The Great Vanishing

Before I finish and publish Chapter 3, I have a task list that needs to be completed first. At the top of the list is studying “Patterns of Technological Innovation” by Devendra Sahal. This book from 1981 attempts to provide a framework for understanding technology, the progress of which appears to be the overwhelming factor in determining the growth (and stagnation) of economic output, rather than labor or capital inputs. This is especially interesting given an apparent economic recovery in the United States in 2010 and 2011 that has resulted in few new jobs. In better understanding the phenomena that are technology and innovation, that is, in better understanding the science of technology, I hope to place “The Great Vanishing” on firmer statistical and theoretical ground, making this effort less prediction and more forecasting, trend-recognition, and roadmap-building.

Chapter 2 – “How Apple Made the Web Tiny” – is now available. Please feel free to write a critique here or on the Facebook Group.

While not a rough draft, this chapter is a bit rough around the edges. I decided to publish it now because of Wired’s September 2010 cover story: “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.” The authors reach a similar conclusion to my own, that app development, not web development, will define the upcoming decade. Meanwhile, the web will grow tiny, or even die, as other technologies mature at a more rapid rate, providing experiences to users that the web will not be capable of supporting in time.

While both the Wired article and the latest chapter of “The Great Vanishing” end with the potential death of the web, the next chapter in this book will argue that the birth of the Metaverse will more than make up for that loss.

Chapter 2 has rapidly grown into two separate chapters. I am now refocusing Chapter 2 on the story of “How Apple Made the Web Tiny” and moving the rest into a new Chapter 3. My deadline is next Monday and the benefit of this delay will be two new chapters instead of one. Please stay tuned!

As part of my research, I am watching Apple keynotes and press announcements from the past few years. The January 2007 announcement of the iPhone is especially illuminating, as you will see. But what strikes me the most about this keynote is just how far we have come from the smartphones of 2006. Looking back at the smartphones that came before iPhone, one wonders what mobile device makers were thinking? It took an outsider – Apple – to shake up the industry, but it did not have to be an outsider.

Or does it matter? While Apple most certainly innovated with iPhone, and continues to do so more incrementally with later generation iPhones, it is unclear to me if its competitors really learned anything. Phrases like “Me, too” and “It’s coming” come to mind. Three years later, Microsoft and Nokia are still scrambling to respond to the iPhone, Palm sold to HP, and only Google has a consistent track record of Android OS updates and an ecosystem of hardware. Yet even Android suggests at best plagiarization. Where are the smartphones that take a different tack than Apple chose? Competitors could have created new interfaces that focused more on voice or gesture than multi-touch, but they did not. Meanwhile, Apple is certainly working on future updates that will merge new interface ideas with multi-touch. While competitors lose precious time emulating multi-touch, risking costly patent infringement as they do so, Apple is building a platform that will one day be multimodal.

Of these competitors, Microsoft seems to be the company most likely to take on Apple successfully in the long term. Why? I might point to Windows Phone 7 and its uniquely different user interface design, but the real answer is Kinect. Microsoft has a revolutionary gesture and voice-recognition interface in Kinect, and it is an interface Microsoft would be insane not to spread into all of its devices and software. While competitors are competing in multi-touch, and before Apple can finish integrating all sorts of interfaces into one seamless multimodal interface, Microsoft could own its own interface space. Consumers would benefit from devices that approach the mobile space in different ways, and when the multimodal revolution does occurs, Microsoft would be able to say honestly that they reached the same destination as Apple via their own unique path.

Does Microsoft realize what it has in Kinect? We probably do not have to wait long to find out.

A big thanks to my friend Guy McArthur for his kind mention of this project. He is spot on in mentioning the energy-efficiency of technology. We are replacing large and bulky devices with smaller, thinner, smarter, and more energy-efficient convergence devices, but many more units of these improved devices will likely ship to many more people in coming years. Without robust and easy recycling programs, our landfills (and poorer countries) will continue to fill up with electronic trash. This is trash potentially much more dangerous to the environment and public health than plastic bags and diapers.

Deeply integrated biotechnologies will make use of biocompatible materials at bulk weights orders of magnitude smaller than the materials we put into consumer electronics and other physical artifacts today. By threading the capabilities of these technologies into our biology during “The Great Vanishing”, we will also remove their bulk and impact on the environment. Unfortunately, this will probably not be soon enough to prevent several more years of negative impacts on the environment and public health. The sooner the consumer electronics industry peaks and collapses, the better.

No, the blog is not vanishing; it is just now arriving! While work progresses on “The Great Vanishing” – my online book about the Metaverse, collapse of the consumer electronics industry, and the integration of the capabilities of consumer electronics and other physical artifacts into our biology – I would also like to contribute shorter blog posts related to these topics, as well as an occasional update about how the project is proceeding.

“The Great Vanishing” is not a new concept. I have been thinking about the outcome of certain technology trends since at least 1997. I was attending graphic design school at the time and I took a public speaking class. My big semester project was about “The Second Brain”, my vision of where the web was heading (spoiler: into our brains.) My talk was a great success, in terms of the grade I received as well as the lengthy and passionate conversation that followed, which led to other speakers’ talks being delayed to another day. I’m bragging here because there is a punchline to this story: the class was overwhelmingly against my ideas. This incredible experience resulted in my love for public speaking and my appreciation for just how personal, even frightening, these topics are to many people.

This project is about where technology is heading, and there are ramifications I think might upset a lot of people. My approach to this expected reaction is to start with a thorough and well-researched exploration of the topic, leading eventually to an open discussion about the ramifications. If you don’t buy my premise then you probably won’t be interested in discussing it anyway. Therefore, almost all my effort now is devoted to the research, education, and writing this thesis requires. I started writing “The Great Vanishing” at the beginning of 2009 and the first chapter has been over a year in the making, with hundreds of revisions between the original draft blog posts and the final chapter. Kernels for upcoming chapters have been in place for awhile now, and they should arrive much more quickly than it took me to finish the first one; in fact, this document should be completed by the end of 2010, notwithstanding my other responsibilities and activities.

“The Great Vanishing” chapters are not open to direct comment, but feel free to comment on “The Great Vanishing” Facebook Page, Twitter, and these blog posts. Just keep in mind I’ve got a book to finish, so I will probably save most of my participation until after I am done. In the meantime, your constructive critiques are most welcome!