Here, by the word “robot”, I’m using shorthand for “automation” – a mixture of improvements in hardware and software. The suggestion is that automation will continue to improve until it reaches the stage when it is cheaper for your employer to use computers and/or robots to do your job, than it is to continue employing you. This change has happened in the past with all manner of manual and/or repetitive work. Could it happen to you?

People typically have one of three reactions to this suggestion:

1. “My job is too complex, too difficult, too human-intense, etc, for a robot to be able to do it in the foreseeable future. I don’t need to worry.”
2. “My present job may indeed be outsourced to robots, but over the same time period, new kinds of job will be created, and I’ll be able to do one of these instead. I don’t need to worry.”
3. “When the time comes that robots can do all the kinds of work that I can do, better than me, we’ll be living in an economy of plenty. I won’t actually need to work – I’ll be happy to enjoy lots more leisure time. I don’t need to worry.”

Don’t need to worry? Think again. That’s effectively the message in Martin Ford’s 2009 book “The lights in the tunnel“. (If you haven’t heard of that book, perhaps it’s because the title is a touch obscure. After all, who wants to read about “lights in a tunnel”?)

The subtitle gives a better flavour of the content: “Automation, accelerating technology, and the economy of the future“. And right at the top of the front cover, there’s yet another subtitle: “A journey to the economic landscape of the coming decades“. But neither of these subtitles conveys the challenge which the book actually addresses. This is a book that points out real problems with increasing automation:

• Automation will cause increasing numbers of people to lose their current jobs
• Accelerating automation will mean that robots can quickly become able to do more jobs – their ability to improve and learn will far outpace that of human workers – so the proportion of people who are unemployed will grow and grow
• Without proper employment, a large proportion of consumers will be deprived of income, and will therefore lack the spending power which is necessary for the continuing vibrancy of the economy
• Even as technology improves, the economy will stagnate, with disastrous consequences
• This is likely to happen long before technologies such as nanotech have reached their full potential – so that any ideas of us existing at that time in an economy of plenty are flawed.

Although the author could have chosen a better title for his book, the contents are well argued, and easy to read. They deserve a much wider hearing.  They underscore the important theme that the process of ongoing technological improvement is far from being an inevitable positive.

There are essentially two core threads to the book:

• A statement of the problem – this effectively highlights issues with each of the reactions 1-3 listed earlier;
• Some tentative ideas for a possible solution.

The book looks backwards in history, as well as forwards to the future. For example, it includes interesting short commentaries on both Marx and Keynes. One of the most significant backward glances considers the case of the Luddites – the early 19th century manufacturing workers in the UK who feared that their livelihoods would be displaced by factory automation. Doesn’t history show us that such fears are groundless? Didn’t the Luddites (and their descendants) in due course find new kinds of employment? Didn’t automation create new kinds of work, at the same time as it destroyed some existing kinds of work? And won’t that continue to happen?

Well, it’s a matter of pace.  One of most striking pictures in the book is a rough sketch of the variation over time of the comparative ability of computers and humans to perform routine jobs:

As Martin Ford explains:

I’ve chosen an arbitrary point on the graph to indicate the year 1812. After that year, we can reasonably assume that human capability continued to rise quite steeply until we reach modern times. The steep part of the graph reflects dramatic improvements to our overall living conditions in the world’s more advanced countries:

• Vastly improved nutrition, public health, and environmental regulations have allowed us to remain relatively free from disease and reach our full biological potential
• Investment in literacy and in primary and secondary education, as well as access to college and advanced education for some workers, has greatly increased overall capability
• A generally richer and more varied existence, including easy access to books, media, new technologies and the ability to travel long distances, has probably had a positive impact on our ability to comprehend and deal with complex issues.

A free download of the entire book is available from the author’s website.  I’ll leave it to you to evaluate the author’s arguments for why the two curves in this sketch have the shape that they do.  To my mind, these arguments have a lot of merit.

The point where these two curves cross – potentially a few decades into the future – will represent a new kind of transition point for the economy – perhaps the mother of all economic disruptions.  Yes, there will still be some new jobs created.  Indeed, in a blogpost last year, “Accelerating automation and the future of work“, I listed 20 new occupations that people could be doing in the next 20 years:

1. Body part maker
2. Nano-medic
3. Pharmer of genetically engineered crops and livestock
4. Old age wellness manager/consultant
5. Memory augmentation surgeon
6. ‘New science’ ethicist
7. Space pilots, tour guides and architects
8. Vertical farmers
9. Climate change reversal specialist
10. Quarantine enforcer
11. Weather modification police
12. Virtual lawyer
13. Avatar manager / devotees / virtual teachers
14. Alternative vehicle developers
15. Narrowcasters
16. Waste data handler
17. Virtual clutter organiser
18. Time broker / Time bank trader
19. Social ‘networking’ worker
20. Personal branders

However, the lifetimes of these jobs (before they too can be handled by improved robots) will shrink and shrink.  For a less esoteric example, consider the likely fate of a relatively new profession, radiology.  As Martin Ford explains:

A radiologist is a medical doctor who specializes in interpreting images generated by various medical scanning technologies. Before the advent of modern computer technology, radiologists focused exclusively on X-rays. This has now been expanded to include all types of medical imaging, including CT scans, PET scans, mammograms, etc.

To become a radiologist you need to attend college for four years, and then medical school for another four. That is followed by another five years of internship and residency, and often even more specialized training after that. Radiology is one of the most popular specialties for newly minted doctors because it offers relatively high pay and regular work hours; radiologists generally don’t need to work weekends or handle emergencies.

In spite of the radiologist’s training requirement of at least thirteen additional years beyond high school, it is conceptually quite easy to envision this job being automated. The primary focus of the job is to analyze and evaluate visual images. Furthermore, the parameters of each image are highly defined since they are often coming directly from a computerized scanning device. Visual pattern recognition software is a rapidly developing field that has already produced significant results…

Radiology is already subject to significant offshoring to India and other places. It is a simple matter to transmit digital scans to an overseas location for analysis. Indian doctors earn as little as 10 percent of what American radiologists are paid… Automation will often come rapidly on the heels of offshoring, especially if the job focuses purely on technical analysis with little need for human interaction. Currently, U.S. demand for radiologists continues to expand because of the increase in use of diagnostic scans such as mammograms. However, this seems likely to slow as automation and offshoring advance and become bigger players in the future. The graduating medical students who are now rushing into radiology for its high pay and relative freedom from the annoyances of dealing with actual patients may eventually come to question the wisdom of their decision…

Radiologists are far from being the only “high-skill” occupation that is under risk from this trend.  Jobs which involve a high degree of “expert system” knowledge will come under threat from increasingly expert AI systems.  Jobs which involve listening to human speech will come under threat from increasingly accurate voice recognition systems.  And so on.

This leaves two questions:

1. Can we look forward, as some singularitarians and radical futurists assert, to incorporating increasing technological smarts within our own human nature, allowing us in a sense to merge with the robots of the future?  In that case, a scenario of “the robots will take all our jobs” might change to “substantially enhanced humans will undertake new types of work”
2. Alternatively, if robots do much more of the work needed within society, how will the transition be handled, to a society in which humans have much more leisure time?

I’ll return to the first of these questions in a subsequent blogpost.  Martin Ford’s book has a lot to say about the second of these questions.  And he recommends a series of ideas for consideration:

• Without large numbers of well-paid consumers able to purchase goods, the global economy risks going into decline, at the same time as technology has radically improved
• With fewer people working, there will be much less income tax available to governments.  Taxation will need to switch towards corporation tax and consumption taxes
• With more people receiving handouts from the state, there’s a risk of loss of many of aspects of economic structure which previously have been thought essential
• We need to give more thought, now, to ideas for differential state subsidy of different kinds of non-work activity – to incentivise certain kinds of activity.  That way, we’ll be ready for the increasing disturbances placed on our economy by the rise of the robots.

For further coverage of these and related ideas, see Martin Ford’s blog on the subject, http://econfuture.wordpress.com/.

A child born today will be immersed in a world that is, more than ever, virtual…  With a single Google search, a child has instant access to a plethora of information. With Google Earth the entire globe can be navigated with little travel-cost endured. And languages can be translated without a single understanding of the complex linguistics of other cultures…

These words are taken from the blog for the forthcoming University of Warwick Virtual Futures 2.0’11 conference.  The stated theme of the conference is “Digital natives: fear of the flesh?”.  The phrase “digital native” refers to someone young enough (in body or in spirit) to find themselves at home in the fast-evolving digital connected world.

But is anyone truly at home in this world?  The author of the blog, Luke Robert Mason, continues as follows, drawing on comments made by performance artist Stelarc who took part in an earlier Virtual Futures conference:

But this virtual world is also plagued by complexity – a complexity born of information which the  biological brain is not designed to comprehend.  As performance artist Stelarc stated in his early work, “It is time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1400cc brain is an adequate biological form. It cannot cope with the quantity, complexity and quality of information it has accumulated; it is intimidated by the precision, speed and power of technology and it is biologically ill-equipped to cope with its new extraterrestrial environment.”

The Virtual Futures 2.0 conference rekindles a series of trailblazing conferences that the University of Warwick hosted in 1994, 1995, and 1996, attracting upwards of 300 attendees:

These conferences questioned the future possibility of the ‘virtual’ and alluded towards the impact of emerging technologies on society and culture. They were, at their time, revolutionary…

The topics discussed at the conferences in the 90’s included chaos theory, geopolitics, feminism, nanotechnology, cyberpunk fiction, machine music, net security, military strategy, plastic surgery, hacking, bio-computation, cognition, cryptography & capitalism. These topics are still poignant today with perhaps the addition of genetics, bio-engineering, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, bio-ethics and social media.

Call for papers

The conference organisers have now issued a call for papers:

The revival aims to reignite the debates over the implications of new and future communication technologies on art, society and politics. The conference will take place on the 18th-19th June 2011 and include paper presentations, panels, performances, screenings and installations.

We welcome researchers, scholars and artists to submit proposals for papers and/or performances around this year’s theme of: “Digital Natives: Fear of the Flesh?”…

Please send proposals (250 words max) to papers@virtualfutures.co.uk by 1st May 2011.

Interested in presenting or performing at the event?  As for myself, I’m preparing a proposal to speak at the conference.  I’m thinking about speaking on the topic “Beyond super phones to super humans – a journey along the spectrum of personal commitment to radical technological transformation“.

I like the conference focus on “digital natives” but I’m less convinced about the “Fear of the flesh?” coda.  Yes, my human flesh has lots of limitations.  But I look ahead to far-reaching bodily improvement, rather than to leaving my flesh altogether behind.  Other radical futurists, in contrast, seem to eagerly anticipate a time when their mind will be entirely uploaded into a virtual world.  There’s ground for lots of debate here:

• Are these visions credible?
• Are these visions desirable?
• How should such visions be evaluated, in a world full of pressing everyday problems?
• Which of these personal futures should we prioritise?

No doubt these questions, along with many others, will be tackled at the event.

Note: Virtual Futures 2.0 is organised at the University of Warwick with support from the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning, the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies, and the Centre for History of Medicine, in association with Humanity+ UK.

Here are my comments on five books I’ve finished over the last few months, each of which has given me a lot to think about.

Switch: How to change things when change is hard – by Chip & Dan Heath

I had two reasons for expecting I would like this book:

• I’ve often described the previous book written by this pair of brothers, Chip and Dan Heath, “Made to stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” as being perhaps “the best book on communications and presentations that I have ever read“; if this new book had anything like the same calibre, I would be in for a treat
• The book turns out to be based around a central metaphor from another of my all-time favourite books, Jon Haidt’s “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom“: this is the metaphor of a human being like a rider (a rational mind, with limited strength) seated on top of an elephant (which has much greater strength and – often – its own set of motivations).

I was not disappointed.  The book is full of advice that seems highly practical – advice that can be used to overcome all kinds of obstacles that people encounter when trying to change something for the better.  The book helpfully lists some of these obstacles in a summary chapter near its end.  They include:

• “People here don’t see the need for change”
• “People resist my idea because they say, ‘We’ve never done it like that before’”
• “We should do doing something, but we’re getting bogged down in analysis”
• “The environment has shifted, and we need to overcome our old patterns of behaviour”
• “People here simply aren’t motivated to change”
• “People here keep saying ‘It will never work’”
• “I know what I should be doing, but I’m not doing it”
• “I’ll change tomorrow”…

Each chapter has profound insights.  I particularly liked the insight that, from the right perspective, the steps to create a solution are often easier than the problem itself.  This is a pleasant antidote to the oft-repeated assertion that solutions need to be more profound, more complex, or more sophisticated, that the problems they address.  On the contrary, change efforts frequently fail because the change effort is focussing on the wrong part of the big picture.  You can try to influence either the “rider”, the “elephant”, or the “path” down which the elephant moves.  Spend your time trying to influence the wrong part of this combo, and you can waste a great deal of energy.  But get the analysis right, and even people who appear to hate change can embrace a significant transformation.  It all depends on the circumstance.

The book offers nine practical steps – three each for the three different parts of this model:

• Direct the rider: Find the bright spots; Script the critical moves; Point to the destination
• Motivate the elephant: Find the feeling; Shrink the change; Grow your people
• Shape the path: Tweak the environment; Build habits; Rally the herd.

These steps may sound trite, but these simple words summarise, in each case, a series of inspirational examples of real-world change.

The happiness advantage: The seven principles of positive psychology that fuel success and performance at work – by Shawn Achor

“The happiness advantage” shares with “Switch” the fact that it is rooted in the important emerging discipline of positive psychology.  But whereas “Switch” addresses the particular area of change management, “The happiness advantage” has a broader sweep.  It seeks to show how a range of recent findings from positive psychology can be usefully applied in a work setting, to boost productivity and performance.  The author, Shawn Achor, describes many of these findings in the context of the 10 years he spent at Harvard.  These findings include:

• Rather than the model in which people work hard and then achieve success and then become happy, the causation goes the other way round: people with a happy outlook are more creative, more resilient, and more productive, are able to work both harder and smarter, and are therefore more likely to achieve success in their work (Achor compares this reversal of causation to the “Copernican revolution” which saw the sun as the centre of the solar system, rather than the earth)
• Our character (including our degree of predisposition to a happy outlook) is not fixed, but can be changed by activity – this is an example of neural plasticity
• “The Tetris effect”: once you train your brain to spot positive developments (things that merit genuine praise), that attitude increasingly becomes second nature, with lots of attendant benefits
• Rather than a vibrant social support network being a distraction from our core activities, it can provide us with the enthusiasm and the community to make greater progress
• “Falling up”: the right mental attitude can gain lots of advantage from creative responses to situations of short-term failure
• “The Zorro circle”: rather than focussing on large changes, which could take a long time to accomplish, there’s great merit in restricting attention to a short period of time (perhaps one hour, or perhaps just five minutes), and to a small incremental improvement on the status quo.  Small improvements can accumulate a momentum of their own, and lead on to big wins!
• Will power is limited – and is easily drained.  So, follow the “20 second rule”: take the time to rearrange your environment – such as your desk, or your office – so that the behaviour you’d like to happen is the easiest (“the default”).  When you’re running on auto-pilot, anything that requires a detour of more than 20 seconds is much less likely to happen.  (Achor gives the example of taking the batteries out of his TV remote control, to make it less likely he would sink into his sofa on returning home and inadvertently watch TV, rather than practice the guitar as he planned.  And – you guessed it – he made sure the guitar was within easy reach.)

You might worry that this is “just another book about the power of positive thinking”.  However, I see it as a definite step beyond that genre.  This is not a book that seeks to paint on a happy face, or to pretend that problems don’t exist.  As Achor says, “Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change.  It is the realization that we can”.

Nonsense on stilts: how to tell science from bunk – by Massimo Pigliucci

Many daft, dangerous ideas are couched in language that sounds scientific.  Being able to distinguish good science from “pseudoscience” is sometimes called the search for a “demarcation principle“.

The author of this book, evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci, has strong views about the importance of distinguishing science from pseudoscience.  To set the scene, he gives disturbing examples such as people who use scientific-sounding language to deny the connection between HIV and AIDS (and who often advocate horrific, bizarre treatments for AIDS), or who frighten parents away from vaccinating their children by quoting spurious statistics about links between vaccination and autism.  This makes it clear that the subject is far from being an academic one, just for armchair philosophising.  On the other hand, attempts by philosophers of science such as Karl Popper to identify a clear, watertight demarcation principle all seem to fail.  Science is too varied an enterprise to be capable of a simple definition.  As a result, it can take lots of effort to distinguish good science from bad science.  Nevertheless, this effort is worth it.  And this book provides a sweeping, up-to-date survey of the issues that arise.

The book brought me back to my own postgraduate studies from 1982-1986.  My research at that time covered the philosophy of mind, the characterisation of pseudo-science, creationism vs. Darwinism, and the shocking implications of quantum mechanics.  All four of these areas were covered in this book – and more besides.

It’s a book with many opinions.  I think it gets them about 85% right.  I particularly liked:

• His careful analysis of why “Intelligent Design” is bad science
• His emphasis on how pseudoscience produces no new predictions, but is intellectually infertile
• His explanation of the problems of parapsychology (studies of extrasensory perception)
• The challenges he lays down to various fields which appear grounded in mainstream science, but which are risking divergence away from scientific principles – fields such as superstring theory and SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence).

Along the way, Pigliucci shares lots of fascinating anecdotes about the history of science, and about the history of philosophy of science.  He’s a great story-teller.

The master switch: the rise and fall of information empires – by Tim Wu

Whereas “Nonsense on stilts” surveys the history of science, and draws out lessons about the most productive ways to continue to find out deeper truths about the world, “The master switch” surveys many aspects of the modern history of business, and draws out lessons about the most productive ways to organise society so that information can be shared in the most effective way.

The author, Tim Wu, is a professor at Columbia Law School, and (if anything) is an even better story-teller than Pigliucci.  He gives rivetting accounts of many of the key episodes in various information businesses, such as those based on the telephone, radio, TV, cinema, cable TV, the personal computer, and the Internet.  Lots of larger-than-life figures stride across the pages.  The accounts fit together as constituents of an over-arching narrative:

• Control over information technologies is particularly important for the well-being of society
• There are many arguments in favour of centralised control, which avoids wasteful inefficiencies of competition
• Equally, there are many arguments in favour of decentralised control, with open access to the various parts of the system
• Many information industries went through one (or more phases) of decentralised control, with numerous innovators working independently, before centralisation took place (or re-emerged)
• Government regulation sometimes works to protect centralised infrastructure, and sometimes to ensure that adequate competition takes place
• Opening up an industry to greater competition often introduces a period of relative chaos and increased prices for consumers, before the greater benefits of richer innovation have a chance to emerge (often in unexpected ways)
• The Internet is by no means the first information industry for which commentators had high, idealistic hopes: similar near-utopian visions also accompanied the emergence of broadcast radio and of cable television
• A major drawback of centralised control is that too much power is vested in just one place – in what can be called a “master switch” – allowing vested interests to drastically interfere with the flow of information.

AT&T – the company founded by Bell – features prominently in this book, both as a hero, and as a villain.  Wu describes how AT&T suppressed various breakthrough technologies (including magnetic disk recording, usable in answering machines) for many years, out of a fear that they would damage the company’s main business.  Similarly, RCA suppressed FM radio for many years, and also delayed the adoption of electronic television.  Legal delays were often a primary means to delay and frustrate competitors, whose finances lacked such deep pockets.

Wu often highlights ways in which business history could have taken different directions.  The outcome that actually transpired was often a close-run thing, compared to what seemed more likely at the time.  This emphasises the contingent nature of much of history, rather than events being inevitable.  (I know this from my own experiences at Symbian.  Recent articles in The Register emphasise how Symbian nearly died at birth, well before powering more than a quarter of a billion smartphones.  Other stories, as yet untold, could emphasise how the eventual relative decline of Symbian was by no means a foretold conclusion either.)

But the biggest implications Wu highlights are when the stories come up to date, in what he sees as a huge conflict between powers that want to control modern information technology resources, and those that prefer greater degrees of openness.  As Wu clarifies, it’s a complex landscape, but Apple’s iPhone approach aims at greater centralised design control, whereas Google’s Android approach aims at enabling a much wider number of connections – connections where many benefits arise, without the need to negotiate and maintain formal partnerships.

Compared to previous information technologies, the Internet has greater elements of decentralisation built into it.  However, the lessons of the previous chapters in “The master switch” are that even this decentralisation is vulnerable to powerful interests seizing control and changing its nature.  That gives greater poignancy to present-day debates over “network neutrality” – a term that was coined by Wu in a paper he wrote in 2002.

Sex at dawn: the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality – by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha

(Sensitive readers should probably stop reading now…)

In terms of historical sweep, this last book outdoes all the others on my list.  It traces the origins of several modern human characteristics far into prehistory – to the time before agriculture, when humans existed as nomadic hunter-gatherers, with little sense of personal exclusive ownership.

This book reminds me of this oft-told story:

It is said that when the theory of evolution was first announced it was received by the wife of the Canon of Worcester Cathedral with the remark, “Descended from the apes! My dear, we will hope it is not true. But if it is, let us pray that it may not become generally known.”

I’ve read a lot on evolution over the years, and I think the evidence husband and wife authors Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha accumulate chapter after chapter, in “Sex at dawn”, is reasonably convincing – even though elements of present day “polite society” may well prefer this evidence not to become “generally known”.  The authors tell a story with many jaw-dropping episodes.

Among other things, the book systematically challenges the famous phrase from Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan that, absent a government, people would lead lives that were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.  On the contrary, the book marshals evidence, direct and indirect, that pre-agricultural people could enjoy relatively long lives, with ample food, and a strong sense of community.  Key to this mode of existence was “fierce sharing”, in which everyone felt a strong obligation to share food within the group … and not only food.  The X-rated claim in the book is that the sharing extended to “parallel multi-male, multi-female sexual relationships”, which bolstered powerful community identities.  Monogamy is, therefore, far from being exclusively “natural”.  Evidence in support of this conclusion includes:

• Comparisons to behaviour in bonobos and chimps – the apes which are our closest evolutionary cousins
• The practice in several contemporary nomadic tribes, in which children are viewed as having many fathers
• Various human anatomical features, copulatory behaviour, aspects of sperm wars, etc.

In this analysis, human sexual nature developed under one set of circumstances for several million years, until dramatic changes in relatively recent times with the advent of agriculture, cities, and widespread exclusive ownership.  Social philosophies (including religions) have sought to change the norms of behaviour, with mixed success.

I’ll leave the last words to Ryan and Jetha, from their online FAQ:

We’re not recommending anything other than knowledge, introspection, and honesty. In fact, as we say in the book, we’re not really sure what to do with this information ourselves.

While indeed there are economies of scale, there are countervailing costs of complexity – the more product families produced in a plant, the higher the overhead burden rates.

That sentence comes from page 92 of “The Innovator’s Prescription: A disruptive solution for health care“, co-authored by Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman, and Jason Hwang.  Like all the books authored (or co-authored) by Christensen, the book is full of implications for fields outside the particularly industry being discussed.

In the case of this book, the subject matter is critically important in its own right: how can we find ways to allow technological breakthroughs to reduce the spiralling costs of healthcare?

In the book, the authors brilliantly extend and apply Christensen’s well-known ideas on disruptive change to the field of healthcare.  But the book should be recommended reading for anyone interested in either strategy or operational effectiveness in any hi-tech industry.  (It’s also recommended reading for anyone interested in the future of medicine – which probably includes all of us, since most of us can anticipate spending increasing amounts of time in hospitals or doctor’s surgeries as we become older.)

I’m still less than half way through reading this book, but the section I’ve just read seems to speak loudly to issues in the mobile industry, as well as to the healthcare industry.

It describes a manufacturing plant which was struggling with overhead costs.  At this plant, 6.2 dollars were spent in overhead expenses for every dollar spend on direct labour:

These overhead costs included not just utilities and depreciation, but the costs of scheduling, expediting, quality control, repair and rework, scrap maintenance, materials handling, accounting, computer systems, and so on.  Overhead comprised all costs that were not directly spent in making products.

The quality of products made at that plant was also causing concern:

About 15 percent of all overhead costs were created by the need to repair and rework products that failed in the field, or had been discovered by inspectors as faulty before shipment.

However, it didn’t appear to the manager that any money was being wasted:

The plant hadn’t been painted inside or out in 20 years.  The landscaping was now overrun by weeds.  The receptionist in the bare-bones lobby had been replaced long ago with a paper directory and a phone.  The manager had no secretarial assistance, and her gray World War II vintage steel desk was dented by a kick from some frustrated predecessor.

Nevertheless, this particular plant had considerably higher overhead burden rates than the other plants from the same company.  What was the difference?

The difference was in the complexity.  This particular plant was set up to cope with large numbers of different product designs, whereas the other plants (which had been created later) had been able to optimise for particular design families.

The original plant essentially had the value proposition,

We’ll make any product that anyone designs

In contrast, the newer plants had the following kind of value proposition:

If you need a product that can be made through one of these two sequences of operations and activities, we’ll do it for you at the lowest possible cost and the highest possible quality.

Further analysis, across a number of different plants, reached the following results:

Each time the scale of a plant doubled, holding the degree of pathway complexity constant, the overhead rate could be expected to fall by 15 percent.  So, for example, a plant that made two families and generated $40 million in sales would be expected to have an overhead burden ratio of about 2.85, while the burden rate for a plant making two families with $80 million in sales would be 15% lower (2.85 x 0.85 = 2.42).  But every time the number of families produced in a plant of a given scale doubled, the overhead burden rate soared 27 percent.  So if a two-pathway, $40 million plant accepted products that required two additional pathways, but that did not increase its sales volume, its overhead burden rate would increase by 2.85 x 1.27, to 3.62…

This is just one aspect of a long and fascinating analysis.  Modern day general purpose hospitals support huge numbers of different patient care pathways, so high overhead rates are inevitable.  The solution is to allow the formation of separate specialist units, where practitioners can then focus on iteratively optimising particular lines of healthcare.  We can already see this in firms that specialise in laser eye surgery, in hernia treatment, and so on.  Without these new units separating and removing some of the complexity of the original unit, it becomes harder and harder for innovation to take place.  The innovation becomes stifled under conflicting business models.  (I’m simplifying the argument here: please take a look at the book for the full picture.)

In short: reducing overhead costs isn’t just a matter of “eliminating obvious inefficiencies, spending less time on paperwork, etc”.  It often requires initially painful structural changes, in which overly complex multi-function units are simplified by the removal and separation of business lines and product pathways.  Only with the new, simplified set up – often involving new companies, and sometimes involving “creative destruction” – can disruptive innovations flourish.

Rising organisational complexity impacts the mobile industry too.  I’ve written about this before.  For example, in May last year I wrote an article “Platform strategy failure modes“:

The first failure mode is when a device manufacturer fails to have a strategy towards mobile software platforms.  In this case, the adage holds true that a failure to strategise is a strategy to fail.  A device manufacturer that simply “follows the wind” – picking platform P1 for device D1 because customer C1 expressed a preference for P1, picking platform P2 for device D2 because customer C2 expressed a preference for P2, etc – is going to find that the effort of interacting successfully with all these different platforms far exceeds their expectations.  Mobile software platforms require substantial investment from manufacturers, before the manufacturer can reap commercial rewards from these platforms.  (Getting a device ready to demo is one thing.  That can be relatively easy.  Getting a device approved to ship onto real networks – a device that is sufficiently differentiated to stand out from a crowd of lookalike devices – can take a lot longer.)

The second failure mode is similar to the first one.  It’s when a device manufacturer spreads itself  too thinly across multiple platforms.  In the previous case, the manufacturer ended up working with multiple platforms, without consciously planning that outcome.  In this case, the manufacturer knows what they are doing.  They reason to themselves as follows:

• We are a highly competent company;
• We can manage to work with (say) three significant mobile software platforms;
• Other companies couldn’t cope with this diversification, but we are different.

But the outcome is the same as the previous case, even though different thinking gets the manufacturer into that predicament.  The root failure is, again, a failure to appreciate the scale and complexity of mobile software platforms.  These platforms can deliver tremendous value, but require significant ongoing skill and investment to yield that kind of result.

The third failure mode is when a manufacturer seeks re-use across several different mobile software platforms.  The idea is that components (whether at the application or system level) are developed in a platform-agnostic way, so they can fit into each platform equally well.

To be clear, this is a fine goal.  Done right, there are big dividends.  But my observation is that this strategy is hard to get right.  The strategy typically involves some kind of additional “platform independent layer”, that isolates the software in the component from the particular programming interfaces of the underlying platform.  However, this additional layer often introduces its own complications…

Seeking clever economies of scale is commendable.  But there often comes time when growing scale is bedevilled by growing complexity.  It’s as mentioned at the beginning of this article:

While indeed there are economies of scale, there are countervailing costs of complexity – the more product families produced in a plant, the higher the overhead burden rates.

Even more than a drive to scale, companies in the mobile space need a drive towards simplicity. That means organisational simplicity as well as product simplicity.

As I stated in my article “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity“:

The inherent complexity of present-day smartphones risks all kinds of bad outcomes:

• Smartphone device creation projects may become time-consuming and delay-prone, and the smartphones themselves may compromise on quality in order to try to hit a fast-receding market window;
• Smartphone application development may become difficult, as developers need to juggle different programming interfaces and optimisation methods;
• Smartphone users may fail to find the functionality they believe is contained (somewhere!) within their handset, and having found that functionality, they may struggle to learn how to use it.

In short, smartphone system complexity risks impacting manufacturability, developability, and usability.  The number one issue for the mobile industry, arguably, is to constantly find better ways to tame this complexity.

The companies that are successfully addressing the complexity issue seem, on the whole, to be the ones on the rise in the mobile space.

Footnote: It’s a big claim, but it may well be true that of all the books on the subject of innovation in the last 20 years, Clayton’s Christensen’s writings are the most consistently important.  The subtitle of his first book, “The innovator’s dilemma”, is a reminder why: “When new technologies cause great firms to fail“.

I’ll be helping to lead a discussion at the recently formed “Oxford Transhumanists” group.

The event is described as follows on Facebook:

Far beyond smartphones

A transhumanist view of where the accelerating pace of technology is taking us

Technological improvements in fields such as semiconductors, software, AI, nanotech, and synthetic biology, over the next 20 years, open opportunities for radical changes in the human condition – at both the personal and societal levels.

Are these prospects a fantasy, or something to be feared, or something to be embraced?

This talk provides an introduction to disruptive but deeply important concepts such as artificial general intelligence, human rejuvenation engineering, intelligence augmentation, exponentially accelerated change, and the technological singularity.

These concepts involve large potential downsides as well as large potential upsides. It’s critical that we anticipate these issues ahead of time.

During the meeting, there will be plenty of opportunity to raise questions and to contribute to the debate.

In case you happen to be near Oxford that evening, and the above topics interest you, feel free to join the meeting!

1. Google Stack
2. Mobile App Stores
3. HTML5
4. A New FCC
5. Streaming Music
6. The Real-Time Web
7. Augmented Reality

You can read the details on Wired.com.  It’s a pretty good list: all the items included are important.

To nitpick, it’s not clear that they all count as “disruptive” rather than “evolutionary”.  And it seems at least some of the items are on the list because of what they’ll accomplish in 2010 rather than in 2009.   Never mind.

Wired asks: “What did we miss?”

With the same two provisos as before, I offer four additional candidates for inclusion:

1.) Mobile maps

Mobile maps seem to be getting better and better, and to be used more and more widely.  With 3D as well as 2D, with improved routing, and with plug-in integration from numerous third party apps and services, this trend is likely to continue.

2.) Mobile payments

From the perspective of the so-called developed world, use of mobile phones in payment transactions still seems relatively unexciting.  But from the perspective of the developing world – in countries where bank accounts and credit cards are comparatively scarce – mobile payments are already making a decisive difference.

3.) User Experience

For a while, technologists could tell themselves that good user experience (UX) was an optional extra, necessary for some mobile products but not for all.  This view is fading fast.  It’s now clear that users have become aware that good UX is possible on mobile – even for complex services – and they have an increasingly dim view of any mobile product that score weakly on UX.

4.) Open Source

It’s still early days for people to see the benefits of applying open source methods to creating mobile tools, applications, services, middleware, and (last but far from least) to improve the underlying platform.  But the transformational potential is enormous  – both in the improvements that end users will notice, and in the skillsets best suited to take advantage of the new innovation engine.  For further discussion of these points, see my recent presentation “Open ecosystems: a good thing?” (PDF) to the Cambridge Wireless network.

Every time I think about Nokia and Symbian, I can’t help picturing a man knee-deep in molasses, running as fast as he can. He’s working up a sweat, thrashing and stumbling forward, and proudly points out that for someone knee-deep in molasses he’s making really good time…

The posting is entitled “Nokia: Running in molasses“. It arose from Mike reflecting on some of what he heard at the recent Symbian Partner Event (SPE) in San Francisco. The posting is well worth reading. I appreciate the issues that Mike raises. These issues are significant. But as you might expect, I have a somewhat different perspective on some of them.

Large software doesn’t mean that software development has to go slow

Charles Davies, Symbian CTO, pointed out to us that Symbian OS has about 450,000 source files. That’s right, half a million files. They’re organized into 85 “packages”…

There are economies of scale as well as dis-economies of scale. The point of the careful division of the Symbian Platform software into packages is to enable each of the resulting packages to have greater autonomy – and, therefore, to progress more quickly.

There’s one subtle point here. Many of the packages include teams from both Symbian and from S60. This applies to cases where the separation of functionality between the two formerly distinct companies resulted in sub-optimal development. Now that Nokia’s acquisition of Symbian has completed, these boundaries can be intelligently re-designed.

Disruption, size, and organisational design

This brings me to a comment on the ideas of Clayton Christensen. Here’s another extract from Mike Mace’s article:

If the folks at Nokia really think they are well positioned to crush Apple, they need to go re-read The Innovator’s Dilemma. Being big is not a benefit in a rapidly-changing market with emerging segments.

Agreed, being big is no guarantee of being able to respond well to changing market conditions. That’s why I’m personally a big fan of Agile. Agile can help established companies (whether large or small) to launch and embrace disruptions. As Scott Anthony, one of Christensen’s co-authors, has recently commented in his article “Can Established Companies Disrupt?“:

The data suggests that it is increasingly common for an established company to launch disruptive innovations. More and more incumbents are learning how to embrace disruptive principles such as:

• Put the customer, and their important, unsatisfied job-to-be-done at the center of the innovation equation
• Embrace the power of simplicity, convenience, and affordability
• Create organizational space for disruptive growth businesses
• Consider innovation levers beyond features and functions
• Become world class at testing, iterating and adjusting

As I said, being big can have its advantages as well as its disadvantages, so long as individual parts of the company have sufficient autonomy. The hard part is knowing when to seek closer ties, and when to seek looser ties. One of Christensen’s later books had some very interesting advice on that score. I can’t remember for sure whether that book was “The Innovator’s Solution” or “Seeing What’s Next“. The advice was that where performance remains a critical differentiator, you should look for a tight coupling. Where performance is already “good enough”, you should seek a loose coupling – with open APIs and a choice of alternative solutions.

As soon as I read these words, some time around 2003-2004, I had a gut reaction that, one day, the relevant teams in Symbian software engineering and S60 software engineering ought to be combined. It took a long time for that insight to be fulfilled. But now that it’s happening, there’s plenty of good reason to expect the resulting combined company to start accelerating its development.

Development in parallel with change

Back to Mike Mace, commenting on the SPE presentation by Charles Davies:

Davies talked about the substantial challenges involved in open sourcing a code base that large. He said it will take up to another two years before all of the code is released under the Eclipse license. In the meantime, a majority of the code on launch day of the foundation will be in a more restrictive license that requires registration and a payment of $1,500 for access. There’s also a small amount of third party copyrighted code within Symbian, and the foundation is trying to either get the rights to that code, or figure a way to make it available in binary format.

Those are all typical problems when a project is moving to open source, and the upshot of them is that Symbian won’t be able to get the full benefits of its move to open source until quite a while after the foundation is launched. What slows the process down is the amount of code that Symbian and Nokia have to move. I believe that Symbian OS is probably the largest software project ever taken from closed to open source. If you’ve ever dealt with moving code to open source, you’ll know how staggeringly complex the legal reviews are. What Nokia and Symbian are doing is heroic, scary, and incredibly tedious. It’s like, well, running in molasses.

I have four comments on this:

1. Even though the full transition to open source may take up to two years from the initial announcement of the foundation (that is, until mid 2010), there are plenty of other things happening in the meantime – with a series of interim releases that progressively convert more of the software from the community-source Symbian Foundation Licence to the open-source Ecliplse Public Licence;
2. There will be new technologies and new UI features in these interim releases;
3. The interim releases should already achieve at least some of the considerable benefits of both open source and community source; the first packages which will become available under the EPL are being chosen so that independent developers can do useful things with some of them (including contributing back working code enhancements);
4. The legal reviews may initially seem daunting, but with the help of modern code-scanning tools and with the advantage of “practice makes perfect”, the process is likely to speed up considerably along the way.

Cool stuff in the lab

Mike ends the main part of his article as follows:

Nokia still has a lot of time to get it right. But do they really understand what needs to change? I can’t tell, because all I usually get from them is monologues on how big their business is and how much cool stuff they have in the lab.

I accept that analysts must inevitably hedge their bets, regarding the extent of future success of the main mobile operating systems, until a period of proving over the next 12-24 months has shown what these operating systems can actually accomplish. I eagerly look forward to the day when more of the Symbian and Nokia roadmap of stunning new technology, new services, and new user experience attains greater visibility. When that happens, analysts are likely to come down off the hedge.

My own expectation is that the moves to integrate Symbian and Nokia, and to create the Symbian Foundation, will see a substantial speed up of innovation over that time period. But I’m not taking this for granted. After all, I’m well aware of the original subtitle of “The Innovator’s Dilemma”: “When new technologies cause great firms to fail“.

At first sight, strong market leadership should count for a lot. It should trigger a virtuous cycle effect. More phones should attract more developers (who are interested in their apps running on large numbers of phones) which should result in more software tailored to that platform, which should in turn increase the attractiveness of these phones to end users. And that should result in even more phones being sold, and so on – virtuous cycle.

And in reality, a powerful virtuous cycle effect does exist. An experienced and sophisticated ecosystem (“ES”) has grown up around the Symbian operating system (“OS”) and is continuously adding more value to this platform. The OS-ES virtuous cycle does work. However, it’s not invulnerable.

The history of the technology industry is full of examples of companies who were in similar leadership positions to that currently held by Symbian, but whose markets were transformed by disruptive new entrants. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen is deservedly applauded for his description and analysis of how market disruption takes place:

• Celebrated examples include how the leading providers of mini-computers, such as DEC, Data General, Wang, Nixdorf, and Prime, failed to appreciate the significance of the initially small market that grew up around fledgling personal computers. These manufacturers saw little profit in that market. But when PC technology improved and the surrounding ecosystem matured, it was too late for these erstwhile computing giants to take leading roles in the new industry (despite lots of effort which they eventually but unsuccessfully expended on that new cause).
• An earlier example, also told by Christensen (in “Seeing what’s next: using theories of innovation to predict industry change“), concerns the disruption caused by the invention of the telephone to the communications industry of that era (1870s): market leader Western Union evaluated the new technology created by Alexander Graham Bell, but concluded it lacked the power to handle the long-range business communications from which the company made most of its profits. Again, technology improved and new business relationships formed, faster than Western Union could respond – with Western Union being plunged into decline as a result.

And there’s more. MIT professor James Utterback elegantly recounts many intriguing and salutary examples in his book “Mastering the dynamics of innovation: How Companies Can Seize Opportunities in the Face of Technological Change”. The book shows how familiar technologies such as refrigeration, electrical lighting, and plate glass, were all clear underdogs at the time of their initial market introduction, and faced serious competition from entrenched industrial alliances whose technologies (such as large-scale ice transportation, or gas lighting) themselves appeared to be regularly improving.

Could the iPhone fit into a similar pattern? It might. There are possible futures in which, say, more than half of all phones sold in the world have iPhone technology inside them. I don’t see that as the most likely future – far from it! – but it does have a certain logic to it:

1. The iPhone is in many ways a simpler product proposition than existing smartphones (just as PCs were simpler than mini-computers). There are considerably fewer applications built into the iPhone than you can find in a standard S60 phone. That relative simplicity means that some feature-focused users will decide not to use the device. But the device taps into a new market that is arguably underserved by previous offerings. This is the very considerable market of users who don’t need every bell and whistle in feature-packed smartphones, but who are ready for a better experience than can be had from ordinary phones.
2. The iPhone uses physical components that “break the rules” regarding cost: they’re considerably more expensive to manufacture than most other smartphones, and this makes the device more expensive to purchase. However, again, it may be that now is the right time to break this rule: a greater number of users may be willing to bear this additional cost (in view of the additional benefits that buys them).
3. The iPhone isn’t growing its ecosystem from scratch; it can benefit from a crossover effect from various components that were already in place in Apple’s pre-iPhone product offerings. Principally, the highly-evolved iTunes distribution mechanism plays a big part in ensuring a good end-user experience with the iPhone.
4. The iPhone has put special emphasis upon a number of usability aspects, including the graphics “wow”, the UI itself, the mobile web browsing experience, and the discovery and installation of new applications. Users have been drawn to these aspects of the device, even though the device lacks other aspects that are present (and well-evolved) in other smartphones.
5. Despite what some critics have said, these innovations aren’t (all) easy for other companies to copy. The “look” can be mimicked, but the “feel” is the result of countless small design and implementation details, that are anchored in a sophisticated underlying software system.

For another analogy, the iPhone is similar to the initial Palm Pilot devices, which fared much better in the market than earlier attempts at pen-input handheld devices. The Palm Pilot delivered less than these other devices (such as the Apple Newton, the Casio Zoomer, and the General Magic “Magic Cap”) but provided a much more usable experience.

So, let’s evaluate this scenario. Do disruptive new market entrants always succeed in reaching market leadership position? Of course not. Although it is difficult for market leaders to respond to this kind of change of rules in their industry, it’s not impossible.

Here’s one counter-example: Microsoft and the Internet. Initally, it did look as though Netscape was succeeding in building an impregnable position by bringing a compelling new product to market in an area that Microsoft had previously ignored – an Internet browser. But Microsoft managed to turn around the situation, by dint of two measures:

1. Clear internal recognition, from the highest leadership, of the fundamentally changing market landscape
2. Swift and effective execution, continued over many years.

I’m loathe to compare Nokia/Symbian to Microsoft, but in this case the comparison has merits.

What’s more, I expect that it will become clear, over the next year or so, just how much the Symbian Foundation is itself changing the rules of the mobile industry – and (crucially) enabling companies who use this software to change the rules even further. If you think the iPhone is innovative, you’re right, but you ain’t seen nothing yet.