A synopsis of my book - Skills for a complex economy

This book talks about why we need to think in a different way in order to thrive in the future. It will go through the new skills that are called for, and describe the background conditions, which determine the competences that are going to be crucial to posses.

My starting point is the long-term trend of humans, machines, cultures and economies to connect - tighter, more often, in greater detail and over larger distances. Occurrences in wildly different realms and areas increasingly interact and impact each other - and on top of it change is accelerating in the global system, as each new technological development enables us to make the next step forward even faster.

We are going through a paradigm shift. The culture of the industrial age is receding and new ways of cooperating and organizing are becoming the new normal. All of this demands a different mindset, which is more relevant to the conditions of the years ahead.

It's not an absolute shift. Large parts of the old culture and the old rules still apply and the norms of the past remain useful in many contexts. It's not like we are ripping out the whole cultural foundation and starting anew, but we need to rebuild, add new features and understandings, and prune away some assumptions that are no longer in line with the new reality. We are in a transition phase where mindsets are clashing. The most interesting places to examine are not the extremes of completely new models. Rather, I'm fascinated with the areas where the old and the new overlap and converge. The grey zones, where you can see all kinds of hybrids emerge.

In an organizational context, for instance, we can observe the softening of the borders between the traditional roles of a ”manager” and ” employee”, between ”producers” and ”consumers”, and between ”partners” and ”competitors”.
Likewise, we see a blending of the hitherto sharp distinction between the individual, personal interest and the interest of the greater good. In technology we experience a blurring of what's ”here” and what's ”there” as everyone and everything comes online.

I call these converging areas the power zones, because that's where the action is. They are dynamic. This is where you find fast growth and development, this is where the business model of the new economy are created, and this is where you can observe the demand for new skills and mindsets - and see the need for new kinds of organization and cooperation.

The enormous increase in material wealth that we experienced during industrialization was made possible by standardization and mass production. Moving forward, we need to think in terms of customization and a much greater focus on the demands and needs of the individual.

In the era of assembly lines, it took large amounts of capital to create new products. Only a shrinking handful of big companies could compete on the market for cars, refrigerators, sewing machines or Broadcast media.
Today, the most important means of production is a computer connected to the Internet. Incidentally, that is also one of the most important platforms for consumption. Knowledge that was exclusive to specialists can be accessed by anyone in 0.14 second using Google, and most teenagers take it for granted that they can upload photos and videos to youTube in an instant.

Both the means of production and the access to knowledge has become radically broader, and this democratization is changing our roles in society. Rather than being passive consumers, the majority of us will become participants and co-creators. In an increasing number of contexts we will no longer accept things as they are. We will demand influence; we will interact and engage in the continued developed of the objects and processes which we use.

Creativity is a key word in this context - but the word has acquired a new layer of meaning. Creativity is no longer a somewhat elitist, artistic activity. It has become a basic, necessary skill. Creativity is an imperative. It has become a demand on us in our everyday life that we are able to develop and add something new to the processes we participate in - whether it is on the job or as a consumer.

Being creative, however, does not necessarily imply creating something new from scratch. It is as much about remixing; combining existing elements in new ways. In short: Creativity has become more of a continued, collective process.

It's not like consumers are completely taking over the production of goods and services, but consumers are increasingly involved in determining what the final product looks like. Consumers become participants in creation; they configure, they contribute data and content, they provide feedback and they help spreading knowledge of the product to others.
Consumers are thus in a tight interaction with the producers - and vice versa. That interaction is a precondition in order to create exactly what an individual needs or demands in his or her particular context, here and now. The focus moves from producing finished products for passive consumers, to designing tools that empower the end users to contribute to solving their individual needs.
Producers that aren't capable of involving and listening to their costumers run the risk of commoditization; that is, ending unable to differentiate your product by meeting the individuals needs of the costumers. Then you can only compete on price.

The trend towards participation affects our notion of responsibility and power. If you are a co-creator it follows that you must see yourself as co-responsible. And this is a major cultural shift. Rather than just doing
what you are told by those higher up in hierarchy, we must learn to take an initiative and be proactive in using the opportunities we have been given to shape our circumstances.
The divide between the upper and the lower tiers of our future society will be marked by those that assume responsibility and are pro-active, and those that remain passive. Arguably that was also the case in the industrial society, but the difference is that in the past century only the privileged few had an opportunity to be creative and to assume responsibility. Today it is a fundamental demand in most jobs.

Leaders, too, will need to adapt to the fact that the nature of power has changed. As competency and initiative moves from the center and out into the network, the function of leadership shifts. To telling employees ”why” and ”where to”, rather than telling ”how” the organization should work.

The progressive coupling of everything and every one implies that we will need to consider ourselves as part of a larger context. No one can really see themselves as independent or self-sufficient any more - neither individual persons, nor companies, organizations or nation states. We are intensely interdependent.
Climate and environmental issues are perhaps the clearest illustrations of how the interests of the individual and the interests of the greater good are converging.
On the Internet we can see the so-called Web 2.0 services - like Wikipedia - as examples of how egoism and altruism are becoming harder to distinguish as motivation for the creators.
In business there is a strong trend towards more integrated and complex products and services, and this in turn means that a single company is unlikely to have all the skills in house that are needed in order to deliver a complex service. In order to be competitive, companies need to cooperate, create alliances and platforms that invite others - companies or consumers - to contribute. The utility of a product or service will depend on the extent to which it links and re-enforces the value of other products and services.

In networks where the stakeholders are interdependent and the interaction is continued, you can get a sense of how to behave in order to create mutual value by studying the field of game theory.
It's all about creating win-win situations, in which the result that emerges from cooperating is greater than the simple sum of the individual contributions.
The scientific research into game theory has indicated some of the factors that can enable so-called “plus-sum games”: You should be initiating cooperation; you should show and establish trust; you should connect, engage in networks, and send your creations into circulation and interaction.
It's very close to what's called “open innovation” in a business context.

And it sounds pretty - but it's not simple or easy. All kinds of noise and disturbances tend to erupt when we are integrated in new contexts. In Europe the debate on integrating immigrants is an obvious example, and it raises the questions of where the border to our community runs; who will we include, and under which conditions?
The European Union itself illustrates the issue: In principle a union is in the interest of the greater good, but from a local perspective the union implies an often controversial surrender of sovereignty.

When the circle, which delineates our sphere of interest, expands it is not always in sync with an expansion of our circle of empathy. And it is by no means certain that all stakeholders agree on the borders to the area of shared interests.

This also affects our concept of openness. When you are cooperating and working for a common good it makes sense for all stakeholders to make their resources freely available to each other, so they can be integrated in the co-creation process of new utility. But often, cooperation is only partial, not complete. There's a grey zone with some cooperation, and some sharing - and some consideration about where to draw the limits to openness.
An example: Excessive enforcement of patents and copyrights can lock up the raw material for new development. Individual inventors and creators want to be paid for the efforts and ideas, but it may come at a cost to the greater good if new products - technological or cultural - are not developed as fast as they could have beeen if all knowledge and tools where freely at the disposal for everyone to utilize and build upon.

Likewise with privacy. There's a very strong trend towards recording all details of our lives and making the information available to others. It's a Faustian bargain, because the data makes it possible create services that help us very effectively and in an individualized fashion. For the greater community the information about our actions also means that society can hold its citizens accountable in every detail - for better or worse.
For the individual, however, it feels intimidating and abusive when we experience that our sphere of privacy is intruded upon and we lose control of our personal information.

Nonetheless I believe we will go on connecting everyone and everything ever closer. It's the arrow of time; a trajectory of evolution which we have followed since the big bang, simply because cooperation and alliances provide an evolutionary advantage. We are becoming one global system, and, given time, perhaps one collective organism.

Historically, we have understood the world and the mechanisms behind it, by splitting it into pieces and analyzing the individual components. For good reasons. Until recently we didn't have the technology to examine systems holistically and while they were running.
Not only do we now have the computing power and tools to visualize enormous data sets, but the issues that are crucial to us and the systems with which we are interacting are now of a nature, which we basically can't gauge if we just reduce them to their components.
Whether it's physical phenomena like urban traffic, eco systems or climate change, or if it's social phenomena like civil war, fashion or online services, we need to approach them with a perspective that is holistic and which considers the interactions and the relationships between the many components of the system.

This is where complexity theory enters. If a multitude of components are coupled tightly and the interaction between them becomes sufficiently rich and fast, that's more or less the recipe for a complex, dynamic, adaptive system.
You may never have heard of the concept before, but once you learn about them, you start noticing them all around us. Despite the fact that physics, societal change, ecology, economy etc. are governed by the mechanisms of complex dynamic systems, we tend to only understand those issues in terms of the traditional, Newtonian, linear and mechanical paradigm which was the underpinning of the scientific and philosophical worldview of the industrial age. This is no longer sufficient.

In the 21st century having a deeply internalized understanding of mechanisms such as feedback, self-organization, non-linearity, probability and evolution will be crucial in order to understand and act intelligently in an increasingly complex reality.

By examining the mechanisms of positive and negative feedback we can explain why some systems are inert and resistant to change, while other systems can easily be drawn into rapidly accelerating and self re-enforcing processes.
Knowing about self-organization we can better grasp the qualitative leaps that happen when many elements start interacting. We get a sense of what it takes to harness the collective intelligence and the wisdom of the crowd. We can also analyze the drivers behind the tragedy of commons, in which choices that are perfectly rational at the individual level add up to a collective madness that can be fatal to the entire community.
With a better awareness of non-linearity and chaos we can appreciate that complex issues rarely have clear-cut, certain answers. We learn to think in terms of probabilities, rather than certainty. We accept that we cannot have absolute control of complex process.
Finally, complexity theory teaches us that evolution never stops. Circumstances change, and we must change with them in order to remain fit. Diversity is the raw material for continued development; we need to let variations and mutations try their luck with reality. Those that thrive will carry the torch onwards. This goes for biology, for ideas, as well as for products in the market place.

It's fascinating how these patternes and mechanisms can be observed across all types of complex systems and networks. Systems theory is a basic understanding, which can be applied across disciplines. Like reading, writing and arithmetic, systems theory is a fundamental literacy that gives access to and strengthens ones understanding of all other topics - be it economics, ecology, marketing, micro biology or music.

… And so what?
To stay in the terminology of evolution, one could consider the future as a fitness landscape. Those, which are best adapted and equipped will thrive under the conditions in the landscape - the rest will not make it to the next round. Companies that aren't capable of adapting to the new circumstances will face an uphill battle - while those that have a better understanding of the trends and drivers will experience that their knowledge and the solutions they develop are exactly what the market is asking for.
The same is true for humanity and our way of living. If we manage to leverage the possibilities that massive connectivity offers us; if we find ways to live comfortably within the constraints of the ecosystem - well, then we can hope to keep reproducing. Otherwise, we will join the hundreds of thousands of other species before us that tried but failed to get a foothold on existence.
It is absolutely crucial that we learn the skills for a new, complex reality and, likewise, that we rid ourselves of past habits and mindsets that have now become counter-productive and are standing in the way of our chances of thriving. The sooner, the better.

Some of these skills can be thought of as a return to behaviors that used to be perfectly natural for humans - like being creative and explorative. Others of these competencies require us to train and adapt to a mindset that can seem counterintuitive at first. But we must learn it, just as we had to learn the skills that were relevant and necessary when industrialism happened.
We have been raised with the logic of hierarchies, clear-cut roles, black and white answers and a fundamental approach to life as a zero-sum game in which every one is fighting each other over a finite, limited amount of resources. With that kind of background, it is not easy or natural for most of us to start reaching out, showing trust, assuming responsibility or embracing uncertainty as opportunity. But, as I have argued here, these ways of acting make sense and create advantages in the age of the network.

The hardest part of this mindset to learn is probably also the most pressing. We need to find an understanding of happiness and meaning which is not so narrowly connected to an ever-expanding material consumption.
For this, we might find some inspiration in the skills, patterns and mechanisms I have described. Seeing your self and ones actions in a larger context; thinking in terms of plus-sum games; being accommodating and creating connections; being creative and assuming responsibility, adapting to new circumstance… Those are the skills we will need in a new, complex reality.

More Power Zones

Here’s another couple of ”power zones”; areas in which the convergence of realms that used be seperate creates some interesting and challenging new results.

We are not at the point where our machines our truly conscious, but a lot of smart systems seem to have moved way beyond simple, mechanical and linear computing. They have a certain new quality; one gets the sense that there is ”something” in the way the machine works that was not explicitly installed there by an engineer.
Likewise, our systems have started to show traits that we would traditionally only associate with organisms that are alive.

Googles clean energy vision

In this podcast, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google speaks for 30 minutes about his vision of the future of energy supply. He provides an excellent summary of the general vision of “de-carbonization” which he shares with a large part of the Californian clean tech venture capital community. This includes an intelligent power grid, massive investments in solar, taxes and quotas on CO2 emissions and a tax policy that doesn’t support the fossil fuel based logic of the past.
All in all a very good example of how hard American entrepreneurial spirit in combination with great amounts of capital can pull, once they catch a glimpse of the Next Great Thing.
Eric Schmidt does not dismiss that Google could enter the energy generation or distribution business – he compares a future intelligent power grid to the internet.
Thought provoking, inspiring – and a reminder that cleantech is moving forward fast.

Power zones

So, I'm working on this book, and one of the main themes in it will be the idea of "power zones", where the old and the new paradigm is converging.
Our industrial culture is fading, and new ways of organizing and cooperating are becoming more relevant in order to thrive under today's and tomorrow's circumstances.
But it’s not a complete change. The old ways are still with us, and they are still useful in many contexts. What’s interesting to study is not so much the extreme cases of way new behaviours. Rather, it’s the areas where the old and the new overlap and converge that are most important. The zones in which there’s some of both.
I call them the power zones, because that’s where the action is.
They are dynamic. This is where you find fast growth and development, this is where the business model of the new economy are created, and this is where you can observe the demand for new skills and mindsets – and a need for new kinds of organization and cooperation.

So here are some of the power zones of convergence:


Producers/consumers
Consumers are not taking over the entire production, but increasingly they have a say in determining what gets created. They participate in the creation, they configure, contribute content, give feedback and spread the word to others... They interact with the producers – and vice versa - in order to get exactly the product or service they want in their current, personal context.
Producers who fail to involve and listen to their users are more at risk of commoditization; rather than competing by meeting individual demands, they can only differentiate their product on price.

There is still a place for expertise and professional skills and experience, but amateurs, who are passionate about their interest, are getting the tools to create to standards that used to be exclusive to professionals. Companies are finding that the greatest experts on their products are often the fans and users, rather than the employees.



Topdown/bottom up
Not a complete rejection of leadership and hierarchy but an increasing share of inputs and initiative come from the periphery rather than the center of the system. The network manages itself, but there is still a need for leadership and vision in order to align.

Competing, yes, but cooperating as well. Co-creating in order to establish a greater platform to do business on.


Me/we
Not entirely altruistic, but conscious that in a connected world of tightening resources, the well being of the system is in the individuals’ own interest – and that any harm or defects to the system quickly translate into negative consequences for the individual.

Not a complete surrender to the collective, still motivated by personal goals and gains, but with an understanding of increasing interdependence and the value of cooperation. The circle of empathy, responsibility and accountability is widening, but there are clashes at the boundaries.

Not letting go of all secrets and possessions, but moving from a completely protected and closed mindset to one of reciprocal sharing – enabling rapid innovation and learning for the benefit of all players.

Not giving up all privacy, but finding a new balance where accountability to the system gives you better service and guards the majority against the excesses of the few.



Here/there
Not gone entirely into a virtual world, but simultaneously present in both the virtual and physical reality. The experience of the local physical reality is augmented, but also distracted by a digital layer of information.

Physically present here, but communicating and acting with consequences elsewhere. And likewise, not just acting on what’s taking place here, but affected by information streams or events that are remotely controlled by others.


A merging of disciplines
Not giving up deep knowledge of a subject, but augmenting your understanding with insights from other fields – transferring systemic features, cross fertilizing disciplines. In many cases because the context and the problems that need to be solved are so complex that the solutions require knowledge from a range of disciplines.

Hybrid taxis

Stockholm has a lot of Toyota Prius hybrids running as taxis. Nice touch. As usual, we can learn from the Swedes.

Starting up a new book

I guess I might as well advertise it: I’ve started writing on my next book, and this time it will be in English. It will be a business book, focusing on how society and the economy is getting more complex and how this will demand a very different attitude and perspective than what the industrial age called for.
I’ve tried to get an overview of the (intended) content by writing the headlines – and I’ve posted it all here. For anyone interested in the subject, I hope this list of headlines can convey a sense of where the content is heading.
Obviously, I’d love to have any comments.

Parallel lives

In the background: Jean Nouvel's Torre Agbar in Barcelona

Ars electronica: A new cultural economy

Just noticed that this years' Ars Electronica festival will be about "A new cultural economy - the limits of intelletual property". It's curated by Joi Ito. Sounds interesting - maybe a bit too predictable? What I usually find really stimulating about Ars E. is their ability to define completely new agendas, that may have been evolving just below the surface.

Zero Carbon Cities - konference

Sorry, this announcement is in Danish:
Jeg har været en del involveret i Project Zero, et meget ambitøst projekt om at gøre Sønderborg området carbon-neutralt inden 2030. Det er et langt, sejt træk, og det er ikke noget en enkelt by kan løse alene. For at få kontakt til andre der arbejder med de samme problemstilinger, holder Project Zero en konference den 17. juni om bæredygtig byplanlægning - specielt med fokus på små og mellemstore byer, der har ganske andre udfordringer end storbyer på miljøområdet.
Vi har fået indlægsholdere fra de 3 europæiske projekter vi mener er de mest interessante: Freiburg, Växjö og Wien. Desuden vil der være præsentationer fra en stribe danske byer som arbejder i retning af carbon reduktion: Frederikshavn, Lolland, Albertslund - og selvfølgelig Sønderborg.
Programmet kan downloades her

World out of sync

This seems seriously spooky. Cherry trees blossoming in London a couple of days ago - on february 5th.

Davos podcasts are coming online

The candy store is open: http://gaia.world-television.com/wef/worldeconomicforum%5Fannualmeeting2008/

What does "Bright Green" mean?

At work we throw the phrase "Bright Green" around a lot. I've made another attempt to define what it might mean:

Bright green is a strategy for meeting our needs and securing a pleasant, modern lifestyle without reducing the opportunities of future generations and harming the foundation for civilization in the long run.
In that sense, the term ”bright green” means the same as ”sustainable”, but by choosing a different phrase we get to rethink the issue and define a vision that is more in line with the realities of today.

No one owns the definition of ”bright green”, but as we see it, the following are some of the characteristics:

Bright Green is basically about understanding ones actions and their consequences in a global and long-term perspective. It is becoming increasingly clear that it is in our own interest that the entire system which we depend upon remains healthy.
Bright Green thinking is circular; realizing that resources, activity and waste are connected in a cycle which is becoming tighter on a planet where a rising population of people are rapidly increasing their consumption – while natural resources are dwindling or depleted despite amazing progress in developing more efficient technologies.

Meeting the future needs of humans calls for radical new technologies, so Bright Green technology must be based on science and facts. Bright Green solutions do not depend on faith or luck – they are proven, well documented and robust technologies with an effect that is reliable and well understood.

Obviously, money is not the only value in life, but the spreading of bright green products and solutions should be driven by market forces. They have to be attractive and make economical sense. Bright green solutions may be supported by regulation - and indeed taxation and regulation are important ways of determining what is economical in society - but basically Bright Green solution should be chosen based on competitive merits and not because of guilt or good will. Bright green solutions are efficient as they seek to optimize the use of natural resources.

Bright Green solutions are thought through at a systemic level and they work in large and complex contexts. Bright Green thinking implies deliberately looking at the larger picture – understanding that whether a solution is in fact positive is determined in a complex interaction between many, interdependent factors. Bright Green is no about quick, local fixes.

Bright Green solutions can scale to mass markets. They are not hand crafted or targetted at small and special groups of users. Rather, they can be rolled out at an industrial scale and be useful to millions of people.

Bright Green solutions offer transparency and overview. They enable users to act appropriately and participate in optimizing their outcome. They invite users to act in a responsible way – to become co-creators rather than passive consumers.

Strictly speaking, the best environmentalist is a dead environmentalist – no longer wearing on nature’s resources. But Bright Green thinking is not about excusing our presence and minimizing our existence. Bright Green should be an attractive, hopeful and fun vision of the future. Nature is not grey and frugal. Nature is an explosion of colours, variety and opportunity, but this richness of the planet has co-evolved as an entire system. Our wealth can only be maintained in balance with the rest of the system – and evolution is littered with designs that did not respect that.

Nowhere to surrender

I was at a meeting the other day in London, just off Kensington highstreet. It was raining and cold in the late afternoon. On the pavement there was a young girl crouching, holding a paper cup with the rim chewed up in front of her. If you looked closer at her, she seemed quite out of it, very red around her eyes, looking like she was not even capable of asking for help. Very, very sad, simply.
Lots of people were walking by, including me; busy, used to seeing beggars. She was probably around twenty, not that much older than my own daughter.
For some reason I was very disturbed by this, but I didn’t know what to do, apart from giving her a couple of pounds. I don’t live in London, I feel like a stranger who doesn’t really know what the rules are, and besides, like everyone else, I had an important meeting waiting.

It seemed she ought to be able to contact someone – a police man – and say, I give up, I’m freezing, I’m crying, I’m sick, I’m sitting on the street in an insane world of people that see me, that care for a moment, who don’t want to harm me – but on the hand, never stop and offer a bit of their precious time to help.

The weird thing was that the meeting was with the author of a book describing how business needs to keep creative, changing and adapting in order to stay fit in the evolutionary game of the market place.

And it makes me wonder, if we are entering a paradigm where each of us is supposed to be more responsible and self determining, co-creating and participating in shaping our circumstances – and if evolution culls those that are less fit... where does that leave those that are not creative and able to assume responsibility. The sick, the weaker minds, those in crisis of some sort.
Once the old ideologies of the industrial mass society are discarded – what mechanisms are left to take care of the weakest? Particularly given that the distance between rich and poor in most countries is growing. How far will polarization go this round?

London - The Hayward Center

The figures of the net

In a podcast from the O’reilly Open Source Conference, Tim o’Reilly rattles off some interesting figures about web 2.0-like services:
- Wikipedia has 5 million articles, written by 100.000 contributors
- Amazon has 10 million reviews written by more than 100.000 reviewers
- Del.icio.us has 2.5 million users contributing probably tens of miliions of shared bookmarks
- The 10 million users of Flickr have so far shared 750 millions photos
- There are 122 million Independent websites on the World Wide Web generating 10-20 billion pages.

I can add another piece of statistics:
according to World internet statistics, there are 1,244,449,601 persons on the planet with internet access – 18.9% of the population.

What’s the mileage on your house?

The price of petrol is one of the most important signals in the climate/environmental discussion. It’s so visible; we can follow the prices rising and falling advertised with big signs along the roads. Most have a pretty good idea of how far their car drives pr. Litre - and of course we do, because we’re confronted with the economic consequences every time we fill our car.
The cost of heating our houses or the price of electricity is a different matter. Very few know the price of a kilowatt hour, or how much it costs to operate their appliances – even though 40% of our energy consumption is spent in our houses, much more than for transportation.
We’re not as aware of whether our house is efficient or not, because we’re not confronted with the information. Experiments have shown that simply installing a gauge that tells the driver what mileage he or she is getting currently improves the fuel economy considerably.
My guess is that if it were more visible, in realtime, how much we’re spending to heat or cool our houses, or to use our devices and appliances, we would save a lot of energy and create a huge demand for energy efficiency in buildings.

A good laugh - Pixar "lifted"

Oh, they've done it again:

Literacies for the networked society

I've been working for years on various iterations of a piece that should describe how the paradigm shift we're living through calls for a rethinking of the skills that we need - and thus also points to the need to rethink our educational curriculum.
So, I've put the latest version on my website - and yes, it's long: 20 pages, but I actually think it is important stuff.
Here's an excerpt, from the beginning:

Society is making its way through a profound change. We are leaving the industrial age and entering a new paradigm - one which we could name the network society.
The main characteristic of this is connectivity. Humans, machines, cultures and economies are connected ever closer, more often, in more detail and across greater distances. Developments in completely different realms are increasingly influencing and interfering with each other.
Acceleration is another characteristic. As each new technical development helps us taking the next step even faster even change itself is accelerating.

The network society offers us countless new opportunities - but at the same time it confronts us with a demand for new competences. Clearly, the type of work that we will be making our living from in a globally connected hi-tech world will be very different from the work which our welfare society was built upon.
We need a new approach, one that's suitable for the new rules of the game. We need a different perception of the mechanisms which drive change - and we need to weed out old concepts and structures that have become irrelevant and which often end up as barriers to necessary change.
All of this implies a deep cultural shift in attitude and understanding of learning, innovation and action - a shift that's needed all the way from kindergartens to retirees.

In primary schools one uses the term ”literacies”, to describe the basic skills that are necessary in order to get by in society. In Denmark the law emphasizes 5 literacies: reading, writing, math, English as second language, and basic IT skills. If you lack one or more of these, you will experience that the doors to further learning are shut.
But what's considered basic literacies obviously changes as the conditions in society change. As we shift from the industrial society to a networked society we will need to acquire a number of new, basic competences to supplement the old literacies.

Put briefly, these new competencies are about understanding the way in which globally connected, complex, dynamic systems work. The internet, international politics, stock markets, or living systems, like our body… These are the sort of complex systems that we need to engage with, and our future welfare will depend on our ability to do so in smart ways.
We will need a completely internalized understanding of the mechanisms that drive such systems. At the moment it may sound very abstract, but concepts like evolution, non-linearity, feedback, self organization and ecology will increasingly be crucial to us in order to asses situations correctly and to act intelligently in relation to the forces that shape our circumstances.

Goodbye sunday paper

A couple of months ago I decided to cancel my sunday newspaper subscription. Somehow it seemed that they never really printed anything in there worth reading anyway. It was nagging me to recieve all of that paper which I basically just wasted time flipping through and discarding. The decisive moment came when they started to deliver the paper wrapped in plastic.

So my life is little bit lighter, and frankly I haven’t missed it at all.

The great carbon cover up, part 2

In Denmark we like to pride ourselves that as a nation we have decoupled economic growth and the use of fossil fuels.
But in fact our C02 emission modesty looks quite different if we include the emissions from the Danish shipping industry. A number of the worlds largest shipping companies are Danish – most notably Maersk.
It turns out that the combined emissions from the Danish fleet of ships amount to 25% of the total Danish emissions. Only the shipping emissions don’t show up in the usual statistics, because fuel for international transport is exempt from the Kyoto protocol – and from taxation.

The great carbon cover up, part 1

In Denmark we are proud to have committed to the Kyoto goals of reducing our emissions. It’s still very much doubtful that we will in fact hit the target, but at least we feel we are doing something.
However, you never hear any discussion of the impacts of our agricultural industry on the greenhouse effect.
There are 5 mio. People living in Denmark, but at any time there is also about 13.5 mio. Pigs. Annually, about 25 mio. Pigs are slaughtered in Denmark.
The Average Danish person emits around 10 tons of carbon dioxide annually. According to The Economist, ”every year the average sow and her piglets produce 9.2 tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent through the methane emissions from their effluent”.
In that case, it seems that the true Danish carbon emissions are about 3 times the official figure.

Apart from the damaging effect of all the methane that these pigs produce, it also takes considerable energy to raise those 25 mio. Pigs annually.
Obviously, you lose a lot of calories when you raise meat, somewhere between a factor 5 to 10, as far as I have been able to research.
Pigs are slaughtered at the age of 4-5 months, when they have reached a weight of about 100 kilo.
Even though Denmark is a wonderfully fertile country we cannot produce enough to feed those pigs, so a considerable part of this is shipped in from Brazil, Argentina and other soy producers. It takes a lot of energy to grow that soy, for fertilizers, machinery and transportation. Fertilizer is produced from natural gas and transportation fuel is almost all fossil as well.
(To make matters worse, the land used for producing soy in Brazil and Argentina is partly forests that have been cleared – and thus no longer help to stabilize the climate.)
Finally, 80% of the meat is exported, adding more transportation and more emissions.

Oh, did I forget cows? Denmark is a big dairy producer. We have 650.000 cows – and cows fart too.

Welcome to the machine

SFO, San Francisco

"Bright green" - what does it mean?

I kinda like the term ”bright green” that the folks at worldchanging.com use to describe their vision of a sustainable future. One of the problems with words like sustainable or organic is that so many interpretations have been heaped on them. They’re tired, they’ve lost their power to engage, and what’s worse, in many cases they actually turn off people, who may be worried about the environment and wish to turn away from a destructive life style, but don’t want to be part of the sustainability brigade.

But what might ”bright green” mean?
Here’s my list – please add to it.

I see bright green as a a strategy for meeting our needs in a way that makes good use of facts, science and technology. Bright green solutions are robust and they can achieve massive, industrial scale. They have reliable outcomes, documented effects, it’s understood how they work.

They are transparent. They enable users to become participants in optimizing their outcome. They invite users to act in a responsible way – to become co-creators rather than passive consumers.

Obviously, money is not the only value in life, but the spread Bright green products and solutions should be driven by market forces. They have to be attractive and make economical sense. They may be supported by regulation, but basically they should not be chosen out of guilt or good will, but based on competive merits.

Bright green solutions are holistic and complex. They are not discrete, local fixes. They take the larger context into account, and this can be done by using sensors, networks and by approaching reality as an ecosystem of interconnected and interdependent factors.

...to be continued

Davos highlight

I didn’t get to the World Economic Forum in Davos this year either. But then again, their website is certainly a very good substitute. I can recommend taking a good look around, there is an amazing amount of good information – among them a great deal of very instructive slides prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers that capture a number of central global predicaments in a nutshell.

A good part of the speeches are available as podcasts, although I would say that to me they were not nearly as interesting as the sessions last year.
The one that captured me the most was the closing remarks by Tony Blair. It’s great to hear someone with ten years of experience as one of the top global players who insists on a vision of better world and even manages to stir up some optimism. I realize there’s a lot of Blair-fatigue in the UK, but I found his speech quite constructive.

Here’s a couple of quotes:

“What is really happening is that nations - even the most great - are realising that they cannot pursue their narrow national interests without invoking broader global values. They are obliged to recognise that interdependence is the defining
characteristic of the early 21st century world”.

“Above all, nations find that they need to confront and deal
with challenges that simply do not admit of resolution without powerful alliances of other nations. And every nation, even the most powerful, is obliged to find such alliances or find their own interests buffeted and diminished.
That is why we call it interdependence. It is the ultimate joining together of selfinterest and community interest. Afghanistan was a failed state, its people living in misery and poverty but in days gone by it would have stayed that way without the world much noticing. September 11th brought it to our notice in the most unforeseen but catastrophic way. Look how the world has changed because of it.
We know Africa’s plight is shameful in a world of plenty. But I have never shrunk from confessing another motive. I believe if we let Somalia or Sudan slip further into the abyss, the effect of their fall will not stay within their region never mind their nation. I will argue for the presence of peace in Palestine on its own terms; but there is no question that its absence has consequences on the streets of cities in Britain amongst people who have never been near Gaza or the West Bank.
And, of course, there is climate change. Assume even a possibility of its threat being real. It would be madness not to act to prevent its realisation – just as a precaution. Its challenge is the supreme expression of interdependence. America and China, even if they had no other reason for a relationship and they have many, would need one simply for this alone".

Blair further speaks about his frustrations that often action is hampered not by lack of political will but because the instruments we have to take decisions and act at a global level are inadequate:

"Global purpose, underpinned by global values requires global instruments of effective multilateral action.
A UN Security Council without Germany, Japan, Brazil or India, to say nothing of any African or Muslim nation, will, in time, not merely lose legitimacy in the eyes of the world, but seriously inhibit effective action. By all means let us have some form of bridging mechanism – perhaps semi-permanent status without a veto – to a reformed Council; but get it done. Likewise with reform within the UN – greater power to the Secretary General, merging agencies, one UN organisation incountry. But reform now has to happen.
There is a powerful case for merging the IMF and World Bank and for increasing the influence of the developing countries within them.
The G8 is already well on its way to metamorphosis into G8 +5. At G8 +5, it can be a forum for agreement between the most powerful nations with a true modern global reach.
But sooner or later, the metamorphosis should be complete.
We need to make the regional blocs more effective.
I strongly believe in changing the rules of the EU to build efficacy in Europe'spower. The EU at 27 cannot operate within the system used for an EU of 15 countries.
It would hugely help the cause of Africa if the AU became a strongly and cohesive voice and instrument of Africa's interests".

The World Changing book

This is to recommend that you read ”World Changing – a user’s guide to the 21st. century”. It weighs a massive 1700 grams, and I have just carried it in my backpack for 5 weeks of travelling – but it was worth it.
”World Changing” is not exactly a page turner, it’s more like a catalogue of all the various activities and issues that relate to this vague dream and hope so many of us share of creating what the folks at Worldchanging call a ”bright green future”. In fact, you could easily compare to the good ole Whole Earth catalogue.
Even for professional eco-information analysts this should provide a good deal of information and inspiration.
Obviously it gets outdated at the speed of technology, but just now I can’t think of a better way to an overview of our threats and possibilities. For the latest information you can always visit the worldchanging website, where most of the content of the book originated. These people are doing great and important work!

Wanted typist

A little souvenir from Madurai, India

The incredible morphing toilet paper meme

Here's yet another incarnation of the folded toilet paper meme - this one's from Ideal Beach resort, Mahabalipuram, Southern India.
What's next - origami?

Schizo

Weird world: The economy is booming, the planet is crashing

What would it mean to teach innovation in schools?

Innovation should not be a separate discipline but rather an approach that is an integral part of all subjects.
There is no doubt that if you support learning processes that are modern, efficient and which invite students to be creative in their daily work – this will help the innovation perspective.

But what is it then specifically that distinguishes ”normal”, good teaching learning methods from learning with an eye to innovation?

In my opinion the crucial factor would be that in learning for innovation, the world is presented as something which is under continuous change – a development each of us has the possibility to affect.

We live in a time in which we increasingly will be expected to act and develop in relation to the contexts we are part of. Thus, we should not merely accept the facts and circumstances that we are presented with as static, but rather see them as stages of a continued process.

This requires that one understands the history that preceded the present, and that one understands the forces that are driving development.
It implies that one decides if a situation is satisfactory and good, or if it should be changed.
And it requires that one feels relatively at ease dealing with uncertainty and change.

This all means that teaching innovation would have 5 distinct assumptions integrated:
- Understanding the world as being under continuous change
- Understanding that each of us has the possibility and is under demand to participate in the further development
- A critical, assessing approach to the existing conditions
- Knowledge of the tools that are necessary in order to act in relation to the development
- A physical environment that can be changed and which invites its users to create and experiment

Mutating memes

The folded paper tissue meme that has been circulating to hotels globally has mutated. I spotted this version: A sticker to fasten the triangular fold in place at The Excelsior in Manhattan.

Dawkins; spirit without religion?

More Dawkins, transcribed from 44 minutes into the Point of inquiry interview.
I find this passage fascinating. To me it shows the intellectual honesty of Dawkins and the vulnerability that comes with it. After lambasting religions and faith based world views, he never the less points at this ”spirituality” at the basis of everything.
It sounds schizophrenic, but I entirely understand him. I am awed by the beauty and sophistication of it all, but I have a hard time with religions.

”There are those that believe in evolution, but still believe in the doctrines of some particular religion such as Christianity. They believe in the redemption by the crucifixion, the resurrection and so on... which are sort of miraculous beliefs.
But there are others who are often physicists or other scientists who don’t have any belief in those things, but none the less believe in some form of intelligence, some vast cosmic intelligence at the basis of the whole of the universe. I do have a lot more respect for them – for one thing they are a lot brighter than I am and one has to respect that – but I would be prepared to argue with them - but I do think that it is very different from belief in some particular religion with miracles, with prayer and with forgiveness of sins and all the things that go with, say, Christianity or Islam or Judaism.
It’s very easy to listen to a physicist who is making a very sophisticated case for some spirit at the deep base of the universe and to think ”oh well, he is just talking about Christianity – No, he is NOT talking about Christianity, he is talking about something far grander, far more profound, something that physicists maybe in a thousand years time may give a naturalistic explanation to.
I think it is very pernicious to confuse that sort of spirituality which sounds vaguely religious with the particular beliefs that we associate with named religions of history and persisting into today".

Prefab housing factory

Swedish contractor NCC has created a quite revolutionary factory for producing prefab houses. Usually 90% of construction is done at the building site. With this concept, 90% of construction is done in the controlled and automated factory environment. The assembly on site is done underneath a giant tent, so no water damage etc.
NCC claims that they have cut production time for housing in half.
There's a 7 minute film about the concept at their website.

Dawkin's back

There's a number of podcast out there with excellent speeches and interviews with Richard Dawkins talking about his latest book "The God delusion".

- A twenty minute speech at TED talks
- An hour long interview on point of inquiry

He speeks eloquently on the dangers of blindly accepting religius dogma and explanations based on faith. Very refreshing.

I transcribed this snippet from his recent speech Poptech - which is not online yet:

Science has taught us many things against our intuition. Appearantly solid things like crystals and rocks are almost entirely empty space – the familiar illustration is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium. The nucleus is the fly in the middle of the sports stadium and the next nucleus is the next fly in the middle of the next sports stadium.
The hardest, densest rock is ”really” almost entirely empty space, broken only by tiny particles so widely spaced they shouldn’t count. Why then do rocks feel hard and solid and impenetrable. Well, as an evolutionary biologist I’d say something like this: Our brain has evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed at which our body normally operates. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms – if we had, our brains would probably percieve rocks as full of empty space.
Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands because our hands themselves can’t penetrate them. It’s therefore useful to our brians to construct notions like solidity and impenetrability.
Moving to the other end of the scale, our ancestors never had to move through the cosmos at anything like the speed of light, if they had our brains would be much better equipped to deal with Einsteins ideas of relativity.
I give the name middleworld to the medium scale environment, the things moving at medium speeds , in which we have evolved, in which our brains have evolved to understand and take action.

A long wait for a good beer - Guinness evolution ad

Just saw this amazing ad for Guinness, three guys in a pub that suddenly get thrown backward in evolution, 3 billion years to the point where they lizards drinking foul water at some pond. Sometimes ads are so great.

The singularity summit as podcasts

So much good stuff, so little time.
There’s a number of very good talks available as podcasts from the Singularity Summit at Stanford – back in may.
A little snippet: In his speech Cory Doctorow has a good description of the fundamental problem with controlling the network with heavy-handed Digital rights management:

All complex systems have parasites and you can’t solve parasites by rendering the system simple. Solving the parasites by rendering the system simple renders the system not powerful enough to not even bother with.

Mega cities on display in Venice

The biennale on architecture in Venice is well worth a visit – you should reserve two days for it, there’s a lot to see. It’s hard work, but luckily there’s all of that wonderful Italian coffee to pick you up.
It closes on november 18th.

The theme this time is Mega cities, and the main exhibition looks at 16 major cities: Caracas, Cairo, Mexico City, Cairo, Berlin, Shanghai, Istanbul and Los Angeles are among them.
Lots of good analysis, breathtaking multimedia, amazing photos and interesting facts. Such as:
There’s one square meter of free space pr. Inhabitant in Cairo.
In 2050 8 billion people will be living in cities - 3/4 of the worlds population, as opposed to just over half today.
The worlds largest city currently is the greater Tokyo metropolitan area with 34 mio. Inhabitants. By 2050 Mumbai is expected to be the largest. It’s currently 18 mio. But will likely be over 40 mio. Then.
In Los Angeles 80% of all transportation is in cars, In Tokyo 80% of transportation uses trains and buses.
The typical daily commuting time in Sao Paolo, Brasil is 4-5 hours.
Half of all cement in the world is used in China. Shanghai alone added 2700 skyscrapers in the past ten years, increasing the number of hi-rises tenfold.
60% of Mexico Cities inhabitants are squatters. The rates for ”informal” occupancy is similar in many third mega-cities.

The impression I got away with was that of to very strong, opposing forces, top-down and bottom-up. One is city planning and architecture on an absolutely massive, soviet style scale. The exhibition shows any number of very large projects for brand new cities with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants – particularly for Asia.
The other force is the flood of poor people simply moving to the city, putting up their shacks where it’s possible. Seen from above, it looks like a sea of corrugated tin roofs and muddy roads swallowing the old, official cities.
The Venezuelan pavilion is about the slums of Caracas. On a wall-size sign it’s states something like: These people have no use for architects. This sort of city does not look like someone intended. But perhaps, the solutions that the people in the slums find to solve the extreme pressure on resources could be used by all of us.

For old times sake I did a radio-report for Radio Denmarks Orientering.
It’s in Danish, though. You can hear it here.

Craig Venter at Poptech

I missed Poptech this year, but very generously the amazing Poptech team streamed the whole conference - so I’ve kinda been there, at least virtually.
The one talk I was really looking forward to was Craig Venter – of decoding the human genome fame. He came on as the last speaker. He’s almost scary in his laser like determination and belief in what he’s doing, but I get this feeling that we’d better listen. He’s working on “synthetic biology”, his project is to create new life from the bottom up, bacteria which can be tailored to do Really Usefull Stuff – like eating CO2 and turning it into energy for us to use.
It’s a wonderful prospect, but I can see a million things going wrong before we can relax about large scale use of synthetic bacteria.
The following passage of Venter’s speech gets into some of the details. Sounds to me like he’s spelling out the future - although I’m not sure that I’ve gotten all the spelling right:

No cells’ genome has yet been even remotely synthesized and even genome replacement has not yet been demonstrated. So we’re early on, but we think there’s tremendous use for this key technology as we go forward.
This audience clearly knows about energy demand and the potential to develop new fuels. My view is coming a little bit from a different side in terms of what we are doing to the environment; We’re adding 3,5 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere each year, we can not afford to ignore any technology that offers a solution.
We’ve designed, on paper, organisms that can take that CO2 back from the atmosphere and fix the CO2 into cellular proteins, sugars, biopolymers etc. Just recently Dupont has opened a plant in Tennessee that has silos, 4 of them, about the size of this room, for producing propanediol from sugar, that goes into their new ceronapolymer that’s going to be used for stain free carpets and clothing - all derived from modifying the genome of a bacteria. They are starting with sugar, but we can go back further, to CO2.
We have metabolic pathways that can take carbon monoxide out of the air, split water with that, producing hydrogen and oxygen. We can go from methane to produce hydrogen or other fuels. We have a team working on modifying photosynthesis to go straight from sunlight into hydrogen production without any other energy being added - and we and others have been working on modifying cells to produce burnable fuels directly.
So cellulasis, or enzymes that break down the complex sugars that form plants and trees – everybody knows that termites can eat wood but in fact termites can not eat wood, they have bacteria in their guts, the cellulasis, that break down the cellulose into simple sugars.
The goal is to convert some of agriculture where we can capture back some of this carbon in a recyclable fashion. People are starting with ethanol but there is no reason why in a few years time we can’t go right from cellulose through a bacteria to make butane, propane, even octane directly.
Now all of a sudden, in stead of taking carbon from the ground, burning it and putting it in the atmosphere we can recycle it through the process of photosynthesis. We’re looking at a wide variety of plants as feed stocks, going into producing chemicals as Dupont is doing, for nutraceuticals and most importantly into energy - in terms of what we are rapidly doing to this planet.
I’m the least worried about disease, whether it’s manmade or new emerging infections affecting humanity. In the long term. if we destroy our spaceship, which we are in the process of doing, disease will not matter.

I’m so fed up with ”innovation”

I write a bi-weekly column for the Danish edition of computerworld. Here's a sample in translation:

It’s hard to have a civilized discussion these days without using the term ”innovation”. We all know the refrain: We are living in different times, and in the future we will all have to be creative for a living.
...I think we’ve all pretty much understood that by now.
The problem with the word ”innovation” is that it suggests that we’re all going to run around spewing great ideas 8 hours a day. While in fact it’s a much broader set of competences that we need.

In primary schools one uses the term ”litteracies”, to describe the basic skills that are necessary in order to get by in society. In Denmark the law emphasizes 5 litteracies: reading, writing, math, English as second language, and basic IT skills. If you lack one or more of these, you will experience that the doors to further learning are shut.

What’s considered basic litteracies obviously changes as the conditions in society change. As we shift from the industrial society to a networked society we will need to acquire a number of new, basic competences to supplement the old litteracies. I would argue that it’s really this new set of competencies that’s being called for, when politicians, business leaders and columnists demand that we learn to be ”innovative”.

I realize that the following will sound pretty theoretical, but, put briefly, I believe that the competences we need are about understanding the new game rules in a globally connected, complex, dynamic system.

The world is being ever tighter coupled and developments in completely different areas increasingly affect eachother. Furthermore, changes in the global system are accellerating, as each new technical development makes us capable of taking the next step forward even faster.
This makes it crucial to have mechanisms like evolution, non-linearity, feedback, self-organization and ecology completely internalized in the way we assess situations and act in accordance with the realities of today and the coming years. One needs to be familiar with these mechanisms in order to understand such phenomena as the internet, international politics, a market place or how a living system – like our own body – functions.

Paradoxically, we are experiencing an increasing individualization concurently with the growing connectivity and interdependence. Ever more of us are reaching a level of education and wealth at which we can start demanding a high degree of individual freedom and service. However, this freedom implies a growing personal responsibility. All of us must learn to be pro-active and manage a personal strategy of development – for instance by maintaining our level of knowledge and our health.
The world has become interactive. In contrast to the dominating mass culture of industrialism we are now increasing co-creators – and thus co-responsible – for the relevance of our work and for the shaping of the products and service we use. We can’t get by like in the industrial age, relying on top-down hierachies in which most people just did what they were told to do.

We need a new approach which is compatible with the new conditions of this new age. At a fundamental level it’s about seeing change as the natural state of affairs. Increasingly, we will produce and consume processes, that are continuously adjusted to fit the users changing contexts at a speed that approaches realtime.
Thus, we need to get accustomed and feel at ease thinking in terms of probabilities and adhoc solutions rather than certainties and stability. In order to participate in the global interaction we must be open minded and explorative, willing to share experiences, able to communicate and receptive to input from others.
... Oh, and of course we also need to be creative in order to find new solutions and to use our knowledge in ever changing contexts. Innovation is crucial – but in my understanding it only covers a fraction of an entirely new mindset that we need to make the basis of our educations.
I wish I could innovate a better word for it.

Terraforming in Holland

...while I’m at it: Here’s another amazing landscape. It’s just north of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The area is known as Glaslaan; the glass region.
What you see are greenhouse, massive stretches of enormous greenhouses. I spent a whole day photographing the surrealism of the place a few years back.

That giant sucking sound

I am working on a presentation about water and I was looking for images that would illustrate how much water is used for irrigation – often in areas that basically are not suited for intensive agriculture at all.
(fact: 70% of global water consumption is for irrigation).

I heard that Garden City in Kansas was a place that used pivot irrigation a lot, and sure enough: if you have a look from the Google Earth satellite, you see this massive example of terraforming.
I can't help wondering what the view will be in a few decades.

Freedom and responsibility

Come to think of it it’s actually very simple:
Freedom and responsibility are intertwined in the sense that the more freedom you have in choosing your actions, the more those actions will be your responsibility.

Weird World War

What drives me nuts about this war is: What are we fighting about?
I'd love to see some demands for change, something concrete to get a discussion going.
Have I overlooked something?

Freestyle computing - tell your kids

At Danfoss Universe, we just launched a pet project of mine, the freestyle computing competition – alas only in Denmark.
The competition is open for kids below 16. They can submit any creation that has computing involved in it – animation, websites, photoshop stuff, ring tones for phones, robots, whatever...
The jury will find the coolest production, emphasizing originality, technical skill, and the ability to combine several media.
We have two age brackets; up to 11, and 11-15 years. The winner in each bracket gets an i-pod – but every entrant recieves an evaluation from the jury.
The concept is heavily inspired by the u19 contest that is part of Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, and the Ars Electronica folks have been very helpful in discussing their experiences with us – they rock!

Our ambitions are to build this into a broadcast event, it seems obvious, considering the succes of the many current TV shows where young untried talents get a chance to show off.

For Danfoss Universe, it’s part of our mission to stimulate the interest and understanding of natural science and technology. We believe that encouraging selfexpression and communication through new uses of digital technology is as good a way to learn about technology as any.

We will post some of the works on our online gallery as we recieve them. I’m really looking forward to see what will come, I have a feeling it will be amazing.

A chilled experience

It’s a scorching summers’ day outside in Toronto, but I’m shivering in the airconditioning of the cinema where I’m finally watching Al Gore’s ”An inconvenient truth”.
They’ve done a great job in my opinion. Gore tells that he has given his climate presentation at least a thousand times, and a good part of the film shows him polishing and editing the show.
There’s a lot of pictures of Gore staring pensively out windows into the distance and, to me, some of the personal stuff gets a bit thick – but maybe that’s what you need in order to make it more compelling, and less like a lecture. Basically, if this movie can’t get the message across, I can’t imagine what will – apart from dire necessity, of course.
Still, it’s not exactly a blockbuster movie: I shared the cold theater with 4 others, but of course it’s been a couple of months since release by now.
So, now I’ve heard the podcast, read the book, seen the movie – It’s time to try to invite the man over to Denmark to spread the gospel.

The future according to the futurists

So, after 3 days of discussing the future at the futurists conference, what does the future look like? Well, not too inviting, I’m afraid.
I’ve been looking at the future for a couple of decades now, and I can’t recall that there has been such a sense of gloom concerning the coming years. You can go to session after session and people will be discussing global warming, epidemics, singularities leaving us in the dust, terrorism... You are incessantly confronted with exponential curves leading us to what looks like hell on earth – at accellerating speeds.
The only hopeful scenarios – those where continued technological progress manages to stave off the various problems of ressources, environmental degradation and health– all seem to take us into a very different existance as radically enhanced fusions of man and machine in societies with very different values. And that doesn’t look too tempting either.
Worse of all; all the well meaning solutions that people suggest; global governance, legislation and treaties, a new consiousness, various think tanks... it all sounds so totally inadequate, naive and somehow just plain boring. Maybe we can dampen things a bit by holding back, but frankly I doubt that you can get sufficient traction among the global masses of consumers and corporations.
I find that the things that do offer hope tend to be very concrete, practical action-based projects that prove that it’s possible to live a fullfilling life outside the logic that we seem to be stuck within. Often they are very local projects, but something like GEs Ecomagination efforts are inspiring too.

In conclusion: The shits seems to be hitting the fan for real – but, a lot of smart people have become acutely aware of this recently.

TV crap

Sorry to drone on about energy, but:
Just happened to see this ridiculous TV ad for the Hummer.

It starts out with a healthy, green-clad young man in a supermarket checkout, buying tofu and other deplorably bland, veggie stuff.




Right after him comes another guy who gets loads of meat, a bottle of alcohol and other tempting goodies. Our young green protagonist grows VERY frustrated.





So he runs out and buys himself a hummer. Yeah! So finally he can eat a carrot with a smile. The caption reads: Restore the balance.





And of course it all ends with the Hummer logo over a shot of mother earth seen from space.



Wow! I guess I should start saving up for one too.

Sleepless in Toronto

5 AM saturday morning, the view from my window is a wall of offices, almost half of them have the lights left on for the night – and in this case, the entire weekend. No sign of anyone working in any of those many rooms.
Canada seems as determined to waste energy as anyone else. At least, you can take comfort in the realization that there are plenty of easy ways to reduce the energy-load considerably. Just turn the light off when you leave.

The future is un-predictable

I’m at the world future society’s annual meeting – this year in Toronto. And boy, does the future ever look un-predictable. Seems we’re going in many different, mutually exclusive, directions at once.
Just to name a few: Turning back the burning of fossil fuels to anything near sustainable levels looks rather unfeasible on a 30 – 50 year timescale – So, we’re cooking the planet, with a lot of ensuing suffering in all kinds of ways.
Or: Will nano and bio-tech combined instead lift us out of the mess, make us capable of creating anything we like at low cost, solve the energy crisis, make everything recyclable, and change us into a new species of super-smart cyborgs in the process – in pretty much those same 30 – 50 years. Or less.

Major mindless damage

The Herald tribune has this amazing article about how wasteful the Russian energy production and distribution is.

In the article the director of the International Energy Agency, Claude Mandil, specifically critizes the widespread practice of gas flaring - that is, burning off gas at oil wells.

"Between 40 billion cubic meters and 60 billion cubic meters a year are being burned in Russia," he said. "That is about a quarter of the 200 billion cubic meters of gas Russia exports to Europe a year."

According to the World Bank, each year about 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas is flared off - equivalent to 30 percent of the European Union's gas consumption.

Developing countries account for more than 85 percent of gas flaring and venting, including Nigeria, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Angola and Qatar.

In Russia, "gas flaring exists because today Gazprom is the only one that can buy this gas," Mandil said. "It buys this gas at such a low price that producers do not see the reason to build a small pipeline that could bring this gas from the field to the trunk line."

So much for avoiding the greenhouse effect...

Snapshots from the future

I have a new book out!
It’s called Snapshots from the future, and it’s 7 short stories that describe life in about 25 years time – give or take a decade.

The book is published in Danish, but the text has been translated into English and the whole thing is posted at the website of Danfoss Universe.

For years I’ve wanted to create something like a cartoon, with a heavy emphasis on pictures and a narrative form to engage readers more emotionally. I’ve tried to keep light and inviting – but the underlying facts are never the less a quite serious attempt to destill years of future studies into a coherent picture.
It can be read by kids at about 15 years, but it’s not meant to be just for school. I would hope that anyone trying to make sense of the future could find some inspiration in it.

For me, the book has turned out pretty much exactly how I wished it – which is very satisfying, of course. The project has been a lot of fun. My old friend and colleague Henrik Føhns made it happen by agreeing to print the articles in the Danish magazine Samvirke – and by suggesting the book project in the first place (tak for det, Føhns!). Emil Landgreen has created some great and beautiful illustrations and fake advertisements.
So have a look – and let me know what you think.

Oh, and for Danes who want to buy the printed version:
FDBs Skolekontakt sells them, either 59 kr. for a copy or 350 kr. for a set of 30 copies.

Go ahead, emit!

Wow, this is seriously weird. Some organisation called "Competetive enterprise Institute" (sponsored by Exxon-mobil among others) has produced two very slick TV-ads that promote CO2. We call it life, they say. Check 'em out, you need to see this.

GE Ecomagination publishes first annual report

GE has just published a report/36 page advertising that describes the first year of their Ecomagination initiativ. It’s not perfect, some may think it’s mostly greenwash, but I happen to be impressed. It’s a very big company and taking it through this kind of re-orientation can not be easy. It’s an audacious undertaking, and it has real impact. Respect!

From the report:

Specifically, GE has pledged to:
Double its investment in clean R&D—GE is growing
its research in cleaner technologies from $700 million
in 2005 to $1.5 billion in 2010.
Increase revenues from ecomagination products—
GE will grow revenues from products and services that
provide significant and measurable environmental performance
advantages to customers—to at least $20 billion
in 2010, with more aggressive targets thereafter.
Reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and improve
the energy efficiency of its operations—GE is committed to
reduce its GHG emissions 1% by 2012, reduce the intensity
of its GHG emissions 30% by 2008, and improve energy
efficiency 30% by the end of 2012 (all compared to 2004.)
Without this action, GHG emissions were predicted to rise
substantially by 2012, based on GE’s projected growth.
Keep the public informed—This report is just one way GE
will publicly report its progress in meeting these goals.

What’s so inconvenient about climate change?

Attempting to reduce climate change demands us to change our lifestyle at a very basic level. In one sense it represents a reversal of a development that has been a main characteristic of humanity.
The story of human development is intimately linked to our increasing power and freedom to connect and move around over ever larger distances.
With the technology that is likely to be available in the foreseeable future, avoiding climate change by reducing CO2 emissions, will require us to reverse that. So: Less jetting and driving around, less long distance trade, less freedom to choose whatever we want anywhere and anytime.

There are a lot of very good reasons to wish that we can continue towards higher connectivity, a cosmopolitan society, more comfort. It’s a big part of desires of modern man and woman: this slick world where humans get what we want - now.
Giving it up is not only inconvenient - somehow it feels like crawling backwards in the evolutionary tree.

SAS Airlines offers emission calculator

You can't really say you don't know. SAS has created a web-service so passengers can see the emissions that the flight they are booking will cause.
Great idea, although it's very well hidden if you are accessing their website from the frontpage. I only found it because I had been given the direct link.

Al Gore on global warming

The trailer for "The incovenient truth", a new film with Al Gore presenting the scary low-down on climate change is out, as well as an extensive website with scientific facts, a calculator to see just how much damage you're doing, and the inevitable blog.
Judging from the trailer, it looks like a very powerful piece of argumentation - the Hollywood drama and bombastic music is not quite to my liking, but I have a sense that this might be what it takes to really get the message out.
It's a terrible situation we're facing - but at last it looks like the issue will emerge from denial. Next step is some action, but, uh, that's the hard part. Very inconvenient, indeed.

Heatwave in dense environment

They've had a heatwave in India and Pakistan this weekend, with temperature reaching 49 degrees celcius in some places. Not very comfortable we can assume.

Big elephant in London

By chance I ran into this last weekend in London. Never quite found out what the point was.

What kind of package would you like for your milk?

The Danish organic dairy producer Thise Mælk is currently using their milk cartons to ask consumers whether they would like a screw top on the milk cartons in the future. Very nice touch. I have no doubt that it provides genuinely useful information for Thise - while at the same time I, as a consumer, get a sense that they actually care and try to produce in a way that I prefer.
You vote by going to their website, of course. I voted no.

fiberoptics plus photoshop

Elements of the web 2.0-sphere

In his speech at Emerging tech 06 (blogged below) Bruce Sterling gives a good wrap up of some of the elements of the web 2.0-sphere (at about 34 minutes into the speech):

- Un-intended use
- user contribution
- effortless scaleability
- radical decentralization
- costumer self service
- mass service of micromarkets
- software as a service
- right to remix
- architected participation

Spimes?

IT-conversation just posted a good speech by Bruce Sterling, recorded at Emerging Tech 2006. The title is ”The internet of things”. As usual Sterling is deeper than he appears to be.

In his speech Sterling outlines 6 qualities of a future ”internet of things”:
1. With interactive chips, objects can be labelled with unique identeties, electronically bar-coded, using RFID, a tag that you can mark, rank, sort and shuffle.
2. With local and precise positioning systems, geolocative systems which work out where you are and where things are.
3. With powerful search engines, autogoogling objects.
4. With cradle to cradle recycling, sustainability, transparent production, sorting and shuffling of garbage
5. 3d virtual models of things, virtual design, cad and cam, having objects present as virtualities in the network before they become physical objects 6. Rapid prototyping of objects, fabjects, the ability to digitally manufacture real world things directly or almost directly from their virtual plans

And Sterling proceeds:
Now, if objects in the future had these 6 qualities people would interact with objects in an un-precedented way. It will be so strange and different that we could think about it better if this class of objects had its own name. So I call an object like that a ”spime”. Because an object like that is traceable in space and time

Spimes are manufactured objects whose informational support is so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes begin and end as data, they are virtual objects first and actual objects second.
So we can engage with these objects better during their entire life cycle. From their moment of invention to their decay.

Sterling also adds that spimes are things which are plannable, trackable, findable, recyclable, uniquely identified and that generate histories.

End of quote.
Personally, I don’t like the word ”spime”, if just for the tone of it. But I’m not sure either that this particular definition is the best way to encircle and categorize a set of developments that I DO believe is significant, and which Sterling summarizes brilliantly.
A illuminating excercise is to try imagine what the objects of the industry you happen to be in would be like, if fitted with those 6 qualities. Very different!

Singularity summit at Stanford

Uh, I wish I could go to the singularity summit at Stanford may 13th. Looks like it will be a mind blowing day. It's even free - if you're in the neighborhood, of course. One can only hope that they podcast it.
The website has lots of good stuff and references for anyone who's interested in the singularity discussion