IoTMatrix: The Green Pill
Sections
- Phase Transition and Discontinuous Change
- Intelligent Connected World
- Ripple effect of change
- Not2Specs
- Phygital Experiences
- Retro Innovation?
- Smart Appliances
- Welcome to the magical world of Enchanted Objects
- The New Yuga (Ages of civilization )
- Green Pill
- Other Reading References and The Matrix Videos
Phase Transition and Discontinuous Change
We are experiencing a World order undergoing a “transition” which looks like a breakdown. The exponential changes in material science, information technologies coupled with AI/ML, IoT, AR/VR and Block chain are creating a phase transition of the world order. We are aware of solid, liquid and gas as phases of matter but we also deal with stranger forms like gel (solid-liquid), aerosol (solid/liquid particles suspended in gas) and aperiodic crystal ( DNA as speculated by Erwin Schrodinger in his 1944 book What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell ) and exotic metamaterials. Some of these have magical properties like superconductivity and invisibility.
Intelligent Connected World
IoTMatrix is a new word we are coining to cover the emerging connected, ambient, intelligent phygital (ie., physical+digital) world. Internet of Things (IoT) is making the Physical or the Real World Digital. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are making the Digital world accessible to us in the real world, both creating a confluence, or an ‘Enchanted Reality’ and “Digital Twins” and a new phase of world order …?
The world is not running to specs.
Ripple effect of change
While most of us understand the first order impact of a change the more enduring change is the second and third order impact and the interplay (reinforcing and enhancing) of other forces at play. This is what causes surprises and needs a systems thinking and complexity theory approaches to understand and lead.
A few example may help
- Horse Back Soldiers due to Stirrup
“Lynn White, in his Medieval Technology and Social Change, offers the interesting hypothesis that the feudal class of the European Middle Ages derived ultimately from the stirrup. After the arrival of the stirrup in Europe by the eighth century, and the primacy this gave the horse and armor in warfare, the state made, land grants in return for the pledge to provide armored knights on horseback when called. The freeman with his battle-axe no longer was the mainstay of the military might of the state, though he was still subject to general muster. Charlemagne’s attempt to raise horsemen by ordering the less wealthy to pool their resources was eventually unsuccessful because of the difficulties in administering such a program. The eventual result was the distribution of land to vassals on condition of knight’s service; from this followed the creation of a fighting elite, which was to have a profound effect on Western society and history.” ```THE STIRRUP AND ITS EFFECT ON CHINESE MILITARY HISTORY By Prof. Albert Dien
2. The social effect of the Automobile in US : The rise of suburbs and women’s emancipation
Modern Transport has also lead to many ripple down changes. As a observer noted for the effect of Car in US
“The automobile was arguably the most important catalyst for social change in the 1920’s, liberating Americans from often restrictive home or neighborhood situations. Many women used the cars to save time in their daily domestic chores — in turn giving them more free time, in which they could educate themselves, or find a job. The younger generations loved the car as an escape from the chaperones. A juvenile court judge criticized the auto as a “house of prostitution on wheels,” due to the relatively large quantity of “inappropriate” sex occurring in the car. Businessmen, possessing a faster, more personal form of transportation, could live farther from the city and subway stops. Consequently the suburb lifestyle began in places like Queens and the Bronx. Rural Americans loved the car as a ride to town and the social circles.”From an article by Tim Samuel
Not2Specs
- A world economy with 17 trillion of negative debt and deflation defying nobel prize winning model of hyperinflation by excessive central bank liquidity
- A world where patent and protected IP are valued by VC has a phase change. Open source toolsets and MOOC trainings ( Redhat by IBM for BILLIONS…) Big Data and AI/ML and deep learning ( neural net) are taking over the information value add. Almost 75% of trillions of market cap of Amazon, Alibaba, Google, Tencent, Microsoft, Netflix are not derived by IP but by “friction free” customer experience
- The convergence includes at scale social physics as we see the paradox of Google universal library and fake news viral circulation by WhatsApp and more….
- The DotCom boom and bust re-established the new models of e-business and we now need to “imagine” a perpetual deficit financed Company ( with humongous valuations in future: WeWork correction is a minor blip along the way..) . Didi and ByteDance may be ephemeral or markers for a new business order?
The artistic vision of this world has been negative. The movie Singularity (2017) or The Matrix (1999) show carbon life subjugated by silicon life.
The Matrix builds on many philosophical themes including Maya. The Red-Blue Pill is a choice for carbon-life to remain in an echo chamber of comforting news and experiences or a “descent” to the trenches of not-so-well-ordered real world.
Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
Marshall McLuhan
The worries about super-intelligent silicon life are well captured in a recent debate (long and a bit meandering )between Alibaba Jack Ma and Tesla Elon Musk at 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference ,Shanghai
Phygital Experiences
Retail shopping has embraced a bunch of tools to bring interactivity to the visitors experience. To quote from SQLI
New virtually-driven brick and mortar stores automatically recognise customers when they enter, either using artificial intelligence and facial recognition (which poses problems with the GDPR however), or by digital identification via the IoT (connected objects fitted with a chip that identifies customers).This is already the case, for example, in certain Uniqlo clothing stores, particularly in Japan. At the checkout, instead of scanning bar codes, all articles are placed in a basket and automatically recognised by connected chips inserted in the clothes. This avoids errors, prevents theft and, above all, makes it possible to increase sales by simplifying and speeding up the checkout process.
Retro Innovation?
There are many products that “bombed” . My favourite was the early Palm Pilot ( a 1997 Personal Digital Assistant PDA similar to Apple Newton?). Today I am a big fan of stylus note taking using Samsung Note and even blogged some time back why Apple should copy some features ( They have. Thank goodness..)
3D movies and 3D TV have been around but have not caught fire( as yet). Oculus and other immersive VR headsets are making incremental changes and Google glass is also getting a rebirth in a different form by Amazon Echo Frames...
Amazon itself must be surprised by runway adoption of Alexa. It has become a model of voice enabled personal assistant (Siri failed !!) . Everything is Alexa-fied from the (withdrawn ) Dash to Echo Frames now (Amazon has become like the older Japanese Casio with hundreds of variations of a watch or a calculator).
Smart Appliances
I once attended a talk (long ago) by John Young, President HP on the future appliances world. Young observed that for most of our history we have used specialized appliances ( cave stone cutting with a smartphone ain’t a good idea!) but general purpose computers are replacing specialised appliances ( tell that to the Camera manufacturers…) . He poised a reversal after technology matures where humans will start seeking special purpose appliances ( smart ones..) and the rise of a new generation.
I was once gifted a Swiss Knife.It was good size, good looking and was appreciated. Come to reflect I rarely remembered about it when I needed a nail cutter or a screwdriver . Specific Appliances won over the general purpose multi functional tool.
Welcome to the magical world of Enchanted Objects
Enchanted objects need not be high tech. An example is Saregama Carvaan which I gifted my mother-in-law. A radio lookalike simple player with a library of 5000 hindi classic and filmi tracks and is simple to use. No need to connect to the cloud and fills our time with nostalgia and joy.
The New Yuga (Ages of civilization )
IoTMatrix is a lever for a series of ripples to waves of change which will cover sociology, economics and legal and political systems for decades ( See Ripple effect of change….)
It is no longer a matter of optimizing between trade-offs among various options in design or business or personal development but a creative adoption of paradox to create value...A quantum change Here is a peek on some changes
- Digital Twin and Simulation merging to Phygital
- Mass Personalization with Mass Surveillance
- India runs on ☕️ Chai and 📲 WhatsApp
- TikTok the celebrity maker
- Mindfullness with Netflix binging
- LIBRA frightens the central banks? Why are monopolists up in arms
- Should deficit financed governments worry about popular perpetually deficit financed companies?
Green Pill
It is vital we become co-creators in shaping the world emerging. We need to create a new Green Pill option between Blue Pill (Jack Ma..) or the Red Pill (Elon Musk..). I will be talking at IoTNext 2019 . We will explore conclusions for IoT ecosystem and future steps. This is a large complex topic and needs multiple perspectives and deep dialogue. Do join in co creating the Green pill …
Other readings references
The Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow, reflecting on his high school years in the late 1930s, wrote that “It was an obvious fact of life to us that our society was malfunctioning politically and economically, and that nobody really knew how to explain it or what to do about it.”
Sociologists regard the evolution of our lives as resulting from a combination of our own choices and preference and the force of our surrounding social network structure.
The world seems chaotic. But it’s not. Underlying all this apparent complexity is some wonderfully simple math. Follow the math to your destination.
A decade ago, Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard professor and renowned father of sociobiology, was asked whether humans would be able to solve the crises that would confront them over the next 100 years.
“Yes, if we are honest and smart,” he replied. “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology”
All the rules managers thought to be true no longer apply, and it’s only going to get worse in the 2020s
The path forward requires systems to facilitate mediating, not manufacturing, consent. We need a hybrid form of consensus that is resistant to the institutional corruption of top-down control, and welcomes pluralism, but is also hardened against bottom-up gaming of social infrastructure by malign actors. The question is whether the more viable solution comes from addressing the formation of factions, or by creating an environment that will lead to a politically and socially healthy relations among the island realities in the archipelago of dissensus.
We are never going to eliminate factions. They’ve always been part of American society; in another famous pamphleteering debate, James Madison argued in Federalist 10 (1787) that factions are, simply, a function of human nature:
- The Matrix 20 Years On: How a Sci-FI Film Tackled Big Philosophical
Questions - The Matrix (1999) HD Trailer
- Blue Pill or Red Pill — The Matrix (2/9) Movie CLIP (1999) HD
- Consilence
The principle is based on the unity of knowledge; measuring the same result by several different methods should lead to the same answer. For example, it should not matter whether one measures the distance between the Giza pyramid complex by laser rangefinding, by satellite imaging, or with a meter stick – in all three cases, the answer should be approximately the same. For the same reason, different dating methods in geochronology should concur, a result in chemistry should not contradict a result in geology, etc.
Edward O Wilson popularised this rare word earlier this year when he used it in the title of his best-selling book Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge. It means “a jumping together”, and in his book he encourages those who study the sciences, the humanities and the arts to bridge the gaps between their narrow specialisms and so link together all the branches of learning, an aim which goes back to the thinkers of the time of the Enlightenment. Professor Wilson is trying to bring together what three decades ago the late C P Snow called “the two cultures” in what he calls a “dream of unified learning”. Wilson argues that all fields of study have a common goal, to give understanding a purpose, and to lend to us all “a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws”. But Wilson didn’t invent the word: that honour belongs to the nineteenth-century philosopher William Whewell (who also gave us the word scientist), who used it in his book The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences in 1840 to describe the interlocking of explanations of cause and effect between disciplines. He seems to have derived it from the Latin word consilere, formed from con-, “with”, and salire, “to leap”.
The trend cannot be reversed by force-feeding students with some of this and some of that across the branches of learning; true reform will aim at the consilience of science with the social sciences and the humanities in scholarship and teaching.
E O Wilson, Consilience, 1998
What prevents us from coming to grips with environmental decay or the rest of our social bedevilments has less to do with a lack of consilience in learning than with the interplay of interests and power.
New York Times, Apr. 1998
THERE USED to be an iron rule for any American boss tempted to talk about politics: don’t. Recently, this rule has been discarded as chief executives have been drawn into taking stands on inequality, the culture wars and climate. So far they have had an easy ride: it is more fun to outline your vision for humanity than for increasing EBITDA margins. But in 2020 this new breed of activist CEOs will face three problems that politicians know well: the charge of hypocrisy, the risk of a recession and destabilising ideological shifts.
But China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was right to sense that troubles in 2019 might come from unexpected quarters. In a speech in January he warned officials of “black swan” and “grey rhino” events, in other words, unforeseen crises or ones arising from obvious but neglected problems. What occurred was a combination of both types, with the colour black prevailing. It was in Hong Kong that the year’s biggest crisis erupted, on a scale that caught not only the party, but the entire world, by surprise. Chinese officials call it a colour revolution, or, referring to the preferred hue of anti-government protesters involved in it, a black terror.
The unrest that erupted in the territory in June has been the biggest sustained challenge to the party’s authority since the upheaval of 1989. The central government in Beijing says the demonstrations have transgressed the “bottom line” of the “one country, two systems” principle that China says it has been implementing in Hong Kong since it took it back from the British in 1997.
Its economy is sputtering and its young people are frustrated, but with America and Europe in tumult, Russia and its leader of two decades are on a roll.
If you own a mobile phone, its every move is logged and tracked by dozens of companies. No one is beyond the reach of this constant digital surveillance. Not even the president of the United States.
The Times Privacy Project obtained a dataset with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million people in this country. It was a random sample from 2016 and 2017, but it took only minutes — with assistance from publicly available information — for us to deanonymize location data and track the whereabouts of President Trump
ByteDance has emerged as the world’s most valuable startup on the explosive popularity of TikTok, where more than a billion, largely young, users share short clips of lip-syncing and dance videos. But with escalating tensions between China and the U.S., American politicians have warned the app represents a national security threat and urged an investigation. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., better known as CFIUS, has begun a review of ByteDance’s 2017 purchase of the business that became TikTok, Bloomberg News reported in November.
