3 Predictions

Three predictions from my Inaugural Lecture, 15 September 2015 at the University of Auckland.

Title of the Talk: 'Connectivity isn't everything (but it's almost everything)'

 

Predictions

I thought it would be an interesting challenge in this context to make a few predictions about connectivity.

Prediction #1: Off-line will become a legitimate space where one can go without apology or fear of retribution.  By this I mean that switching off a connective device, or not checking email, or even leaving your smartphone at home will increasingly be considered an acceptable option.  We have heard of ‘digital vacations’ and no phone use during meals.  I believe we will see more of this behavior at least by some individuals and groups in the future.

I was recently heartened to hear of a friend’s young son leaving for a school trip to Japan and leaving his mobile phone at home.  The school had learned the fundamental principle of experiential education, that the best experiences are those that are felt and lived directly.  I was impressed by the school, but the best part of that story was that this young man understood and willingly left his smartphone at home, asking simply for an old-fashioned digital camera to take pictures.  (I imagine there were still lots of selfies.)

Prediction #2: Machines may take some jobs, but not the best ones.

Despite the current fear of artificial intelligence, a thoughtful and creative human with a decent machine will still outperform the best supercomputer in the world.  This has been proven in the Watson vs. human chess competitions.  The supercomputer, IBM’s Watson, can beat any human on their own, but a human with a rather average computer can out-perform the supercomputer (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014).

‘Computers are not useless, but they’re still machines for generating answers, not posing interesting new questions.  That ability still seems to be uniquely human, and still highly valuable.  We predict that people who are good at idea creation will continue to have a comparative advantage over digital labor for some time to come, and will find themselves in demand.  In other words, we believe that employers now and for some time to come will, when looking for talent, follow the advice attributed to the Enlightenment sage Voltaire: ‘Judge a man by his questions, not his answers’ (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014, The Second Machine Age, p. 192).

Prediction #3: Sh*t will happen. Perrow’s observation of ‘normal accidents’ in complex systems suggests that we can expect connective breakdowns and security breaches on more or less a regular basis, with the possibility of major systems meltdowns. This is because the Internet is a complex system and though adaptive measures are in place, things are going to break from time to time. Having said that it’s normal won’t make living through such episodes any easier.

Conclusion

From my Inaugural Lecture, 15 September 2015.

Title of the Talk: 'Connectivity isn't everything (but it's almost everything)'

Conclusion

In conclusion, we have defined connectivity, but it could also be said that connectivity defines us and our time. It has transformed education, social interaction and work.  It seems to be almost everywhere and everything.  But, if, as I have suggested, it isn’t everything, what is it not?

As much as it serves as a platform for so much of contemporary society’s day-in-and-day-out interaction, connectivity on its own does not necessarily equate to what we might call the connected life.

The connected life reflects where we have been and where we are physically located.  The connected life has connections that are constant, beyond technology.  As Heidegger suggests, we are always close to those we care about.  We need some connections that are always close to us, regardless of whether we can reach them on a mobile phone.

The connected live means practicing conscious ‘disconnects.’  For a host of reasons, we need to be able to throttle down some of the connectivity overload that many of us experience.

The connected life is also an inclusive life, where the digital divide gets conquered.  If smartphones are an essential tool for the so-called developed world, they are 10 times more powerful in a developing economic context.

Do we need more connectivity?  That is a moot question.  We are all going to experience ever increasing levels of connectivity in our lives. 

The question is this:  How do we make a more connected life a better life?

Thank you.

Full text as pdf can be found on Academia.edu and ResearchGate.


A good summary article was posted on the Business School's web site in November 2015.

Bio

Darl G. Kolb is one of the first foundation professors in the Graduate School of Management (GSM) at the University of Auckland Business School and the first Professor of Connectivity in the world.  He has been defining, theorising and empirically exploring connectivity for 15 years, having written articles on the ‘metaphor of connectivity,’ ‘requisite connectivity’ and ‘states of connectivity.’  His field research has looked at connectivity in globally distributed teams and how smartphone users manage ‘media flow.’  Prior to joining the GSM, Darl was a member of the department of Management and International Business (MIB) for 20 years, during which time he received several distinguished awards for excellence and innovation in teaching.  Outside the Business School, he has worked with hundreds of small to medium-sized New Zealand businesses through ICEHOUSE growth programmes.  Prior to his academic career, Darl spent 10 years as an experiential education instructor/facilitator/leader with the Colorado Outward Bound School and the Santa Fe Mountain Center.  As an academic, he has held visiting fellowships at the University of Sydney and the University of Cambridge, where he is a Life Member of Clare Hall.  He holds a Bachelors degree in sociology from Illinois State University, a Masters degree in experiential education from the University of Colorado/Boulder and a PhD in organisational behaviour from Cornell University.

Message on a bottle

"I look back on life -- it's funny how things turn out.  You, the creator of beeping sirens and honking cars, yearn for the solitude of the mountains.  You, a connoisseur of fast food, now gaze at water that took years to gather natural minerals as it trickled down from the Himalayas to within your reach. And I, some of the purest water in the world, stand here, trapped in a bottle.  Come, enjoy the irony."

From a Himalayan brand water bottle in India. One secret to living in one of the most populated countries on the planet is to keep your sense of humour.  Clever marketing, or just a bottle of water trying to tell its story?

Flying back to New Zealand tonight after a few good meetings in Bengaluru (Bangalore) with our tech partners.

Flash Boys - A Must Read!

I picked up a copy of Flash Boys before boarding a flight from San Francisco to Newark.  By the time we were over Yosemite, I was hooked.  The first chapter reads like an action adventure/thriller on the most unlikely of events, the conception, funding and installation of a fibre optic cable from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to New Jersey.  One might think that this is a story only project managers and engineers would love, but Michael Lewis (The Blind Side, Moneybag, The Big Short, The New New Thing, Liar's Poker) is not just any storyteller and this, ladies and gentlemen, is no ordinary story!  Janet Maslin of the New York Times describes the story as, 'Guaranteed to make the blood boil.'

The fact that it is a true story is the most mind-blowing realisation among a romping tale of one extraordinary WTF! moment after another.  How could Wall Street Banks, with the help of (mostly) Russian programmers (even that is not made up!), create or knowingly or unknowingly allow the creation of trading intermediaries that would systematically skim millions and millions of trades on a supposedly 'fair' market system, i.e., the US securities (stock) markets?  But, from around 2009 onwards, that is what happened.  In Lewis' words:

"The US stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots.  The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nano-second had value.  The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all.  What had once been the world's most public, most democratic, financial market had become, in spirit, something more like a private viewing of a stolen work of art." (p 69, emphasis in original).

The reason the have-nots could not see the market was due to the presence of high-frequency traders (HFT) intervening between buyers and sellers.  Using small fractions of a second advantage, HFTs would test the market for buyer interest, find it, then 'front run' to other markets, buy the shares of interest before the original buyer knew anything had happened. By the time the buyer's bid arrived on other markets, the price had gone up and the high-frequency traders had arbitraged a profit. All this takes place within less time than it takes to blink an eye.  The profit margins were small, but multiplied they added to billions of dollars (it is impossible to know for sure) of essentially a tax on investors, not just big hedge fund-type investors, but ordinary investors, whose pension funds relied on these markets to create wealth for ordinary people.

Of course the HFTs come off looking pretty bad, but the Wall Street banks were more or less (admittedly it seems to differing degrees) complicit with this behaviour, creating their own 'dark pools,' where the banks traders traded, at superior speed, against the banks' own customers!  There is a line that comes to mind from the movie, "A Few Good Men," where one of the court marshalled Marines explains to his co-defendent friend, We did do something wrong; we were supposed to protect Santiago (the victim).

The hero in this story is Brad Katsuyama, a Canadian working as a trader for the Royal Bank of Canada, who can't figure out why his trading screens change the minute he sends a buy order. Tenaciously following his curiosity, he searches for people who can help him understand what is going on in the stock markets.  In his quest, he finds incredibly smart computer programmers and others, like Ronan Ryan, a gangly guy from Dublin, who understood markets better than almost anyone and Zoran (their own Russian), who could sit stone-faced waiting for things to break in these complex systems and then fix them without crumbling, while the whole world watched, and John Schwall, a former Wall Street banker, who left in disgust after the GFC.  The team of insurgents grows until they finally make a bold attempt not just to understand the system, but to fix it!  To do this, they all quit million plus (and in some cases, multi-million dollar) jobs and bet the ranch on their creation.  But, it was never going to be easy.

"Some large amount of what Wall Street had done with technology had been done simply so that someone inside the financial markets would know something that the outside world did not.  The same system that once gave us subprime mortgage collateralized debt obligations no investor could possibly truly understand now gave us stock market trades that occurred at fractions of a penny at unsafe speeds using order types that no investor could possibly truly understand.  That is why Brad Katsuyama's most distinctive trait--his desire to explain things not so he would be understood but so that others would understand--was so seditious.  He attacked the newly automated financial sytsem at its core; the money it made from incomprehensibility" (p. 233).

To be fair, there are even two Wall Street bankers who display exemplary courage in the face of institutional pressure. Ron Morgan and Brian Levine, of Goldman Sachs, took the brave step of sending orders to Brad and co's exchange, even though they knew their company would reap less profit from trading on a more robustly fair exchange, the IEX.

Flash Boys has created considerable controversy and naturally the Wall Street banks and HFTs have launched several public relations campaigns to counter Lewis' story.  The Afterward in the new edition offers a summary of the fall-out from the story being told and includes a cautiously optimistic ending, namely that it is not remarkable that technology can be used to game a system, nor even that one of our most important systems (finance) has been corrupted by greed, but that amidst--indeed, from within--this system, a few brave characters decided to do something to make things better.  Now, that is a story that brings some hope.

Excuse me, is this tweet taken?

When I re-started this blog 3 years ago, I made the comment that blogging was one thing, but life was too short to use Twitter.  See my post about 'Blogging into the darkness.'

Actually, what I said was that if I wanted to bark randomly into the darkness, I would use Twitter, instead of a 'real' blog.

But, a few weeks ago, I made the leap and signed up on Twitter.  So, has it changed my life?  Not really.  I mean yes, it provides another news stream, which I do look at every other day or so.  (I think it's fair to say I'm not a news addict.)  And, what about my tweeting? How's that going, you might ask.  Well, it turns out that as daunting as writing my first post, I have been wondering how to launch my twiterary career.

What pops into my head are throw away lines like the following:

Excuse me, is this tweet taken?

I'd love to tweet, but I've got nothing to say.

Twitter is a messiah maker.  I have followers and I haven't written a word!

Don't follow me, I may not tweet.

Don't follow me, I'm lost too.

On the other hand, should I follow or match the style of this blog and try to write intelligently about news and developments in the world of connectivity?

Sounds good, but I don't want to produce a string (thread) of sound bite cliches.

As I was deliberating, I thought I should wait and post my first tweet from Silicon Valley.  It seems fitting some how.  And, so here I sit in the Marriott in San Jose.

To see that first tweet, check out @DarlKolb on Twitter (sorry, I haven't figured out how to link to a specific tweet... so much to learn!).

Give a little, get a lot!

A month or so ago I needed some better graphics for a series of keynote talks that were coming up, so I asked Franziska Mueller, an intern who was working with our Media Flow project, if she would re-design and illustrate several of our key ideas -- and she did a great job!  I wanted to pay for her talent and time, but she insisted it was not a big deal.  When I later learned that she and her husband had rescued an abandoned dog in New Zealand and wanted to take Pai (the dog) with them when they return to Germany, my wife and I decided to help them out a little. Giving on-line was easy, thanks to an on-line giving service provided by a local telco.

On-line social giving sites are showing up all over the web, and by coincidence the day after giving on-line, the New Zealand Herald featured this TEDx Auckland talk by Dale Nirvani Pfeifer, explaining the Maori concept of 'utu' and the importance of reciprocity (give and take) in our indigenous Aotearoa (New Zealand) culture.  I met Dale a few years ago when she was visiting the New Zealand Leadership Institute at the Business School. She recently has started a social giving organisation, called Good World, based in Washington, DC.

Dale's talk is inspiring.  At a time when there is a lot of fear and loathing around the Internet, it is heartening to be reminded that technology-enabled platforms are just another way in which the 'good' elements of traditional cultures and societies can and are being replicated on-line.

When we give to someone in need, it takes us back to our cultural roots, where 'give and take' bond us together.  Some would argue that there are also moral benefits from caring and sharing.  When we give a little, we get a lot.

The future of Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple

The four major on-line brands--Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple--get a rapid fire, informative and funny review by Scott Galloway of the NYU Stern School of Business.

Even if you don't care about these brands, but want to understand premium brands (like Apple), this video is a must-see!

The Four Horsemen brand overview and predictions for the Apocalypse.

Enjoy!