Tag: the future

My Top 10 for 2018

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

I was thinking about some of the cool things I saw, read, noticed and digested around the world of tech for 2018. A bonus blog post for your holiday perusal.

You’ll notice underlying the top 10 is what I regard to be the biggest shift in tech at the moment is the realisation that we have a technology wildfire raging. We need to learn to control it and ensure that what we are building serves the many, and not just the few. We can do it – but first we must understand it.

So here it is, the Sammatron’s Tech Top 10 for 2018…. enjoy:

  1. Blog Post of the year: Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff, who contends that the one percent are plotting to leave us behind. It’s a compelling read that unearths the dangers of the schism between us and the one percent.
  2. Podcast Series of the year: The Dream by Stitcher is a brilliant review of the history of Multi-Level Marketing (MLMs), pyramid selling and their total dodginess. Think Amway. The thing I found most compelling is how hackable the human mind can be when an organisation is selling ‘hope’ instead of an actual product. The ironic thing about these MLMs is that the philosophy they sell is all true (in relation to business success), but the business model they attach to it is a total fraud. And that is their trick. A mind blowing story that is very well researched.
  3. Podcast Episode of the year: Joe Rogan’s interview of Dr Ben Goertzel. Dr Ben Goertzel is a mathematician and leading Artificial Intelligence researcher. They go deep on everything that matters on tech and our future. Ben might just be the most informed, intellectual, articulate, compassionate and humane individual I’ve ever had the pleasure of listening to. It’s two hours of wonder. The world is lucky to have people like Dr Goertzel in it.
  4. Book of the Year: Winner Takes All by Anand Giridharadas. The elite charade of changing the world. This book couldn’t come at a more important time in our history. It’s the one book I’m recommending at the moment. In this book Anand explains from the inside how the emergent global elite pretend to try to ‘change the world for the better’, but in doing so really just obfuscate their desire to preserve the status quo and their role in causing the problems they pretend to try and solve. Jaw-dropping stuff.
  5. Documentary of the Year: The Cleaners by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewick is a timely film which investigates the shadowy and disturbing world of content removal from popular social media sites. An ugly underbelly of outsourced, low-paid workers deciding on whether a beheading constitutes news, free speech or inappropriate content. Another reminder that these are not technology companies but media organisations that are long overdue some serious regulation.
  6. Software of the year: Well, it’s more a shift than a singular piece of software – the Low Code / No code app movement. This is the arrival of software platforms that allow anyone with basic computer literacy to develop software or apps without any coding expertise. Put simply, if you can read, you’re about to become a software developer too. An important evolution for the masses where software is eating everything
  7. Tech Fail of the year: Crypto currency price crash – Ok ok, this is actually good – it means we can now focus on the important technology which underpins it – Blockchain. I actually believe that this is a bit like the Dot Com crash in 1999-2000 and is almost a pre-condition for crypto and blockchain to be everything it can be. Yes, it will come back even stronger.
  8. TV Show of the Year: Black Mirror. In fact, it’s not even close – it’s Black Mirror and daylight. By far the most insightful and important TV series in decades. The most recent episode Bandersnatch just snuck into 2018 a few days ago. If you haven’t seen it, then do yourself a favour.
  9. Smartphone App of the year: Surprise….None, zero, zip. I can’t think of one, and I checked my phone too. None have been good enough in the past 2 years to even make it onto my device! Actually I lie, a new parking app in my city Melbourne called PayStay is quite useful, but it’s more a reflection of our city being 5 years behind the times than an innovation. It’s another reminder that the halcyon days of app development are over, and that the real game in the coming few years is beyond the app economy. It’s probably worth looking at your own phone – I’m certain you’ll also be underwhelmed about how little it’s changed in the past few years.
  10. Technology Shift of the Year: The move to Voice as a primary interface. It’s early days – but I believe it is under-hyped and will replace the screen as our primary interaction in years to come. Don’t forget, language is Humanity’s killer app. Best you get onto it now.

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Have a great 2019, Steve.

 

 

 

 

The last 10 steps

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

In the week before Christmas, houses around the world are inundated with ‘Sorry we missed you’ delivery notes from couriers. So if you’re wondering why on-line retail still only represents 10% of sales in the USA and around 6.9% in Australia, it’s because the real problem isn’t the last mile, it’s the last 10 steps.

What is the last 10 steps? I’m defining it as the space between where the delivery van stops out front of the final destination, to getting the package inside. It’s estimated that more than 20% of deliveries do not get made on the first attempt. This comes at a massive cost to couriers, and ultimately us. And this is before we consider the horror of having to go into a post office pick up the package. Which is much worse than shopping –  so annoying.

While we have access to most everything via ecommerce these days, our houses need an upgrade to cope. Yep, our houses have been upgraded many times as new technologies arrived. We’ve added electricity, indoor plumbing, automated heating, and even driveways are a little over 100 years ago. Unfortunately our letter boxes haven’t had an upgrade in about 250 years – and we need one. The early attempts to solve this problem are lets just say, sub-optimal. Giving Amazon a key for couriers to unlock my door? No thanks. A  locker outside a petrol station brought to you by postal services around the world? Hmm, that seems like a company not trying very hard. Quite frankly I can’t believe a Mac Daddy Delivery Box hasn’t entered the home market yet.

So what would one of these puppies look like? Here’s the Sammatron version of the Mac Daddy Delivery Box to avoid our Christmas ecommerce woes in 2019:

The Mac Daddy Delivery Box – Some of the features I’d put into it:

  • It would have 3 sections: Dry, Fridge and Frozen – so it could take all deliveries.
  • It would probably be a as big as a fridge.
  • It would be underground and have a button for the courier to press and it rises up on demand to take the delivery.
  • When a delivery arrives the owner would get a call and see live video footage of who is delivering the item and potentially check their ID.
  • The delivery unit would only open via the owners smart phone.
  • It would have near field communication readers (RFID) and image recognition cameras to detect the delivery is correct and as ordered.
  • All data of deliveries would be owned by the person who owns the MDDB (Mac Daddy Delivery Box) so they could sell that information to companies if they choose, for their own profit.
  • The MDDB would aggregate data and give reports of who, what and when back to the owner to track their spending.
  • It would be secure like a safe, so that items of high value could be delivered safely.
  • It would be electric, and solar powered.
  • It would make your friends envious and totally want one.
  • Optional Extra: two small palm trees above the underground delivery unit – so that when a delivery arrives it looks like the Thunderbirds secret cave coming out of the ground!

This type of delivery unit seems inevitable to me. It’s not if, but who and when. And if it isn’t done by mid 2019, then I’ll do it myself in my House of the Future project. Until then, you might just choose a glitter bomb to entertain you in the interim.

 

🎄Have a great Christmas, Steve. 

 

Why utilities need to be back in public hands

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

After 30 years of infrastructure privatisation in Australia, it’s time we put critical utilities (Energy, Water, Telecoms, Rail, et al) back in the hands of the public. While this may sound somewhat draconian and even semi-communist, right now it is the most capitalist move we could make, and our future depends on it. I spoke about it today on radio – you can listen here.

An Infrastructure Reset – Show me a rich country, and I’ll show you rich infrastructure. It’s what modern economies are built on and always will be. We are currently moving through a 200 year shift which involves an entire reset of the physical world around us. In telecoms we are rapidly moving to optic fibre and 5G. Energy is shifting away from coal to renewables (primarily solar) and we need to build out an ‘energy internet’ to replace our ageing grid. All cars will be electric in 8 years time and we’ll require highly distributed charging facilities where ever a car parks.  Every economy in the world, that wants to compete globally, must now build out, connected, post industrial infrastructure.

Natural Monopolies – There are certain things which are what economists call Natural Monopolies. These are industries where the most efficient way to serve a market is with a single operator or system. This is most often the case with large national based infrastructure. For example, it doesn’t make any sense economically to have 2 competing sets of national railways alongside each other, to have 2 sets or power lines, or wireless competitive 5g towers serving the same geography. This idea isn’t new, and goes way to back to Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations. And while it would be dangerous to have infrastructure businesses that are privately owned not to having any competition, if they’re publicly owned, and regulated we can remove problems associated with monopoly operators.

Competing interests & political instability – When things like ‘energy‘ are owned by private firms, their imperative is maximise profits and serve their shareholders, not their customers. At a time when we should be shifting to new forms of infrastructure, privately owned utilities create misaligned incentives in the market place. This will be to our long term detriment in the Australian economy. The NBN is a classic example. At a time when NBN is being rolled out (public), it has to compete with the 5G networks of Telstra (private). If we had a single telecoms infrastructure provider, we’d have a chance to build out a singular, worlds best network. Instead, what we have is a piecemeal financial basket case. We, the tax payers, are the losers.

I  truly believe the leadership crisis we are currently facing in Australia (today and over the past decade), is partially because of the problems of vested interests trying to influence the public policy. We have a population that want to move towards renewable energy, yet factions within political parties are influenced by the coal lobby and short term financial interests. The net result is that leaders can’t make the decisions they need to for a future proof economy and we end up with a dysfunctional government.

The benefits of publicly owned utilities – Crucially, this idea isn’t something which sounds fanciful, but just isn’t possible financially. The investment markets have already priced in the truth of what I’m talking about here – that is, the cost of many infrastructure assets are at all time lows. Telstra has a yield of 7% and new coal fired power plants are literally un-investable. Hence, these infrastructure assets could be taken back into public hands at, or below the cost of capital to acquire them. If we did this, the Government would have the ability to build out what the people actually want, and what the future needs. These renewed Government owned enterprises could serve as future employment training grounds in critical skills arenas and we could re-engage our long lost technical apprenticeship model of employment. And let’s not forget that having infrastructure which is world class would facilitate startups to compete globally. This would benefit both the tax base (remember the Gov has a 30% Joint Venture with every business via tax) and open up export potential. What we learn building this out, could then be built in other countries. (software & hardware)

This program might be something we just need to do for 20 years before going private again. But what is clear that our telecoms are a mess, our energy system is a mess and we need new infrastructure quickly if we want to remain wealthy and relevant.

Just this week I was in Sri Lanka and they already have 5G well underway. Emerging economies are building out tomorrow, while wealthy countries like Australia mess around with yesterday’s technology to keep the rich and influential happy. It’s the great squander of our times. One of the reasons the government won’t serve us in Australia, is that we don’t own the assets the decisions are being made around. Maybe if we took the assets back, they’d have to make sure they run these industries properly or they wont get voted back in.

Radical times, require radical action.

How to invest in technology

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

One of the most common questions I get asked is, ‘What technology or companies should I invest in? You study technology everyday and spend time large companies, so you must have an opinion’. And you guessed it – I sure do. While I’m not an investment advisor, there are some interesting things which we can be sure of when it comes to investing and technology.

The hot technology of the day will always be overpriced. We can expect that hot tech stocks, and even raw materials that go into technology will attract attention and demand that push their prices up. While this may be justified based on future expectations, it often reduces the potential return on investment. We often see this in P/E ratios. For example, the P/E ratio of the S&P500 is currently 24.37 compared to a long term average of 15, due to the big tech stocks currently making up such a big portion of it. In fact, six stocks (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix and Apple) make up 30% of the S&P500. Sure, some stocks continue to rise like these have – but how many of them did you pick to be as big as they are now back in 2005? When it comes to stocks, I take the Warren Buffett approach and invest in Indexed Funds – that way I get all the winners and none of the cost. You can listen to a podcast I did on this topic that explains it succinctly.

Focus on the beneficiaries of the technology. The way to do this is to scrutinise social and economic structures will change due to new technology. Structures which live a layer or two outside of the technology itself, yet stand to benefit significantly from it. One particular area which is both underpriced and about to benefit from a large technology shift is certain forms of real estate. Transport historically has had an big impact on how and where we live. As we enter an era of autonomous transport, it will be easier to live further afield from major cities, and commute either virtually or in your ‘rolling lounge room’ one or two days a week to the office. While Henry Ford facilitated the birth of suburbs through affordable cars, autonomous vehicles and the work from home revolution will invent exurbs – places of great beauty within two hours of a major city. Via technology, these places will have all the benefits of a major city, but the advantage of a tranquil and desirable natural landscape. It’s possible to buy large land tracts in Geelong (1 hour from Melbourne) for a little over the median house price in the suburbs.

Right now this opportunity is wide open a few years out from when new forms of transport will change everything. It’s this type of technology investing few people ever think about.

Steve.

What data doesn’t understand

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

It’s true data, and our new found ability to sift through large volumes of it, has come with many benefits: fraud detection, genomics, natural language processing to name a few. But, data doesn’t get humanity. It’s just a reflector, not the director. As a tool it has certain biasses built into it. One of which is its ability to take the wide, and make it narrow. It’s also great at finding correlation between the disparate. You know data what it isn’t good at? Detecting boredom.

We humans are weird beings and right at the point when data might tell us something is heading a certain way, we about face, and go in the exact opposite direction, often quicker than anyone expects. Probably because we love variety, nuance and something a little different.

It turns out that computers don’t actually understand – they calculate. The word computer itself used to be a job title of people who literally added things up. The large majority of algorithms we employ calculate the probability of something. That probability calculation will be based on the stack of code it feeds from. And the larger that stack, the deeper and more hidden the bias will be inside it. What this means for us, is that when we change our mind, on a whim, ‘the system’ won’t see it coming.

The stimulus we get as humans comes from the real and messy world we we live in. So much of which still sits outside of the data economy, even with all the tracking we do these days. So what does this mean for us? It means that unexpected change is inevitable, and the data wont tells us it’s coming. We need to look for it ourselves and measure it from personal human experience. Variety is one of the great human desires, and just when something is peaking in popularity, we decide to leave the building for no real reason other than the fact we are human.

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How to predict the future

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Predicting the future seems like an impossible task, but there is a trick to it. It’s less about guessing what’s next, and more about piecing together what’s already here. A veritable mash up of tools, behaviour and incentives.  Sure, there will always be unexpected turns in events – economic externalities, social backlash and political events which we’ll never predict. But, the vast majority of the time, what is about to occur in business or an industry is there to be seen, and acted upon a long time before it happens at scale. The way I do it is by observing three things in particular.

Anthropology: This is what doesn’t change. Or that which changes very slowly – human behaviour. We are running a very old piece of software as humans – a 400,000 year old code, otherwise known as our DNA. By studying our human proclivities we can observe patterns which demonstrate what we value and how we’re likely to behave in a given set of circumstances. We need to study behaviour, everywhere we go. Paying attention pays dividends.

Technology: This is what does change. The tools we use to get things done, and they are in a constant state of flux. If the barriers to entry are lower enough to switch to a better, more efficient and enjoyable method of getting anything done – we will. The trick, is that very often the tool is available a long time before it is widely distributed. It first must be affordable and available geographically before we can embrace it. When we study what’s next in technology it’s easy to see where shifts are likely to occur because most emerging technologies follow price/ performance ratios which are very predictable. This happens both at the industrial and consumer level. Importantly, the eventual adoption of a new technology can’t be based on utility alone, it must also be socially acceptable to our species. Google Glass comes to mind as an example of something we simply didn’t like. Likewise, large corporations often find it difficult to embrace new technology for weirdly social reasons. Because new technology ignores both the financial and emotional investment a company may have made in now outdated infrastructure. Legacy firms often get disrupted because they fall in love with their tools and systems, instead of the problem they are meant to be solving for people. Read here – successful humans don’t like change.

Economics: This is what ties to the above two elements together. A simple way to define economics is the study of incentives. Wider incentives are what shapes our behaviour, and in turn influences the way money flows around people and the systems we live inside. The question we need to ask here, is will this technology facilitate the way people behave and provide a big enough incentive for them (Corporations and Consumers) to move to this new way of getting things done. If so, how will it change the way money, things and people move around.

So, when it comes to thinking about tomorrow, start by thinking about what’s already here today.

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What is TATE? A mega growth industry

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

After a keynote speech, I was asked again today what will happen to all the people who will lose their jobs due to Automation and Artificial Intelligence. The example cited was people who drive for a living. While I’ve written about this before, as well as the shift off farms to the cities in the industrial dawn, this time I thought it might valuable to propose an entirely new economy – The Autonomous Transport Economy or TATE.

TATE will allow a set of entirely new business models, consumer products and employment created by the advent of driverless vehicles and drones. Before we do that, let’s explore the last time something like this happened, something we all experience daily: The Night Time Economy.

A little over a hundred years ago there was no night time economy. Artificial light used to be inordinately expensive, unobtainable to many, smelly and dangerous. Candles, kerosine lamps, open fires and gas lanterns that did provide light weren’t nearly as convenient as the electric light we now take for granted. When wood was the main source of light, it took 60 hours of work to generate the equivalent lumens of a modern light bulb shining for a measly 54 minutes. ‘Light’, which was once too expensive to use, is now too cheap to notice. The significance of cheap electricity is profound. Electricity invented the 24 hour economy. Before that our productive life, and economy, was mostly restricted to daylight hours. Think of everything you now do at night, and you’ll get a perspective of what the ‘night time economy’ has generated – cinemas, bars, nightclubs, night markets, restaurants and 24 hour production. In the home, we have television, radio, entertainment, gaming, white goods and pretty much everything that happens when the lights go down. And yes, it would’ve been difficult to predict the industries and jobs that inevitably arrived to support this entirely new economy. As it is difficult now to predict The Autonomous Transport Economy (TATE).

The possibility for economic change, and therefore growth driven by TATE, is bigger than everyone imagines. A few simple ideas for stimulus display how much opportunity lies before us to create tomorrow’s jobs. The best way to predict the future by asking a few simple questions:

What will happen to Carparks? How will we reconfigure the real estate of high rise and underground carparks. What will we use these concrete caves for? Day time popup shops and night time charging stations? Places for Autonomous cars to sleep and get cleaned?

What will happen to the ground space in cities allocated to car parking – where our cars have a little rest? This averages 30% in large cities. Will we green them, make pedestrian friendly or build on them?

We can expect real estate prices and populations in Exurbs (places of great beauty within 2 hours of a major city) to increase as people decide to live further afield, work remotely and travel to the city autonomously for their meetings or 2 office days per week.

Offices will shrink, as large companies realise costs for running a Corporate Taj Mahal in a city can be reduced re-assessing the need for expensive real estate and the impact on a lengthy commute for staff. As they realise team members only need to be in the same room a few days a week and not five, the corporate office will fragment into smaller distributed work places. A large corporate might have satellite offices or share co-working spaces around the state, knowing of course that the autonomous vehicles will zip workers to the city at 200km per hour when meetings are needed.

These new driverless vehicles will be reconfigured very differently to current day cars. Some will be fitted out as fully connected rolling offices, and they’ll look more like a business class cabin on a plane than seats do today (which are really just stage coaches with a motor instead of a horse!).

We can expect cars to be redesigned and new versions of cars to be invented. Just like we invented buses and pick up trucks, we’ll invent Sleeper Vehicles. These will be designed for longer trips (Overnighters), or for those requiring a bit of luxury while in transit. People will own them, some will order on demand. They’ll look more like a bedroom or lounge room than a transport device.

E-commerce arrived with the web, and now we can expect R-commerce or Rolling Commerce. It’s an entirely new type of buying we’ll do which is time- and geographically-specific, based on where we are and where we are going. It will claim some of the time we used to allocate to drving.

As a result, industries will pop up to support R-commerce, including RX designers (Rolling Experience) and build strategies around the money which is expended in vehicles. It will become a commercial measure among retail, ecommerce and other documented economic indicators.

Shopping centres will become distribution hubs, where the giant carparks we currently have are converted into autonomous retail pick up up bays by day and electric recharging stations and cleaning zones by night.

Why just sit and relaxing in the car on the way? Why not order an a GymCar with built in exercise machines and do some rowing or weight lifting on the way to the city?

With the worry of crashing your gone, we’ll still need Hacking Insurance. While it will be rare, it’s already proven to be possible and hacking will generally become a major pivot for the insurance industry in many product arenas. The fear of cars being hacked will recruit and educate consumers to insure every digital product they own against hacking.

We can expect cars to be tracked thorough using blockchain technology. One owner who only drove it on Sunday? We’ll know everywhere the car has been, done and had done to it. Even our payments for utilising cloud cars will be built on this tech sooner than we think.

Of course, cars will use more data than houses. If we choose to own one, there’s a good chance we’ll send it out to work when we are not using it. It’ll need data for entertainment, commerce, deliveries, and of course driving itself. Expect data packages to become a major selling point with cars. Cars sold in regional areas might just come with satellite data access. (Powered by SpaceX? Maybe they’ll provide the cloud that powers transport data?)

Roads will need to be redesigned to cope with autonomous transport. Concrete, steal and meta-strcuture will need to be built by hand and machine creating significant employment. We’ll first see signs on the road which say “You are now entering an autonomous vehicle zone.” Eventually, human driving will be outlawed as new laws redefine how we move.

All this excites me – I see new industries, employment and opportunities to create a greener, safer more fluid world – most of which we are yet to imagine.  All we really need is the willingness to move towards our inevitable future.

Go build it – Steve.