Ten of the best

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Every year MIT’s Technology Review has a feature on what its editors regard as the most interesting tech developments to have emerged during the previous year. Their current list is now out. See the article for the full details, but the headlines are:

  • Agricultural Drones (giving farmers new ways of increasing yields and reducing crop damage)
  • Ultra-private smartphones (e.g. the Blackphone)
  • Brain mapping
  • Neuromorphic chips (i.e. microprocessors configured more like human brains than conventional chips)
  • Genome editing (the ability to create primates with intentional mutations to study complex and genetically baffling brain disorders). Hmmm… some ethical issues here
  • Microscale 3D printing (i.e. using inks made from different kinds of materials)
  • Mobile collaboration (so-called ‘productivity’ software for smartphones. Example: Quip)
  • Oculus Rift (the wearable VR tech that Facebook recently acquired)
  • Agile robots
  • Smart wind and solar power (i.e. using big data and AI to produce more accurate forecasts of winds)

The Laws of Social Networking

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There is a 100/10/1 “rule of thumb” with social services. 1% will create content, 10% will engage with it, and 100% will consume it. If only 10% of your users need to log in because 90% just want to consume, then you’ll end up with the vast majority of your users in the logged out camp. Don’t ignore them, build services for them, and you can slowly but surely lead them to more engagement and potentially some day into the logged in camp.

Source

Big screens, small houses

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I was a TV critic for 13 years (1982-87 on the Listener, now sadly defunct; 1987-95 on the Observer, still going strong), so I feel I’ve paid my dues to the medium. I still watch TV occasionally, but rarely while it’s being broadcast (which is why, for me, the BBC iPlayer was such a great innovation). It’s “my schedule, not the scheduler’s schedule” now. And because I watch TV on devices other than ‘television sets’ I’ve paid very little attention to how the consumer market has developed over the last decade or so.

But the the other day I found myself walking through the local branch of John Lewis while en route to somewhere else and I found myself in the audio-visual department, where I was surrounded by gigantic screens. And then I was struck by the irony of what’s happening. All over the country, developers are building new apartments consisting of ever-smaller rooms, while at the same time manufacturers are building ever-bigger flat-screen TVs. If these two trends continue then we are on course for an interesting collision.

And then I stumbled on this nice piece by Douglas Coupland, in which he writes

big-screen TVs are ugly. In the history of human technology, there have been few inventions whose intrinsic ugliness and brutality of form defy all notions of beauty and defeat everything we call “home”.

Trying to put a big screen in a domestic space and have it look natural is almost impossible, like having a 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith inserted into your life – a monolith that has total disregard for your humanity or taste. The black minimalist box on your wall negates your framed wedding photos, your cornices, your art collection, your potted plants. The only environment it looks passably OK in is a modern house built after 2008 that factors in the bizarre scale of big screens – and even then, when you see one passably installed, you feel like you’ve walked into Muammer Gaddafi’s bedroom.

Yep.

Our Kafkaesque world

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This morning’s Observer column.

When searching for an adjective to describe our comprehensively surveilled networked world – the one bookmarked by the NSA at one end and by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and co at the other – “Orwellian” is the word that people generally reach for.

But “Kafkaesque” seems more appropriate. The term is conventionally defined as “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality”, but Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka’s most assiduous biographer, regarded that as missing the point. “What’s Kafkaesque,” he once told the New York Times, “is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behaviour, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.”

A vivid description of this was provided recently by Janet Vertesi, a sociologist at Princeton University. She gave a talk at a conference describing her experience of trying to keep her pregnancy secret from marketers…

Read on

If you think the music industry is a big deal, think again

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Industry_global_revenues

Given all the noise the recording industry makes — and the idiotic amount of attention it gets from government ministers — you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was one of the most important industries on the planet. In fact, as this chart shows, it’s minuscle compared to the industries that drive our economies. It’s about the same size as the watch industry. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t important to those who work in it, or that its future doesn’t matter. But let’s have a sense of proportion about it.

HT to Benedict Evans for highlighting the chart.

Deadlines

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Nice cartoon in the New Yorker. Shows a journalist frantically typing and saying to a bemused colleague: “I’m listing my deadlines by due date so I can miss them in chronological order.”

The French exception

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Thomas Piketty’s book has taken the Anglo world by storm, but has been out for two years in France without generating anything like the same fuss. Why?

One reason, perhaps, is that the French didn’t think it was left-wing enough. Another reason, muses the Economist,

is that questions about inequality, the centrepiece of Mr Piketty’s research, have long been central to the political debate in France, a country that already has an annual wealth tax on assets. This has been true for the right as much as for the left. Jacques Chirac, a Gaullist, was first elected president by campaigning to mend the country’s “social fracture”. Mr Hollande was at his most passionate on the campaign stump when denouncing the world of finance as his “chief adversary”, and the super-rich as “grasping and arrogant”. In short, drawing attention to resurgent inequality has a sense of novelty in America, but in France it is a political given.

That seems about right to me. I am reminded of the row there was many years about the decision to ‘rebrand’ Free Software as ‘Open Source’. The reason? Lots of people in the free software movement thought that it was being held back by the fact that the US corporate world sees the word “free” as synonymous with communism. It’s nuts, but that’s America for you.

Piketty: the gist

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I’m reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which is unlike any other economics book I’ve read in the last twenty years.

It reminds one that his subject was once known as political economy for the very good reason that economics and politics really belong together. As Bertrand Russell once observed, “economics is the study of how people make choices while sociology is the study of how they don’t have any choices to make”, and since the absence of choices (aka inequality) is a political matter then writing about economics also involves writing about (small-p) politics.

Another distinctive thing about Piketty’s book is that it’s intensely readable and has lots of cultural references. In that sense, he’s more like Keynes than he is like, say, Kenneth Arrow. He knows the films of Tarantino, and has read Balzac and Jane Austen. He talks about our societies reverting to “the Downton Abbey world” of a century ago.

The book is a 577-page doorstep but, strangely, its central core is easy to summarise. Here’s how the Guardian‘s Economics Editor, Larry Elliott, puts it:

The gist of Piketty’s book is simple. Returns to capital are rising faster than economies are growing. The wealthy are getting wealthier while everybody else is struggling. Inequality will widen to the point where it becomes unsustainable – both politically and economically – unless action is taken to redistribute income and wealth. Piketty favours a graduated wealth tax and 80% income tax for those on the highest salaries.

Or, to put it even more simply: the capitalism we’ve got is unsustainable, and we need to do something about it.