The end of all things

One of our discussions today dealt with big picture issues: global economic order, global political landscape, collapse, etc... The discussion was the first of a series of planned conversations exploring some very big systemic issues, and coming out of this first one we idly wondered about certain trends over time.

So, to get the ball rolling, we ran a quick Google Trends search for certain terms over time.

Not that this necessarily tells us much at the moment, and some of it is entirely predictable, but we were surprised that there weren't higher numbers for "antiglobalization."

Focusing on change

As I have asserted for some years now, at the heart of futures studies is the focus on change.  No serious forecast of any alternative future can be achieved without some sense of how change happens and no aspiring vision of the future can be seriously attempted without some sense of how change can be made.  The understanding and anticipation of change lies at the heart of all good futures work.

That being said, there are few resources out there that, at least from an intellectual standpoint, consistently meet the need of trained futurists for thinking and research on change in society than the "experiment in thinking" blog, Understanding Society.

For ongoing intellectual (and theoretically grounded) provocation about how and why society changes, I highly recommend following this excellent resource.

15 books for your Christmas list this year

Since it's that time of the year again, we've put together a list of recommended reading that might be helpful if you happen to be shopping around for Christmas gifts for any readers and deep thinkers on your list this year.  The selections below span a range from deep, almost academic treatments to long views of history to works on subjects that are a little more "top of mind."

Thinking About the Future

• The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: While somewhat contentious among trained futurist circles, Taleb's justly popular book on black swan events, randomness, and the limits of knowledge is an important set of intellectual reminders.
• Connections: James Burke's multiple television series on "Connections" is a perennial futures favorite as it wonderfully highlights the contingency of the histories we all take for granted.
• Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era: History, Purposes, Knowledge: For anyone interested in learning about the academic field of futures studies, this is a great place to start.
• Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social, and Civilizational Change: Produced by two great thinkers, this book reviewing big picture theories of social change is a must-read for serious thinkers about the future.
• Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation: A classic work concerned with scenario planning (popularized by the Global Business Network), this book is still recommended by professional futurists to professional futurists.

Economic Futures

• Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation: This most recent work by Cowen paints a vivid though not necessarily encouraging vision of our economic future that will definitely exciting to some, and depressing to others.
• The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time: Certainly receiving renewed interest since 2008, this famous work by Polanyi introduces both an important critique of modern economic flows and new definitions for understanding economic life.
• Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy: The futures of automation and the dislocation of human labor are hot topics at the moment, and this work by Brynjolfsson and McAfee is a wonderfully short and clear dive into the subject.
• Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization: Drexler almost single-handedly kicked off the nanotech craze with his book, Engines of Creation.  In his most recent work he returns to an exploration of the technology that remains poised to revolutionize material life.
• Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages: For those interested in either "creative destruction" or solid theories of economic change, Perez's book on long cycles of technology-driven change is sure to delight.

Political Futures

• The Future of Power: Critical to any exploration of political futures is some consideration of power, and Nye's book does an excellent job of exploring the changing nature of power on the global stage.
• No One's World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn: Amid the recent deluge on books about the future of the world order, the rise of China, and/or the decline of the US, Kupchan's book was an interesting, thought-provoking suggestion that the future will not be a new hegemony, but something with greater political diversity.
• The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History: For those interested in how the modern nation-state came to be, and what historical patterns suggest for it's future, Bobbitt's incredibly detailed account and theorizing will be thoroughly engrossing.
• Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future: Any long-view and deep history buffs will be sure to enjoy Morris' thoroughly engaging exploration about the patterns that made, and perhaps continue to make, the world order.
• Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety: Another in a long list of works on global political futures, Rachman's book is useful for the reminder that the world doesn't fall neatly into two ideological camps on all issues; rather it splits up messily according to specific issues.

3D printing vs. digital fabrication

"What Does The Future of 3D Printing Look Like?" is an article from Techpublic this morning and it is a good example of the distinction we need to make between 3D printers and the broader suite of technologies that make up digital fabrication.  For example even a quick glance through your typical makerspace reveals that the 3D printer is but one of a range of tools and expertise brought to bear on the creative challenge of making truly amazing things.

Predicting Google

After writing this morning's post, I was thinking about the supreme difficulty of accurately anticipating the new businesses and new business models that emerge in the world (i.e. that "stick"), and the even greater difficulty of anticipating what those new businesses then evolve to become/create/reshape.  Thinking first about the graphic from this morning (Figure 1), consider the "entrepreneurial experimentation" occurring in the Surface layer.

Part of the great challenge in knowing how the economy will ultimately be affected by the entire landscape of changes lies in this area, what roughly corresponds to the "Emergent Models" section of the original Infinite Economy landscape image (Figure 2).  This is an area of basically evolutionary action: variation and selection.  Out of this competitive space eventually emerges the businesses and business practices that go on to (re)define normal.

And this jumps us to thought leadership/consultant's s-curve from "Working the hype cycle, part 2" (Figure 3).  See the orange line the defines the "Application Gap?"  This is the space in which VCs and other investors are developing ever-greater interest in other people trying to develop new things and to make businesses out of new things.  This, of course, is where people are looking for "the next Google."

But of course you can't really know ahead of time what invention/innovation/new venture will succeed (i.e. stick).  That's why they're all bets.  But even if you could get really, really good at anticipating what new piece of technology or what new venture goes on to become established and mainstream, you still couldn't know what they will go on to do outside of their intended application or their original business plan.  It's essentially an issue of, to use Google as an example: Could the folks who invested in Google at their outset truly have been able to anticipate what they might yet do to shape broad economic change in a variety of areas, far beyond improving internet search?

I am certain that the answer is no.  So consider the difficulty in not just "picking winners" amongst all the emerging technologies and business models out there right now (in terms of what they're trying to do right now), and then anticipating how they will evolve to introduce even more fundamental economic changes beyond their original intents.

Thinking about economic futures...

After yesterday's round-up of articles related to economic futures, I spent the early part of my morning thinking more on what the landscape of economic changes looks like today.

For those of who attended the 2012 Hawai'i Futures Summit, you will be familiar with my framing of the Infinite Economy.  For those of you who aren't, you can check out yesterday's post or the 2012 slide deck on slideshare.  The Infinite Economy looks at the full breadth of changes occurring in the world that, collectively, will shape economic life.  In this way the Infinite Economy looks much farther afield than just one or two developments, say 3D printing or renewable energy.  And in it there's a graphic that conceptually tries to see all the elements of this "landscape" (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: the Infinite Economy

In reflecting on this image this morning, I started to list some of the big trends and emerging issues that are found within the Infinite Economy and which people are discussing today.  The list began with:

• Automation
• Digital fabrication
• DIY movement
• Maker movement
• Social financing
• Alternative currency
• M2M/internet of things/ubicomp

A comprehensive list would of course be huge, but after just getting this far I started thinking in a new direction.  Switching to a layered view, I started to list some of the major trends, but also started to add some of the change dynamics that are relevant to anticipating economic futures (Figure 2).

Figure 2: initial iteration of a layered view

In starting to draft this visual I soon realized (and was reminded of) a number of things:

1. This image will need a lot more time and effort to capture enough of the different dynamics of which I think people need to be aware
2. I need to switch to my preferred 11x17 page size :)
3. Thinking about economic futures today truly requires a global perspective.  An exploration that simply focuses on, say, the American scene, will overlook critical shifts and interdependencies shaping economic life
4. And this requires a much more systemic perspective than I think we've traditionally employed when thinking about the "economy"
5. Partly because there seem to be changes occurring on so many levels and across some many domains/boundaries, employing only an "economics" viewpoint will not provide real insight
6. Considering economic futures today requires a practice of zooming in and out to see the different kinds of change dynamics underway (future iterations of Figure 2 will illustrate this point)

Economic futures round up for Thanksgiving

Because everyone has nothing better to do today than hang around on the web reading articles, I've included below a few good articles that bear on economic futures (not to be confused with the stock market term).

1. "A Skeptic's Guide to 3D Printing": as I was saying on Twitter a couple of days ago when this article got posted, this is the best starting point for exploring the futures of 3D printing I have seen yet. And as I've said in previous posts, in its full suite digital fabrication clearly will play in interesting role in rewiring some of our economic life, but the current hype around 3D printing is animated a bit more by people's excitement and imagination than by critical examinations of the development and diffusion of a new technology, which is something this article does well.
2. "Google Enters 3D Printing Arena": Follow the digital fab vein, this short article as an announcement about a development agreement between Google (dba Motorola Mobility LLC :) ) and 3D Systems to build a high speed digital fabrication and fulfillment system to support Motorola's mobile device customization project, Project Ara.  As a colleague has often said, take a quick peek at anything Google gets into.
3. "The Reluctant Visionary": This is a review-of-sorts of Eric Drexler's new book, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization, which returns us to an examination of what Drexler now calls "atomically precise manufacturing."  Nanotechnology has had its own massive hype in decades past, but in various forms the science and engineering continue to advance and, as always, the promise of what manipulation at the atomic level could mean for human economy is nothing short of revolutionary.
4. "How Google's "Deep Learning" Is Outsmarting Its Human Employees": The last article is from Fast Company and takes us back to Google and into the realms of neural networks and machine learning to look at how Google's system for deep learning is evolving capacities to distinguish objects in the world around it that it's programmers never provided.  Augmentation of human capabilities with machines and the replacement of human effort with machine effort, both fundamental aspects of technological change since the beginning, will of course portend even greater changes in economic life.

And for our early work from last year on framing many of these larger economic shifts:

The Infinite Economy from Richard Lum