Found this Harvard seminar about the Internet of Things, and it turned out to be a bit different from what I expected – more opinionated, for a start. The lecturer is James Whittaker (medium.com/@docjamesw), and part of what he’s talking about – though he doesn’t use the specific terms – is the kind of situationally-aware computing that Google is working on right now. 

One of his speculations gave me an idea for an SF story involving a woman whose living comes from being a taste-setter. A step beyond a blogger; companies give her clothes and accessories because they want other people to see her wearing them and buy them (which generates affiliate income for her), and venues like restaurants and nightclubs pay her to come and be seen in them. She’s an aspiration model. All of this is guided by subtle interactions with machines; a self-driving car turns up at her door and she gets into it and goes to where it takes her. 

But what happens when the machines start guiding her away from a man she’s met because being seen with him would lower her aspiration value – and she wants to be with him?

https://itunes.apple.com/nz/course/seminars-internet-things-video/id1069443090?i=359205504&mt=2

While I’m between projects at the day job, I’m making use of the vast amount of free training that’s available on the web these days, in order to skill up on topics that will help me do a better job on the next project. 

I found this one about collaborative product development on iTunes U. 

The basic idea is that “lead” users build innovations they need or want based on existing products. These are things that the producing companies don’t know that people want; if told that they want them, they may even send the customers away, because they don’t know yet that there’s really a profitable demand, or they don’t even know how to produce the thing. 

But talking to lead users helps to identify what are the unmet needs of your user community. They will also know who else (perhaps in a different field) is facing a similar problem and what they’re doing to solve it. 

The smart thing for a company to do is partner with these users and make it easy for them to innovate and share their innovations – then support them in the core product. This creates great loyalty, to the point where the user community will actively protect the company’s interests, rather than trying to undermine them (as they’re likely to do if the company lawyers go all cease-and-desist).

A great solution is to provide a toolkit with which the users can design their own solutions to the problems they know they have (but the company doesn’t), and then assemble a product to their design and sell it to them. 

The next step is to produce a flexible, customisable product that users can modify themselves “in the field” to fit their specialised needs. This captures a much larger market, including “markets of one,” and the producer doesn’t have to understand the individual problems in depth. They just have to know what is possible in terms of solutions, and make an abstracted toolkit that’s easy to use. This involves hiding everything the user doesn’t need to know in order to solve their problem, and leaving them only thinking about the things they know that the company doesn’t – thinking in terms they understand. 

This toolkit should enable “trial and error” and feedback to help improve the solutions.  

The professor uses engaging examples, ranging from skateboarding in empty swimming pools through kitesurfing, LEGO, computer chips, protein folding and Barbie Hairstyler. One of the projects he was involved in was as a consultant to 3M, and the products developed in consultation with “lead users” outperformed the ones developed in-house by a factor of 8. 

What I’ve been trying to fit my brain around is how this could be used in writing and publishing. Obviously, smart publishing companies (if there were any) would be adopting some of the techniques that the indies have developed for marketing – romance writers are state of the art here, collaborating and sharing best practices, and they’re the big winners in the current publishing landscape. But could we also work with readers to discover the kinds of stories that they want that nobody is writing yet?

https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/how-to-develop-breakthrough/id674624937?mt=10

As worldbuilders, we need to bear in mind that the way that seems right and natural to us today is the current point in a long and continuing evolution, and not the way things have always been among all right-thinking people. 

Which isn’t to say that I don’t think the way my marriage works is great: legal equality, mutual respect and affection, freely chosen by the partners. It’s just not how marriage tended to work historically. Even my wife’s grandparents married, as far as we can tell, largely for pragmatic reasons.

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/how-romance-wrecked-traditional-marriage/

Just don’t give them any grimdark fantasy.

Originally shared by ExtremeTech

Improving robot AI.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/223054-storytelling-may-be-the-secret-to-creating-ethical-artificial-intelligence

Another misleading headline (at this point, it’s the painfulness, not the memory, that can be erased), but some interesting implications for the future. Already pretty well explored in SF, though.

Originally shared by CM Stewart

via Shar Banning et al

http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-figured-out-how-to-to-erase-your-painful-memories

In connection with my day job, I’ve just finished this extensive and comprehensive course on sustainability and business innovation, taught by SAP’s first Chief Sustainability Officer, the personable and knowledgeable Peter Graf.

A few key ideas and concepts I learned that I want to think about some more:

1. The concept of a “social license to operate”. Governments issue businesses with licenses to operate, but markets issue them with “social license to operate” – that is, if we decide that we don’t want to patronise businesses that don’t conform to our values, their viability becomes endangered. An example is the backlash against Nike when they were found to have child labour in their supply chain; they’ve since tightened up their act and become a model of socially responsible manufacturing, knowing that their brand would otherwise be destroyed. (Look for something similar from VW soon.)

2. The idea of a “circular economy”. The traditional linear economy extracts resources to make consumer goods which end up becoming waste. A circular economy designs from the beginning with reuse and recycling in mind, pays attention to how materials are sourced, how goods are manufactured and shipped to markets, to the costs incurred when the goods are in use (for example, energy efficiency of devices), and to the process of recycling them back into the value chain when they’re no longer usable for their intended purpose.

3.  Dematerialisation: a product (or process) that used to be physical becomes virtual. We’ve seen this with music, movies and books so far. It also applies to things like remote education and the replacement of physical travel with electronic collaboration or telepresence. All of this reduces environmental damage incurred by transporting things or people around. 

4. Replacing the selling of products with the selling of a service:

– An air compressor manufacturer shifts from selling air compressors to selling compressed air, meaning that they install, monitor, maintain and replace their compressors in the client’s facility and charge for the air they produce. They now have an incentive to make their machines as efficient as possible.

– A tractor company or a fertilizer company shifts to selling agricultural productivity, monitoring farmland and advising on the best way to produce maximum yield, and providing only the necessary machinery or chemicals at the time they’re needed.

– A carpet company shifts to selling floor covering as a service, so it’s now in their interests to make the carpet last a long time and be recyclable when it’s worn out.

All these are made possible by cloud computing; big data and the ability to analyse it; the internet of things (constantly monitoring multiple aspects of performance for big data techniques to analyse); and mobile technology. 

5. Changes in behaviour occur when people or companies see a personal, immediate benefit – so that’s the way to pitch the change. For example:

– Sell car pooling as a social benefit that provides networking opportunities and the ability for the participants to grow social capital. 

– Use energy use as a proxy for process inefficiency, and make a business case based on saving money on energy costs. 

– Demonstrate that employee retention has an impact on training, recruitment and internal efficiency costs, and put a dollar value on an improvement in employee retention – which will give you the budget to offer your employees something that will make them stay around.

6. The idea of a “social sabbatical” – offering skills to NGOs or developing countries, or in mentoring students or entrepreneurs, which in turn cultivates potential valuable employees or business partners. 

I personally believe in a mixed economy (which is what we have, of course), neither completely unregulated and relying solely on “enlightened self-interest” to produce good outcomes, nor completely regulated and assuming that good outcomes must always be compelled. Just as laws regarding how individuals behave aren’t necessary for people who have enough social awareness that they don’t attack each other or steal each other’s stuff, but still are necessary because not everyone is like that, so laws regarding how companies must behave aren’t necessary for companies that are smart enough to see that taking care of their social and physical environment is in their best interests – but they are still necessary, because not all companies are that smart. (Also, sometimes acting in a way that harms others is in a person or company’s interest, unless the law provides negative consequences that the act itself does not.)

All in all, thought-provoking stuff, and it will go into the mix for any SF I write in the future. 

https://open.sap.com/courses/sbi1-1