This is your life…in about 15-20 years…maybe sooner.
Taking this back to the blog because I was starting to write a lot on the twitter…
Apple day today.
I started out saying this :
“Not going to hate on the apple people. Enjoy your day!”
But then I started thinking about it.
I swear I’m not hating still…I just find it very curious that I have such ingrained disdain for Mac and nem.
Especially given that I specialize in Cognitive Ergonomics as a career…Ap.ple is a master at this in more ways than one.
They do it REALLY well!
Taking the “know how” out of using technology is my entire focus job wise…and I admire teams that can do this well.
But I also know the costs of doing this well.
Taking as much required specialized knowledge out of doing something as possible….
When you do that REALLY well, you also remove the need for a human to do it at all.
That in combination with the huge amounts of data that are being collected about users across the digital landscape in the “living Internet” makes things extremely ripe for what’s coming next technology wise.
You guys might remember when I went to the BI conference in Vegas earlier this year. The “big data” people. The people who have data points on pretty much every aspect of your life from your bank account to how much water you used in your house yesterday.
Right now, there aren’t a lot of people who know what kind of data they have yet. They’re all being sat on by marketing people for the most part while they work out the ethical/functional use cases for them besides using such info to sell you more stuff…for the most part.
For the small subset of people who DO know what they have though, they’ve developed things like WATSON :
Here’s Watson on Jeopardy a while back.
Watson uses Natural Language Processing/Machine learning techniques to return information about different subjects using algorithms and reasoning that mimics human thought processes. More than 1 + 2 =3, it considers what is 1 really? What is 2? In what context is plus used? How was it used in the past? What are the words around it? What language is this in? Etc…
Basically Watson performs millions of calculations in matter of milliseconds…and returns a correct context aware answer 70%+ of the time.
This is awesome.
Or scary…depending on how you look at it.
Awesome because maybe you don’t know what to cook today. You can ask say your phone and not only will it tell you something that would be delicious and tailored to your personal tastes, it’ll also be affordable for you (it knows how much money you have), it’ll have either the ingredients or a prepared meal delivered to your door (based on how you feel that day according to your tone in emails or how busy your day was schedule wise, etc.) and it’ll also deliver it just in time for your favorite show along with your favorite wine that’s in season from that one place you raved about 2 weeks ago on twitter.
Awesome.
Or scary…
Natural Language Processing/Machine Learning AI has the ability to provide efficient customer service that never requires a human (much more sophisticated than call your bank today btw) or say… test drug effectiveness for thousands of widespread diseases in seconds.
Oh wait, Watson already does that.
So there’s that.
What to do then?
I like it, but that’s easy for me to say because my job is to make technology like this possible/more commonplace.
I feel like it’ll bring about another renaissance period as there’s less to do productivity wise.
Oh and probably a class gap….
A huge one.
But don’t say I didn’t warn you…
I’ll look around at what they say about future proofing your career but…might want to hop on that sooner rather than later.
MAYBE a good 10 years to go before it becomes a huge problem.
Give or take an alien invasion.
