Looking Towards the Broader Interests in Google Glass

Yesterday Paul Krugman had a post on "The Economics of Evil Google," in which he is exploring the issue of Google's services (Google Reader) being so important to the public, yet not in the interests of the service provider to continue providing them.  He references an article by Ryan Avent on The Economist of "Google's Google Problem."  Both writers are basically pushing the issue of when a private service becomes important enough to be treated (and provided) as a public service.  I've asked it before and I will keep asking it: "when does Google become critical enough infrastructure to warrant an eminent domain conversation?
 
On a related note, as Google Glass comes nearer to market, techno-optimists and techno-cautionaries have been spending a lot of digital ink on what to look forward to or what we should deeply concerned about with this new consumer product.  GigaOM had their post on "The real breakthrough of Google Glass: controlling the internet of things."  I don't think I disagree on the potential for shifting the primary interface with an ecosystem of wirelessly connected things, but across the broader societal landscape, I would hew more closely to the techno-cautionaries in anticipating the important applications of Glass.

For instance, I think the real fun stuff will start to come into play as more people in mainstream society realize that devices like Google Glass are mobile CCTV cameras, recording everything that individuals are looking at.  Beyond the individual privacy issues, about which people are justifiably concerned, lie the very real interests that other economic and societal actors will have. Wait until Glass telemetry is key evidence in court cases, in auto insurance claims disputes, in sexual harassment cases...  It is so very easy to imagine the situation: "No, I swear, he came out of nowhere..." says the car driver.  "And yet your Google Glass feed clearly shows that at the exact moment of the collision, you were looking down at you iPhone," says the insurance company rep.

In this regard, Google Glass simply becomes another sensor platform in what I think is likely to be a very pervasive ecology of sensoring and ubiquitous computing, of which high flying Hellfire-armed drones are merely the most talked about early iteration.  Such a "system" really comes online with a multitude of new stationary or other-mobile sensor platforms, like Glass.

Spotting the Future

I caught the following article this morning as it flitted by on Twitter (via +Fabienne GOUX-BAUDIMENT), "How to Spot the Future," by Wired of last year.  I of course could not resist checking it out.

Their list of rules of thumb for spotting the future include:

1. Look for cross pollinators
2. Surf the exponentials
3. Favor the liberators
4. Give points for audacity
5. Bank on openness
6. Demand deep design
7. Spend time with time wasters

Fundamentally, I was kind of "ehh," about the whole article.  Perhaps Wired really does use those, um, heuristics, to anticipate change, but the academic in me is not that impressed (of course, the academic in me wants to see one of their intrepid editors write up a proper historical study of their experiences in this regard, so that we can see exactly the historical precedents that inform their rules of thumb).

At the same time, what I often see around me when others are "forecasting" the future is not dramatically dissimilar: a broad rule of thumb/model of change combined with some form of informal frequency analysis + novelty hunting (scanning the Web and identifying things that seem to be popping up more but are not yet fully mainstream + picking out things that provoke and are probably less well known).

Verge: a general practice framework for futures work

Back in 2004, my friend Michele Bowman and I started working on an environmental scanning service to offer corporate clients.  Out of those discussions emerged what we thought of at the time as a new taxonomy for conducting scanning.  As most folks involved in futures (foresight) work know, the most common frame for scanning or discussing trends and emerging issues (TEI) is STEEP: Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political.

The basic idea in using STEEP or any related or similar arrangements is to ensure a complete sweep of the environment, overcoming a group's natural biases or blindspots.  It's simple and useful.

Being academically trained futurists out of UH Manoa, we, of course, weren't satisfied with this and were looking for something fresh.  My original idea was to try and "anthropomorphize" the taxonomy and look at how people experience or view things in daily life.  While I'm not entirely sure I achieved that original objective, what resulted was a new set of categories, collectively named Verge:

• Define: the concepts, ideas, and paradigms we use to define ourselves and the world around us
• Relate: the social structures and relationships which define people and organizations
• Connect: the technologies that connect people, places, and things
• Create: the processes and technologies through which we produce goods and services
• Consume: the ways in which we acquire and use the goods and services that we create
• Destroy: the ways in which value is destroyed and the reasons for doing so

 Originally intended to frame scanning, this set got shared and communicated over the years to a number of professional futurists and client groups and has become a general practice framework, a framework that is easily applied in virtually all aspects of futures research and foresight work.  Like the general practice tool of Implication Wheel, which is used by many professional futurists, Verge is used for scanning and research, for forecasting and scenario construction, and for exploring implications.

And like any generally useful tool, it constantly gets interpreted and adapted for local use.  And I would expect it to continue to evolve.

Now to work on the next tool...