Homo Pomus - of Apple

Computerworld Conference SIngapore - Friday 18th Feb

Yours truly waxing lyrical about the need for innovation as organisations seek to adopt emerging trends like Cloud Computing, Social Networking and so-forth.

BTW Folks - In case you haven’t heard…. Powerpoint is DEAD (oh so Dead). Check out Prezi.com for a new way to communicate visually. It’s AWESOME

We live in exciting times. The acceleration of mankind’s evolution and the threads of innovation that go hand-in-hand with that process are fast approaching another historic vertex; potentially of far grater significance than the invention of the printing press, the industrial revolution or the communications revolution of the past 20 years.

All evolutionary processes are characterised by the formation of a paradigm that; having been realised in nature or technology; facilitates and drives the subsequent evolutionary phase. This is as true for the dawn of life arising from the beginnings of raw organic chemistry on our very own planet; as it is today with the social, economic and political changes playing out following the explosion of communications and the internet over the past 20 years.

Within the next 10 to 20 years several dominant trends will together change almost every aspect of life as we think of it today.  Ray Kurzweil calls this “The Singularity”.

$1,000 will soon purchase a unit of computational power (calculations per second) and memory that is equivalent to the power and retention capacity of a single human brain. Some few years after that, this will buy us a computer roughly equivalent to the aggregated power of every single human brain in existence on earth today. Neurological and computer sciences are rapidly approaching complete reverse engineering of the human brain/mind/memory. The combination of these two events will give rise to seamless extension of human intelligence with artificial intelligence.

The intersections of biology, chemistry, engineering and computer sciences are progressing at an astonishing rate towards mankind’s mastery over its own physiology, life expectancy and the physical environment in which he/she continues to live and evolve. Nanotechnology will soon be working inside of us and ubiquitous in the environment around us.

In his book (The Medici Effect) Frans Johansson also points out to us that the sciences are converging. In most if not all fields of science we are finding that our basic understanding of things is close to complete.  The significant majority of new developments arise from intersections across scientific disciplines.

The movement and mixing of people globally resulting in the dissolution of cultural boundaries.

While the fundamental laws of economics remain unchanged we are likely to see a dramatic shift in the relationship between business and consumers. For six decades, big business and government have benefited from the relative luxury of maintaining a high degree of control over their consumers.  The communications revolution is shifting the balance of power in this equation. Traditional controllers of media and content are also losing their ability to control their markets and consumers.  Social frameworks are no longer constrained by the socio-economic boundaries of the past. Nor are they limited by proximity and geography. The new consumer is essentially taking significantly greater control over their choices in every aspect of their lives – including the products, commodities and services they wish to consume.  They are now living within an extended neural network empowered by the connected anywhere/anytime experience and the emerging social fabric of the network.  Whilst that network touches the people, corporations and governments who are ‘selling’ something, the balance of power (control) is shifting dramatically towards those who consume and away from those who produce.

There has never been a more important time for organizations to embrace the emergence of these emerging social and economic trends as they work to identify strategies that will create sustainable enterprises for the future.

Part 2 to follow

P.S. Dec 13th. Just saw this excellent article on TechCrunch all about “Singularity University” which is well worth the investment of your attention: maybe-there-is-hope-for-silicon-valley-and-the-world-after-all