The Next Big Thing (2023)

Nine years ago (Jan 2014), I wrote a post about "the next big thing". I think its fair to say that in a history of technological innovations and revolutions, there isn't really much in the last decade or so that would warrant much more than a footnote; the theme has been 'evolution, not revolution'.

Well, I think the Next Big Thing is - finally - here. And it isn't a thing consumers will go out and buy. Its an abstract, intangible thing; software not hardware, service not product.

For the first time in years, tech has got genuinely interesting again.

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Unordered S2E1 - Reboot

A collection of things that caught my attention about Twitter blowing up, Taylor Swift blowing up the charts, Sim City blowing off parking, Amazon not really losing a trillion dollars, a book about The Beatles, the comedy of The Simpsons, and the fundamental importance of comedy.

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Congratulations to the runners-up

I love this story; ten years ago, there was a Starcraft tournament.

The prizes were;

  • 1st Place: $500
  • 2nd Place: S250
  • 3rd Place: S150
  • 4th Place: $100
  • 5th-8th Place: 25 BitCoins

At the time of writing, 25 BitCoins a) would probably be spelt "25 bitcoin", and b) would be worth about £430,000. (Mind you, last November they would have been worth about £1.2 million...)

You have to wonder what might have happened to them. Maybe all four of the winners forgot about them completely, and those 100 bitcoin are now part of the estimated 20% of 18+ million bitcoin in existence that are held in lost wallets.

Maybe they sold them to pay for a pizza or something.

At least the winner won $500 in cold hard cash... Except apparently1, they lost the money. Not by blowing it on gambling or drugs or something - they literally just left it on the bus.

  1. I don't care know if its a true story - only that its a good story. ↩

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The Metaverse is an Elephant

One reason the Metaverse is doomed is because of the idea that it will straddle all of the different computing platforms; too many conflicting business interests will make this impossible to execute.

One reason the Metaverse will succeed is because of the idea that when something, sooner or later, straddle all of the computing platforms, it will deliver something incredibly useful.

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Rise of the machines (Robot war part 2)

Two narratives, one story;

  1. An AI developed by Google has developed sentience - the ability to have its own thoughts and feelings, and a Google engineer working with it has been fired for making the story public.

  2. A Google engineer thinks a 'chatbot' AI should be treated like a human, because he believes that it has developed the ability to have and express its own thoughts and feelings. After Google looked into and dismissed his claims, the engineer went public with them, and was then placed on paid administrative leave and subsequently fired.

The subject of the first story is artificial intelligence - with a juicy ethical human subplot about a whistleblower getting (unfairly?) punished.

The subject of the second story (which is a little more nuanced) is a human engineer going rogue, with an interesting subplot about ethics around artificial intelligence.

I think most of the reporting has been around the first version of the story- and I think thats because it fits into a broader ongoing narrative; the idea that 'our' machines are getting smarter - moving towards a point where they are so smart that humans can be replaced.

Its a narrative that stretches back for centuries - at least as far back as the industrial revolution.

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Site Refresh/redesign

I've just given the website a bit of a design refresh. Its still a work in progress - a few things I want to do but haven't got round to, a few things that I've changed but still not quite happy with etc. But I know from past experience that if I wait until its 'finished' then I'll be spending months with an old website design I'm not happy with as well as a new website design I'm not happy with. This way... at least I have a new website design.

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The Echo

<blockquote>"The whole game that our culture is playing is that nothing really happens unless its in a newspaper. [...] And so our children begin to feel that they don't exist authentically unless they get their names in the papers, and the fastest way of getting your name in the papers is to commit a crime. Then you'll be photographed and you'll appear in court and everybody will notice you. It really happened if it was recorded - in other words, if you shout and there doesn’t come back an echo, then it didn’t happen. Its a real hang up.“</blockquote>

From "Out of Your Mind" - a series of lectures recorded by Alan Watts in the late 1960s. Perhaps in the 1980s or 1990s he would have talked about getting your face on television instead of your name in the newspapers. Surely today, he'd be talking about being in people's social media feeds. But the story stays the same - the insight here isn't really about 'media'- its about people.

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How might 'Metaverse Identities' work- and what's in it for Meta?

If “moving seamlessly between virtual spaces” is a key feature of the metaverse, how might that actually work with virtual identities on a decentralised platform? (And why would Mark Zuckeberg, who holds a bigger centralised database of virtual identities than anyone, want that to happen?)

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Neil McElroy - Godfather of "Brand Men", Soap Operas, and the Internet

If your job is anything like mine, a huge part of it has been shaped by a man you've probably never heard of; Neil McElroy. He was central to the invention of market research, brand management, soap operas - and involved in (although admittedly much less) the development of the internet and the iPhone.

I’ve been doing some reading around the foundations of media and market research (trying to figure out the general trajectory of ‘jobs like mine’; what they are, what they used to be, what they might look like in the future), and along the way learning about a man whose name wasn't immediately familiar to me - but whose career I found fascinating.

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From the Archives: Falling Giants

Originally posted on my old (now-defunct) website in April 2013. (Lightly edited here for grammar/spelling etc.)

Prompted by a warm-up question at a conference panel about what major industry developments we didn’t see coming; my answer was that it wasn’t the rise of new companies/technologies that surprised me, but the fact that the tech giants of 2003 like Microsoft and Nokia seemed virtually irrelevant in 2013.

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