It will be a while before covidian becomes an adjective in Merriam-Websters. Even in the current early stages, COVID-19 has left such an indelible mark on our world, that is hard not to adjectivize it.

Any attempt to assess the impact of Covid-19 at this stage will only scratch the surface of what its impact will be in 6 months, a year, or five years. However, here is one such attempt, through the interconnected dimensions of society, business, and technology.

The ripple effects of a pandemic across these three dimensions will be the tale of this decade.

1. Society

My observations about us as a society falls into 3 areas: 1) How we collaborate as people; 2) Glaring gaps in social safety nets, and 3) Impact on our environment.

1.1. Collaboration

Unless we are on the front lines of fighting COVID, most of us now wear face masks to not contract the disease, or more importantly not pass it on as asymptomatic carriers.

Wearing masks is an act of individuals collaborating to fight the disease. A usual sight in Asia until now reaches North America.

There are countless examples of selflessness in tending to elders and helping those in need in all communities across the world, that puts a smile on our faces despite the bleak circumstances.

At a macro-level, examples of collaboration at scale include counties, states, and countries working together, with few exceptions. Examples: the seven county San Francisco Bay Area going into lock-down simultaneously; federation of state licensing boards in the US allowing cross-state care delivery by doctors; South Asian countries setting up training and surveillance system.

1.2 Safety Nets

Social safety net issues can be summed up into: universal health care, universal basic income, and higher education. Covid has given a fillip to the proponents of these causes and policies. Spanish government is working on a universal basic income plan that outlives the pandemic crisis.

1.3 Environment

Wild life utilizing roads that are not trafficked by humans, pollution levels dropping due to limited human activity, visibility of mountain peaks from far-off cities etc. have all been reported worldwide.

All positive side effects of an unmitigated crisis. Nothing surprising here. What will we do about it?

2. Business

Bailouts compensate for lack of safety nets. Most businesses will need some. See this vulnerable labour pool estimate report for the US. 46% of US labor force is vulnerable to being laid-off. (Chart Courtesy: Yahoo News)

We will debate endlessly on whether we should be a welfare state. We will debate less on whether we should be a bailout state, because when the fire rages, we must put it out.

Isn’t a government bailout, socialism rescuing capitalism?

Continuity of business operations will get a rethink — even the business of legislating by US congress which was threatened to physically assemble to pass covid-response stimulus package.

Outside of front-line service industries like hospitality or food, business continued in job roles where people could work from home and knew how to do so. If they couldn’t work while keeping social distance, they shut down. Where supply chains are complex and fragile (no buffer to absorb shocks), businesses are suffering.

Will we rethink business continuity and leverage local production and distributed workforce (“virtual”) to reconfigure business operations, beyond the obvious supply-chain reconfigurations? Will we automate more both in production as well as support and service?

Will labor laws change to improve safety nets for employees and gig workers? In the US, safety-net oriented policies in health care are bound to have an impact on employment laws.

3. Technology

While we wait for better medical diagnostic testing and vaccines, we are working virtually. Some of us are keeping social connections alive via virtual happy hours. Information technology has helped soften the blow in some job roles and sectors.

Will IT be leveraged more broadly by workers outside the knowledge-work sectors?

The shortage of supplies, especially medical supplies, will cause us to rethink the trade-off’s of local vs. global sourcing and production. Will manufacturing technologies like additive manufacturing (“3D printing”) accelerate?

Will certain types of manufacturing go local? In life sciences, will every country setup its own medical equipment and pharmaceutical production facilities, if they can afford it?

In health care delivery, will more people work remotely to serve patients via virtual clinics and virtual consultations? Will the combined digital and medical technology enable health care without borders? Will we rethink policies to speed up trials for new therapies and tests — even when they are not-invented-here?

Will We? Can We? Why Not?

The last 25 years have seen technological innovation transform business and society.

Will innovations in how we function as a society — collaboration, governance, and policy — power our next transformation?

Will new systems of collaboration come into existence to strengthen post-world war organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO)?

If so, that will be another first since the Second World War.

Humans are a creative bunch. We adapt. No better time than now to fast-track it.

The post The Infected Village — Our World Through a Covidian Lens appeared first on Hari Harikrishnan.

Should technology-driven automation be our sole concern about reduced demand for labour and loss of jobs in the economy? Has automation not existed in our midst for thousands of years where it served to augment human labour, to help us evolve our higher competencies?

Is the correlation between job reduction and automation an open-and-shut case?

Jobsageddon

In the 21st century, the convergence of multiple factors beyond automation sets us up for an armageddon of jobs and associated societal change – a jobsageddon.

Those factors are:

1. Borderless Labour
2. Longevity, and
3. Sharing Economy

Here’s a brief look at each and the threats they pose vis-a-vis the oft-repeated bugaboo of automation.

1. Borderless Labour – a.k.a Diaspora of Jobs

20th century saw the physical movement of people across countries – often the move was from undeveloped economies to developed economies. Depending on whether your country was on the sending or receiving side of this people movement, it was referred to as immigration, emigration, bain-drain etc.

Jobs are moving in the reverse direction, from the developed economies to the developing economies.

This job diaspora is a reverse osmosis of jobs homing in on skills causing a job diaspora.

This goes beyond the smart-sourcing in manufacturing or business process outsourcing (BPO) where call center work or paralegal work migrated to Asia from US and Europe.

The effectiveness and lower cost of communications and collaboration technologies, coupled with job brokering platforms like Upwork has made it much easier to source labor from outside national boundaries.

Why would we hire a graphics designer in New York when we can find one in Bangladesh for a fraction of the hourly rate in New York?

Assuming job performance is assured, we would not, unless motivated by some variation of the be-local-buy-local fervor.

Until now, simplistic protectionism has been focused on raising the cost of imported goods – and indirectly the cost of farm and manufacturing labour – not on stopping the outward leakage of service-sector jobs.

National boundaries, effective at stopping the flow of goods and people, are currently porous when it comes to labour. Even language barriers that kept jobs within nations are being eroded by technolgy-assisted translation.

The graphic below shows the potential for labor-arbitrage, given the wage rates in different countries.

This osmosis of labour flow is a supply shock to labor markets in developed countries.

How will global on-demand-labor affect the society in developed economies? Are we headed to social unrest in the west?

2. Longevity

Not only did the 20th century saw movement of people and jobs, it also saw advances in medicine that dramatically reduced infectious diseases and infant mortality. The result is not simply an increase in older population, but an increase in labour force.

To understand this better, let’s look at the projected US population by age-group over the next 40 years — a time horizon that is within the life horizon of a majority of the population.

Key takeaways:

• The 65+ age-group (erstwhile “retired”) shows the most dramatic change – a 40 million increase to nearly 100 million – a whopping 25% of the total US population in 2060.
• Assuming 25% of the 65+ group participates in the labor force, that is a 10 million increase in labor force. The number could be higher as traditional notions of retirement are swept away by our need to live and work longer.
• US will need to employ 40 million more people in 2060 to keep unemployment at the current 4% rate – 10 million of that – 25% –comes from the longevity effect.

In short, longevity is a supply-shock to labour market, just like borderless labour.

Nowhere in human history have we had a demographic shift like this, nor unprecedented challenges arising from this – from how the older adults participate in the economy, to how we care for this population.

[Note: How the healthcare industry needs to prepare for this deluge of demand for accessible and affordable healthcare is a topic for later.]

Sharing Economy – Gig-driven, On-Demand, and Asset-lite

The common thread across AirBnB, Uber, and cloud computing services (e.g. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure) is the idea of pooling of resources to be shared by vast number of consumers. This results in increased utilization of the underlying assets and new ways of consuming those assets.

Ride-sharing pools the asset (cars) and labour (drivers) to meet the demand; AirBnB pools assets (under-occupied homes); cloud-computing pools computers and optimizes utilization.

All these are examples of how capital and labour are being reshuffled to ease our consumption of the assets as a pay-as-you-go utility.

It is too soon to assert if this scale of asset and labour pooling will drive the demand for labour and wages.

Key questions being researched and debated include:

• Will we need less computers overall? Will we need less operators of them?
• Will we need less hotel rooms and staff?
• Will we need less drivers and cars?

Unlike borderless labour and longevity, the effects of sharing economy on labour will vary by industry.

Automation – Not the Sole Grinch

Humans have been inventing widgets to automate tasks for thousands of years – from wheels to indoor plumbing to Alexa. Should we be more worried about the effect of borderless labour, longevity, and sharing economy on jobs?

Or is the velocity of our inventions outpacing our ability to develop new competencies, resulting in large sections of society becoming unemployed? Is speed of automation the only new wrinkle on automation in the 21st century vs. all its predecessors?

Regardless, technology driving the globalization of labour, increasing life expectancy, and delivering higher utilization of capital and labour looks to be ominous disruptors of organized, country-specific employment as we know it.

Will that result in a jobsageddon and consequently a new societal order in the 21st century?

The post Jobsageddon: Why Automation isn’t the Grinch that Steals Jobs? appeared first on Hari Harikrishnan.

Is a flag merely an expression of patriotism?

Does it evoke other emotions?

Is a flag a type of logo?

Will a logo embrace a flag?

Will a logo be a flag?

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We have all heard of it. The maniacal focus on customer satisfaction. Nay, customer delight. The focus on free cash flow. The focus on continuous improvement of a “flywheel” business model that delivers growth and value.

The one that strikes fear in the hearts of most traditional firms. The You-Know-Who. The one-that-shall-not-be-named. AmaZon!

Let’s assume Jeff Bezos and Team Amazon continue to prosper; that they don’t back away from their reinvestment of cash to grow relentlessly; that they don’t get anti-competitive or predatory; that they don’t run afoul of anti-trust hawks inside governments.

Where can Amazon go from here? Is Amazon similar to a non-profit? Will they make governments better or replace them? Should governments fear them? Where does that leave us consumer-citizens? Fear, awe, love?

First the basics.

Amazon’s P.E.T Leadership

In 1996, when I was still a new immigrant in the United States, after a lot of hesitation I signed up for Amazon for books. It took some persuasion to give away my credit card and personal information to an upstart in the early days of the Internet.

They promised these 3 things to win me over.

1. Price: Money talked. I could do with discounted books. As a new immigrant, prices at the nearest brick-and-mortar store were daunting to me.
2. Experience: Convenience of home delivery. Icing on the cake.
3. Trust: Peace of mind and great return policy. I was sold.

Over time, these three attributes got better. Trust translated over to other products and services. Some experiences where memorable. Like the time when they let me keep an item I was about to return for free.

P.E.T culminated in a relationship called Prime.

Prime shipping is like a flat tax you pay for faster service. A subscription to the local toll booth so that you can bypass the lines.

Prime has morphed. More benefits were added if you were in the prime relationship.

Now, 2 out of 3 households in the USA have Amazon Prime.

Prime is poised to fuel the flywheel even more powerfully.

Now that we know P.E.T, the flywheel, and Prime, let’s see how big Amazon is relative to the US economy and what else Amazon can deliver, before we compare Amazon to government.

Amazon and The Economy

Excluding housing expenses, US consumer spending is $9 Trillion. Amazon’s retail revenues were about $125B in 2016. That’s many orders of magnitude apart.

Let’s see if the gap can be closed. I am going to round-up numbers to keep the math easy.

About $25B of Amazon’s retail revenues (15% of total retail) came from retail third-party seller services. That is just the portion of fees Amazon recognized as revenue. Not what we paid for the purchase. If the average fees amount to 10% of the purchase price, the total consumer spend is $250B.

I’m simplifying, it could be a much higher percentage including referral fees, fulfillment services, and newly added checkout/payment services. Add to it the $100B retail products sold by Amazon and we see the impact.

That’s a whopping $350B of consumer spending that Amazon controls.

Let’s say they double every 3 years. That is an average annual growth of 25%. Quite doable given their history.

In 5 years, Amazon can power US$1 TRILLION of consumer spending globally.

Compare that to the $9 trillion US consumer spending and we see the relative size of Amazon in the economy.

Where is the growth upside? Let’s look at the nascent and untapped potential markets for Amazon using 3 sectors as examples: Food, health, and transportation.

Amazon can impact how we Eat, Treat, and Move

Prime Eats

Amazon has inserted itself in our food supply chain — perishable and cooked.

It is early days still for Amazon Fresh and Amazon restaurant food delivery, but their investments firmly place them to control farm-to-fork experience whether directly or through the restaurants.

Priming Our Health

They can easily orchestrate how we get healthcare, especially remotely delivered care. For example, doctors-on-demand provided under a Prime Health relationship with Amazon is not far fetched.

Plus they will treat me like a paying customer rather than as a patient. I am impatient for that experience.

That is not counting pharmacies and the drug supply chain.

With a play in two sectors — food and health — Amazon plays not just in farm-to-fork, but farm-to-body. How we eat and treat ourselves could be revolutionized by Amazon. And that could do wonders to society.

Prime Mover

How about Prime Taxi for helping us get around.

They could buy cars and operate fleets. Or they could just buy Uber or Lyft and do a better job at it.

Could they collect road tax and maintain roads too? Could they tax us based on our usage?

Tax talk brings us to government.

Government and P.E.T

Shall we look at government’s price-experience-trust trifecta?

When it comes to experience, governments are stuck in a 20th century customer experience still. Wait, we aren’t customers. We are mere citizens. Just like we are mere patients in the healthcare system.

Citizens get the spaghetti experience on the left, specially reserved for tax-paying, law-abiding, upstanding citizens. Customers get the experience on the right.

Amazon’s NPS (Net Promoter Score) is about +70 [Range: -100 to +100. NPS is arrived at by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of supporters]. Government agencies are starting to think about measuring experience!

Amazon should give the government a master-class on experience. Better still, government should use Amazon as their front-end.

Government Added To Cart

I want to renew my driver’s license through Amazon. And my business permits. Amazon can collect my taxes and figure out how the money gets to the right place.

Government should become a third-party reseller on Amazon marketplace, addable to Amazon shopping cart.

What about the other elements of P.E.T — Price, Experience, Trust?

I don’t want to get you started on a rant about government inefficiencies (and consequent higher prices/taxes) and our confidence in how government can serve us better.

May be I do!

Improving price and trust needs more than window-dressing the front-end experience and becoming part of Amazon’s marketplace. It needs government services to be part of not just Amazon’s marketplace, but its supply-chain.

How about Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) applied to government services?

Can’t the government use Amazon for service fulfillment? Government is already outsourcing IT services to AWS (Amazon Web Services). They could go the whole hog and outsource more than just IT services.

That could work. Especially for “retail” services offered by government.

Bezos can throw those pesky government services into the flywheel and give it a nice once-over. It will free governments up to focus on policy and defense…and world peace.

Government fulfilled by Amazon may be more fulfilling for me as a citizen-customer.

For-profit or Non-profit

I hear us murmuring about placing our trust blindly in a big bad corporation.

Should we trust a for-profit corporation to do non-profit government work? Won’t the corporate greed take over?

Well, here is the irony!

The last time I checked, Amazon was operating like a non-profit! A self-sustaining non-profit focused on free cashflows and not profit margins. If that party continues, let it roll. When it stops, we will see. [Note: All the more ironic for me since I serve on the board of a non-profit for a great cause.]

And the irony doesn’t stop there.

The last time I checked, government was not non-profit. It was actually negative profit. Borrowing to spend. Investments for the future, we say.

Exactly what Amazon is doing.

Net-Net

Amazon is a master orchestrator of the economy. Its flywheel model and price-experience-trust trifecta can be applied to serve the bulk of consumer spending. Prime-relationship variants reinforce the flywheel.

Can we leverage the Amazon machine to eliminate inefficiencies in the economy — both in the private and public sectors? Perhaps that is a more productive conversation than the should-we-break-up-amazon conversation.

Finis.

The post Will Benevolent Bezos Replace Government? appeared first on Hari Harikrishnan.

Mapping Bias

I started by placing men’s attitudes on a spectrum ranging from conscious bias to unconscious bias as below.

Then I placed women’s attitudes on a spectrum ranging from accepting bias to protesting bias.

To see how women responded to men’s bias, I placed these axes together.

Time was when women accepted men’s overt bias, as in quadrant 1. Time is now when women protest against men’s unconscious bias, as in quadrant 4. In between lie times where women protested against conscious bias or accepted unconscious bias. The plot over time looks like this.

If you follow my friend’s quip above through this map, it will be as if 1816 is quadrant 2; 1916 in quadrant 3; 2016 in quadrant 4…just labels to mark time. The path blazed over centuries makes for an ominous shape – an ’N’ that seems to scream ‘no’? I think of it as the N-continuum of gender inequality.

The N-continuum is beyond simple evolution. It actually represents real progress over hundreds of years. Varied statistics from child marriage, to years of education, to health and wealth, the numbers have improved. We have world leaders who are women. But the numbers also suggest we have a long way to go. So we can’t simply be contented about the status quo. Social and economic progress such as community health and global productivity depend on continued progression towards gender equality.

The N-continuum made me wonder about how we went from a terrible state like quadrant 1 to quadrant 2. How did we arrive there? What part did men of influence play a role in the arrival or departure from that quadrant? That’s a topic for another time.

Three Iconic Women

Bulk of the women’s rights activists and women of accomplishment fall in to quadrant 2 in the last century or quadrant 4 in this century. While we all have women we know in our circles who come to mind for having overcome bias in their own ways, three personas come to mind when I think of gender bias. This is not to ignore the numerous others, but these have special appeal to me. You won’t see them being celebrated at your local women’s action forums. These three are from different eras, from different geographies, and from different races. They represent slices of time in the N-continuum of gender inequality.

• Nangeli: In early 1900s, Nangeli protested against the oppressive upper caste landlords in Kerala, India. The upper caste ruled that lower caste women must pay taxes to have the right to cover their breasts. Nangeli protested, by cutting off her breasts. Her courage and defiance leaves you dead on your tracks, doesn’t it?

• Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother of Rock and Roll, who gave voice to many male musicians like Chuck Berry and Johnny Cash. Her singing of This Train in the 1930s is like Nina Simone singing Mississippi Goddamn in the 1960s. A voiced protest. A black woman playing an electric guitar in the 1950s is an image to behold.

• Eugénie Brazier: Also known as La Mère Brazier, she is a renowned chef from the 1920s, first winner of 6 Michelin stars and one who gave rise to a lineage of renowned 20th century French chefs. The roadside restaurants of Mères (mothers) on the way from Lyon to Italy served travelers and put women to work in the wake of the Great War. Can’t tell if she protested, but she served. She served tasty meals at a time of conscious bias and need for brutal resolve to recover from a socio-economic disaster.

There are many such quadrant 2 stalwarts who moved the ball so that we could outlaw conscious bias and move to quadrant 3 or 4. Most women today are in quadrant 4, protesting unconscious bias, sitting on a platform where conscious bias is illegal or frowned upon in most developed nations.

Looking Ahead

What next for the N-continuum? Just like Iron Age swept through different parts of the world at different times, these transitions through the quadrants happen in different parts of the world at different times. That explains why snapshots of progress is different in Middle East to Africa to South Asia to the West. You could map each country on this continuum based on where the majority of its women are in their response to bias. Will information technology fundamentally change businesses and societies and close the gender inequality faster? Will a digital society with pervasive connectivity of people via mobile and relentless spotlight on inequalities through data help us focus efforts to reduce bias? Here is hoping that traversal through the N-continuum is swift for generations here and beyond.

Epilogue

So what has all this got to do with washing machines and goddesses? I came across this sculpture at the water fountain of a San Francisco area restaurant. It depicts what looks like a roman goddess emptying a washing machine.

Running water made possible by indoor plumbing freed women from hard chores in the 20th century, something I always thought of as a significant technological and social milestone. Home automation of the last century via washers and dryers took it a step further. Oddly, the intended incongruity in this art – ancient goddess with a modern tool performing a household chore – is reminiscent of the lean-in discussions and nouveaux feminist activism. It reflects the reality of the 21st century women’s lives where they are balancing new conveniences with old ways of life and old biases, conscious or unconscious.

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Conversation shifted to other topics. We all moved on. Years later, that phrase is still stuck with me. Brilliant as he was, his statement was notable for its humility, insight, and balance about his self.

Over the years I have saved myself many times from the brink of stupidity by remembering those pithy words I now refer to as the 50% rule and its significant corollary: 50% of the people you come across think you are smarter than them and the other 50% think that they are smarter than you. What has this got to do with Schrödinger’s Idiot? Let’s start with Schrödinger’s Cat.

Schrödinger’s Cat

If you recall this concept from your quantum mechanics lessons, you may skip ahead to the next section. If not, here is an unscientific primer on Schrödinger’s cat. The thought experiment by Erwin Schrödinger as shown below has a cat in a box. The cat dies from poisoning if a radioactive material in the box decays. Note: No animal has ever been harmed by such an experiment.

Detailed sequence of events is as follows:

In this hypothetical experiment, we will not know for certain if the cat is dead or alive (50:50 chance) unless we open the box. Once we open the box, the wave function (ψ or psi) representing the cat’s existence collapses and we see a dead cat or a live cat. Until then the wave function tantalizes us with the very real possibility of the cat being alive.

Schrödinger’s Idiot

Let us replace the cat with our intellect as perceived by others – some considering it smarter than theirs and the rest who consider it less smart than theirs. As this sentiment of “smarter or dumber” could vary with time, we could be perceived as smarter or dumber depending on the time of day. The time-dependent perception of our intellectual capacity implies that we are constantly moving back and forth between the state of being smart or not in others’ views at any moment, sometimes during a single conversation, much like the existence of the cat.

Caution: This line of thinking might make for a rancorous debate with your significant other on who is smarter. Be careful when trying at home!

As a result, our intellect viewed by others is like a wave function with crests and troughs that as Werner Heisenberg said “…represents partly a fact and partly our knowledge of a fact“.  That wave function collapses when others observe us. Close inspection could indeed be lethal to the intellect, exactly what it did to the cat!

At this point in my rant to self, I certified myself as Schrödinger’s Idiot. I had replaced the cat with my intellect and found myself ambulating about in a state of partial knowledge about the state of my intellect relative to others.

I am not sure how you feel about your intellect being governed by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. I have mixed feelings about it. In other words, I am 50:50.

What about you? Which 50% are you in today? Did you observe your wave function collapse? Did others observe it? When your wave function collapsed, were you smart or were you not?

Bonus tip for having read this far: the overlap between the group you think is smarter and the group that thinks you are smarter represents the size of your mutual admiration society.

Post Script

It appears we could apply the 50% rule to other attributes of one’s persona such as wealth, happiness etc. Are 50% of people richer than you or poorer than you (at least within a particular social strata); happier or sadder than you?

What about your promotability at work? When you are promoted, do 50% of people view it as deserving and the other 50% view it as undeserving? If that makes you mad, you may reflect on your own views of others’ promotability and calm yourself down.

This quote by George Eliot seems to be a fitting end to this rant:

One couldn’t carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.

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BYO: God, Bottle, and Device

Various BYOs have existed in our world for a long time. Some are well known; some are not; some have divine significance beyond a useful dining convenience. The three below are a study in contrast.

First of all, this tells us that BYO practices are not all about technology. Let us look at Bring Your Own God (BYOG) closely. BYOG has existed as long as gods have existed in various cultures. There is a panoply of them to choose from. In much of human history, even when one regime conquered another, the vanquished were often allowed to keep their gods, at least as long as it suited the conquerors. BYOG is perhaps the oldest recognized BYO. Nowhere else is BYOG codified better than in the US constitution where religious freedom and promise against discrimination on religious grounds is a celebrated right. So what is common between BYOG, BYOB and BYOD? Let’s get back to IT and business for an inventory.

BYO Incarnations

Let’s look at more variations of BYO to see any pattern behind the BYO phenomenon and the universal driver behind it. Here are some manifestations of BYO in alphabetical order:

• BYOA: Bring Your Own App. Use any App you prefer, not a new concept that smart phones introduced. People use Thunderbird, Outlook, or Mac Mail for e-mail; Firefox or Chrome for browser. In the ’80s and before various mail programs were used on Unix like elm or pine.
• BYOB: The most commonplace of all BYOs is a bottle of beer or wine. Please, nothing stronger.
• BYOBag: Or pay for bags at check-out. A green initiative to ensure that we aren’t filling up landfills.
• BYOBB: Broadband access paid by employees to access corporate internet and do more work away from the office.
• BYOC: Content. Movies, music etc that you own available to you from anywhere on any device like iTunes Match service that lets you do this for an annual fee.
• BYOC: How about computer? Will employers not stop issuing laptop or desktop computers to employees and expect them to get a computing device of their choice soon? This is a subset of BYOD then.
• BYOD: Device. The current trend that brought BYO notion to the forefront in technology and business.
• BYOD: Disc. Same as content. See how vudu offers converting your DVD to digital for easy access.
• BYOD: Disk. Your storage drives hosted at your cloud service provider
• BYOG : Bring Your Own God. A sublime BYO articulated in the First Amendment of the US constitution. Mother of all BYOs perhaps. The key drivers behind it are fascinating.
• BYOIT: Bring your own IT (or parts of it) If you want services beyond what is offered by your employer’s IT department, go to a cloud services provider? Go rogue at your own risk. Yes, BYO-Risk while you are at it.
• BYOL: License. License we have for software that can be used to run that software on a computer likely not owned & operated by us. License portability is a big deal in these days of cloud computing. Think of running software that is licensed to you on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This also applies to licensed content. Hence, similar to BYOC.
• BYOR: Bring Your Own Rights. Rights to content such as music or video that grants us ways to access that content from any device, anywhere. Could be rights to software license too. BYOR encompasses BYO-License and BYO-Content. Beyond digital rights, this has a whole other significance of personal rights that encompasses even BYOG (“right to worship” or not).

What example of BYOX did I miss?

BYOX is about Empowerment

Suffices it to say that BYO is not some iDevice or Android device induced consumerization of IT. It is more fundamental than that. It is in an 18th century document written by a few Christians of various denominations with an astounding sense of idealism and sense of equality that one can only marvel at. BYOX is about choice. It is about empowerment. With it comes satisfaction (not to mention the pursuit of happiness of our own making!). In corporations, policies that promote BYOD targets employee productivity as well as cost-savings when the onus of device procurement, management, and ownership is transferred to employees.

I can’t ask for a BYO that is nobler or more godly than BYOG. I have a humble request though. It is time Amazon offered me BYOB, Bring Your Own Book, as part of Amazon Prime subscription, so that I can access any book I own on Kindle without carrying about physical books – a Kindle Match service like iTunes Match.

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Asset-Heavy to Asset Light

In the report mentioned above, the authors talk about asset-light generation (you will have to skip ahead 2/3rds of the way in to the presentation); on how space, time, and money are re-configured by the new generation who relies on smart phones and Cloud. Some examples of how the asset-light generation functions is below (reproduced from the above link):

• Zipcar: Instead of owing cars, we rent as needed using a subscription plan that is hassle-free and cheaper compared to traditional rentals
• Virtual assets: instead of buying books, CDs, textbooks etc. we subscribe to services like Spotify (Music on demand)
• Housing: economical rentals by owner enabled by Apps vs. traditional hotels with low utilization

Asset-light has long been used in the world of business to reflect how companies can make smart core vs. context decisions to stay nimble and not be weighed down by owning assets or holding debt. Just-in-time or lean manufacturing being one example; outsourcing of non-core processes being another. I found the application of this to consumers novel, as a new way of doing things using cloud and smart phones.

Asset-light Generation == Spiritual People?

If we are asset-light by virtue of some Heavenly Cloud, doesn’t this bring to mind a parallel where ascetic saints gave up their worldly possessions and meditated to high heavens, as shown below? Are technology & spirituality part of the same continuum?

Asset-light Generation == Pancake People?

Asset-light generation also brings to mind the indelible image portrayed a decade ago (2003) by playwright Richard Foreman viz. pancake people, to refer to a new generation dependent on the Internet for their knowledge and activities. Previous generations have relied on developing and storing knowledge in their minds (local or literally on-premise storage and retrieval of information), not possessing the capabilities or technology to access information on-demand. Newer generations have information at their fingertips and so could be deemed as having only superficial knowledge. You can find more on this in this post by Nicolas Carr titled “Is Google making us stupid?“.

If we are pancake people and parts of us are being substituted by the intelligence in the cloud, does that make us less human? Does that make us incrementally robotic? Eventually, will man be substituted, truly substituted, not just in piece parts of their function? Or do we become embedded in a universal intelligence or become extensions of it? My post on virtual social network too sent me down that logic.

Let’s bring these confusing array of notions together. Which ones are we? Pancake people, asset-light generation, or spartan spiritual beings? Perhaps we are all that. Whatever we are, I don’t think we are in danger of being eclipsed by technology. For millennia we have supplemented ourselves with technologies. No doubt these technologies have brought about profound changes in humanity, but we have adapted. Why should we carry tonnes of information in our heads when we have it at our fingertips when we need it and we can apply unique human intelligence on top of that information? Would it not make us more productive by focusing on analysis and not information storage & retrieval? Perhaps in a million years our neurons will be wired differently, more for analysis and action than for information storage.

Guided by Cloud?

A favourite stanza from the Rubaiyat (Edward FitzGerald version) springs to mind as I conclude this:

Then to the rolling Heav’n itself I cried,
Asking, “What Lamp had Destiny to guide
Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?”
And–“A blind understanding!” Heav’n replied.

Should we replace “A blind understanding” with “Google and Wikipedia”?

The post Technology Meets Spirituality appeared first on Hari Harikrishnan.

How has treatment of leftover food evolved over millions of years? Here is a speculation that you might find amusing (or off-the-wall) on how decision-making by Americans around food could evolve. In the process, let me coin the term Americanid to describe us, the North American Hominids.

 Do you think the future of doggie bags depend on evolution of our decision making? Will we start to order less as time passes?

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The attributes of self-actualization — lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts etc. — seem godly characteristics that call for a mapping to a suitably named iGod tier. (Picture on the left is courtesy Wikipedia).

So where would we place an iPad or iPhone on this hierarchy of needs? After I posted this article, I came across Apple’s statements in the past that suggested that “iPhone was just below food and water on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs“! Another writer had a similar theme: Do you really need an iPad? I am inclined to place the iPad in the iCrave tier. On the other hand, if one believes that internet access has come to be a human necessity, as I casually suggest here, they may place it in the iNeed tier. Where would you place iPad in this hierarchy of needs?

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