest.

It will certainly track your movement via your smart devices (watch, phone and other wearables) and know what type and frequency of exercise you’re getting. It will update the shopping list to include the right foods for your level of movement and nutrition needs.

It will assess the health of your skin through the seat and track sun exposure. It will be linked to your shower which will take daily photos of your skin to check for dangerous sun spots.

In fact, it will do much more than this.

This then raises all sorts of important questions about which previously unrelated industries should be collaborating with each other. If plumbing and medicine start to matter to each other and packaged groceries and white goods matter to each other, then you can be certain there’s an industry you haven’t thought twice about that will start to matter to you. And probably quicker than you think.

Our toilet will be the smartest device in the house, looking after the most important things in your life, your health and your family. It’s another reminder that technology is neither good or bad, but a tool we can choose use to make life better and even extend it.