Ubiquity: smart people, smart places, smart organisations

SMART PEOPLE, SMART PLACES,SMART ORGANISATIONS

UBIQUITY

By Tom Cheesewright

You are all futurists.

I may have made it my job title but no-one gets through life without thinking about the future.

Whether it is setting the sales targets for the year ahead, or spending furtive half hours at work booking your summer holiday, we all plan. We all spend lots of time thinking about the future.

This presentation will talk about a future that is rushing towards us, ever faster. A future that only a few years ago would have been pure fiction, but due to the pace of change is fast becoming reality.

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I’m going to start with a physics lesson.

Only joking! It’s not your GCSEs again or O-levels.

This is a diagram showing the operation of a new type of camera designed by Rambus Inc.

I’d like to show you the camera itself.

But there’s not a lot to see because it’s the diameter of just three human hairs.

It needs no lens. And it costs less than 15 pence to manufacture.

If you think we live in a surveillance culture now, just wait until this hits the market in two to three years’ time.

This camera is just the latest evidence of the unstoppable progress of technology. Its exponential progress on all fronts: smaller, faster, cheaper, better.

Digital technology is reaching an important milestone in this inexorable advance. A point at which it is everywhere, yet almost invisible.

We call this milestone ubiquity, the point at which the promise of ubiquitous computing becomes reality.

Today I want to talk about the concept of ubiquity and how it affects all of our lives at three different scales: personal, organisational and geographical.

People, companies and places.

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Let’s put this in historical context. The term ubiquitous computing was first coined 26 years ago at the home of so many computing innovations, Xerox PARC.

Here the mouse, the graphical user interface, Ethernet, and the laser printer were all created. Some of those for Steve Jobs to steal.

Or not. Depending on your version of history.

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You can start this story all the way back at Manchester’s baby, and probably before.

The concept of ubiquitous computing has been fleshed out by academics in the subsequent years, but it’s best understood by plotting the advance of computers.

But for me it began with the ZX Spectrum. This is mine in its swanky full keyboard case. The Spectrum was great. But it had its limitations.

The user interface wasn’t exactly friendly.

More specifically, it wasn’t very human. In fact it was alien.

If you wanted to converse with a Spectrum or any other computer of this era, you had to learn its language. Its customs.

It wasn’t very portable.

Its only means of interconnection with other machines was via tapes.

The bandwidth of this connection depended on whether you chose first or second class post.

The next big milestone for me came when I was issued with one of these.

It was portable. With the addition of a PCMCIA card it could be connected to the Internet.

Wirelessly after a while.

And it had a graphical user interface. Much more natural and friendly.

Today, we have smartphones. They’re more powerful. They’re permanently connected. And they’re pocketable.

But most importantly, they’re more human.

The reason anyone can pick up a smartphone and use it in minutes is because all that power has been put to good use.

Making it speak our language. Touches, swipes, gestures.

We stop treating the technology as a discrete object. It becomes part of us. An extension of ourselves.

We may not have the sound effects or the sharp suits of Steve Austin, but we are all bionic now.

I have a terrible sense of direction but it doesn’t matter. Because my digital prosthetic can navigate for me.

It makes up for the weakness of my memory. My smartphone is the reason that I am usually in the right place at the right time.

But my phone does more than make up for my deficiencies. It makes me superhuman.

I have digital sixth senses called Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn that keep me aware of what’s happening in the world, my home and work life, in

real time.

I now have a truly photographic memory.

I can tap the world’s knowledge in seconds.

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We have gone from somewhere computing, talking an alien language.

To portable computing, using a much friendlier means of communication.

To anywhere computing. Small devices so powerful and so human that they have become an extension of ourselves.

The next natural step is from anywhere computing to everywhere computing.

Computers disappearing as discrete objects in their own right. Their power being distributed into the cloud and into the everyday objects all around us.

At the personal scale, today, Ubiquity looks like this.

Or at least it does if you’re a model…

The reality remains a lot more dorky.

This is Google Glass. All of the technology of a smartphone, condensed into a pair of glasses. You can see some here today if you haven’t had the chance yet.

They’re impressive, but the technology’s not quite invisible.

Kopin Corp.That’s coming though. This is me sporting a prototype by a company called Kopin.

OK they’re a bit Dame Edna but at least you don’t look like an extra from Star Trek.

The display is tucked away just here. Behind the lens and barely visible to anyone else.

The camera? Well if it uses the one I showed at the start, it could be just about anywhere.

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These gadgets represent the most visible steps towards ubiquity today.

They’re certainly eye-catching. But it’s the impact that they will have that is much more interesting.

At the personal scale, ubiquitous computing does one clear thing.

It makes us more capable. And capable of doing more.

This is one of the key themes in technological progress of the last few hundred years.

An economist would explain it as the substitution of capital for labour.

Historically automating production has always spurred economic growth and created more jobs.

Some people become very rich but the whole of society benefits.

The efficiency of computing means economic growth for some but fewer jobs over all.

We see this trend writ large in the headlines today.

Why was there a tube strike in London recently? Because machines were replacing people.

The same way many blue collar jobs were handed over to robots in the 60s, 70s and 80s, now we are seeing the automation of customer service, retail, and even professional services.

50%of law firms with >10 partners

merged or acquired

in 2013Law, accountancy, banking and many professional jobs are being deskilled and automated.

Traders getting high are being replaced by high frequency trading algorithms.

Bank managers no longer say ‘no’, the computer says ‘no’.

But it’s important to remember that not all of this is about cost.

Doing things by digital means is not only orders of magnitude cheaper, it is often more efficient for the customer.

People chose to buy music from iTunes rather than HMV, not because the cost was wildly different but because the experience was better.

As many jobs will be transformed or displaced by the way ubiquitous technology changes the experience, as they will by the impact it has on cost.

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A. There will be lots more people like me. Self-employed.

People who have multiple different facets to their business that together represent a healthy career. Enabled by technology!

Q. What does this mean for us as professionals?

Ubiquitous computing also has implications for our interactions with each other.

Cloak tracks people’s social network checkins and allows you to avoid bumping into them.

Your ex. That guy who talks to much. Your inlaws. You can avoid them all. As long as they use FourSquare.

Cloak is the complete opposite of Tinder.

Are you familiar with Tinder?

If you don’t know, Tinder is a social network with a very explicit, real-world purpose.

To help people hook up.

And it is very, very successful.

SMART… PLACES

Ubiquitous computing also changes our interaction with our environment.

Across our homes and cities, technology is changing the way we operate, making the dumb smart and displacing even more manual labour.

We have cut the amount of manual labour in the home by a factor of thirty in the last six decades.

The next frontier is cutting the resource we use. The Nest smart thermostat, for example, learns my families patterns of occupation and dynamically sets the heating appropriately.

And combined with advances in materials we should be able to dramatically cut our carbon production from heating and lighting.

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Some of the most exciting work is happening at a larger scale though, making whole cities smart.

20,000 sensors are distributed across the Spanish city of Santander. On top of buses and taxis, underneath parking spots, on lampposts and shop fronts, under roads and in buildings.

These sensors are built with off-the-shelf hardware for very low cost. The most expensive sensor in the network is around £100.

They measure traffic, parking spaces, noise, air quality, temperature, daylight, energy consumption. And they feed it all back to a central hub where operators and managers can make smarter decisions about how they run the city.

They can remotely turn off lights that have been left on.

They can tweak heating controls to reduce energy bills.

They only water lawns when they need watering.

Most importantly, the data is being fed back to the citizens of Santander as well. They can see via street signs, mobile apps and websites what is going on to really practical effect, like cutting down the time it takes to find a parking space.

Image of dustbin from Santander

The technology is now so disposable that in Santander they’re even putting it in bins.

This bin has a simple sensor in it that measure how much rubbish is in the bin. When, and only when it is full, will it ask to be emptied.

The mayor of Santander expects to save about 25% of his fuel costs for waste collection trucks by emptying bins only when they are full.

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Santander’s smart city project can be described by five actions. These five actions are relevant to every scale of technology I am have talked about so far.

The first action is that of collecting data. From sensors distributed around the person or the place, or from databases where information is already stored.

This data is then transmitted through the connection layer. 3G, 4G, whitespace, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee – we have so many ways to carry data available to us.

The data is aggregated at the processing layer, where raw numbers are translated into information.

But arguably most important is the presentation layer. The point at which machine language is translated into a form that human beings can understand and interact with intuitively.

For all that technology is the heart of this presentation and the vision that sits behind it, people remain the most important part of this network. The ubiquity model is built with people at its core.

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COLLECTI orient the diagram like this. Concentric layers of technology that surround the human, but also abstract them from complexity.

What you or I see at the centre, as citizen, customer or controller, is the information we need and the levers we need to act on it. Tailored, personal, relevant.

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Of course which people you put at the core of this model has a great bearing on whether it’s a positive model or not.

This version is pretty dystopian.

No-one’s doubting the risks here.

But the opportunities are immense.

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Take local government.

Like all councils they need to save money, slashing tens of millions from their budget, cutting huge swathes of the workforce.

These organisations are populated from top to bottom with people who actually care about the work that they do. They are being forced to cut costs but they want to do it with the minimum negative impact on services.

In fact, they want to try to improve services. Today these organisations and those around them look something like this – very simplified.

Government and public sector services are very hierarchical. They are organised from the top down.

The council has peers and suppliers – other organisations providing services to the end user. There is very little connection between the services the council provides, let alone between those provided by the council’s peers.

Customers must interface with each of the different services individually.

Imagine if all of the services were connected. If all the data that were relevant to me were indexed and processed and presented to me in a way that was meaningful and useful. Perhaps with contextual software that could guide me through decisions.

This is the vision we have for the councils I’m working with. And the key point about it is that it is not structured around hierarchies, or management, or government.

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It is structured around the individual.

It is ubiquitous technology that makes this possible.

SMART… ORGANISATIONS

Ubiquity has changed the conversation about the structure of organisations and presented a third way.

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Whereas in the past trends have swung from the highly integrated to the highly outsourced, we’re now settling on a new model.

What I call stratification

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LOGISTICSThere are some very high profile examples of this model. Amazon is possibly prime amongst them.

Most of the time we as consumers experience Amazon only through its presentation layer. The .com or .co.uk websites.

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But sitting underneath that layer is its marketplace technology that allows any one – not just Amazon – to present products to prospective purchasers in a variety of ways.

Amazon doesn’t lock other retailers out of its retail platform. It allows them to make use of its design and marketing investments to find an audience.

Sitting underneath the marketplace is Amazon’s technology platform, AWS. It’s the same technology that Amazon uses but because it is so highly optimised, Amazon can afford to let other people use it - for a fee.

Amazon’s own interests and those of its customers and competitors sit side by side. This is where the ugly phrase co-petition comes from.

Amazon also has a very effective logistics organisation, partly outsourced but very automated. How long before it opens this up to third parties as well?

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COLLECTSmart organisations like Amazon are flexible, agile and efficient. They achieve this agility in the way they are designed.

As a collection of loosely coupled components with open interfaces between them.

In organisations it is the interfaces

between these layers that I think provide

the most interest.

These interfaces are what allow these organisations to operate efficiently and transparently, and to take advantage of opportunities quickly – even when those opportunities come from outside the organisation.

By encapsulating different functions within the organisation into units you get some of the advantages that have been implicit in outsourcing: i.e. transparency.

You can see and measure the inputs and outputs and understand performance at a very granular level.

Perhaps more importantly, exposing these interfaces to other companies allows those companies to see components of your organisation as Lego bricks with which they can build their own innovations.

When you have clearly defined units with open interfaces, you can not only reconfigure your own organisation quickly, other people will put you into their innovations exposing you to new growth markets with limited risk.

Creating these interfaces and making them robust is challenging. But it wouldn’t be possible at all without the ubiquitous availability of computing power and connectivity.

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What these interfaces also do is lay bare the separation between man and machine in the workplace. This will be a major topic of debate in the coming years as more and more jobs are mechanised.

But if we are to succeed the debate cannot be about man OR machine. It must be about how we best work together.

It’s years since a machine first beat a human being at chess. But a human being and a computer working together remain unbeatable by man or machine working alone.

We have to recognise the strengths on each side and configure our organisations and our education system around them.

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That neat return to ubiquity at the human scale brings me almost to the end.

I believe that for people, living in a developed economy, over the next twenty years, the biggest driver of change will be technology.

We will see that change at every scale: on our person, in our homes and cities, and in our places of work and the organisations that govern and support us.

“THE BEST WAY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE IS TO INVENT IT.”

ALAN KAY

IMAGE BY CARL GODWIN HTTP://WWW.BOOKOFTHEFUTURE.CO.UK

I hope this presentation spurs you all to go and invent a new future, for themselves and their organisations.