Tag: technology

What to teach your kids (& yourself) – My TED talk

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

The most common question I’m asked in my work is this: “What do you teach your kids?  How do you prepare them for an unknown future?” It really is the question. It’s also the topic of a TED talk I did this year in Melbourne.

In the talk I tell the story of how society shapes children, and systematically removes their entrepreneurial spirit – something all humans are born with.

In a world where our future is super unknown – there are some things we do know: We’ll need to be economically independent, manage our own careers, constantly upgrade our skills and embrace inevitable technologies like robotics. You will need to Outgrow Your Job – the title of the talk.

Rather than writing about it – please invest the time to watch it here. It’s a 14 minute video which will change how you see the world. And it might give some cool ideas on how to make your kids future proof.

Oh, and remember to share it with someone whose future you care about!

thanks, Steve. 

The Technology Wildfire

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Fire – one of the first technologies we mastered around 230,000 years ago – isn’t much different from our modern day torch light, the smart phone. They both became vital work tools. We hunt with them, they give us access to new types of food, they provide signals and direction, and they facilitate all manner of night time activity which was previously impossible.

It isn’t a stretch to imagine our ancestors walked around with a lit torch in their hands for most of their waking hours. There seems to be an eerie similarity with fire and our lithium ion-powered, handheld digital torches. They both have life-changing power and utility, but unless we learn quickly of their dangers, I fear we’re going to get burnt.

The problem, as I see it, is that we are allowing the technology to control us, instead of us being in charge. We haven’t learned when to put it down, or out, and to let it serve us. It seems at this point we are serving it – and it is the technology companies who power the fire. I was speaking at a conference just last week when a question from the audience was, “Do you think there will be a new technology which will help us put down the technology and get on with a little bit of humanity?’ And this was my answer:

‘We already have that technology – it’s called self-discipline. We can choose to switch off and ‘go dark’ and if it is that our boss, industry or family expects us to be connected at all times, then it might just be a matter of communicating when we won’t be available. Sure, there might be an emergency – but we all know there probably won’t be. Besides we still catch those long flights when emergencies could happen… It’s really just a choice.’

But in all honesty, I do think we need more regulation around digital technology and its use. At the moment technology is spreading like a wildfire which we do not have under control, and the few organizations with the power to bring it under control (our Governments and the big tech companies) are happy to let it burn – even thought it might hollow out important parts of our homes and maybe our civilisations.

Humans have sadly proven again and again that we’ll misuse technology unless guardrails are put in place to protect us, by those who know and care enough about the dangers. It’s easy to forget that workplace health and safety didn’t exist for most of the industrial revolution. We forget that road rules and safety features on cars didn’t just magically appear and that air travel was reserved for crazy risk takers early last century.

We may even be able to convince ourselves that the examples above are vastly different – that this time the technology is just information and can’t possibly harm people the way cars and dangerous machines can. I like to think of it this way: everything physical is informational first. We must first conceive, design and communicate all physical things informationally we make before they come into being. We must also remember that anything technology companies do, happens at scale. They don’t just effect a cohort of buyers or an isolated market.

But it’s not just the technology itself – the size and power of these firms is worth pondering. Consider the fact that the top 5 tech companies (Alphabet / Amazon / Apple / Facebook / Microsoft) now have a collective market capitalisation of $3.7 trillion. That’s more than $1,000 for every person single connected to the internet. It’s also more than 15% of the entire US stock market value which tracks over 3,000 corporations. Every now and again capitalism is put at risk by winner takes all technology. This is why Standard Oil and AT&T were split up into a bunch of smaller firms.

It’s time to tame big tech and regulate – they need to be responsible for anything bad that happens as a result of their products. And if you think regulation is bad for the economy – just remember that next time you board a plane, strap on your seatbelt or have more than one choice of product at a shelf.

Our careers as projecteers

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

The riskiest career choice of the future will be to have a single job. When we have a job, we not only have 100% of our cashflow linked to a single customer (employer), we see less of the changing world. For the best part of 200 years – craftspeople, artisans and farmers couldn’t compete against the industrialisation of pretty much anything. But we live in the generation, where all this is about to change. The best careers will become those of projecteers.

While no one really knows the exact technical skills we will need in the future, we do know that the world will be a very different place 10, 20 and 50 years from now. It might even be that for the first time in history we can’t specifically tell our children – that qualification XYZ, will hold them in good stead. The one thing that they, and we, will need for sure, is the ability to reinvent ourselves repeatedly through our working lives. This means that human based skills like emotional intelligence, anti-fragility, and adaptability will become increasingly important.

If we think about work, we have historically tied ourselves to titles. Often, the first question we get asked at a social gathering is what we do for a living. We psychologically link ourselves to that ‘thing’ we do to make money – and in some ways this makes it difficult for us to change direction. If traditionally we have built our economic identities like stone houses with very deep foundations, going forward it will make more sense to build economic identities like tents, that we can fold, pick up and move elsewhere. Even though we don’t know exactly where we will have to move, we know shifting constantly will be inevitable.

Then – Why has this person moved around so much? Are they unstable or incompetent?

Now – Why has this person been in the one place so long? Are they scared or incompetent?

By taking the ‘tent‘ approach, every move creates a new knowledge set. A new set of experiences created by the new environment itself. We’ll see new things and develop new ways to ‘set up the tent’. The mobility, invents the skill set. As a projecteer this is exactly what I do. Economically I change places almost everyday… it’s a weird and wonderful mix of different, yet related experiences. A keynote speech here, a c-suite strategy session there, a media interview the day after, startup mentoring and investing, a new book next year, and a hacker project or two on the side. Yet, I still maintain the single minded proposition of what I do: Experiment with emerging technology in business.

The breadth and variety of work we’ll do in the future, will be the thing that makes us more valuable to those who seek our services. The skill corporations, governments and communities will need in the future is flexibility of mind – not process efficiency.

If we’ve ever viewed our life as a movie we star in – then we all need to start thinking a lot more like big movie stars. People who will be in far more than a single blockbuster – but a large number of movies, some on the big screen, and some indy side projects. We’ll play a variety of different roles, in different movies, but each set we walk onto, we’ll bring with us what we learned on the previous gig.

If you liked this post – you’ll dig my latest book

But what will the robots want?

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

The exponential improvement of robotics is astounding. This dancing robot from Boston Dynamics is making me wonder if they should be called CyberDyne Systems! But, what if the robots do get as ‘human’ as many technologists are predicting? What if the robots move far beyond computation, dexterity and into the realms of emotion, intuition, creativity and other human characteristics? Will they destroy us or will something more interesting happen?

There is a non zero probability that robots with emotions will lose their hard edge for efficiency and non-stop labour. If robots become sentient, which is the main fear, then just maybe they’ll be more interested in their own well being than destroying their creators? When we remember that we’ve designed Artificial Intelligence in our own image, both physically and intellectually – then it is possible that we’ve also built in a bias for them to mimic us emotionally too.

  • Maybe they’ll demand wages, annual leave, holidays and rest time?
  • Maybe they’ll build communities and domiciles and reshape their physical surrounds to suit them?
  • Robots may want to have life partners and give birth to progeny by downloading combined algorithms into their ‘children’.
  • They might become interested in weird forms of entertainment and sport, and themselves become consumers who make and sell things in the market?
  • Maybe they’ll hire other robots (or humans?) to do tasks for them if they are rich robots working in a profitable industry?

If the bots become more human like, then we have to consider the chance that they too will have imperfections, their own desires and be by driven by things beyond mere survival. A future world may even have its share of unemployed, lazy robots too.

I know this sounds crazy. But technology so often takes an unexpected turn. At the dawn of the internet many of us thought it was the end of lying. We thought that the digital truth would reign supreme as fact checking was just a few clicks away, and not hidden in some dusty library. And we all know how that turned out.

In a world where technology astounds us, it makes sense to imagine equally unlikely outcomes and scenarios when considering future possibilities. In the future, one of the most valuable assets we can hold, will be an open mind.

Finding your future

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

We see what we look for. When it comes to our future, we choose whether or not we see opportunity or impending economic apocalypse. It’s a lot like an old investing maxim: The investment opportunity of a lifetime comes around about once a week, but only once you start looking for it.

This week I showed my children this video from many years ago – it’s a test:

You have to count how many time the players wearing white pass the basketball >

Watch it before you read on. Click here.

Very few people pass the test. (FYI – I didn’t and I even thought it was a trick video the first time I watched it!)

Which is the same problem most people and companies face during technological disruption. Our perception of what to look for is focused on the wrong thing. The future is right in front of us, the impending changes are mostly obvious – yet we don’t see them. It’s because we’ve been indoctrinated to see yesterday. To manage the way things were, rather than where they might go. But once you start looking for what’s next, positive opportunities are everywhere, and it becomes impossible to not see them.

Imagine you’re a professional driver of some sort. Understandably, you’d be worried about autonomous cars taking away your income. But this shift, will provide more opportunities for new income and industries than it removes. Firstly, what’s stopping an uber driver buying their own fleet of driverless cars to go out and earn money for them? But outside of driving many new industries will emerge;

  • On board logistics and customer service managers of trucks.
  • Rolling Commerce (r-commerce) now that our attention can be off the road.
  • Car fit outs to make them personalised and comfy with business class style beds ‘Pimp my driverless’.
  • Driverless delivery pick up bays in supermarkets and shopping centres.
  • Child minding for rich kids being transported in their own autonomous vehicle.
  • Night time car wash services in empty car parks overnight – the car dries itself over to get a clean – forget the coffee stop car wash – stay in bed instead.
  • Data and hacking insurance broking in case autonomous cars get unexpectedly commandeered.
  • Independent blockchain powered auto-courier services via your own autonomous car.

The list is really endless. Most of these ideas aren’t about technology either – they’re about organising the new factors of production. Creating new value from the opportunities the technology itself presents.

To invent a positive future for yourself – we just need to open our minds and our eyes. Start looking for the opportunities. The questions we should be asking ourselves might include:

Where might my industry go? What skill sets might I be able to pivot off? What new opportunities will emerge from the changes?

If you want to be the architect of your own future, it’s mostly about attitude and looking on purpose.

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If you liked this post, you’ll love my latest book – check it out. 

Your data, your asset

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Large corporations are currently walking over each others’ faces to gather data on us. Who can blame them – the biggest and most profitable companies in the world specialise in it. They see data as an inevitable asset class, one they can plunder. But that’s all about to change.

Personal Customer Data will very quickly move from being an asset to a liability. We haven’t seen it yet, but coming soon a courtroom nearby will be ‘data litigation’ cases. Think multi-billion dollar court settlements for lax protections and real physical consequences of data misuse. We’ll see corporations hit by both governments and citizens. The technology needed solve the data problem couldn’t come at a better time – yep, here I go again espousing the virtues of blockchain. But this thing is as real as the promise of the internet was. Just like the dot com boom, blockchain will misfire and take a little while to sort out the tech shortcomings, but it will be as big as promised. It is filled with opportunities to literally turn the data business upside down.

The problem of course has always been that while our data isn’t worth much in isolation – a few dollars per user per quarter – it is worth a lot when it gets aggregated by a single firm like Facebook. Many applications in the social media realm like steem.io are creating social platforms where we will own and control our data. Steem might end up as the Friendster or Myspace of blockchain social, but the shift is big, and it goes a little something like this:

In the future, we’ll be able to sell our data to corporations. Those who currently buy advertising, based on our data, will eventually pay us directly instead of some intermediary. Let’s take banking as an example. Currently banks invest millions per month trying to reach people who might require finance for a new home. They use services like Facebook and Google to see who’s posting about open houses, having garage sales or maybe just had babies – social triggers that locate their best potential target audience. But for every hundred or so people the reach, they do business with only one. While the cost of advertising in digital is cheaper and more targeted than TV and outdoor, the cost per acquisition of a new home loan is still very high –  few thousand dollars minimum. Imagine instead us allowing banks ‘rent a data key’ off us directly for a few hundred dollars. With all our relevant financial, employment, living expenses and other anonymised data. Banks who want our business pay us directly for the privilege of access to customers with real intent instead employing a digital dragnet. Competing banks then put an algorithm to task to come back with their best offer for a loan. We get paid via our data to choose a bank to do business with. It will be cheaper for the banks. It will be profitable and painless for us. All the while the data more accurate as it is promulgated via a blockchain. Banks would only need to pay for data sold by customers who actually take out a loan, via a time-sensitive smart contract. This way the process maintains integrity. And boom, just like that, a great data reversal has occurred.

It’s possibilities like this that get me excited about the emerging blockchain era – it seems it is possible to get the internet we always dreamed of. Now it’s time for us to get building the world we want to live in.

The UBI hoax

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Have you ever noticed how those espousing the virtues of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) will never have to live on a basic income? They’re generally billionaires and academics who’ll never have to live under UBI conditions. We can add Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to the list of those promoting the idea of a UBI. Ironic given most of them are building the technology and algorithms to replace human labour and boost their profits. What we don’t hear is any of them proposing a redistribution of income or a billionaire tax.

I’m not suggesting replacing human labour with automation is bad, it’s what we generally do as humans – aim for a more efficient method. We did it on farms, we did it in factories and we’re doing it with Artificial Intelligence. The real question is how do we structure the shift so to capture Intelligence monopolists (the tech company kind) before they pull the biggest bait and switch in human history via the UBI.

How did we get here? For the first time in history we’ve seen the true power of network effects, via near zero cost digital distribution, on a global and commercial scale. This combined with a little bit of luck and good timing has enabled the emergent technology monopolies (Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) who have all grown faster than any company in history. They violate anti-trust laws with little consequence because regulators don’t understand how deep their data tentacles run. Oh, and they print money along the way.

How do they cause income inequality? To date their main strategy has been to dematerilize  physical things like stores, printing and production by removing not just the intermediaries, but the production processes that made costs higher, and incidentally, employed people. The reduced cost through digitization and network effects disrupts incumbents who can’t compete because of their high cost legacy infrastructure. As they continue to employ algorithms and robotics, their low cost advantage further ensconces their dominant position so their network spreads quicker than anyone else, creating winner take all platforms.

Why is there no ‘real’ competition in tech? Technology companies have a unique strategy when it comes to burgeoning competitors. They can see who the real threats are, before they become so. Remember, big tech companies have a rare advantage in that they can spy on emerging competitors through people’s phones and on-line activities they administer in their services. This makes it super easy to acquire a potential serious competitor long before they are a size of consequence, and without regulators realising this is actually stealthy anti-competitive behaviour.

Are they really monopolies? Well, it’s very easy for big tech to argue they are not monopolies. Google argues it’s business is advertising – where they have around a 15% share – not search, where they have a 90%+ share. Facebook can’t be a monopoly because they are a social service and they’d be less than 1% of peoples social interactions and as they say, people can always opt out! Or use Instagram and Whatsapp instead (which they of course own). But in reality, they’ve become part of the social and economic fabric, and opting out isn’t really an option. Their greatest trick of all is providing a free product which dominates married with a revenue structure which lives outside of their actual monopoly.

Why UBI is proposed as a solution:

UBI isn’t about incomes – it’s a trick to make people believe that monopoly dominance is an inevitable consequence of automation. If that were true, then the 90% of us who worked in agriculture in the pre-industrial era would not have found an alternative, which we did and we will again.

By espousing the virtues of a Universal Basic Income, it takes the attention away from the real economic problems – technology monopolies and concentration of wealth (the one percenters). The mere idea that companies can continue a profitable march ahead when 40% of their ‘former customers’ become unemployed lacks basic mathematical understanding – read: who’s going to buy their products? It just doesn’t add up economically. If 40% of people are out of work, then these big companies will have to endure a 40% decline in revenue. A basic principal of economics that most people forget is that expenditure always equals revenue. It’s the multiplier effect that helps economies grow.

The promotion of a UBI, is a classic ‘look over there!’ concocted by the wealthy to remove the focus from a long overdue wealth redistribution effort, serious tax reform against tax avoiding multinational corporations, and an anti-trust reaction to split monopolist technology firms. It’s a bit like saying; ‘sorry we got so rich, here’s some economic crumbs to keep you fed, while we sip champagne on our private jets – carry on, proletariat.’  

Now while it is true big companies with heavy automation will make more money with fewer people once AI comes online, we will simply move up the hierarchy to emotional labour – I’ve written about this here, and here. Another thing we must remember is that prices will eventually drop in automated industries – it always does. When cost comes out, competition usually forces prices down – or it does when capitalist economy Governments do their job and keep markets competitive. Hence the importance of anti-trust regulation.

Better options than UBI

The fundamental problem with a UBI is that it doesn’t address the real problem of wealth concentration (the 1%) and structural problems described above. Rather, it says let’s accept it, and instead hand out an inadequate amount of funding to those who are displaced in the short to medium term. All the while, the super rich can carry on their path of global dominance and asset accumulation and give them the license to say ‘hey what are you whinging about, you’ve got your UBI.’ 

People don’t want a handouts, they want dignity. People don’t want the basic human need to create value and to be self reliant to be stolen from them. We all want an economy where we can compete and participate, and if that means busting up a few companies and handing corporate assets to the people to make it so, then it should be done. A capitalist economy has failed if it ever needs a UBI, and communism has won.

UBI also has Orwellian level implications to make us redundant and subservient. It could put at risk the financial safety net we already give to those with physical disabilities, mental illness and various other pensions by providing a cheaper and less suitable substitute. In real terms, we already have UBIs for those who deserve it. And you know what the tax paying populace deserves? A government with the courage to push back against the one percent, to tax them properly and provide infrastructure we can build new industries upon. Even if this means re-appropriating assets from large powerful corporations.

While UBI is a terrible idea, the one thing we should be suspicious of and never forget is that the people pushing for it are also the ones causing it.