The Robots are coming

For a while now technology has seemed to focus on only one aspect or another of information. Everything from Google to Facebook, to Instagram, to all aspects of the sharing economy, are essentially all about trying to achieve perfect information.

Slowly the emphasis is beginning to shift. Now voice recognition, robots, drones and a renewed interest in artificial intelligence are all pointing to a new technological direction.

Just as we’ve had to readjust to the creative destruction and social shifting of the information economy, now the the automation or AI economy is upon us. What will it change? How will it reshape the social contract and perhaps most of all, how will it reshape the nature of work?

Nicholas Carr, the best selling author of THE SHALLOWS, and THE BIG SWITCH turns his attention to this future in his new book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

My conversation with Nicholas Carr:

Understanding the Internet of Things

Although the origins of the quote are a bit murky, the idea that the only way to predict the future is to invent it, certainly seems true in the 21st century. In fact, that future is being invented right now.

As technology moves from dedicated devices, to virtually everything, soon everything from our pens to our trash to our kitchens to our most intimate desires, will be connected to the each other and to us, in ways unimagined until now. Will that technology be more humane or more intrusive?

David Rose is on the cutting edge of inventing that future and he details it in Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things.

My conversation with David Rose: