Tag: technology

The next phase of innovation

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Innovation doesn’t have to include a microchip, be a consumer gadget, come from private industry, generate profits, or even be a physical thing. If we can agree on these truths and what innovation is, then we can usher in a long over due, different type of innovation.

So what is innovation? 

Here’s the Sammatron definition: The implementation of better solutions to meet existing market desires, new market requirements, and even unarticulated needs. This can be done through products, services, methods, processes, business models or governance. 

The two things that matter above for this post are; ‘unarticulated market needs‘ and ‘Governance‘.

Both of which will be the most important facets of innovation in the coming decade. But before we explore the next phase of innovation, it’s worth reviewing the phase we are currently in.

Innovation which has shaped the past twenty years has been the domain of private industry. Technology firms now make up seven of the ten biggest companies in the world. Only one of which, was on the list in 1999 – that being Microsoft. Their financial dominance is a clear function of the consumer utility they have provided, no doubt. The digital era has provided inordinate consumer value through data mobility, entertainment on demand, social connection, digital connectivity, smart devices and ecommerce to name a few. But, they have become an invasive species.

Like all invasive species, they can only spread so far before they start to negatively impact the eco-system they, and others depend on to survive. These days their most important strategies are spreading their data tentacles further, buying nascent competitors, and lobbying government to avoid anti-trust action. It’s now time for a new phase of innovation. It’s time for structural and regulatory innovation from our friendly and representative Governments.

Now after you all finishing choking on your coffee while reading this, let’s not forget how we got to now. The reason big tech has been able to do everything it has, is simply because of what Governments did beforehand. We can thank the the Cold War and the Space Race for literally everything which exists in digital. The moon landing drove the creation of software, the integrated circuit and the microchip, it led to the development of CAT scans, it advanced wireless technology, solar panels, fireproof materials, satellites, GPS navigation, laptops, virtual and augmented reality, even the ‘gorilla glass’ on smart phones to name a few. The list is very long indeed. Big tech isn’t standing on the shoulders of giants, they are standing on the shoulders of tax payers. All the innovations creating our modern lives from a bygone era of Gov investment and innovation.

Unarticulated needs: While most people don’t know it yet, we need to reign in big tech with regulation so that others can compete fairly. The second unarticulated need is for major Government funded technology driven projects – NASA level projects – real moonshots. This scale is needed to unearth new technology which will be the realm of entrepreneurship 10-30 years from now. The reason it needs to come from the world’s Governments is to ensure that new innovations become open-source so that others can build open them – as per the Space Race. The new Australian Space Agency is a good start.

Governance: We need heavy regulation on technology exactly because big technology firms are starting to act like ‘quasi governments’ who control the major factors of production in the digital era. They are even trying to launch their own currencies. Recent responses from Google and Facebook here to the ACCC’s plan to curb their dominance are telling. They claim reigning them in will risk technology advancement. Their aim is to make us fearful we can’t advance society or innovate without them. The reverse is actually true – they couldn’t have existed without us!

So what types of regulatory shifts do we need from Governments? Well, here’s a few crazy ideas to get us started.

Deeper Privacy Protections: Outlaw facial recognition software, and facial storage by private firms without explicit permission.

Gov funded social networks: Social networks which are Gov funded, but open-source so we can build and iterate it and avoid surveillance capitalism.

Mid-life Education Funding: Any person who loses a job to automation ought be able to study free, funded by government for a ‘mid life’ student program. Who said school is something kids do? When public schools were invented life expectancy was around 60 years of age – now it’s approaching 100 – maybe mid-life schooling can replace a midlife crises!

Progressive Regulation: Like our taxation system regulation shouldn’t be put in place on tech firms as a one size fits all. The problem in doing that is that it suits big firms with the resources to respond to regulation and makes it hard for startups to do so. Therefore, regulations should be tougher and more stringent based on size, data and number os users on a service – like we do with income tax.

Algorithm Transparency: What is inside algorithms should be listed like ingredients are on cereal packets. So we know why we are seeing what we are seeing. There should also be an ability to ‘opt-out’ of every algorithm which determines what content a person sees on any web platform.

Terabyte Tax: We know data worth more than oil, so let’s tax it accordingly – we tax oil with an excise – let’s do the same with data.

For anyone who still thinks Government can’t do anything properly, think about it next time you drive on a safe road, drink a nice clean glass of water or fly safely 30,000 feet in the air.

Some of the most important innovations aren’t about efficiency and speed, but about being thoughtful, slow and purposeful.

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You’ve read this far – please go checkout the latest episode of Future Sandwich Now-Soon-Later – and please make a comment too! I appreciate your support. Steve.

The Future of Truth

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Technology is on a progressive path to let us fake just about anything. Photoshopped faces, Instagram filters, fake friends and fakes news which is often very difficult to distinguish from the real thing. Like most things tech enables, fake isn’t new – it just scales better than ever.

The internet has a very long memory. In our digital lives, nothing we do ever really disappears. There is no ‘delete’ button. The truth is we’re all wading through a mountain of digital debris which has tracked our lives for the past decade or so. The problem with this debris, however, is that it can be used to build different versions of events. It can retell the story of what we said and what we did in ways which seem indisputable to the human eye.

In an era of Deep Fakes, the  last forms of provable truths evaporate right in front of our eyes – video so realistic we can’t tell whether the global leader actually said that at a news conference or whether that celebrity really did make a porn movie. The scariest part? It’s all possible via open source software where a few random pictures and a voice sample can be concocted to create such fakes. This could be life-changing for the victims. They’re already for sale right here for a few hundred dollars. We can even take a single image and make semi-plausible video today as shown in the gif above! Imagine how even more advanced this technology will be in a year or so.

Weirdly, there is some good news. As deep fake videos become so easy to make and so ubiquitous in our digital world, we’ll start to distrust everything we see online. When this happens, what we’ll be only be left with is what happened when we were in the room ourselves. Or we’ll just have to ask the person what actually happened and what was actually said. We will be swimming so deep in fake everything in the coming years that the truth will again morph into something irrevocably human. No digital copy or version of anything will suffice. Analogue truth might just make a comeback.

Even so, that too might also be temporary. The world as we know it moves in technological tides, so the next iteration of deeper fakes will be truly mind-blowing.

Let’s consider something a little crazy. What happens when we can make robots that are indistinguishable from humans? Robots with soft-exo bodies, natural sounding voices and smooth movements. Once that becomes possible – and it will – it’s only a matter of time before we have a world in which fake humans leave the screen and enter the street. Then we’ll have to ask ourselves some weird questions like:

Did Steve really come to work today or did he send his robot proxy?

Was the nice girl I met at the event and exchanged numbers with real or humanoid?

Was the Olympic runner who won the 100m dash real or a lab-built improved replica of the human runner?

It’s only just beginning.

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Check out the Latest ep. of 👉 Now-Soon-Later by Future Sandwich. Don’t forget to subscribe for 4 minutes of video goodness every week to give you boardroom worthy soundbites 🙏

Now-Soon-Later

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

As you know I’m currently working on a new TV show called Future Sandwich. But quite frankly me and Tommy have contend and ideas pouring out of our ears. So we’ve decided to do a weekly web series called:

Now – Soon – Later

Each week we’ll take a tech topic in the news and break it down to these 3 little bits. Discuss what happening now, what will happen soon and where it’s going later. This week we talked about the inevitable Flying Taxi on the back of Uber Air and Lillium announcements. You’ll love my predictions… mind blowing.

Check out the First episode below – It’s a quick 4 mins and it’ll give you solid sound bites to take into the boardroom or next dinner party. It’s recorded with no-prep, off the cuff while cruising the means streets of Melbourne into the Future Sandwich TV Studio. You’ll dig it.

Please share and why not subscribe to our new Youtube channel while you’re at it.

Reinvent Yourself

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Both entrepreneurship and technology were once fringe activities. Saying you worked for yourself or you were an entrepreneur was often interpreted by the other party as admitting you were unemployed, or even unemployable, the last refuge of the unskilled and unwanted. So too with technology, that weird stuff nerds did late at night in garages with chemistry sets and soldering irons. Now these two activities are reshaping our economy and our futures, whether we pay attention to them or not.

We must all upgrade our skills in these areas if we want to remain relevant and independent in the modern economy. No doubt you’ve got used to having to upgrade your technology devices and software. Every time that message pops up on our screen, we should ask ourselves this;

‘When was the last time I upgraded my own software?

‘When did I last download a new module to make myself more useful and more in demand in the marketplace?’

Upgrading our grey matter is no longer a choice. It’s a kind of ongoing economic hygiene check, in which small regular interventions ensure our long-term economic health. And it’s easy to do if we do it regularly. It’s a game of frequency, not depth. And the really good news? For the the first time in history, it’s not a game of resources. If you have an internet connection you have every resource you need at your disposal.

Maybe you’re scared? Maybe you think you don’t have the ability or potential to cope with our complex world? Well, I have good news about that too….

The most difficult thing a human being can learn is language; when it comes to computational complexity, natural language processing (computers learning human language) is still at the top. Therefore anyone can who is clever enough to learn to speak a language (everyone reading this), is also clever enough to upgrade their skills  and reinvent their career. And just like learning a language, or learning to walk, it’s about just keeping on and keeping on. You’ll see how a little bit often can have a huge impact later. Here we need to remember the law of relatively: everyone can, but most people won’t. Your success will depend on the effort you put in compared with others. So remember 2 things:

(1) You are capable of more than you know.

(2) Most people won’t bother.

Be the person that bothers. Your future it turns out, is mostly up to you.

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* If you want an inspirational and informative keynote on the Future of Work at your next conference  – give me a hoy here – it’s my latest jam.

The Uber IPO – Imaginary Profits Only

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Last Friday night, I did a TV interview on ABC regarding Uber’s long awaited IPO. An IPO is when a company first becomes a publicly traded stock that anyone can buy and hold. To put it bluntly, Uber is a terrible investment for anyone who didn’t already own the shares in it before it went public. But I do think this IPO is very instructive from a technology business strategy and investment perspective, so I thought I’d lay it out in clear terms why I don’t think Uber has a bright future as a publicly traded stock. So get ready for some finance meets tech nerdocity below.

The Valuation: Uber was priced at $45 USD per share giving it a valuation of  around $82 billion USD. This means Uber is a more valuable company than Ford and GM combined. It closed its first day of trade down 8% at a price of $41.60. To be clear, the founders, early investors and many employees ended the day very rich indeed. And yes, they have a terrific service many of us enjoy more than we ever did taking the traditional taxi cabs. It might also be that many investors, hungry to get their hands on ‘high tech’ stocks like Uber will irrationally push the share price up – especially given most tech companies stay private for much longer these days.

  • Amazon IPO 1997 – 2 years after it was founded
  • Google IPO 2004 – 5 years after it was founded
  • Facebook IPO 2012 – 8 years after it was founded
  • Uber IPO 2019 – 10 years after it was founded

Even though retail investors have far less access to high growth companies these days, I can’t help but think Uber will never be achieve the long term profitability serious investors will require. Here’s why:

Profit: Uber currently loses $10 for every $30 ride transaction. The more it grows, the more money it loses. And this problem can’t be fixed easily. It’s not like other software businesses, because every ride has a real and unavoidable marginal cost. The difference between it and companies like Google and Facebook is that new users come with very little cost increase, if any. Uber, on the other hand, doesn’t.

Cost Cutting: The main opportunity for Uber to cut costs is to simply remove its drivers and replace them with autonomous vehicles. It seems pretty clear to me that Uber regards its drivers as ‘holding places for robots’. The problem however, is that as soon as Uber can reduce operating costs by employing autonomous cars, so can Ford, GM, Tesla, Google and every other car manufacturer in the world. All of whom already have autonomous car projects and eyes on the market of transport as a service.

Adjacent Businesses: Again Uber has done well to create offshoots including Uber Eats, but just like the example above, as soon as autonomous cars and drones become possible for local eateries, and much cheaper, I don’t see why any of them would hand over that margin to Uber when they could simply do it themselves. It also should be said that if they become a ‘logistics company’ then they better get good at competing with Amazon.

Low Barriers to Entry: Of all the large technology businesses going around, Uber is the least complex – evidenced by the increasing number of its competitors around the world, including Ola and Didi. The low barriers to entry aren’t just because of the simplicity of the software model, but counter to popular belief, there isn’t a dramatic network effect. A network effect is present when a service gets better when more people use the same service, like Facebook. In real terms, users just need enough cars on the service they choose and most savvy drivers operate on all the rideshare apps simultaneously. In my view, it’s only a matter of time before we see ridesharing drivers cut out the middleman and develop their own app so they won’t have to pay extortionate fees to a third party like Uber. This just might make the difference for the work to be fair economically for the drivers.

Legal Issues & Regulation: On top of all its general business challenges, Uber is fighting dozens of legal cases. It is also highly likely government regulation will further impact its business model as its drivers become legally recognised employees. While tech used to be everyone’s darling, there has been a clear sentiment shift recently to question their ethics and impact on wider society.

If there is anything the Uber float points out, it’s that a business that’s good for consumers, doesn’t always result in a good business.

Your World in 2030

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Ten years is not a very long time, but in a world of exponential technology, a lot can happen. So I thought I’d provide some predictions for the world by 2030. Thirty of them, to be precise. Let’s call it 30 for 2030.

Sure, some of the ideas below might seem like science fiction or fantasy, but so was much of the technology we take for granted today. It makes sense to think about these now, so that we can consider longer-term career, financial and corporate strategy decisions today. So buckle your seat belt, open your mind and enjoy!

1. All-Electric Economy: The vast majority of the energy we consume in the future will be electric. Fossil fuels will be replaced almost entirely by electricity, generated by renewables. Electricity will win not through a political battle, but purely through economics. Fossil fuels won’t be able to compete on cost. The energy will be generated by the the sun, wind and water. We’ll find a storage solution 10o times more efficient than the lithium ion batteries we use today.

2. The Energy Internet Emerges: We will be trading energy with each other through a new type of distributed energy grid. It will be akin to the way we trade information with each other on the internet now – except it will be energy – and we will generate excess energy on our buildings. Sometimes we’ll get paid for it and sometimes we’ll simply give it away. Centralised energy production will go the way of centralised news and media – and mostly be replaced by user generated content (but this time it’ll be energy).

3. Data Becomes a Liability: Data is currently seen as a commercial asset that companies try to acquire from us. By 2030 this will be reversed. Data will become a well-regulated liability. If companies hold our data it will be like a bank deposit that we own and they look after, and they’ll even have to pay us interest or fees. If they lose it, or it gets stolen, they will have to pay heavily for the mistake.

4. Globalisation Will Go into Reverse: The current trend to re-nationalise, and de-globalise will continue. Countries will become more closed and trade less. Fear of technology, job losses and immigrants will continue its current pattern. This will be further enabled by automation and manufacturing where the low-cost labour market trading advantage evaporates.

5. Climate Issues Will Re-Globalise: We will only become a truly global community when climate catastrophe demands it. While the technology to de-carbonise our economy is already here, we’ll be stifled by politics and the worst will hit in the early 2030s creating a necessary global alliance across countries for species survival.

6. Mobile Work > Office Work: More people will work away from office and formal work locations than those who work in them. Large companies will realise modern offices are a poor allocation of resources and de-centralise their workforces. Most people will be mobile in their work and cross-fertilise ideas with people outside their company and industry.

7. Freelancers Overtake Employees: There will be more freelance workers selling their time and skills on projects for companies than people who are full-time employees. As technology removes the friction of employment, we’ll all become modern day digital craftspeople.

8. Gigs with Benefits: The gig economy will evolve from its current exploitative business model. New startups will emerge to perform the roles of what unions and HR departments used to do to represent and organise gig economy workers. These quasi-union organisations will facilitate work benefits once only available to full-time employees. Think sick leave, annual leave, superannuation, training, wage negotiation. This will become a huge industry and may work in conjunction with the superannuation industry as employee numbers decline.

9. Regional Renaissance: Administrators and residents from regional areas will realise the internet can change their fortunes. Global e-commerce, lower living costs and higher living standards will create a renaissance for non-city places of great beauty. They’ll leverage their geographic monopolies and localised products, sell to global market places and compete effectively with cities.

10. Public and Private Transport Morph: The two forms of transport will continue its trajectory to differentiate from each other. Autonomous vehicles will be owned by private people who rent them to public systems. The shape of public and private transport will replicate each other and become mobile forms of commerce, relaxation and entertainment zones.

11. National Parks 2.0: National parks are generally enclaves reinventing the way the ‘world used to be’. A new form of National Park will emerge in cities. Places where there is no internet connectivity at all. These ‘zones’ will replicate pre-internet industrialisation where humans need to connect directly and nothing can be copied, documented or shared.

12. Cities Redesigned for Living: During industrialisation cities were designed around factories and offices. But cities will be reinvented to be built almost entirely around human living spaces. They will be more green than grey and grow most of the produce for their inhabitants in buildings. They will be pedestrian-centric with clean air.

13. Nationalisation of Technology Platforms: Big tech in America won’t just be split up – they may be acquired by the government and be redefined as national infrastructure – as we saw with railways. Some big tech companies will be repatriated. Many countries will build their own digital platforms such as search and social, taking them out of private hands. Algorithms will be regulated, and listed like food ingredients on digital platforms.

14. Government Will Love Small Again: Governments around the world will finally realise big powerful companies are reducing their tax revenue. They’re doing this in two major ways: through tax avoidance and reducing their number of employees paying PAYE tax due to production automation. New policies will be set in place the world over favouring local and small businesses. The current rhetoric of ‘corporate tax reduction creates employment’ will be rebuffed and the trend of lower corporate tax will be reversed.

15. Highly Paid Because Human: The highest paid jobs in the economy will be paid as such ‘because a human is actually doing it’ even if it could be automated or done by a machine. Think of the cost of a concert versus a digital download, think barista coffee versus coffee machine . We’ll start paying more for the real thing. Highest economic value will be placed on humans doing tasks for other humans, even if a robot ‘can’ do it.

16. Personal Operating Systems Will Arrive: Software systems will organise our personal lives. We’ll train them like dogs and they’ll be our personal life assistant. They will owned by the individuals (rather than a company), powered by open source software and backed up by machine learning.

17. Humans Start Merging with Machines: Information technology and biotechnology will increasingly overlap. We’ll have the first versions of ‘upgraded cognitive ability’ for humans inserted into our bodies. This will start an inevitable split in our species: neo-humans and organic-humans.

18. Humans Become a Hackable Species: As we merge with the machines, we will for the first time become hackable from the inside. The hacking process will mean that we could be programmed to behave in ways we didn’t intend. The hacking will mostly occur without our knowledge that we’ve even actually been hacked.

19. Posthumous Existence: Our memories and intelligence will become uploadable into the cloud. In doing so, many of us will have a posthumous existence and continue relationships with loved ones after we’ve passed.

20. The Higher Education Bubble Will Burst: People will wake up to the fact that all but a few (eg medical) university qualifications can be obtained online, for free, from the world’s best practitioners on those topics. Alternative education methods will emerge and gain more credibility. Knowledge will also start to become a commodity we can buy and download directly into our brains.

21. Crypto Currency Replaces Fiat: Governments around the world will launch crypto currencies to replace their fiat currency. A global crypto currency will emerge and replace the USD as the quasi-official global trading currency.

22. 3D Printing Will Have a Smart Phone Moment: A revolution in 3D printing will occur, probably associated with new materials science. Materials like graphene will become ubiquitous, like ‘plastics’ did in the 1950s.  We’ll finally end up with desktop manufacturing in most homes and offices, the way PCs became household items in the 1990s.

23. The Toilet Will Become a Laboratory: The toilet will become a digital health parter as a mini lab in your home. It will be the most high tech device in every home.

24. Everything with Electricity Will Be Smart: If it has electricity, it will be smart and connected to the cloud. There will be near zero dumb devices that require electricity to operate.

25. Augmented Reality Metastructure: A new type of virtual infrastructure will emerge in cities and homes. We’ll put some technology into our eyes (eg glasses or contact lenses) that enables enhanced digital vision of everything around us to augment the physical world and provide bespoke, on-demand information for cognitive shortcuts.

26. Universal Basic Income Will Fade Away: The robot and automation job apocalypse will never eventuate as technology will create more jobs than it destroys. With this, the fashionable concept of UBI will fade away.

27. Clean Meat Movement: Clean meat (nature identical meat grown in a lab) will be lower cost financially and environmentally, than meat grown through traditional agriculture. This will create a massive consumer shift starting with the humble burger, ending in disruption to agricultural industries.

28. Semantic Language Coding: New software will be developed granting coding powers to anyone who can speak. Software that builds software based on voice commands will democratise the code development process, mostly through AI and machine learning.

29. AI Cold War: A cold war around winning the AI race (which has already commenced) will continue, resulting in a handful of AI superpower nation states.

30. Blockchain Digital Commons: Many platform businesses like Uber and Airbnb will be replaced by a new form of Digital Commons. Software will be owned and operated by the providers of the services,  instead of a giant internet company like Uber taking 30 percent for every ride organised.

 

Some of these ideas will happen within a couple of years and some will be closer to the end of the decade – but I’m confident most of them will eventuate. The exciting bit? It’s our turn to go and build all the good stuff and help circumvent the bad bits.

 

The Other 1 Percent

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Ferrari sales in Australia are up 17% on last year. While new car sales are down 3 percent. A new Gulfstream private jet has a 2 year wait list. By all accounts the one percent are doing well. But there’s another 1 percent out there which doesn’t get nearly as much attention.

This is the 1 percent who take the time and effort to invest in themselves. The few who understand the gift technology has given us to transform. This is the 1 percent who:

  • Re-educate themselves on changes in their industry
  • Turn up to the free learning event on hot topics like  E-sports, Blockchain or Artificial Intelligence
  • Learn anything, for free, on-line
  • Do night projects
  • Start a side business
  • Tap into the world’s best thinkers who publish their ideas for free
  • Read the book and not just the blog post
  • Listen to podcasts instead of FM banter
  • Aren’t concerned about keeping up with the Kardashians

All of which have the very low price tag of allocating spare time differently.

These people realise that even though there are income disparities, an eroding middle class, and change which will disrupt jobs – they’ve also been given a choice. A choice to change and adapt with the market as it moves on. A choice to be the person who invests small and frequent amounts of time to know more, become more and reduce their income risk when that change finally hits. This other one percent are thankful for the dignity of choice to ‘upgrade our skills’ we’ve all been given, and they’re taking it.

And the others? Well, they just watch the next season of that tv show they watched last year, with those people fighting each other to win some cooking battle, get voted off an island or marry someone they don’t even know. They opt out of their life and start living someone else’s.

Sure, it’s tough when the rules of business, life and the market change. But it would be tougher if we didn’t have all the choices we do to do something about it.