Perceptric Forum

Time For Unconventional Thinking

Chris Gilbey — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:10:00 +1000

Over the last week the world has watched in awe as the big swinging dicks on Wall Street have been humbled. I predicted that there would be a crash several years ago, but had no idea that when it happened it would happen so fast. And it has really only just begun.

But now is the time for all of us – individuals and businesses alike – to stop gaping at the train wreck. It is time to take stock and evaluate how we will be affected, because we all will. We have to look at things from outside of the habitual bubble-perspective that most of us have absorbed in our own centre-of-the-universe self interest.

Most people probably view the crash in the way that spectators view an accident as it takes place. We need to realize that while the big swinging dicks have been driving the train, and are at the front of the wreck, each one of us are participants in one way or another. The momentum of the wreck is going to be so huge that we are all going to be hit by some of the flying debris even if we aren’t passengers on the train.

We are all about to find out what that specifically means over the next few weeks and months. For those who are able to figure out what the changes to society and business will look like there will be opportunities to help our fellow man and to build new business opportunities. And one thing is for sure – we need to have a new attitude to the economy and understand that it too is also an ecology.

Here is what got me thinking about this:

I was at dinner on Monday with a friend and his wife. He retired a year and a half ago. He is 66. His superannuation fund, that was expected to be sufficient for he and his wife to live on for the rest of his life is now worth less than half of what it was when he retired. He has to go out to work again.

On Tuesday I was in a meeting with a venture capitalist friend. He told me that sources of capital for his business have absolutely dried up.

Before the crash really hit, last week, I had a coffee with a friend who runs a division of one of the biggest global media organizations. He told me that classified advertising revenue, the mainstay of newspapers since time immemorial, is shrinking fast, revenues are down, and media is in a state of flux. Big changes are afoot, and no one can predict clearly what is happening.

Another friend, who is in the M&A business, told me earlier this week that as of now emissions trading schemes and greenhouse gas reduction strategies that cost money are effectively off the table. Everything social is off the table in fact. And now economic rationalism will be the order of the day.

People are very focused at the moment. Presidential elections in the US, climate change, war in Iraq… there is a lot to think about.

We are at the somewhere in a tsunami of epic proportions. We haven’t seen the last of it. We may have only seen the first wave.

I think that the one thing that defines what is happening right now is this: Trust has been irrevocably broken between the US population and the White House together with its proxies on Wall Street. The broken trust meme is growing in Europe too. It is building in momentum too and regardless of whether Congress belatedly passes a modified bail out plan there will be a growing vocal minority that will be making a noise about the wrongness of the proposal.

First Bush and Blair and Howard broke the trust of their populations by lying about WMD. Blair and Howard are already relegated to the history books of past leaders. Bush is soon to go. But his integrity is so shot to pieces that when he tells his nation and the world to support the bail out it is not surprising that a lot of people immediately assume that whatever he is saying has got to be spin and that the leopard doesn’t change its spots. The order of the day for Bush is to take care of his cronies.

We need to get away from that thinking or we will all end up hiding in the cellar with the sky falling. Now is the time to develop the scenarios that help us figure what the future is going to look like.

There are going to be a number of convergent social, technical and business vectors that are quite feasible to predict and will provide individuals and business with the ability to determine where the opportunities are.

These wont come without risk.

The first thing to consider is that the disruption from the impact of digital networked technologies – IT – is going to continue. This will happen because the technology is incredibly cheap and accessible. Many of the smartest people in the field are pursuing the goals of changing the world, because they can. Not because they are getting paid.

The next thing to consider is that regardless of what happens on Wall Street on Main Street real estate prices will continue to fall. They have to because when banks start tightening up their lending policies, it will be harder for people to get the money to buy houses. That will mean a change in demand. That in turn will mean less taxes to State Governments from stamp duties. State Government revenues going down means less money spent on infrastructure. That translates into less jobs and a continuing slow down in the national economy.

A lot of businesses will become more risk-averse. They will reduce their inventory. Reduced expectations for businesses to hit targets will lead to small businesses tightening their belts and big businesses becoming more aggressive in the way that they deal with competitors. A lot of small retailers wont survive. The big retailers will do it tough too.

Some areas of business will prosper though. These will be the businesses that are able to think outside of the box, do the unconventional, leverage new ways of communicating with markets. The one’s that spend time now working to understand the way that their ecosystem is likely to function, rather than expecting it to continue in the same old, same old way, are the ones that will do extremely well.

Now is the time for unconventional, lateral, revolutionary thinking.

Wanna Read A Good Book

Chris Gilbey — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:10:00 +1000

I first came across John Gray via the excellent podcast that come from the Australian ABC. One of the podcasts I listen to features big ideas. An address that author and philosopher, John Gray, gave to the Sydney writers festival was a feature.

This guy is one of the most lucid thinkers in the world today. He fires broadsides at every belief that is not logical....

So I bought his latest book. And it is sensational. Here is what the London Times has to say about him and it:

He is so out of the box that it is easy to forget there was ever any box. He is also impossible to categorise. He can’t be seen as an orthodox political thinker because his perspective is far too broad. And he can’t be seen as a philosopher because he is too impatient with the “arguments about arguments” in which philosophers tend to indulge. He says philosophy is just a way of finding good reasons for holding utterly ordinary opinions.

Buy it at your peril. It may ensure that you change the way you think!

Its A Digital World.

Chris Gilbey — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:49:00 +1000

There is a heightening awareness of what may become a cost to society of our reliance on technology. An article in New Scientist explores the issue.

It is only available to subscribers, so I googled the headline to try to find out who might have posted it. Within nanoseconds I had found a full version of the article at this blog which I then blogged about at the GRMP blog.

Isn't it remarkable - the very technology that makes things so easy to find, also makes it incredibly easy and perhaps inevitable, that the material that is available by subscription is available free. And I think that it makes the point that the business model of subscription is one that is at risk because of the googleization of media.

But the important point of the article is that the more complex systems become, the more potential there is for system failure.

Reality

Chris Gilbey — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 20:06:00 +1100

I was in a meeting at an ad agency today discussing some creative concepts.

I took the guy through a concept that he liked. And then I started talking about the web and how there is a general acceptance (in my opinion) that everything out there is true.... And the reality is something quite different.

He looked at me ands said, "reality is what people believe".

How true!

ARE you a generalist or a specialist?

chrisbroad — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 23:47:00 +1000

Vertical search-engines

Know your subject

Jul 12th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Topic-specific search-engines hope to challenge Google, at least in some areas

ARE you a generalist or a specialist? The question can be asked of people, but it is increasingly being asked about internet search-engines, as specialist or “vertical” sites take on generalists such as Yahoo! and Google. Some are already prospering: GlobalSpec.com, for example, a profitable search-engine for engineers, has 3.5m registered users and signs up another 20,000 each week. “They own that market,” says Charlene Li of Forrester, a consultancy.

This is due in large part to GlobalSpec's definable customer base. Its knowledge about the needs of its users sets it apart from the generalist search-engines, says Angela Hribar of GlobalSpec. Vertical sites, which serve up search results from a carefully selected group of topic-specific websites, can also target advertising at particular audiences more precisely...

Guy Kawasaki Talks Truemors.com

chrisbroad — Thu, 24 May 2007 21:21:00 +1000

Why Truemors ? an extract from the About us section of Truemors.com

Take a note of their belief in demonstrative technology — products/solutions that enable the open exhibition and expression of information, emotions, and opinions.

" First, call us romantics, but we believe in the democratization of information—that is, access for everyone to everything. A long time ago royalty and religious leaders had scribes. Around 600 the Chinese printed using negative reliefs. Around 1450 Johann Gutenberg combined hundreds of years of progress into the screw printing press.

Fast forward to 1985 when Apple (Macintosh), Aldus (PageMaker), and Adobe (PostScript) produced “desktop publishing.” A few years later people could create web sites. Then blogging appeared on the scene. Still, people needed a computer and a blogging tool like WordPress or TypePad to disseminate information.

As Steve Jobs would say, “There must be a better way.” Not that Truemors is in the same league as Gutenberg, Apple, Aldus, Adobe, etc., but now people just need a phone or web access to tell the world.

Second, we also believe in demonstrative technology—that is, products that enable the open exhibition and expression of information, emotions, and opinions. Where democratization implies that the many can read the content of the few, demonstrative technology enables the many to create content too. Thus, Truemors is the melding of democratization and demonstration—and you thought it was just a web site. "

VQUENCE meets Guy KAWASAKI

chrisbroad — Tue, 15 May 2007 12:29:00 +1000

I had an opportunity to meet Guy KAWASAKI last week at an AMCHAM event in HK.

An Apple Fellow, and now MD at Garage Technology Ventures www.garage.com , Guy makes for a compelling funny and pithy speaker.

I got talking to him about VQUENCE and his main comment was show people what a vquence is and also – so when do you ship ?

He sent me a copy of his ppt. centered around his latest book ‘The Art of the Start’ and I managed to get a picture with him “advertising” VQUENCE.

In conclusion he told us to 'kick butt' and after reading our white paper said " ..I could make the case that it's a very valuable service for people who are pushing out video. "

He also mentioned a neat company called iStockphoto.com which he is mentioning around on his travels - it's cool .

Quantum Leaps

paul bambury — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 13:37:00 +1100
There have been significant developments recently in Quantum Mechanics. Einstein was talking about this field of science when he said "God doesn't play dice". Quantum Mechanics is seriously weird and counter-intuitive.

Quantum Computing

This recent Wired story reports the demonstration of the D-Wave Systems 16-qubit, specific-purpose quantum computer and includes an interview with the father of quantum computing, Oxford University theoretical physicist David Deutsch, who "...invented the idea of the quantum computer in the 1970s as a way to experimentally test the "Many Universes Theory" of quantum physics -- the idea that when a particle changes, it changes into all possible forms, across multiple universes."

Quantum Cryptography

Quantum Crypto is more developed that Quantum Computing and has been commercially implemented on optical networks by MagiQ Technologies. This technology employs Heisenberg's Uncertaintly Principle to achieve a highly secure crypto solution.

Interestingly, Quantum Computing has the potential to make current mathematical approaches to cryptography redundant, as the massive parallel computing power available will render current algorithms vulnerable to brute force attacks. However, Quantum Crypto is not beleived to be vulnerable to this type of attack.

While these are both transformational technologies, Quantum Computing is possibly a boot-strapping technology. It appears to promise solutions to several currently intractable computational problems and to dramatically increase computer modelling capacity. Applying Quantum Computing to scientifc problems such as global climate modelling, carbon management, nanotechnology and nuclear fusion could lead to the exponential leap of scientific and technical capacity known as the Singularity.

Such a quantum leap in human intelligence augmentation will hopefully develop in time to be applied to the climate emergency. We, and our computers, will need to be as smart as possible to deal with this.

Bottleneck versus Singularity

paul bambury — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 20:43:00 +1100
This may sound like the title of a post-modern computer generated monster classic. Godzilla versus Mothra zapped through a Predator versus Alien filter!

But seriously, this may be the most important dichotomy of our blighted age.

I recently read two fantastic sci-fi novels, Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson and Accelerando by Charles Stross, which pose interesting scenarios of the Bottleneck and the Singularity, respectively.

Both novels suggest that humans (and posthumans) don't transcend natural (Darwinian) behaviour. This rings true and provides a great literary device, the tragic flaw, which lubricates the narratives.

Both authors are familiar with Sociobiology. The main character in Fifty Degrees Below, edits a sociobiology journal and exhibits, in his introspection, a growing awareness of the grip that hardwired routines have on his own and everyone's behaviour. Another scientist in this novel conducts an intriguing experiment in scientific democracy.

In Accelerando, "godlike" artificial intelligences, descended from corporations, behave like plague locusts and convert most of the solar system into Computronium.

This led me this think about our global predicament. The problem is timing. If we reach the bottleneck first, then the singularity won't happen in time to help. If we reach or approach the singularity before the bottleneck then perhaps we can survive it by applying powerful new technology (artificial intelligence, nanotech, 3D printers and so on). I guess, this is vaguely what we all hope will happen. Technology to the rescue.

But didn't technology cause the problem in the first place?

Technology is not the problem. The problem is human behaviour. While our wise men and women tell us that our survival is at stake, our leaders are obsessed by distracting territorial and ideological disputes. The resources of the final flowering of the post industrial economy are being squandered on the war machine.

Don't we all wonder from time to time why we are in this horrible predicament in the first place, and why we don't seem to be able to fix it?

The problem is human behaviour, which is stalled in prehistory. We are not adapted to the technosphere we have created. We are still running ancient war games, when we need to be running blue sky scenarios.

More than anything else we need to develop the ability to manage our own global behaviour.

The End Of Money

Chris Gilbey — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 05:54:00 +1100
I came across an interesting blog called The End Of Money.... written by Dr Chris Martenson.

If you are wondering whether the US economy is headed (and that also means the macro global economy - the world of money is totally interdependant), it is worth a read.

Here is a snippet:

Then, on January 26th 2007 it was reported that Alex Weber of the European Central Bank (ECB) sternly told the Davos participants that “If you misprice risk, don’t come looking to us for liquidity assistance”, meaning that he wanted everyone to know that the Central Bank would absolutely not bail them out if they got into trouble, and that the wealthiest market players in the world would have to accept their losses just as you or I would. However, this must have been entirely too unthinkable an outcome for the Davos participants because Alex immediately softened that harsh rhetoric by saying that of course “systemic threats to financial stability” would be treated ‘differently’ which, - let me access my banker decoder ring thesaurus function here - turns out to be an alternative spelling for ‘to a bailout’. While Mr. Weber took many words to convey his true message, I managed to encapsulate it in a single short memo:

“If you’d like to be eligible for the ECB bailout program, please endeavor to be sure that your bets are large enough to possibly ruin the system. Thank you. A. Weber”