The emerging trend of digitalization is blurring the line between the physical and digital world. The dramatic reduction in the cost of data collection, storage and analysis in the last several years has opened the door for this change, and it’s changing the nature of business. Greg Ness guided a discussion panel on the consequences of digitalization on Day 2 of the Future in Review 2016 conference. Preston McAfee, Michael Schwarz, Mark Sunday, Tim Fitzgerald, James Urquhart, and Edy Liongosari were also present as panel members. Their responses have been aggregated below.
So what precisely is digitalization, and what does it mean for large enterprise? Its definition has changed over time. The dramatic reduction in the cost of data services is impacting the way that we conduct business. Furthermore, the dramatic change in connectivity is driving change. This ability to capture data in real time from multiple sources enables us to react in real time. This increased flow of data between the physical and digital world is at the core of digitalization.
This increased flow has the potential to drastically change industries, some perhaps more than others. Potentially there is no limit to which industries can apply this idea. Agriculture is one example, where the monitoring of moisture levels can dramatically reduce water usage and increase relative yields. The mass collection of data will allow for macro-analysis, which can the be micro-targeted down to individuals based on their specific needs. These sort of “personal plans” will permeate many industries. Digitalization will also change the organizational structure of firms. To be used effectively, digitalization efforts will have to be embedded in all functional areas of a business, not siloed in one department. The bottom-line is this: digitalization is happening. Those firms that choose to get in front of the wave will prosper.
This begs the question: Who is working in this space now? General Electric is a great example of a firm who is adapting well. Seemingly overnight they transformed from a hardware company to a software company, and are now collecting enormous amounts of data on their equipment. Another consequence of this flow is cloud computing, which is being used to allow firms to fail fast in innovation. In this environment, the slow movers will be damaged quickly. Perhaps more quickly than ever before. It’s important to remember that although digitalization may spell big changes for the way that companies do business, it’s likely that consumers will not experience life changing effects.
Something that cloud computing allows is collaborative filtering, whereby data sets and patterns are developed by millions of users but are accessible at a personal level. This is the biggest change for consumers. Cloud computing and mobile connections enable this. Furthermore, machine learning applications in voice, picture, and video digitalization are changing the applications of cloud computing.
One form of digitalization not often mentioned is the digitalization of human assets. Through this process, it will become possible to select an ideal candidate for a job based on their digital profile, or to select the best customer type from a group of potential customers. Additionally, this process may have a “flow” effect, whereby the network created by human digitalization will allow us to seek out particularly useful contacts for a project or position.
This digitalization may drive longitudinal change through the rest of the decade. Thought to text and universal language translation will may be the biggest change makers, probably by the end of the decade. These technologies will change the nature of human interaction and increase the digitalization speed of human assets tremendously. The organizational structure of firms may begin to change as well.
Conway’s Law states that systems developed by organizations tend to mirror the communication practices of that organization. Digitalization will possibly reverse this trend, and organizational structures may begin reflecting the nature of the digital communication protocol.
To discover more or read other articles from the conference, visit StratNews.com or our Medium blog.
Populations, like data, capital, and intellectual property, flows across borders. There are many drivers of population, which vary with time and region. This breakout session, hosted by Mike Winder, explored the nature and drivers of population flows in the 21st century.
Labor is one critical driver of current population flows, as demonstrated by the immigration debate here in the US. However, the nature of work in the future may be fundamentally different than it has been for the last hundred years. Automation is replacing human labor in positions across all industries. This displacement of traditional roles, which required attendance, by new service-based roles, which may be accomplished remotely, will necessarily change the dynamics of population flow with respect to labor.
Other drivers of population flow may be environmental. War, poverty and famine are historically common reasons for human migration. However, in the future, environmental collapse may be a driver of population flow. China, particularly in highly industrialized and populated areas such as Beijing, is already experiencing acute pollution issues that are causing real human suffering.
Populations will continue to flow as they always have. The drivers may be different in the 21st century, and understanding these trends will be critical to unlocking value in the coming hundred years. To discover more or read other articles from the conference, visit StratNews.com or our Medium blog.
The CTO Team continued work on Thursday at the FiRe Conference to solve its two challenges: creating a flow computer system and a flow system that measures energy of the Earth in real time.
They met throughout the day in separate teams working on the two sides of the problem. The initial plan for this technology started out with piece of paper on an easel. Thursday’s evening session was about bringing the two teams up to speed on each side’s work and preparing a report of their progress for Friday’s session.
Nathanael Miller, an aerospace engineer at NASA, wanted to tie what they’ve done to the basic flow presented in the keynote of the conference, including friction, stock/capacitance, and attributes of flow.
Brad Holtz, CEO of Cyon Research and chief nexus officer of Coventry Computer said that they created many different views of the structure. They also went through the flow of the structure, and tried to answer the questions of what is in the system and what is not in the system.
Holtz said the flow process will be to authenticate, visualize, and interact with the data.
The working name of the Earth Monitoring System is currently “E2MS.”
To discover more or read other articles from the conference, visitStratNews.com.
The FiRe conference famously brings many of the brightest minds together to discuss the future of our world. On day 3 of the conference, Ed Butler solicited the opinions of five of those minds to answer a simple question: What is your view of the future? David Engle, Thomas Curran, Mike Winder, Michael Bartholomeusz and Mark Godsy each answered the question in their own way.
Education was the first theme to emerge from the discussion.
“The model for education needs to change and needs to change dramatically,” said David Engle.
He elaborated that the current model is stuck in the industrial age, and reconstructing it would likely be too painful to be practical. The answer is to start a conversation about education by focusing on what we want out of our students and our communities in the 21st century, and creating a new education system from scratch. This model will require a revamping of the current digital infrastructure as a support system and potentially an interface for the students.
Speed is another critical factor that will shape the future. Automating software is rapidly changing the way that we think about computing applications. Additionally, the rapid increase in software development, as catalyzed by open source tools and massive collaboration, is significantly shortening the innovation cycle in the software space.
The convergence between silicon and carbon based organisms will be a crucial event in the near future. One rung in the ladder toward this convergence is the decoupling of silicon organisms from the environment. Technologies such as those offered by HZO are in development and can “coat” sensitive electronic products at the nano level with moisture resistant materials. This advancement in materials is but one sign post on the road to singularity.
The fourth and final theme that emerged from this conversation is the need to accelerate entrepreneurial development. The New FiRe Fund was announced during the session. They exist as an advisory board to entrepreneurs to assist in product development, scaling, and most importantly managerial practices that shift the focus from technology ownership to technology stewardship. To discover more or read other articles from the conference, visit StratNews.com or our Medium blog.
The slave trade is alive and well. Although invisible to most, millions of people are affected each year by human trafficking. Andrew Wallis, Founder and CEO of Unseen UK, and moderator Cynthia Figg met to discuss the efforts being undertaken in the UK to eliminate modern slavery.
Modern slavery is an illicit trade, subject to the economic principles of supply and demand. Globally, this business annually creates $150B in profit, exploiting more than 46 million people globally. Most of the people are migratory women and children who are fleeing war, famine or seeking economic fulfillment.
However, recently there has been a shift in the female to male ratio. More and more men are becoming victims of the slave network, driven by a global need for labor. This forced labor exists at the bottom of many supply chains, which are often so long and convoluted that the parent organizations have little idea of the injustice occurring.
“Supply chain is the wrong term,” Wallis said. “We should be calling them supply whips.”
In this way, the average consumer interacts with slavery on a regular basis. Many of the products bought and sold all around the world, especially cotton, electronics, and food, have a high likelihood of slavery in the supply chain.
The key to reversing this trend and putting slavers out of business is for commercial enterprise to get involved. Increasingly, firms are paying very close attention to their supply chains and in some cases are required by law to demonstrate supply chain transparency. In the UK, firms whose sales exceed £35M annually are required to submit a supply chain transparency report detailing efforts to eliminate social injustice to the lowest links of the chain.
The millennial generation is accelerating this change by rewarding socially responsible firms with their business and thereby incentivizing companies to undertake these efforts.
Additionally, a human trafficking help line is now live in the UK. The helpline can be used by anybody experiencing, witnessing or concerned about human trafficking incidents. The goal for the helpline is to eventually have one number recognized globally as the human trafficking hotline. In this way individuals are empowered to help end modern slavery.
Finally, big data applications are just now coming online to fight this problem. Law enforcement agencies, businesses and the hotline are all streaming large amounts of data to Unseen UK for analysis. Predictive analytics will begin to be useful in identifying individuals, companies and trade routes that are hot spots for violations.
Andrew Wallis believes in the efficacy of these efforts, and is hopeful for the future. “Our mission is to put slavery out of business. I think we can do that in a generation.” To discover more or read other articles from the conference, visit StratNews.com or our Medium blog.
Brett Horvath, Head of Product at Scout, kicked off the session on the future of quantum computing by urging the audience to check out quantum computing if it’s unaccustomed to it, specifically referring to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s explanation of it.
Jonathan Carter, Deputy Director of Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab, agreed.
The conversation between the two men revealed that a future that includes quantum computing may be closer than many may realize. Horvath asserted that not many companies are looking at specific applications for quantum computers, and instead are looking for general purpose computers. However, Carter said he was spotting a change.
“Some companies, Google particularly, think it would be great to have a near term win, as well as the long term goal of a quantum supercomputer,” Carter said.
In practical terms, this means a pairing traditional computers with currently available quantum components.
“Instead of waiting for the most powerful quantum computer, you build a quantum subprocessor,” said Horvath.
“We want to get to some usable simulation results in the near term,” Carter said.
To discover more or read other articles from the conference, visit StratNews.com or our Medium blog.
Emmanuel Weyi, Presidential candidate for the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Bruce Dines, VP of Global Liberty joined BBC host Ed Butler on Thursday afternoon to discuss the future of the Congo, one of the most troubled countries on earth.
Born in the DRC to a banker and a businesswoman, Weyi was sent to Europe at the age of fifteen to be educated. In 1985, he started a sustainable energy and mining company in Colorado and Congo.
“When I came to the US I had only $135 in my pocket,” Weyi said. “I was young and motivated.”
Weyi was the president and CEO of his company for nineteen years and recently left to become a politician. Weyi’s vision for his country begins with stability and leads towards a highly educated and technologically connected future.
“The first thing is security,” Weyi said.
The DRC needs a well staffed, well trained, and well compensated army to protect its natural wealth, like a bank that has a security guard to protect its assets. After securing and stabilizing the country, Weyi plans to begin crafting the digital economy with broadband, using fiber optic, satellites and other available technologies to improve telecommunications.
He said that one advantage in the DRC is that they don’t have to go the UN, IMF or other foreign funding sources to fund these types of technology ventures.
Dines, who Weyi has asked to lead a digital strategy initiative for the DRC, is optimistic about the future of the country and “the opportunity to leapfrog technologies” from the sparsely available 3G all the way to 5G. Dines believes that technology companies such as Microsoft and Oracle, will have any easy case to enter the market once the government is stabilized.
“The corruption piece has to be dealt with, and that’s no easy task,” said Dines, “But when you have a man that has the conviction that Emmanual does, that will be addressed.”
Weyi said “Congo is an old kingdom, but a young country,” and is experiencing the growing pains of a young democracy. In looking towards the future, he said, “Everything starts with leadership.”
To discover more or read other articles from the conference, visit StratNews.com or our Medium blog.
We are creating and using record numbers of industrial and agricultural chemicals every year, with little understanding of their side-effects on biological systems. Dr. James “Ben” Brown, Department Head of Molecular Ecosystems Biology at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory explored the unintended but increasingly noticeable consequences of the wide use of these industrial compounds. The session was hosted by David Morris.
The infrastructure currently being used to determine toxicity of new chemicals is sorely lacking, and the subsequent regulation is inadequate.
“We regulate against known compounds,” Brown said. “We don’t have standards for unknown compounds.”
Out of the approximately 100,000 industrial compounds in use across the world today, only around 7 percent have known toxicity profiles. Carbon nanotubes are an example of such a compound. They can be bought inexpensively on the open market. When inhaled, 40 percent of the nanotubes remain in the lungs and cause necrotic lesions.
Another facet of the problem is the process used to determine the toxicity for that 7 percent. The current testing process takes approximately 5 years and $1.5 million per compound to determine toxicity in rodents. A series of “interspecies correction factors” is then applied to determine unhealthy doses in humans. These factors are largely just educated guesses. This scaling creates an over-regulation problem, whereby certain chemicals are billed “toxic” at levels far below their actual toxicity threshold.
To solve these problems, Brown and his team are proposing that prospective toxicology testing may create relevant timescales and more significant interspecies applicability. The idea is that testing can be done across a variety of organisms that represent a broad spectrum of the phylogenetic tree, and are therefore applicable across the entirety of the tree of life.
On a smaller scale, molecular ecosystem biology is attempting to understand how gene regulatory transduce, respond to and ultimately influence both populations and ecologies. In this way, Dr. Brown is trying to replicate very complex microbial systems, like those that exist in acre plots of farmland, in order to better isolate the chemical variable in toxicity testing. If microbial variables can be eliminated from the toxicity testing of chemicals in plants, we could have a much better understanding of the actual effect of the chemical(s) in question.
The Environmental Consortium is just one organization that is advocating internationally for the need for this testing. Using these methods on a large scale would help to dramatically reduce the harm caused by chemical compounds at all levels of the tree of life, from microbe to biome.
To discover more or read other articles from the conference, visit StratNews.com or our Medium blog.
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) wants to take you from Denver to Las Vegas in less than an hour, and D.C. to New York in 30 minutes. Bibop Gresta, chairman of (HTT), took to the stage Thursday at the FiRe conference to educate and update attendees on the company’s current status and future vision.
This world-changing technology utilizes an above or below ground tunnel. The tunnel carries capsules, powered by a series of magnets, which start to levitate at 20 mph and can reach speeds up to 760 mph.
Gresta said that to create this new industry, HTT is trying to build on what’s been done before rather than starting everything new.
“The risk to reinvent something is too high,” he said, “we can’t afford it.”
Hyperloop minimizes new infrastructure by developing ways to pair the system with highways and railroads already in place.
Sharon Anderson Morris, SNS program director and host of the panel, said, “Nobody has a budget to do it because it’s never been done before.”
He said they plan on having agreements in place with countries to begin testing within 34 months. The main tech and design is there, and they are ready to build. This new technology doesn’t require government subsidies, because the company is energy net-positive.
Gresta spoke about the effects of creating a disruptive technology.
“We want to make it in a way that is not disruptive to anything else,” he said. “We want to contribute to countries, not destroy industries.”
During the interview, Gresta showed a video that he said they don’t show to anyone, but did because “FiRe is a special place with brilliant minds.” The video depicted some actual testing of the technology.
The company was presented with an award for Company of the Year from Future in Review.
To discover more or read other articles from the conference, visit StratNews.com.
What is the path forward for health care in the US, when the complexity has grown exponentially? Larry Smarr hosted Glenn Snyder, Medical Technology Segment Leader and Michael E. Raynor, Director, Monitor, both of Deloitte, to talk about this and other issues facing the healthcare system.
According to Snyder, technology will likely help drive the simplification and more precise targeting of patients.
“There are a lot of situations where a patient is diagnosed with the specific condition, but the standard treatment doesn’t work for them” said Snyder.
With increased data collection, as well as rising interest in personalized medicine, it’s becoming possible to parse out how individuals will respond to treatment.
Raynor agreed, noting that even if the diagnosis is the same, a disease will be uniquely manifested in each individual and may need different treatment. He said that with technology, “we are getting to the point that we can take individualized medicine seriously.”
One of the concerns, however, is the regulatory environment. Both Snyder and Raynor agreed it was a significant problem, but according to Snyder “there are some promising developments in the US” including the MACRA legislation passed earlier this year. The legislation is intended to shift physician incentives towards quality rather than the current fee for service system. Snyder also noted there there is a growing “willingness to experiment, collect data and figure out what works,” which may help drive systemic change.
All three panelists agreed that the key to relieving the burden on the healthcare system is by preventing people from getting sick in the first place.
“‘Patient’ implies they’re sick, but you want to treat the citizen so they don’t become a patient,” said Smarr.
He continued by asserting that chemotherapy clinics that are at full capacity, and that if cancer were prevented or detected earlier, less chemotherapy treatment would be needed.
“Whether it’s choosing a healthy lifestyle or if you have a chronic disease that you need to take a specific medication–compliance is our biggest issue,” said Snyder.
However, he was also hopeful that technology can provide some solutions to compliance by precisely targeting and messaging patients based on their individual tendencies.
“Reasons for lack of compliance are very different depending on the people,” he said. “There are different archetypes. For some it’s because of money, for others it’s because of memory. So we can get to be really targeted on how we influence behavior.” he said. To discover more or read other articles from the conference, visit StratNews.com or our Medium blog.
