Christian Renaud's Blog

Anecdotage

One interesting aspect of this trip to Toronto for the World Future Society is that the attendees of the conference seemed to gravitate towards three distinct demographic strata:

1) Professional Futurists. These 40-60ish consultants were in abundance at the conference and most of the presentations were in-some-way a sales pitch for their omniscient services.

2) Up-and-comers. These 35-50ish independent or corporate-affiliated futurists were the audience of (1). They walked around with a dazed look most of the time and tried to absorb all of the inherited metis of the conference.

3) Older futurists. These folks regaled the audience with predictions of theirs that had proven true, and lots of anecdotes about how the futuring business has always been this-or-that. They had an abundance of context, most of which was (sadly) ignored or otherwise discounted by (1) and (2). I cannot fathom why younger generations actively choose to ignore the inherited lessons of those older than themselves, as if enacting a surreal magnified extrapolation of a cultural 'Don't touch that stove, it's hot!' admonition.

Two under-represented demographic categories were those under 25 years of age (the people who will actually be living in the future) as well as quantitative, analytical phenotypes. There were statisticians here, to be sure, but everyone seemed to run screaming from any semblance of quantitative analysis. The excuse for this is that the future is too complex of a place to actually quantify. I can somewhat understand this given the personal mind-maps I keep as a result of all my futurist reading, however the conference represents thousands of people with no 'outliers' who Quixotically-attempted to deconstruct the future into some particular schema.

Also, the method of the conference was very traditional. To quote McLuhan, since I am in Toronto,'Architecture is Politics' and 'The Medium is the Message'. Prelate to congregation in church seating. What was absent was any use of modern methods, presentation tools, milling spaces for serendipitous conversations, etc.

The merit of interpersonal relationships made at the conference was one of the primary things mentioned by each speaker, however this was not promoted at the conference except for the prescribed hours of cocktailing after each keynote (from 2130 to 2300 each evening after 0700 meetings each morning).

Internet access was non-existent, the tools were all 'distribute the gospel' hardcopy, and the audio archives of the conference are nearly $200 from an outside firm. They should talk to the O'Reilly folks about their ETech conference coordination.

I met this very-enlightened octogenarian when I was walking out of the hotel to hop a cab to YYZ, and he mentioned the exact same things about the conference.

He thought that the conference was out of touch with the realities 'on the ground', and needed to be updated. I think this proves that age does not mandate perspective, and makes me very optimistic of the boomers and boomer+ generations as they often have much more reasoned and rational insight than my 40-ish peers.

iCal now informs me that I must scurry off to my gate to head stateside. More later.

One from the Gipper

"No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!" Ronald Reagan

Fractal Presentations

One of the items that came up during the conference today was that all of the presentations during the workshops were very linear and deductive. This is in stark contrast to the overarching message of the speakers, which is that futurist studies are systemic and complex in nature, spanning multiple disciplines.

This spurred a quick exchange during lunch where we discussed what would substitute for linear PowerPoint in a conveying a complex, nuanced, multifaceted argument. What fractal presentation tools, heavily interlinked like Kurzweil's PersonalBrain software or the new film and music relationship sites, could be created to demonstrate more breadth and depth?

Still looking for a good answer on that one. Comments welcome and encouraged.

WFS Day Two

World Future Society- Day Two- Toronto

Today was no less interesting than Thursday, as I had the fortune to be seated at a table of remarkably intelligent futurists. It was remarked that the attendees of an event like this one typically have a broader range of interests than most people, and the lunch conversation and training exercises we performed today certainly gave proof to that theory.

The workshop also presented a unexpected small-world moment when I discovered that I had inadvertently sat myself next to the excellent writer Peter Hesseldahl. I had previously had the pleasure of reading the two posted English chapters of his book "The Global Organism", and had been meaning to send him an email asking if any more chapters had been translated. He has recently released a new book, Snapshots from the Future, which is already completely translated and posted at Danfoss Universe.

The formal keynote of the conference was this evening, with three very different keynote speakers. The first of these speakers was David M. Walker, the US General Accounting Office Comptroller General. The second was Joel Garreau, a reporter and editor of the Washington Post. Third, Lance Secretan of the Secretan center.

Mr. Walker was a great relief to hear speak. Given the general malaise in the United States regarding the governance of the country in general, Mr. Walker was insightful, honest, and direct. He led off his talk with my favorite quote-of-the-day, which was "The United States does not have a strategic plan, and has never had a strategic plan. And that is a problem." This is pretty straight talk when you consider that this man, and his counterpart in the OMB, have supreme oversight over the fiscal activity of the United States. I hope his influence in D.C. waxes strongly in his remaining nine years of appointment.

Joel Garreau spoke on the subject of his new book, Radical Evolution. His talk was funny and insightful, if not slightly pessimistic as to the fate of the human species due to our uncanny ability to play with tools we do not understand (in this case, human modification).

Finally, Lance Secretan spoke. I was concerned given the pragmatism and reductionist nature of the prior two speakers that he would be challenged to connect with his audience, however he quickly captured the attention of the room with his call for 'one-ness' in life (emphasis on business). Excellent speaker, excellent message.

Good day, great conference so far.

Virtual Insider Trading

I've been mulling over a particularly nasty economic-consequences problem that I could use some help getting to closure on.

Facts:

1) There are massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) that have thousands and thousands of players.

2) There are items in these MMOGs that are more rare/valuable/coveted than others. A short sword is passable, a 'Dragonslayer' is better, a 'Blade Cuisinart' is a must-have item for this hunting season.

3) There is a real economic exchange on eBay and other places that specializes in the exchange of virtual items and virtual currency for hard currency (real world dollars).

Given these three items, I struggle with the fact that there is a very closed system of currency valuation in MMOGs that could easily be swayed by large degrees by a very few individuals.

For example:

- Developer A (or development team A, more likely) decides that they have been working too many hours for too little pay at Game Developer Inc.

- A particular weapon, the 'Blade Cuisinart', typically found by killing giant spiders in a particular location of the virtual world, is required to complete a subsequent task that allows a player to advance to their next level in the game. Suffice to say, it is a particularly critical item to up-and-coming players.

- Development team A has a set of players (or their own avatars) acquire a large quantity of Blade Cuisinarts, which is straightforward task given the frequency of the distribution of said item, which for this example's sake is '1.0'.

- After a suitable interval, the development team 'accidentally' introduces a bug into the newest revision of the server code that reduces the frequency of the Blade Cuisinart to .65 from 1.0, making it harder to find and setting off a small demand bulge for these swords amongst a set of players.

- Development team begins offering their easily-acquired Blade Cuisinarts on eBay for an attractive price, where new players flock to retrieve this critical item. Currency is exchanged for virtual items, and in short time, the development team all celebrate their coup by watching the World Cup on their new office HDTV.

This is a small example of the Gordian knot that I have been sawing on for a few weeks. The small-fraud example above does not concern me as much as the underlying fact that a very small group of people can alter a very small bit of game code and create very real financial after-effects. Granted, the amount of money that we are talking about is still relatively small, and there are multiple markets for virtual items both in-game and elsewhere that would absorb some of the margin of this type of arbitrage.

In a world of electronic fulfillment, like MovieLink and iTMS, you have abundance instead of scarcity, storage instead of inventory. You can sell the same ones and zeroes over and over at almost-non-existent carrying costs. In these examples, you eventually need to settle accounts with the content providers, like Warner Brothers or Sony. There is accountability.

In the virtual goods space, there is only a primitive form of market accountability (market equilibrium pricing) to replace the settling of accounts. Since almost all games are 'walled gardens', which is to say closed supply systems, the scarcity and market price of any particular items can easily be altered by simple variable changes that result in downstream fluctuations of prices.

The 'rush to the bottom' of virtual-gold prices causes uproars in games where gold-farmers set up shop. The governance authority bans the guilty accounts, market equilibrium is restored. But, what is preventing the governance authority itself from causing some planned scarcity to drive up specific prices when their financial quarterly results are coming in soft and they need to 'punch it up a bit'?

Futurpitude

World Future Society 2006, Toronto. Day one. Dr. Peter Bishop (University of Houston Futurist-studies Professor) presented an excellent survey today of the tools and techniques of 'Professional Futurists'. He was quick to point out that professional futurists are, on the whole, degraded by their quantitative-science brethren, accused of witchcraft, and otherwise disrespected.

He also pointed out that institutions of higher learning have considerable academic infrastructure for the study of the past (History) and the present (the sciences), but almost no infrastructure for the study of the future.

I have to agree with Dr. Bishop. After nearly twenty years in various higher education programs, I cannot think of any tools or techniques that I was acquainted with beyond some rudimentary forecasting tools in undergraduate business courses.

This may be because the study of the future is more a hybrid of philosophy, scenario planning, and a melange of a number of other disciplines (economics, demographics, political science). This is unlike my experiences with the fine people at the Santa Fe Institute, which also focuses on the intersections between disciplines, however the SFI studies are generally quantitative in nature, avoiding when possible any qualitative influence.

Given that there are so many independent variables and permutations in predicting all possible futures, a quant-heavy scientist would probably throw up his/her hands and exclaim 'What is the point if I cannot measure it?'. In this case, a prompt reference to Herman Kahn's work on scenario planning at the DoD and RAND in anticipating options in the event of nuclear war would probably put a nice fine point on the argument.

My point? Not all qualitative studies are worthy of pejorative disdain by 'real scientists', as they often frame the world we live in. Remember, natural philosophers got off to a qualitative start before they invented the science and math required to properly articulate their findings.

RTFM

Note to self, before sweating yourself to death running like a crazed fiend for 45 minutes to test your new Nike shoes, be sure to RTFM and CALIBRATE them, so they store the running data. It's the wrong kind of surprise to have at 0645 EDT when the data doesn't magically move from the iPod to Nike.com.

Nice run this morning though. I should emulate the wife more often and RTFM when I buy an item instead of just running with it (pun intended).

Blame Canada

I'll be at the World Future Society conference in Toronto this week (and part of next). Expect some rather disjointed blog updates during this short period. Apologies in advance. :-)

P.S. In a rather amusing postscript, I googled "Blame Canada" to find a graphic, and came across a site named 'Blame.ca' written by Dick Hardt at Sxip Identity, a great Identity 2.0 startup. If you are in the networking business, take a look. Even if his write-up of Salling Clicker (a phone-based remote controller for your Mac or PC) reminded me that it still doesnt work with my trusty Razr.

Reading Atoms and Bits

Chris Anderson had a number of topically relevant points in his excellent book "The Long Tail", but the one that resonated the most for me in subsequent days was his point about Atoms vs. Bits, and the shifting balance of delivery of information and entertainment electronically versus physically.

His most notable example of this was Amazon, which now publishes books and presses CDs to reduce inventory costs and ship-time. We are already getting close to dis-intermediating portions of the distribution chain with iTMS for music, and burgeoning sites like CinemaNow and MovieLink for movies (with some fleas on the latter dog). What we do not have yet is the book equivalent of the iPod, an e-book/e-ink reader. They have been proposed, prototyped and not widely deployed yet. Why?

I'd love to be able to travel with all of my library when I leave my home state, just as I travel with a substantial percentage of my CD library on my iPod. An e-book reader that tied in to my MacBookPro with bluetooth or wifi for content loading that I could read, as well as draw upon when searching for 'that one quote'.

A good first start en-route to this updated (read 'Digital') age would be to include a link to the audiobook and e-book with a paper-purchased book. The next step would be to find a method to keep the paper, e-ink, and audio versions of the books synchronized, so you don't have to scan around looking for your page.

More on this later. -C

User Experience

Quick post.

Today I received both the replacement RAM for my Powerbook G4 (installed, working well) from DHL, as well as my new MacBookPro about 10 minutes later from FedEx. I was able to move all applications, data and settings from the Powerbook to the MBP in 35 minutes, and was up and running on a H.323 videoconference seconds later. Working flawlessly.

I've already installed Parallels virtual machine software, Windows XP, and OfficeXP. Outlook is happy and humming in it's VM cage. Now to hunt down the drivers for my handy old micro-recorder.....

I was at a dinner in Cambridge earlier this year, when a colleague asked another (ex-Apple employee) colleague what was the secret behind Apple. He replied perfectly, in my opinion, when he stated that 'Apple takes the tasks that you do most frequently and works and works to make those the absolute easiest things to do on a Mac.' To that, I'd add that they take even infrequent taks, like computer swaps, and make that easy as well.

Nice Job Apple.