Shift to the Future

My new iPhone and Surface laptop both provide a facial recognition (let’s call this FACE) method of identifying myself for access (logon).  I use Keeper, a password and other confidential information manager and it too leverages FACE.  When I need to log into an app or website, I am offered Keeper as a source for the username and password and when I choose that, Keeper uses my face to login and look up the app or website, and offer the credentials to fill in.  Super convenient!  FACE is or will be used to customize customer experiences. For example, you walk into your home, it welcomes you by name, adjusts the heat and lights, and perhaps it pushes your favourite digital pictures and art to the wall frames, and selects your favourite streaming station to pipe through the house A/V system.  Or, you walk into a mall, and the screens, which are everywhere by now, start presenting ads to you based on your social media behaviors and past shopping activities.  FA...

Do you ever go down memory lane and think about all the things that were normal then that are very different now or gone completely?  I find myself reflecting on the past while I consider the present and how different the future will be.  We live in truly interesting times don't we. I haven't been writing in this space much in the past few years.  I kind-of lost interest in writing about what I've been up to, what I've been thinking, or what I've been speculating about.  However, I was watching an interesting clip from Doc James Whittaker   @docjamesw  recently where he talked about the past, present, and future and it inspired me to write again.  I don't know that this will become a habit again but there is this post at least. James mentioned playing the disruption game.  This game involves taking an industry and thinking about how it could be disrupted in the future by technological advancements.  As you know, technology is probably the...

Something has been on my mind as of late and I feel compelled to write about it.  I am grappling with why technology is so often pushed to the background into a supporting role.  I know, I’m biased right, I’m a technology advocate.  It’s true but that is not why I believe technology should always be first when considering an activity, a way of working, a way of learning, and a way of teaching others. Way back in 1985, my wife and I got married.  We planned a honey moon trip to California.  We bought some paper maps and had access to, yes, an atlas!  We figured out our general plan then as proud BCAA members, asked for driving maps to be produced.  We studied and followed those maps carefully all the way down and back over the next couple of weeks.  Now fast forward to 2015, we are planning a trip to Spain.  Should we use the same approach with the same tools (technology) to plan a trip?  No of course not.  We are using Google Maps...

This morning after breakfast, my wife and I were sitting chatting in our family room enjoying a French dark roast cup of amazing coffee when my iPhone, sitting on the coffee table, lights up.  It signaled that a new email had arrived.  This reminded me of how amazing our technology has become and how we essentially take it for granted.  How did the email get to my iPhone?  Really.  Can you explain it in full detail?  We can talk about how it came from the ‘cloud’ or a server at my work.  But how did it find my iPhone?  It had to find my my city, street, and house.  We use Shaw for wireless and Internet, so somehow (I know, IP routing, electrical signals, etc., but) it got from my worksite to Shaw then through kilometers of cables, dozens of complex machines, and eventually to our house.  It then ‘jumped’ into the air and enveloped the room.  Somehow the iPhone ‘sucked’ the email bits from the radio waves (how did it know to do this?...

The more I read about history, the more in awe I become of the numbers and types of transformational changes that have occurred.  I read (audio book) Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest this past year.  Empires as we know, rise and fall but their stories are impressive.  A rise and a fall are both transformational events.  We humans experience transformational events personally and on larger scales, all the time.  Being born is a pretty transformational event don’t you think.  Something seems to happen to many of us along the way through life to reduce our tolerance of transformation, “a change or alteration, especially a radical one” ( free dictionary, Dec. 14, 2014 ). We become comfortable with the status quo and resistant to change.  Ruben Puentedura’s in his discussion of the SAMR model describes stages of change as Enhancement: Substitution to Augmentation and Transformation: Modification to Redefinition.  His context i...

The first time I experienced any form of telepresence was probably 10 years ago at a Cisco Systems office.  They produced a hi-tech corporate teleconferencing room that was and is fairly expensive but unique in how it makes the room participants feel connected to one another.  It worked by connecting like rooms together.  For example I was in a teleroom in Vancouver connected to identically equipped and designed rooms in various US cities and we were able to see each other and our voices were heard in relation to where we sat.  The cameras would auto focus on the speaker.  Participants could present from any of the rooms to all participants.  That was than but the world has changed, dramatically. Do you remember when Sheldon on the TV show Big Bang Theory confined himself to his room and would only ‘come out’ as a telepresence robot?  Well, I was at a conference this past week in Montreal, an historic city in Quebec eastern Canada and at one of the e...

When I wrote my first post to this blog Dec. 29, 2009, Disruption is Coming , I committed to a post every week within the themes of the future, technology, and education.  I held to that until May 6, 2012.  My wife and I went on our first European vacation in that month and both disconnected from blogging and Twitter.  Again in August, I only wrote one post and on Christmas break, skipped a week.  This past summer I skipped six weeks of blogging – it was awesome.  It would seem that blogging has become a bit of a chore for me and I’m having some difficulty with the commitment to write regularly.  I guess after 171 posts, I’m struggling to find inspiring new things I want to write about.  Perhaps I have ‘bloggers block’.  This post is a think-out-loud on some concerns I have on my mind about the three themes for this blog. The more I read about the future the more concerned I become.  Technology is “miraculous” for sure, but there are distu...

I am the type of person who pursues big ideas, big problems, and adrenaline charged activities.  For many years I engaged in somewhat extreme (not according to today’s crazy riders but…) downhill mountain biking.  There’s something invigorating about facing down a laddered launch about 10-12 feet high 15 feet out over a gulf to the other side.  I loved the adrenaline rush caused by fear and accomplishment.  The key to success is total commitment, any hesitation and things can go horribly wrong as they did numerous times for me – broken bones, torn ligaments, and for quite some time afterward, apprehension and fear.  I still ride hard but have switched to all mountain / cross country – high speed and flowee but much safer (getting older and wiser). Last week Saturday two of my sons, one of their friends, and I went skydiving for the first time to celebrate my 50th birthday.  Wow!  What a rush that was.  I am afraid of heights so expected to be qu...

My first introduction to algorithms dates back to grade 11.  There was one computer, an APL machine , in the entire school district and it happened to be in my math classroom.  As budding mathematicians, we learned to write algorithms and program them into the APL machine.  I remember writing a black jack card game and that might have been the turning point for me to shift away from becoming a mechanic to go into computer science.  Actually I often credit that particular teacher (thank-you Jim Swift ) with changing my destiny as it was he that pointed me into the new direction.  Folks, math and algorithms, “ a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations ”, are underlying everything in our world.  I will relate this to education later in this post so hang in there… Remember back in the early days of Internet search when there was no predictive hints provided?  You had to know how to find things online (Internet quests anyone) and tha...

When February 1st arrived, I was grappling with how quickly time seems to be passing by.  I know, it’s an age thing right, as we get older time seems to speed up.  To check this theory I asked my youngest son if he felt time was speeding up.  He said yes – he’s 20 so it’s not an age thing after all.  I know, not a very scientific conclusion.  But seriously, I wonder if the rapid changes that we are experiencing in our lifetime are in effect like a time warp? My wife reluctantly lets me keep this 45 year old clock – it was ten years old when given to me by someone when I was 15 and working as a sales guy in a ski shop.  It still works!  Notice it’s cool pre-digital look.  The numbers flip over as the minutes tick by.  I suspect the iPhone 5 I have now, which has a simple digital alarm clock feature, will not work 45 years from now.  It probably won’t work 10 years from now!  What might clocks look like, work like, in the future....

I’ve started reading another book.  Yah, I know, what a surprise :-)  In How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Ray Kurzweil claims “ this is why we invent tools – to compensate for our shortcomings ” (Kindle 458).  That is an interesting statement given the checkered past the advancement of society has.  Although our technology is agnostic, it always seems to have a good and an evil use or purpose.  In Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation et al, the authors quote “’ In the years ahead,’ Rifkin wrote, more sophisticated software technologies are going to bring civilization ever closer to a near-workerless world’ ” (Kindle 118) and claim that the “ the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors ” (Kindle 125).  In light of...