Economics

Le dodici tecnologie dirompenti

Sep 4, 2013 Erik Brynjolfsson , Andrew McAfee, and James Manyika

SAN FRANCISCO – La storia è ricca di tecnologie acclamate come la nuova grande innovazione. Ciò può diventare irritante per i consumatori quando si rendono conto di aver buttato via i soldi ad esempio comprando un impianto stereo quadrofonico. Ma quando sono le aziende a scommettere sulle tecnologie sbagliate, allora le conseguenze possono essere addirittura devastanti per loro.

Alla fine degli anni ’90 si credeva, ad esempio, che gli scambi B2B sarebbero diventati l’applicazione decisiva per il commercio, mentre si è arrivati a crearne solo 1.500. Molti di questi sono poi scomparsi bruciando miliardi di dollari di investimenti.

Per ridurre il martellamento pubblicitario legato all’arrivo di quasi tutte le nuove tecnologie, il McKinsey Global Institute ha esaminato più di 100 tecnologie in rapido sviluppo e ne ha individuate 12 in grado, quasi sicuramente, di cambiare lo status quo nei prossimi anni. L’MGI prevede che l’impatto economico combinato annuale di questa “dozzina di tecnologie dirompenti” (che spaziano dall’informatica, alle apparecchiature e ai veicoli, all’energia, alla bioscienza e ai materiali) arriverà a 14-33 trilioni di dollari entro il 2025. Gran parte del valore (e in molti casi, una maggioranza consistente), sarà molto probabilmente destinata ai consumatori.

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Nathan Coppedge Dec 8, 2013

Both in the article, and in Laventurier's comments, I find seedlings of the idea that citizenship has a lot to do with these issues. For example, the concept of modular citizenship: the cheap, valuable, equipped, mobile citizens of the future plug into technologies and exploit them. In fantastic terms, these might be like Silicon Valley start-ups that only require QOL benefits for compensation. Some of this is being realized already with crowd-sourcing (a word that I think has become taboo in the upper circles, because it is an unstated dependence. Or I could be wrong. Perhaps it is still being under-used). There is probably a sense of information overload hitting the upper levels, as a lapse transpires between consumer-creations and consumer-applications. Yet, this is still the vital juice of things to come. As usual, little secrets add up to a new mythology or role-playing game of possibilities.

One key will be to standardize the available integral circuit (metaphorically, the interface between the citizen and the future social platform such as architecture and other environments), so that new technologies appear like visions from the future, that automatically integrate to some degree with other emergent technologies. The recent failure of this trend or possibility is felt in the relatively slow or non-integrated emergence of the self-printing industry. Yet it has the common element of modular parts. I'll tell you what I think about modular parts: we need more permanent, more perfect technology, and we need more virtual consumption. The only way to do this is to improve the physical, technical infrastructure, and to more greatly perfect information.

There are several jumping off points for ideas of the future, and they are not all recent. For example, architecture has responded to concepts of futurism for at least 100 years, although it has not always responded to hand-held technologies, it has certainly responded to technological meaning. Many new technological ideas can be traced backwards to basic, emergent concepts in architecture, although sometimes the architecture that it comes from is already a figure of the past.

For example, we will ultimately depend on the kind of ornateness that exists in Gothic cathedrals, and the Alhambra. But these are no longer the form of architecture. Therefore, we make the mistake of distancing ourselves from its significance. However, more recent architecture is even more prescient and subtle. Modular concrete emerged relatively recently and is still considered prohibitively expensive for small budgets. Modularity is a brilliant technical concept that can be applied to information, organization, and planning. It is just as important as hieratics and historical indexing.

Even without new political concepts, people reach out for a new idea. The first instinct is to declare that old ideas are dead and new ideas are uninteresting. Then they rely on concepts of stimulation, 'sex appeal' to grant meaning to reality. But another approach is to reach from concepts of reality, leaving stimulation as an incidental feature which is only a function of mental concepts---a projection which can be fitted cheaply to any passing taste, to the most nonchalant, inscrutable instances. Images must be made cheap, someone famous said. But that is just the spicy surface of the future economy. The interior has to do with how to realize reality. And it has to do with the relations of concepts like historical indexing, hierarchies, and modularity, combined with the most imaginative applications the heart could desire. These applications are the boundary between that ultimate reality ('god', 'society', 'materialism') and the emergent tangible image. The easiest thing to do is to look at recent or ancient styles of architecture, and decide, 'how does it fit into the program'? After all, these are already real, tangible, living metaphors that have been accepted, and manifest, for generations. Then apply it to all known styles of art, and to the granted preferred modalities of the most cultured citizens according to genetics or current science. Then apply it to the emergent cusp of art, science, and information. And at that point, information will be gratifying, and people will accept that one of the virtues of society is living in the future, that compartment, that aperture of the childish philosopher, where lightning strikes and the fundamental codification takes place.
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Marc Laventurier Sep 7, 2013

The third of A.C. Clarke's 'laws of prediction', found in his essay, "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination", is familiar: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Wall Street may come to find that a fully realized social graph is indistinguishable from socialism.
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