The U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee recently convened  a hearing to provide “an opportunity to learn about vehicle-to-vehicle communications technology and what it means for our future economy.” Called to testify were executives from GM, Toyota, and Tesla as well as IT industry analysts and consumer privacy advocates. Our cars are becoming data devices in their own right. If you consider its full implications, the Internet of Cars is not just on the verge of a tipping point itself; it is poised, domino-like, to kick off a series of related tipping points.

Let’s look at five of the reasons that the Internet of Cars will change everything.

1. Kicking the Internet of Things into high gear

The Internet of Cars is a game-changer for the Internet of Things, of which it is an emerging segment, in large part because there are so many of these particular “things.” They’re everywhere. The amount and variety of data that automobiles can be called upon to collect and to share is staggering. For starters, cars will collect information on their own performance, driver behavior, the behavior of other drivers, road and traffic conditions, starting points, destinations, optimized routes, etc. They will track data on where the driver and passengers like to go, what they like to do, what kind of music they like, what kind of restaurants  they visit, how early they get up, how late they get to bed — all of which can feed into new products and services we have barely begun to imagine. Think of what happened when mobile phones went from being communication devices to being entertainment, data processing, and social networking machines.  We will see an explosion of applications as the Internet of cars follows a trajectory very similar to the mobile Internet before it.

2. Transforming the automobile industry

Chris O’Connor, General Manager of the Internet of Things business at IBM, recently wrote a piece entitled The Internet of Things drives new opportunities for the automotive industry, outlining the end-to-end impact of IoT on the automotive industry. Automobile designers and engineers increasingly rely on analysis from data that cars themselves collect and distribute when developing new models. Manufacturing occurs in intelligent factories driven by smart supply chains. Sensor-driven automotive servicing and preventative maintenance now involve the car telling the mechanic far more about what’s going on than the driver ever could (and in a more timely fashion.)  And, as we’ll see in greater detail below, every facet of the automobile consumer experience is changing radically.

3. Changing how we drive

Of course, the big predicted change for how we drive is that we’re going to stop doing it altogether and the cars are going to take over. But Gartner’s Thilo Koslowski says that connected cars will bring about startling and disruptive changes to the process of driving long before they complete their evolution from “automated to autonomous to unmanned” operation. The more immediate shift will be in the kinds of interactions we will come to expect to have with our cars. Think of the difference between a land-line telephone from 30 years ago and your smartphone today. As Koslowski explains it, your car is about to become “the ultimate mobile device.”

He paints an interesting picture of how that might look:

Imagine you are stopped at a stop light, and you want to know more about the car next to you with these interesting-looking wheels. You wonder if they are available for your car as well, so you just ask your car the question. The car responds by not only saying, “Yes, they are available for your car,” but also by giving you pricing information and asking if you would like to stop by a dealer who happens to have them in stock and can install them on your way home. For automakers and dealers, this represents a valuable new service model that can help keep customers in the fold.

4. Redefining vehicle ownership

The implications of fully connected cars go beyond these kinds of straight-up sales opportunities. The Internet of Cars raises challenges and opportunities similar to those brought about by the Internet of Homes. Sensor data will prove pivotal in ensuring safety, timely maintenance, fuel efficiency, and so on. But it has other uses.

IBM’s Chris O’Connor predicts the Internet of Cars will transform automobile insurance. People will now “pay as they drive,” meaning that those who are on the road all the time will face higher premiums than, say, folks who work from home. And there will even be “pay how you drive” variations, meaning that your rates might go up based on information your car collects on how fast you drive, how long it takes you to brake, etc.

Of course, not everyone is thrilled at the idea of marketers, insurance companies, or the government having access to all (or any) of their data. Drivers may begin to eye their cars suspiciously, and begin to wonder who is really in charge around here. Security pundit Bruce Schneier worries that such connected cars only hasten the Internet’s transformation into what he describes as “a massive surveillance tool.” And, in fact, one of the reasons for that House Oversight Committee meeting mentioned earlier was to “highlight how the automotive industry is tackling important issues around cybersecurity…and privacy” in the face of all these developments.

We can expect to hear a lot more about all this in the days to come.

5. Accelerating the need for big data analysis

As noted above, the Internet of Cars will bring about an explosion of new applications, accompanied by an explosion of data volumes — the latest in a long series of those — as well as a host of new varieties of data and new use cases to derive insights from the data being collected. Big data is only getting bigger, and with each new iteration come new risks and complexities. The Internet of Cars offers tremendous potential benefits (and risks) to auto manufacturers, car dealers, retailers, law enforcement, and many others, including the drivers themselves. Realizing these benefits, and avoiding the risks, will require flexible and capable tools for deriving insights from these masses of data.

How can businesses stay agile and competitive in the face of massive data volumes, exponentially increasing complexity, and the growing need for real-time answers, decisions, and responses? In his new book

In this edition of FastForward, Oliver provides an overview of this methodology and explains why a new approach is so needed for businesses today.

“Companies are looking for a roadmap,” Oliver explains. “There are so many technologies to choose from that executives struggle even to start. Drowning in technical decision-making, these leaders lack the focus and time they need to paint a multi-year roadmap for getting the enterprise to operational excellence.

“The Sentient Enterprise is like a north star for companies, showing them where they can take their businesses,” he continues. “It outlines a five-stage maturity model that focuses not on bits and bytes, but rather on the core capabilities businesses need to scale agility and decision-making.”

Why “Sentient?”

The core understanding the new model begins with some very simple observations. An enterprise is made up of people. Each individual within the organization is a sentient being. As humans we share in some common behaviors and tendencies: we listen; we think; we interact, we learn. These traits are critical to business success, and yet they are enormously difficult to scale. They do not transfer easily from the individual to the group.

“The problem is that the more of us you put together in a company, the less we do those things,” says Oliver.

In other words, an enterprise made up of hundreds or thousands of sentient beings fundamentally lacks the ability to listen, to think, and to make decisions. It is quite a paradox.

It was interest in this paradox that brought Oliver, Chief Product Officer for Teradata, together with his collaborator, Mohanbir Sawhney of the Kellogg School of Management. An initial meeting between the two in 2013 led to an extended conversation in which they began to sketch out the core capabilities that make up the model–quickly coming to the realization that what they were describing was the basic blueprint for a sentient enterprise.

The Five Stages

“The five stages of maturity capability are not linear,” Oliver explains. “Each enterprise approaches them in the way that makes sense for their particular needs. But the stages are interrelated and they build on each other.”

Agility

Given that data is the biggest asset that businesses have to work with today, how do these organizations become and remain agile when dealing with the large volumes and multiple structures of data that confront them? And how do they avoid the “wild west” mentality that delivers speed at the expense of data governance and documentation?

Behavioral Platform

A major paradigm shift involves moving away from a focus on transactions to a focus on behaviors. Transactions are a core business concept, but they do not reflect the complexity of the challenges that businesses face today. The enterprise must be focused on both human and machine behavior, and must drive decisions from a behavioral perspective.

Collaboration

How does the enterprise structure an environment in which people can easily work with each other? How do they eliminate silos and connect the people who might be one floor apart doing the same thing? The Sentient Enterprise introduces an approach that might be described as “LinkedIn for analytics.”

Data Application Platform

Another core paradigm is that of the app economy. While app development within the enterprise is usually locked away in IT, today’s reality is that everyone has a smartphone and there are many potential app developers throughout the organization. In the new model, those with the basic interest and skill set for developing analytical apps are given the tools and training they need to build apps, test them, and roll them out as needed.

Autonomous Decision Platform

In the accelerated, real-time environment in which business operates today, decisions can’t wait for a decision-maker to navigate the maze of permissions and filters the enterprise has traditionally put in place. Frequently, decisions must be made in great numbers and at faster-than-human time scales. The enterprise must leverage decisions on the spot, and surface those that require someones to step in and make them. Artificial intelligence is opening up a path by which human decision-making can be encoded into the Enterprise.

Real-World Results

In the podcast, Oliver cites several diverse examples of companies already achieving success with the Sentient Enterprise methodology, including Volvo, Blizzard Entertainment, and the San Francisco Giants. And he predicts that there are many more such stories to come.

“Agility is a continuous improvement process. Companies must expect a lot more of themselves than they have before, and align themselves with ever-increasing velocity.

“That’s the key not only to being a survivor, but to redefining your industry.”

—
FF 001-668
Music: www.bensound.com

First, the objection:

Collecting good ideas adds little value. Ideas are all talk. Like talk, they are cheap. Only doing things counts, and even then only doing effective things counts. Everything else is noise that is as likely to slow progress as it is to speed it along.

Let’s think about that. On the podcast we talk about this convergence of phenomena that drive us toward a very different future.

• Individual people are becoming capable of doing more.
• Doing things is easier than it used to be.
• We can do things faster than we used to be able to.
• Doing things requires less infrastructure and energy than it used to.

I can give examples of all that, but assuming you generally agree with those propositions, let’s move on. Also, these are probably not separate phenomena at all, but different manifestations of an underlying driver: Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns or Buckminster Fuller’s Ephemeralization—which are probably just two different names for the same underlying teleological principle.

Another way to describe that principle is emergent magic. For our purposes, we’ll say that magic is the ability to think or speak reality into being. Per that definition, magic does not currently exist in our world. Nobody (that I know of) can just think about something or speak an idea out loud and have it happen.

But we are much closer to that capability than we have ever been before. All that stuff about people being more capable, things being easier to do, things happening faster, things requiring less infrastructure—that all adds up to fewer steps between thinking about something and that thing happening. Maybe one day, after the Technological Singularity, we will get to straight-up practical magic that will be very close to “real” magic as I have defined it above. Via an elaborate post-AI, post-nanotech infrastructure, people will be able to think or speak just about anything into being.

But before any of that, we have emergent magic, with the gap between thought and reality getting narrower.

Okay, so here’s my strange idea. (That’s right, none of the above counts as a “strange idea” in my book. It’s all a given.)

Is the value of ideas diminished by their ubiquity as the “ideas are a dime a dozen” argument would have it, or is it diminished by the low probability that they will amount to anything?

We will set aside the apparent relative value of ideas. Ideas for novel medical treatments or energy technologies should be, of course, a lot more valuable than,”I’ve got a great idea for a new app; it will be the next Angry Birds!”

But the question of relative value is complex—sometimes when important ideas are implemented poorly, they end up doing harm; sometimes seemingly frivolous ideas have unintended consequences that make them extremely useful. That’s hard math and we’ll skip it for now.

If low probability negatively impacts the value of ideas, then—because of emergent magic—ideas are becoming more valuable every day. As the gap between thinking them up and executing on them closes, they become more probable. As they become more probable, they become more valuable.  They may be a dime a dozen today, but next year they will be worth a dime each. And then they’ll be worth a dollar each. And then a hundred of dollars.

Of course, even if they are becoming more valuable, there are so many ideas becoming valuable at the same time that, once again, the sheer number of ideas becomes a problem. Today we struggle to find the one valuable idea in a sea of useless ideas. In the near future, we may struggle to find the one billion-dollar idea in a sea of million-dollar ideas.

Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash

Well, maybe it doesn’t. That is, maybe the future doesn’t just “happen.”  Let’s look at some future events. Take tomorrow’s sunrise.  Get up early and go watch it if you like. You have nothing to do with it. Every day, it just happens. It’s the future, and it just happens. So far, so good.

How does the future happen? It just does.

How about something else that might happen tomorrow? Not a sunrise but a sunburn. Now for that future to happen, you have to show up–unlike the sunrise, which is going to happen either way. You have to get out there and expose yourself to the sun. Even though you’re going to just lie there and do nothing, the sunburn won’t  just “happen.” Your behavior will contribute to it. You will create the sunburn future.

How does the future happen? Sometimes, you allow it to happen by creating the circumstances that lead to a particular outcome.

Now let’s take a really different future. Say tomorrow you decide you want to make some sun tea. In some ways, making sun tea is a lot like getting a sunburn. You set everything up just right and let the sun do its thing. But now you have to do more than just take your clothes off and lie in the sun. You have to get get a jar. You have to get some tea. You have to get some water. You mix everything up right and then, at the critical moment, you put the sun to work.

How does the future happen? Sometimes you create it.  It doesn’t just “happen,” but you got there in part by leveraging something that did just “happen.”

Look at the world around you and you will see that the present moment — yesterday’s future — is complex mess of sunrises, sunburns, and sun tea. There is the future you have no control over, the future that you allow to happen, and the future you make happen.

Recognizing this reality is the first step in recognizing what the future really is, and the role you can play in its coming about.

Available now

Visions for a World Transformed

99 Ideas for Making the World a Better Place — Starting Right Now

How different will the future be from today? As different as we can imagine, and possibly stranger and more wonderful than we ever HAVE imagined. The key is turning our visions for the future into the future itself. And that begins with articulating our visions.

In this collection of essays compiled by the hosts of the popular internet radio series, The World Transformed, world-leading futurists, scientists, authors, artists and others share their visions for changes that are on their way, or that we can bring about, that will transform our world forever. Contributors include Ramez Naam, Brian Wang, PJ Manney, John Smart, J. Storrs Hall, Aubrey de Grey, James Hughes, Jim Elvidge, Alvis Brigis, David Brin, Dave Gobel, Paul Fernhout, Ben Goertzel, Getnet Aseffa, Zheng Cui, Wayne Radinsky, Giulio Prisco, Colin McInnes, Erika Lives, Will Brown, Yiqing Liang, Cosmo Harrigan, Tudor Boloni, Khannea Suntzu, Belle Black, Anyazelie M. Zéphyaire , Gina “Nanogirl” Miller, James Bennett, Extropia DaSilva, Christine Gaspar, Melanie Swan, Stephen Gordon, Radhaa Nilia, Leslie Kirschner, Arnold Kling, Kevin Estes, Zoltan Istvan, Chris Tacklind, Richard Gordon, Bruce Schneier, Gennady Stolyarov, Bruce Katz, Nikola Danylov, Reichart Von Wolfsheild, Maria Konnavalenko, R. U. Sirius, Jay Cornell, Sabrina Surovec,and others.

The argument, of course, is that boys get that message from everywhere, all the time. I kind of doubt that’s true in this day and age. The message boys get over and over today is that girls can be anything they want. Maybe this makes up for many years of the message going the other way, but I’m not sure how punishing today’s boys makes things better for girls of the past.

Still, Hull’s argument that there are no good role models to be found on the Disney Channel or in Disney movies, even recent ones, is wrong.

For example, her notion that Jake from Jake and the Neverland Pirates somehow doesn’t count as a strong male lead because he’s a pirate is silly. Jake is a good kid, in context. My children, who love that show, don’t really get that “pirate” means “bad guy.” In Neverland, there are good pirates and bad pirates. Jake and his friends are good ones.

Also, what about Miles from Tomorrowland? Miles is a strong male lead in a show that highlights the importance of a family working together. A good show for boys and girls.

And she gets it wrong about the Disney movies, too. Aladdin is a boy of exceptional character — he foregoes his own (stolen) meal to feed two younger, hungrier kids. He is the only one worthy of entering the cave of wonders. He finally learns to stop being afraid that he’s not good enough and do what’s right for everyone — even the genie. It’s a great story, and the fact that he starts out as a thief on the streets with “poor personal hygiene” (um, who cares?) doesn’t detract from any of that.

Likewise, Kristoff in Frozen is a good, reliable guy. He works hard and he does what’s right. He’s kind to animals and he has a good sense of humor. This is a good role model. The fact that he is a bit of a loner is a good thing. He is the very John Wayne character the author is looking for. Once again she makes a big deal about personal hygiene. I wonder if Hull lets her sons watch old westerns, or is she put off by how smelly those guys must have been?

Finally, no mention of Disney’s Tarzan. My five year-old boy loves that movie. Tarzan is brave, strong, kindhearted, smart, and he finds a way to bridge two very different worlds. I’m guessing the author disapproves based on the lack of shower facilities in the jungle.

Anyway, I think the bias Hull describes is real. But her case would be more convincing if she didn’t attempt to sweep all contrary examples under the rug.

UPDATE: I went looking for a picture of Tarzan to use and I stumbled upon this amazing story. So Anna, Elsa, and Tarzan are all siblings? That can’t be right. Tarzan is English, not Scandinavian. I don’t care who plays him!

I got some feedback along those lines for linking to this piece: A Japanese technique for overcoming laziness.

I’m interested in Kaizen (with a capital K) because I used to manage the total quality program for the product engineering and development group within the telecom company where I was employed. In the 1980′s and early 90′s, many American companies discovered and began implementing Japanese management practices in an effort to become competitive. The irony is that one of the pillars of those practices was the statistical quality control introduced into Japan by the U.S. after the war. W. Edwards Deming was an American; interesting that the prize named after him is awarded in Japan!

One of the early adopters of statistical process control was Toyota, whose management saw an immediate fit with their continuous, incremental, team-based production improvement process — what they called their “kaizen” process. It was built on simple principles geared to foster continuous improvement.

Toyota didn’t invent that word. It’s an everyday Japanese word that means “change for the better” or more simply “improvement.” On its own, it doesn’t mean continuous improvement or working in teams or practicing statistical process control or spending a minute every day on something — which is apparently what the confused author of the piece linked above seems to think — or any of the rest of that stuff. However, it has become associated with  those things in the minds of many western managers and consultants who understand Kaizen (with a capital K) to be a Japanese management philosophy. Books by Masaaki Imai — who did not “invent” Kaizen, as the linked piece erroneously states — and others have contributed heavily to this understanding of what Kaizen is.

I haven’t worked in quality management for many years now, but the idea of continuous improvement has stuck with me. I come up with elaborate formulations like The Human Imperative to try to explain why this principle is so important. But I have always loved the elegant simplicity of Kaizen.

For all its flaws, the piece linked  provides some pretty good advice. Spend one minute, every day at the same time, trying to work on one area of potential improvement. For example, the author of the linked piece might work on his or her research / fact-checking processes. I would add that it doesn’t have to be a minute, and you don’t have to just work on one thing, and you don’t need to do it at the same time every day.

And, for that matter, you don’t have to call it Kaizen. But you can if you want to. As long as you are talking about making something better, that word works.

In fact, encourage them to give away one to three copies, depending on how much they liked the book.

If the book is well-liked, it will go viral. If it is not it will fizzle out almost immediately. This is a test-case for the Gift Economy, albeit an incomplete one.

This may be the model we use for distributing The World Transformed: the Abridged Edition.

If not, I think I will try it out on a subsequent book.

And down the road, people might start swapping out organs just as part of a maintenance program. If young blood can make you more youthful, what might a whole new heart do? For that matter, can we produce our own “young” blood?

Can we print out new eyes with perfect vision, new ears with perfect hearing?

Nice straight new teeth?

And why stop at old body, new parts? How long before we can print out (not clone, mind you) a whole new body and just pop our brains into it?

The ideal fit would be with self-starting startups. As a dedicated AI system (or many such systems) launch profitable companies, their ownership is distributed throughout the population according to whatever criteria make the most sense. It could be random or tied to consumer behavior or other interests / aptitudes.

Or possibly one could gain ownership in businesses by expressing an early interest in them or contributing to the original idea from which they are launched. You might think of it as the auto-pilot of entrepreneurship. The machine does all the hard stuff while we reap the benefits.

For a related idea, see Wealth Robots.

For a road map of how we get from here to there, check out Melanie Swan’s recent piece on Blockchain Thinkers and Smart Contracts.

Studios will soon have to start licensing these one-off versions of movies, as well as one-off games based on them or face losing to pirates who will do so anyway.

But then if you can put your own likeness and voice into classic movies to provide a more egocentric way of enjoying them, you can also put yourself into wholly original movies. These movies might be based on stories that you have come up with yourself or built up from stories suggested by the movie-making system based on your expressed interests. They could be simple fantasy fulfillment, such as a love story involving you and a fantasy figure from your own life or popular culture. Or they could be the chance to re-experience memories: happy memories, painful memories, memories of important events.

What if I hadn’t taken that job? What if we had gotten married? What if I had majored in business?

Sit down and talk it over with a virtual version of you who took the road not taken. The projected alternative won’t be in any sense “accurate,” of course, but any reasonable extrapolation on what might have happened would have something to teach you. You might be surprised what you learn.

If people could virtually eat any and everything they want, any time, and the physical experience was identical to the real experience of eating — including feelings of fullness and satiety — it would make it much easier for people to eat healthily and moderately when really eating.

But the experience will have to be convincing. The technology to allow for such an experience is still some ways off. Currently the cutting edge of virtual reality has to do with creating an immersive visual and aural experience. That’s great, but it is no substitute for eating…

Existing VR interfaces stimulating the sense of touch are still fairly crude. And if there is any progress being made on VR taste and smell experiences, I haven’t heard about it. Eating will have to provide a highly refined synthesis of all three senses — plus vision and hearing for good measure. Such an interface is more likely to feed directly into the brain than into our various sensory organs.

The possibility of unlimited eating may prove to be one of the prime motivators for developing such technology, which may (paradoxically) lead to a big reduction in overeating. In fact, full-immersion virtual eating may lead to the end of overeating altogether.

Arguably, the arms race between intelligent trading systems is working on a goal similar to this, although those bots are concerned only with enriching their makers — not everybody.

Or go back a step: what if we deployed machines working on creating recursively smarter machines focused on the task of making us all wealthier? Machines can only tell us what they think we should do. They can’t force us. But then, machines who can make us rich could make a pretty good case that they should be in charge.

There are also sites that provide virtual girlfriends. One variety a downloadable AI software who provides some level of girlfriend-like interaction. The other variety relies on real women, but seems to be largely about establishing a paper trail to prove that you actually have a girlfriend.

Why not virtual online friends for the truly lonely? The page for the AI girlfriend linked above claims to be providing that, but I don’t think anyone would much go for it absent the implied sexual component.  Just somebody to talk to and spend some time with. Today they would be pretty crude, but they will only get better. They could make life easier and more enjoyable for a lot of lonely people.

And developing programs just to be friends with people seems like a good step to take towards friendly AI, doesn’t it?