Entries Tagged 'philosophy' ↓

The iPad promises to be a very big deal: not just because it’s the next big over-hyped thing from Apple, but because it fundamentally shifts the way that humans will interact with computing.

Let’s call this the “fourth turning” of the computing paradigm.

Calculators

Early “computers” were electro-mechanical, then electric, and then later all electronic. But the metaphor was constant: you pushed buttons to enter either values or operators, and you had to adhere to a fixed notation to obtain the desired results. This model was a “technology” in the truest sense of the word, replacing “how” a pre-existing task got done. It didn’t fundamentally change the user, it just made a hard task easier.

8-Bit Computers: Keyboards

The early days of computing were characterized by business machines (CP/M, DOS, and character-based paradigms) and by low-end “graphics and sound” computers like the Atari 800, Apple II, and Commodore 64.

The promise here was “productivity” and “fun,” offering someone a more orderly typewriting experience or the opportunity to touch the edges of the future with some games and online services. But the QWERTY keyboard (and its derivatives) date back to at least 1905. And the first typewriters were made by Remington, the arms manufacturer.

The keyboard input model enforces a verbal, semantic view of the world. The command line interface scared the hell out of so many people because they didn’t know what they might “say” to a computer, and they were often convinced they’d “mess it up.” During this era, computing was definitely still not a mainstream activity.

More of the population was older (relative to computing) and had no experience with the concepts.

The Mouse, GUI, and the Web

Since the introduction of the Macintosh, and later Windows, the metaphors of the mouse, GUI, and the web have become so pervasive we don’t even think about them anymore.

But the reality is that the mouse is a 1970’s implementation of a 1950’s idea, stolen by Apple for the Lisa from Xerox PARC. Windows is a copy of the Macintosh.

The graphical computing metaphor, combined with the web, has opened the power of the Internet to untold millions, but it’s not hard to argue that we’re all running around with Rube Goldberg-like contraptions, cobbled together from parts from 1905, 1950, and 1984 respectively. Even so, the mouse alone has probably done more to open up computing than anything else so far.

The mouse enforces certain modes of use. The mouse is an analog proxy for the movement of our hands. Most people are right handed, and the right hand is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain, which science has long argued is responsible for logic and reason. While a good percentage of the population is left handed, the fact remains that our interactions with mice are dominated by one half of the brain. Imagine how different your driving is when you only use one hand.

While we obviously use two hands to interact with a keyboard, some cannot do that well, and it continues a semantic, verbal mode of interaction.

iPad

The iPad will offer the first significant paradigm shift since the introduction of the mouse. And let me be clear: it doesn’t matter whether hardcore geeks like it now, or think it lacks features, or agree with Apple’s App Store policies.

The iPad will open up new parts of the human brain.

By allowing a tactile experience, by allowing people to interact with the world using two hands, by promoting and enabling ubiquitous network connections, the iPad will extend the range and the reach of computing to places we haven’t yet conceived.

Seriously. The world around us is reflected by our interactions with it. We create based on what we can perceive, and we perceive what we can sense. The fact that you can use two hands with this thing and that it appears to be quick and responsive is a really big deal. It will light up whole new parts of the brain, especially the right hemisphere — potentially making our computing more artistic and visual.

Just as the mouse ushered in 25 years of a new computing paradigm, pushing computing technology out over a much larger portion of the market, the iPad marks the beginning of the next 25 years of computing.

And before you get worried about how people will type their papers and design houses and edit video without traditional “computers,” let me answer: no one knows. We’ll use whatever’s available until something better comes along.

But computing platforms are created and shaped by raw numbers and the iPad has every opportunity to reach people in numbers as-yet unimagined. That will have the effect of making traditional software seem obsolete nearly overnight.

When the Macintosh was released, it was widely derided as a “toy” by the “business computing” crowd. We see how well that turned out.

This time, expect a bright line shift: BIP and AIP (before iPad and after iPad). It’s the first time that an entirely new design has been brought to market, answering the question, “Knowing everything you know now, what would you design as the ultimate computer for people to use with the global network?”

It’s 2010, and we don’t need to be tied down to paradigms from 1950 or 1905. Everything is different now, and it’s time our tools evolved to match the potential of our brains and bodies.

There’s been a lot of speculation about Google’s plans to deploy Gigabit fiberoptic Internet. Where will they deploy? What are the criteria? How many homes will they serve? Will they favor cities, or rural areas?

Your guess is as good as mine. But as a part of the global tech community and as someone who has spent a lot of time at Google and with people from Silicon Valley, these are my guesses about what they might do.

Cities Offer Higher Returns

Cities have the kind of density required to deliver a lower cost-per-home deployment. Less cable, a single point of negotiation and contact, and the ability to deploy using lateral construction from fiber conduits means lower overall costs.

Multi-family housing means more customers per square mile. Baltimore has a city-owned conduit system which can serve over 90% of the area of the city — without requiring the use of poles or negotiating with third party utilities.

Rural Areas Cannot Be Served Profitably

Telephone companies receive funds from the Universal Service Fund to subsidize service in areas that otherwise cannot be profitably served. Google is not subject to the regulatory framework (Communications Acts of 1934 and 1996) that would give it access to USF funds; in fact, it has every incentive to fight to avoid falling under such regulation.

Google is not a charity, it’s not being subsidized by the government, and it is not a monopoly. There is no special reason why Google should care about making services available in rural areas, and there is certainly no profit motive. Rural service requires fuel, vehicles, and people on the ground. Every part of this is expensive; it’s why it loses money and why it has to be subsidized by USF funds.

Google simply has no motive at all to serve rural areas. I’ll eat cat meat if Google selects a rural area for this trial. It just won’t happen.

Tech Is Opinionated

Google has opinions. In the tech world, people take a stand: Google and Apple both expressed strong opinions about how a smartphone ought to operate. Opinionated software is an emerging trend in software tools. Software designers bake their opinions into the tools they create. People who use those tools end up adopting those opinions; if they don’t, the tools become counterproductive, and they are better off using different tools.

There is every reason to believe that Google’s opinion is that the suburbs are obsolete, and that that opinion will inform their strategy for building out a fiber network. Here’s why Google likely believes the suburbs are obsolete:

1. Suburbs rely on car culture, which consumes time; that’s time that people can’t spend on the Internet, making money for Google.
2. Suburbs are not energy efficient, requiring lifestyles that generate more CO2 emissions. Google has said it wants to see greater energy efficiency in America.
3. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said he wants to see America close its innovation deficit. There’s nothing innovative about the design of the suburbs. It’s a tired model.
4. Schmidt has supported Al Gore politically and in his efforts to combat global warming. Regardless of what you might think of Al Gore or global warming, we have a pretty good idea what Google thinks of the issue.
5. Gigabit Fiber in cities could utterly revitalize them. We’ve been looking for ways to fix our cities for the last 50 years. The last renaissance was powered by large-scale economics; a new renaissance can be launched with large-scale communications investment.
6. Google’s employees are young, idealistic, and believe in self-powered transportation. It’s worth pointing out that the Google Fiber project lead, Minnie Ingersoll, is an avid cyclist.

The Suburbs Are Done

I’ve said it before. So have others. But I’m not promoting that they be subject to some kind of post-apocalyptic ghettoization, either, so calm down. No one’s threatening your commute or your backyard barbecue.

But what I am saying is that at some point we need to take a stand about where we’re going to invest in our future. About where we believe we can regain competitive advantage and efficiency.

I believe our only hope to do that is with smart, well-designed urban cores, connected with world-class communications infrastructure and fast, green, and efficient people-powered transportation. And I think Google believes that too. Bet on it.

I recently wrote an essay about how our educational system is an artifact of the industrial revolution, designed to produce cogs for a machine that no longer exists.

It received wide circulation and a lot of people weighed in with their own ideas about what’s working in education. My mother started a school when I was young, and I’ve also been in the process in the last year of evaluating school choices for my kids (who are entering middle school) so I’ve had a good deal more recent first-hand exposure to the question. And it’s got me thinking.

Play and Exploration

People learn by interacting with the world around them and by following the ideas they are curious about. Think back on your school career and try to name three teachers or three projects that really inspired you and got you excited. You can probably do that, but if I asked you to name four or more, you’d probably be at a loss.

Real learning doesn’t occur through mindless rote tasks or in any context where one is teaching to a test, and it almost certainly can’t occur in huge classes.

Kids grow when they are inspired to inquire into a subject themselves; sometimes that happens by way of a teacher, parent, or role-model, and sometimes it happens through reading or another kind of exposure to an idea. I won’t claim it’s causal, but there is a correlation between the number of books in a home and later success in life. While it is equally probable that the kinds of families that value books are also the same homes most likely to properly nurture a child, there is something wonderful about being surrounded by books and being able to select just the right book at just the right time.

Learning, at its best, should be a kind of just-in-time delivery system for knowledge and discovery.

There has been some debate as to whether schools should make any pretense of having a curriculum at all, or just focus on a kind of resource-rich play. The New York Times recently wrote a piece about how play is at the center of learning. A friend told me about the Sudbury School which has no curriculum and lets kids make up the rules. And if you read the literature, Sudbury “graduates” are as successful as anyone else.

Learning In Spite of the System

If you study the evidence, it becomes clear that the only real learning that happens in our traditional school environment happens by accident — as a side effect of our system, not as a primary result of our system. If this is true, our system is mostly wasted energy – noise and light – and not actually designed to solve the problem it purports to solve.

What do I mean by “learning by accident?” If you can count on one hand the number of teachers you had that inspired you, then your learning was by accident. If you can remember maybe just two projects from your school years that meant something to you, you were learning by accident.

The tragedy is that in our worst schools, those accidents never occur. Students slog zombie-like day after day through halls that threaten their safety, misdirect their higher calling into self-defense and trivial pursuits of one-upmanship, and generally burn them out on life and its possibilities. It’s no wonder that the survivors of this system (it’s hard to use the word “graduates” when many do not, and the process is more a trial than a system) tend towards cynicism and a zero-sum view of the world. There is no time or place for higher thinking when safety is in question.

Our very best schools – the schools in higher income areas, or our private schools – simply are rigged to increase the odds of “good accidents” occurring at a higher rate. These schools typically do not fundamentally alter the design, though, they just increase the odds that something good might happen inside their walls — through parent involvement, better teachers, and a community that is generally more able to support a learning environment.

So even our best schools are only, perhaps, 30% as efficient as they could be. The rest is all noise and heat and light. How can we unleash that untapped 70% of energy that we lose to the inefficient design we currently call school?

Homeschooling or the Sudbury method offer potential answers. However many alternative approaches carry baggage from the culture wars that make them unpalatable to the population at large, or include biases that make them less than effective.

Ideology and Indoctrination

Thanks to Hitler, it is still today illegal to home-school children in Germany. Indoctrination was such an important part of his new totalitarian state that he dared not leave it to chance. We have something similar going on in our country today. Our school system is a kind of indoctrination. We need to ask serious questions about whether we believe in the values it imparts, or whether it is something more sinister.

The extreme left and right get it wrong. This is not about warmed over hippie ideology, and it’s not about right-wing religious nuts opting out to preserve a cult-like bubble around their children. It’s also not about non-religious right-wing people rebelling against the abuses of teacher unions or big government. Education is too often co-opted by these sects and it’s counterproductive.

The real challenge is how to design an approach — which may not look at all like public education as we know it now, so stop reflexively bashing it — that scales up and works for moderates. And by “works” I mean delivers an level of efficiency closer to 90% rather than 30%, and is divorced from ideology.

Design is an opportunity to incorporate, or not to incorporate, ideology. Would you design a right-wing fork? Or a liberal toaster? Is it possible for us to design an educational approach that is simply functional, and light on ideology? We owe it to our kids to do so.

There is an insurance sales office not far from my home with a letterboard sign out front that proclaims, “The real risk is doing nothing.” Of course, they wanted you to think about the risk of not having insurance. But it got me thinking about entrepreneurship and how entrepreneurs change the world through their actions.

And I’m not talking about changing the world in some pie-in-the-sky, abstract kind of way. Recently I’ve been reading the work of entrepreneurship researcher Dr. Saras Sarasvathy, whose theory of “effectuation” states that entrepreneurs actually create the world around them through their actions.

Sarasvathy has interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs and one common thread she has observed is that entrepreneurs believe that they are called to act when they see an opportunity to create change; they know that if they do nothing, they will achieve nothing, and things will stay the same.

And so entrepreneurs evaluate their options — what and who they know — to take a calculated risk to move a little closer towards a goal. That action might be as simple as putting together a meeting of stakeholders or researching a topic. And with that very first action, they’ve changed the game.

The entrepreneur has widened the opportunity by involving more people, or by knowing more about the subject, or attracting investment. And so in a very real way, she has changed the world around her to make the world more hospitable to attaining the goal. Her actions do not cause the goal to come true directly; it is the compounded effects of the entrepreneur’s actions that lead to a world where the goal becomes possible.

What Really Motivates Entrepreneurs

A purely rational evaluation of entrepreneurship would suggest that it occurs when someone perceives an unmet market opportunity and then proceeds to allocate resources to address this unmet need. Sarasvathy observes that this is almost never how entrepreneurs really operate.

Indeed, most entrepreneurs are haunted by the risk of doing nothing. They might say, “Well, I’ve always wanted to try this idea and I think it might work. How will I feel if I don’t pursue it?” And then they look to limit risk. Often, if someone can craft a scenario where the downside risk is affordable, they go for it. They ask, “What’s the worst that could happen? I lose a year and have to return to my job.” They are not typically motivated by the lure of the upside, but rather the fear of not acting!

Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?

Are entrepreneurs born risk-takers, or are they just regular people that are applying a particular kind of logic? Sarasvathy suggests the latter. She says that there is nothing about her study of entrepreneurs that would suggest that there are particular personality traits that distinguish entrepreneurs from others propranolol sans ordonnance. The only difference is their use of “effectual logic” and the subsequent learning that comes from its use.

Entrepreneurs ask, “What do I know, and what can I do with it?” They then take steps that help to change the game. Then they ask, “What else can I do with it?” Expert entrepreneurs engage in an iterative process of changing the world and then with each round re-evaluate the opportunities that their previous actions have made possible. Surely it’s possible to teach this process to people in the same way that it’s possible to teach a high-schooler how to think scientifically.

The differences come with experience. First-time entrepreneurs are likely to make mistakes around trust and judgment: they tend to trust people too little or too much, misread the character of a partner, or underestimate the importance of foundational elements like operating agreements. And so while many entrepreneurial enterprises fail, each failure causes the long-term success rate for an individual entrepreneur to increase. Failure helps entrepeneurs to know what pitfalls to avoid and it also teaches him fundamental lessons about his own strengths and weaknesses. This is why it’s so essential for entrepreneurs to pick themselves up and try again! Failure is essential to the creation of the expert entrepreneur.

The Role of Entrepreneurial Action in the World

One of the things that puzzles Dr. Sarasvathy is how effectual logic is used routinely in private sector business but is rarely applied to solving the deep social problems that we face in the world. Some beneficial businesses like micro-lending site Kiva.com got started through effectual thinking (you need $27 to break free from debt? Here’s $27), but for the most part we have consigned the world’s most pressing problems to the work of charitable foundations and non-profits. And because of the way these entities are funded (donations and partnerships), effectual logic cannot often be applied.

Sarasvathy suggests that a wave of social innovation might be unleashed if we were to change the funding model of social enterprises to better enable effectual thinking — primarily because effectual thinking is very efficient and good at minimizing risk at each step. And this goes beyond the current trend of “social entrepreneurship” that suggests that there is a class of problems that is suited to entrepreneurial thinking, and class that is not.

Why shouldn’t all entrepreneurship produce social benefit, and why shouldn’t all social problems be soluble through the application of effectual logic? This is an open set of questions, but certainly they represent the challenge of our time.

The Moral Imperative

If we believe that entrepreneurs literally affect the world to alter their own odds of success then we must also believe that there is a legitimate role for human action in the world.

The theory of effectuation additionally suggests that entrepreneurs are designers: at each stage they are using design thinking to imagine a set of possible solutions using available assets.

If entrepreneurs, through their actions, can help design potential solutions to the world’s most pressing problems, then isn’t the real risk doing nothing?