We need to learn quickly to keep up with the massive change around us so we don't get run over. We need to outrun change.
big strech ideas of what the future might hold – need to start thinking!
Here’s a few of the articles that stretched my understanding of this amazing world we live in. The open frontiers of space and technology. Just brief comments from me.
Space
7/14 – Daily Bulletin – SpaceX makes another successful launch, putting 6 communication satellites into space.
Continue reading “More good stuff on the open frontiers – 8/4”
The change taking place around us is thrilling and confusing. The best way I have to put this in some sort of order for myself is to compare with the open frontier of the US west after our Civil War – The education, energy, space, and publishing worlds are each a new frontier and those frontiers are wide open.
A few articles to give some form to that open frontier:
Cyborg telemarketing
Three articles on the increasing use of computers making the pitch on cold call telemarketing:
Continue reading “More good stuff on the open frontiers – 12-30-13”
The two best articles I’ve read that explain the massive shifts we are seeing in the economy were from Walter Russell Mead back in June 2011. Those articles put much in perspective and give a hint at a way forward. They were foundational to me starting to focus on the radical change taking place all around us.
The Death of the American Dream I compares the painful transition away from family farms to a suburban home funded with a cheap mortgage and paid by working a life-time job. We are now transitioning away from the model that has been in place since everyone reading this was a child. It will be painful, just as the disappearance of the family farm was painful.
There is a $10M prize in the XPRIZE competition to develop a functioning machine portable machine that can assess a patient for 15 conditions. There are 31 teams entering the competition. That will be whittled down to 10 during the qualifying rounds in April 2014.
Scientific American describes XPRIZE Unveils Medical Tricorder Teams.
The goal is to develop Continue reading “About those fantastical make-believe tricorders? 31 teams will compete to develop one.”
That’s the question in the post #page 462 – What will the company that replaces Walmart (and Amazon) look like?
Remember the dominant players Kodak, Pan Am, TWA, Sears, Montgomery Wards, and IBM (the PC manufacturer)?
All but Sears are gone. And they are a subsidiary of K-mart.
IBM (the PC manufacturer) has disappeared from the market and been replaced by IBM (the IT consulting outfit).
The iconic name brands disappear as new, more nimble companies come along.
So we wonder who will replace the current dominant players like Walmart and Amazon.
How about truck driving as a threatened field?
The Wall Street Journal article provides a question you may hear soon: Daddy, What Was a Truck Driver?
Truck driving
Continue reading “More industries transformed by tech revolution – truck driving, legal field”
Professors at 10 more large university systems can access MOOC courses for use in their classes.
Coursera, which is one of the big providers of what are called Massive Open Online Courses, is expanding its reach.
The Wall Street Journal reports Web Courses Woo Professors.
Continue reading “Coursera makes online classes available to more colleges”
That we haven’t seen the full impact of IT is a comment I heard the first time a few years ago. That sort of made sense but didn’t really register. This blog is focused on sorting out that change. The idea that the technology revolution has barely begun finally clicked for me with a column by Matthew Yglesias – Why I’m Optimistic About Growth and Innovation.
A few industries have seen huge impact from technology. Think of book publishing, journalism, and music. Those industries have been turned upside down. I read a lot and listen to a bit of music so am quite attuned to those areas. The way everyone consumes news has been transformed. I regularly read dozens of blogs a day. They just appear on my computer screen with a mouse click or two. I’ve always been a news junkie, and my consumption has soared in the last few years.
However, as big as those industries are, they are a small part of the total economy.
Continue reading “Impact of the technology revolution has barely begun”
You will still take a cab to the doctor’s office. For a while. That is a post that guesses what the annual checkup might look like a decade from now.
A self-driving car takes you to the office. A friendly, perceptive, caring, automated voice talks you through your checkup. Sensors that don’t touch you run all the tests.
John Bredehoft paints an appealing picture. Check it out.
You’ll have to read the article to see John’s predictions for the destiny of Google, Facebook, and Apple.
Continue reading “What your visit to the doctor may look like in 2023”
Check out this video – Profits in Space! Entrepreneurs Are Scanning the Cosmos for Big Money. Glenn Reynolds interviews Chris Lewicki, CEO and Chief Asteroid Miner at Planetary Resources.
A few highlights: Continue reading “Interview with an asteroid miner – Yeah, I did say mining of asteroids and it’s coming from the private sector”
The frontier in higher education is wide open.
How ‘bout starting a college in your basement with $100k seed money?
That’s what Mr. Tim Cook has done with Saxifrage School. He wants to radically cut the cost of college education. His idea is to combine learning a trade or other productive skills along with traditional humanities classes that teach you to think.
Check out the status so far, according to Startup Takes Aim at Old-School Ways in the Wall Street Journal: Continue reading “Start a college in your basement”
One territory in the open frontier of the education world is the idea of assessing knowledge acquired instead of counting time spent in chairs.
Two articles last week point to the possibilities, both from Via Meadia:
College Too Expensive? Try the $5,000 degree – Second sentence of the post:
Continue reading “The frontier is open, education department – stuff learned vs. time spent”
The new frontiers:
New frontiers have opened up, with incredible opportunities as wide as the prairies in the northern plains states. They also have the same high price of admission as the old frontier.
In the previous post, I talked about the oil patch and publishing. Now I’ll talk about education and space exploration.
Education
The new frontiers:
The American prairies
The opportunities opened up wide as the prairies and the Dakota sky with the signing of the Homestead Act.
A man and his family, or a single woman, or a former slave, could stake out a claim, work as hard as you wanted, and with a little bit of luck and constant hard work, make a go of it. Millions of people did.
The opportunity was there for the taking.
As I mentioned before, the land was free but the admission price to play was steep.
That frontier has long been closed.
Other frontiers have opened up, with the opportunities, also as wide as the prairies. Also with the same high price of admission.
That’s the lead question in an article by Kevin Kelly at Wired, Better than Human.
He asks:
Imagine that 7 out of 10 working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they all do?
Well, we’ve been there, done that. And thrived.