There is a tsunami of change coming our way. What change exactly? I am not sure. I don’t think I can grasp it. It will change our companies, schools, universities, non-profit institutions. It will not necessarily be good for everyone, people will be left behind, bewildered, not knowing what hit them.
This at least is the impression I got on the second and last day of the vBusiness Expo Conference, at the presentation by Professor Tony O’Driscoll, Duke University.
What do Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type printing in Europe, Richard Trevithick, pioneer of the steam engine, and the Lumiere brothers, pioneers of the motion pictures have in common? Well, so O’Driscoll explained, it took in each of those cases about 50 years to 60 years to think up good applications or at least more good applications for those inventions.
Movable type printing: for tens of years the only books printed were Bibles. It took 50 tot 60 years to realize that other books as well should be printed.
Steam engines: these machines were used in the cotton mills for instance. It took tens of years to develop a locomotive.
Motion pictures: these were used to film plays. It took tens of years before people started using the “cut” technique, making the movie business possible.
As for the internet, and the evolution from web1.0 (giving people access to information, finding information), web2.0 (allowing for participation and collaboration) to the 3D internet (co-creation in virtual environments), O’Driscoll made us feel that the real creative applications still have to be discovered.
The conference sessions of today were more sophisticated than yesterday’s, but the setting was still that of a very classical business hotel conference room, with a stage, a screen and at respectful distance an audience. Even though the physical limitations of the “real world” do not apply in a virtual environment, the only thing we seem to be able to dream up in a corporate context is the boring and not very efficient stuff we are confronted with every working day.
This same theme was discussed by various other speakers today such as Chris Badger, VP at Forterra. He wants to fill in the gap between web conferencing (easy access but not for long events) and high end video conferencing (very expensive and other limitations), using virtual environments for business collaboration (Forterra also has rather spectacular applications for emergency services, health professionals and the military). The problem is of course how to convince the “C-level kind of person” (I guess he meant the higher management of a corporation).
The presupposition (probably right) is that those C-people do not particularly like environments which are known for wild experimentation (Second Life) and which have a kind of Wild West reputation. (My own take: far too many corporate people seem to believe that good reputation=uncreative=predictable=boring).
There is a certain commercial logic to offer people an environment they are used to, even though other and probably far more interesting settings are possible. Of course, even in this conservative approach, innovation is still possible. One of the things which a company like Forterra develops is to link the avatars with the information available on 2D-social networks (like LinkedIn of Lotus Connections). This would be a great tool to find out about other people in-world and would facilitate interaction a lot.
However, stuff like this (and related issues like avatars which can be made to resemble you, trying to avoid to become too creepy however), is just the very beginning. More is possible, a lot more.
Let me return to O’Driscoll and his internet example. EBay is a household name. Most people do not actually work for eBay, but it is an important economic platform. Maybe eBay does tell us something about how the economy and corporations will be structured in, let us say, 30 years to 50 years. On O’Driscoll’s site, Learning Matters!, he talks about a recent study from IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook suggesting that the future might consist of a billion one-person enterprises—people who act as free agents moving freely and frequently from project to project as their skills, focus, and passion shift.
There are other small but important signs, writing on the wall, which ought to make us think harder. Teenagers cheat. They use electronic networks such as Facebook to get together and to distribute the homework. Those who like mathematics provide that part of the job, those who like to write deliver texts which are carefully “customized”. In other words, they make their teachers and professors rather angry, but they do engage in what could be called “collaborative co-creation” using the internet-tools at their disposal. They learn how to optimize networks and discover that by doing so they get things being done. At the same time, they challenge the underpinnings of education like it is organized now.
These are important writings on the wall, but yet we cannot see very clear. What we can identify, are vectors. The vectors O’Driscoll mentions are 2D synchronous learning (think WebEx, Adobe, Citrix, LifeMeeting etc), Knowledge Sharing (SharePoint, Lotus TeamRoom, Yahoo Groups, Blackboard…), Web2.0 technologies (blogs, wikis, rss, tagging, social media) and Virtual Worlds. Part of the Web2.0 technologies is tagging, which is absolutely crucial:
Pretty much everyting created and stored in the Web 2.0 domain (people,profiles and content) is TAGGED. This means that contextually relevant knowledge through people or content is much more easily or even serendipitously encountered.
Just imagine tag clouds linked with individuals. This would go far beyond the LinkedIn-link with an avatar. The tag cloud would give you a good feel what that particular individual did last week for instance, giving you the possiblity to connect much more easily. It would lead to “dynamic knowledge discovery”.
We talk here about a combination of stuff into a “cognosphere” which is immediate, intuitive, immersive and interactive. I found an interesting text on Learning Matters! explaining all this. Here is a short video:
So there the audience was. In a classical conference room, staring at avatar-speakers who were struggling with the audio, but getting glimpses of the “singularity”, which O’Driscoll defines as
A technological black hole at the apex of four technological vectors that is moving forward at an exponential pace and integrating across vectors at the same time.
Mind you: our children will grow up at the other side of the black hole. They won’t ever be able to understand how life was back in the days when we all lived at the side we still live in now.
Roland Legrand