Category: web of no web | 無處不在的技術 | 보급 기술 | 普及したテクノロジー
The web of no web came out of a course that I taught at the La Salle School of Business at the University Ramon Llull in Barcelona on interactive media to a bunch of Spanish executive MBA students. The university wanted an expert from industry and they happened to find me by happenstance. I remember contact was made via LinkedIn.
I spent a couple of weeks putting together a course. But I didn’t find material that covered many of things that I thought were important and happening around us. They had been percolating around the back of my mind at the time as I saw connections between a number of technologies that were fostering a new direction. Terms like web 2.0 and where 2.0 covered contributing factors, but were too silo-ed
So far people’s online experience had been mediated through a web browser or an email client. But that was changing, VR wasn’t successful at the time but it was interesting. More importantly the real world and the online world were coming together. We had:
Mobile connectivity and wi-fi
QRcodes
SMS to Twitter publishing at the time
You could phone up Google to do searches (in the US)
Digital integration in geocaching as a hobby
The Nintendo Wii controller allowed us to interact with media in new ways
Shazam would listen to music and tell you what song it was
Where 2.0: Flickr maps, Nokia maps, Yahoo!’s Fireeagle and Dopplr – integrated location with online
Smartphones seemed to have moved beyond business users
Charlene Li described the future of social networks as ‘being like air’, being all around us. So I wrapped up all in an idea called web of no web. I was heavily influenced by Bruce Lee’s description of jeet kune do – ‘using way as no way’ and ‘having no limitation as limitation’. That’s where the terminology that I used came from. This seemed to chime with the ideas that I was seeing and tried to capture.
Mobilizing for Monuments is an interesting brand collaboration. Flickr was a natural partner for the the environmental charities due to it being the destination community for serious photographers. Rivian also makes sense, given that they make electric all-wheel drive vehicles – which presumably have a lower carbon footprint.
The Mobilizing for Monuments road trip film that highlights the benefits of the brands involved as well as the conservation messaging. Rivian gets to showcase its vehicles at a time when Tesla’s Cybertruck has a reputation that’s gone from a must-have vehicle to a dog’s dinner. The thing that I am most curious about Mobilizing for Monuments is where Flickr takes it next? Test
Ray Kurzweil expands on his idea of The Singularity
This MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy talk is very pertinent given the current debates that copywriters seem to be having around automation and LLMs. Mina Lee takes a social science approach to her investigation to LLMs including an evaluation model.
Reinvent the model
Swedish fashion retailer Lindex has looked at diversifying its models across its advertising and marketing materials. It is also re-examining beauty standards and the related pressures that its customers face. This a long term process that they have described as ‘Reinvent the Model‘.
Spotify (at least in the UK) have done a great job supporting strategists and planners with case studies and research reports over the years. This time they have collected a selection of UK-specific campaigns on their platform demonstrating its strengths.
Channel 4 Streamland—an in-app experience, which personalised show recommendations for Spotify users based on their listening habits.
Hyundai did a video takeover for their campaign to get consumers to pronounce their name authentically.
Shutting down is a conscious choice. You might see it described as digital detox or a digital break. I, like a number of people that I know have a ‘dumb’ phone to complement my smartphone. This is different from the pre-broadband era of the internet where going online was an active decision punctuated by the sound of the modem.
At that time, keeping in touch was an active decision rather than the tyranny of the pings from messaging applications. We cocooned ourselves from each other with a personal audio soundtrack via an iPod or a Discman. This cocooning effect was viewed to have a positive effect on personal autonomy was called the Walkman effect by sociologists.
Once you used a device be it the modem-connected PC, TV or music player you went through the act of shutting down devices. My parents still go room-to-room at night shutting down devices.
My Nokia N95
Over the past two decades we have stopped shutting down. A number of things happened:
Phone as Swiss Army knife. Cellphones quickly became our alarm clock. Working on the Nokia N93 launch with Flickr (then part of Yahoo!) felt like a watershed moment allowing photos to be taken and shared instantly online. During the July 7th London bombing, I got home by navigating with the ring bound A-Z atlas of London, which lived in the bottom of my backpack. Now I have four apps that would use depending what I wanted to do.
Device as social currency, your smartphone says as much about your economic health as your car. It’s a hygiene level of status, just like branded training shoes (sneakers) were when I was at school.
Synchronous social media. The now long-forgotten iNQ SkypePhone, BlackBerry and Danger Sidekick heralded no-shutting down engagement.
Dark patterns / design techniques used to encourage app or service use as a compulsion. It is no coincidence that a number of senior design and engineering teams at Tinder and Instagram sat in BJ Fogg’s persuasive computing design (captology) modules, yet the products used techniques that Fogg described as unethical.
Parent and policy voices.
The key points that activists and concerned parents talk about revolve around the following talking points:
Screens now dominate our lives, and their presence is only getting stronger and more powerful. For instance, I can no longer phone up my local surgery to get a repeat prescription or book an appointment, it’s all mediated by the surgery website and the NHS app.
(Some) adults can control to a certain extent how often and when they use screens. Shutting down is proving hard for many adult consumers to do. But there is a commonplace screen addiction. Empirical evidence suggests that it would be damaging for children. I could make countervailing points, here is a better place to see them outlined.
Smartphone addiction and drug addiction share some similarities including a neglected personal life, a pre-occupation with the subject of the addiction, social media as a mood modifier or for escapism. The implication is that smartphones are an unwilling appendage which add capabilities (some of which are of a questionable value) and can’t be put down. All of which reminded me of my childhood (and adult relationship with music).
The push seems to be on regulating the services that run on top of smartphone platforms.
There doesn’t seem to be a corresponding focus on encouraging shutting down as a desirable behaviour; presumably because the efficiencies promised by digital government services are too alluring.
Under-supply.
While there might be a desire for dumb phone, there are remarkably few options as second generation mobile networks have been turned off around the world.
HMD (what was Nokia’s terminal business) is the leading player in this sector. They are starting to do clever things that tap into the idea of shutting down and being present in the meatspace at key moments.
Heineken collaborated with HMD and streetwear atelier Bodega to collaborate on a ‘dumb’ phone in a transparent case, similar to electronic devices issued in prisons.
Heineken seem to doing this for a number of reasons:
People are less likely to be themselves when there is a broadcast studio in your pocket full of distractions to pull you away from the now.
Shutting down allows you to be more present for your friends.
Losing a £1,000+ device down the pub full of work information and access to your bank account isn’t a particularly attractive option. So providing a cheaper option is a bit like the ‘festival phone’ tough but basic Nokia that I bring to gigs and festivals.
Punkt.
A less well known competitor is Punkt. Punkt is a boutique Swiss consumer electronics company who have made a number of cellphones, home phones and a Braun-like alarm clock. Punkt want to promote the idea of intentional technology use, rather than as a wrapper around our everyday lives. Their MP02 phone acts as a wi-fi hotspot and a dumb cellphone, as they view a two device strategy of laptop and phone leans in better to their intentional technology use vision. Punkt make shutting down easier, by adding friction to switching on.
The phrase AI two-step is something I first heard from my friend Antony Mayfield. He used it to talk about how companies were adopting the latest developments in AI for business processes. And then reduce headcount to reflect the newly AI derived tasks instead.
The AI two-step isn’t necessarily a new concept, companies like Pegasystems were using rules-based systems to take away the drudgery of back office work in banking and fund management for decades.
Further back, companies like Experian, through their access to CCS’ CardPac software provided a service for credit card issuers in the UK using rules-based credit scoring and applications approval. This ran on time-shared mainframe computing resources, which also provided Experian with a good source of ongoing credit worthiness data. All of which reduced the back office work and employees needed by the credit card company. MBNA used to make a virtue out of having every decision reviewed by real live credit analyst, who could overwrite a scoring decision if they saw a compelling reason to do so. (CCS became part of First Data and eventually part of Fiserv).
As these services were being rolled out, there was a corresponding cut in jobs.
Examples
Here are just a few examples of businesses adopting AI, some of which are prime examples of the AI two-step.
IBM
While IBM may no longer trumpeting its Watson AI service as loudly as it used to, AI methods are dispensing with the need to replace staff who leave the technology company.
Pfizer’s Charlie
One might think in the UK that Pfizer should have thought a bit more carefully about the name Charlie, but the aspiration behind the platform is interesting. Charlie was noted to be helping with content creation, fact checking and legal reviews. Research by Bain & Company have found that it isn’t just Pfizer in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector that are taking this approach. Some 40 percent of executives who were surveyed said that uses of generative AI were factored into their 2024 budgets.
Bain indicated uses across a wide range of business functions within pharma:
IT programming code review
Competitive intelligence
Research and biomedical literature review
Marketing copy
Augmenting the selling process as a sales co-pilot and contact centre automation
Publicis
French listed marketing combine Publicis made a high profile adoption of machine learning and AI-based services back in 2017 under the moniker Marcel. Back then Marcel was being used for workflow type tasks and organisation of data. This year Publicis rebranded its approach to the less playful CoreAI, so far it has cut the use of freelance staff – which are usually essential for project delivery in ad agencies, rather than the usual AI two-step of lay-offs.
UPS
UPS adoption of AI techniques in everything from workflow to customer service allowed the logistics company to make the largest lay-offs in its 116-year history.
Clear analogues to the AI two-step?
Various commentators compare the AI two-step happening to the dot com boom of the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. The comparison with the dot com boom is easy at first. You have businesses that have phenomenal share price growth, widespread interest and experimentation. Business sectors from advertising to Hollywood are concerned about massive disruption.
The examples I would think about would be factory automation and business process re-engineering. In factor automation, over decades companies used machines to negate the need for unskilled and semi-skilled workers. A friend of mine worked in Huddersfield in a textile mill. He was one of just a couple of people who worked a shift. None of them were weavers, they were engineers and an IT admin who maintained the lines of machines turning out high-end suiting fabric that was mostly sold to Japanese clothing manufacturers. This came very close to being a ‘lights out production line‘ where the product is handmade by robots as they used to say in the old Fiat car advertisements.
Weavers and machine operators were replaced by a lot fewer, but more expensive roles.
Business process re-engineering was driven by enterprises implementing enterprise software to drive efficiencies and automate workflows. This was a lucrative time for consultancies who were brought in to shape a company’s workforce and processes to fit a software company’s pre-defined template for that industry. This was usually based on average industry standards. Software giant SAP have been building and refining these templates for the best part of 50 years, each industry template draws on individual units that might cover a business function like HR, finance or asset management.
A bit of software customisation was needed to fit a given business, and it might have to interface with third party products to handle market complexities such as different tax regimes.
The consultancy teams also laid-off employees that didn’t fit the framework. That’s what business process re-engineering actually meant.
Automation was responsible for putting up to 47% of American jobs at risk. However other research indicates that new forms of skilled or professional jobs are being created. One of the big problems with this data is that they are speculative models. More positive takes from businesses fuelling automation like McKinsey and Company versus more critical predictions from government think tanks and academics.
Factory automation and business process engineering are both similar to the use of AI in business, in that they are primarily helping mature businesses maintain their position and drive efficiency. The dot com boom on the other hand was much more disruptive and spawning more upstart businesses – some of which were very successful and leaving mature businesses struggling to cope. From financial services to media – pre-internet businesses are still struggling to cope with the innovation and disruption that begat the dot com boom.
Optimists versus pessimists
The optimists highlight a number of nuances that they think mediates the impact of automation and machine learning over time.
Tasks over jobs.
It’s tasks rather than whole jobs are being lost. Yet if you look at the data that Scott Galloway shared in his newsletter and the speedy ‘these job losses aren’t down to AI denials’ this optimistic assumption is pure fiction. The jobs being lost are the second part of the AI two-step.
Creative destruction.
Jobs are being created too and it’s often about ‘skill shifts’ rather than ‘job shifts’. While there are redundancies being made, there is a requirement (at the moment) for people skilled in writing ‘prompts’ to get the most out of the AI models created.
Overconfidence.
Overconfidence in technology and what it can do. An extension of this is a belief in the perfectibility of technology. A classic example of this is Air Canada’s recently aborted use of an AI-powered customer service chatbot. The airline quietly pulled its chatbot offline after being found legally liable for bad advice given by the customer service bot to a customer.
Moffatt booked airfares and retrospectively submitted an application for a refund to the reduced bereavement fare after travelling. Air Canada denied the request. Moffatt challenged that decision, saying he was owed the refund because he had relied on the information provided to him by the chatbot on Air Canada’s website. Air Canada admitted that the information provided by the chatbot was “misleading”, but it contested Moffatt’s right to a refund, highlighting that he had been provided with the correct information via the link the chatbot shared in its message.
The Civil Resolution Tribunal considered whether Air Canda was liable for negligent misrepresentation, which arises under Canadian law when a seller does not exercise reasonable care to ensure its representations are accurate and not misleading. Moffatt was required to show that Air Canada owed him a duty of care, that its representation was untrue, inaccurate or misleading, that Air Canada made the representation negligently, that he reasonably relied on it, and that that reliance resulted in damages. The court held that Moffatt met those requirements.
The Civil Resolution Tribunal noted that Air Canada had argued that it could not be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants or representatives, including a chatbot, but had not explained the basis for that suggestion. The Civil Resolution Tribunal rejected as a “remarkable submission” Air Canada’s suggestion that the chatbot was a separate legal entity that was responsible for its own actions.
Demographics – the idea that aging countries from the west to China, Japan and Korea have skills deficits due to population decline. Automation is one of the coping mechanisms alongside globalisation and migration that have been suggested solutions. The Chinese are also looking at building factories in countries like Ethiopia, who have a young and growing population. Automation makes sense where migration would adversely affect social cohesion and the cost of globalisation would be more expensive than automation technologies. Workers in the global south are dependent on being cheaper than machines, rather like the American legend of John Henry versus the steam engine.
Companies like Automata have been looking to help businesses automate repetitive low skilled work, such as sandwich making in food service factories or low volume manufacturing tasks.
The state of automation in different roles is running along at different rates of progress. While John Deere have managed to make the most of arable farmland through the use of telematics and GPS guidance of tractors, automating farming for tasks like harvesting is proving more difficult. This is exasperated in the UK at least by the challenge of getting sustained venture capital for hardware. Technology automation in other sectors such as construction and healthcare continues to move at a slow pace.
In an area like consumer electronics we have seen benefits and declines in automation. Benefits in the way a company like Apple can manage a sophisticated global supply chain workflow via automated software. Apple has also pioneered the use of robotics in dismantling its more modern smartphones when they are brought in to be recycled.
The declining area has been one of design choice. Prior to the smartphone and broadband internet, companies like Panasonic designed circuit boards that were less dense with components. The reason for this was to facilitate automated board manufacture through the use of ‘pick and place’.
Nokia used similar techniques for its cellphones and smartphones until the business was disrupted. Apple iPhones needed much more manual assembly because of the tightly packed components in their phones. Young women were valued for their small hands and manual dexterity leading to concerns about worker conditions.
More work to be done.
Creation of new jobs seems to be a matter of faith. IT in businesses drove an increased amount of management, the move online drove a need for webmasters, web designers and online marketers. There is an assumption that over time AI will have a similar effect, beyond people who can write prompts.
Limiting factors
Technology
While GPT based models have surprised both in terms of what they can do and fail to do, there is a belief amongst experts that:
Data sets will only get you so far. There is no clear path to a new technique, or what older techniques would need to be combined with GPT-based systems. Of the data sets out there, a significant minority could be filled with ‘poison’ data like nightshade.
That there isn’t enough data to train models in a lot of cases and synthetic data is often used instead. Others believe that this will corrupt and stunt future AI models rather than help them.
Resources
AI systems like crypto mining consume a lot of energy and require a lot of water for cooling which is already straining data centres and infrastructure. All of which will impact corporates ESG profile and larger investor relations health. You could have an amazing AI model, but if you have as bad an ESG rating as Exxon you willl struggle to raise funds.
Six hundred pairs of Nikes in a custom-built house
The six hundred pairs of Nikes are owned by a Japanese lady who now is head of marketing for Ugg in Japan. Previously she’d spent over 20 years in sales and marketing for Nike. Her house was designed around her shoe collection and the double height ceiling in the room to host the six hundred pairs is worth watching for alone. There are more than six hundred pairs. Some of the stories about the six hundred pairs of shoes are fascinating such as how Nike Air Max 95s were responsible for thefts and muggings in Japan.
Tom Ford
Everyone needs a Tom Ford in their life. From personal life hacks to interior design and grooming all in the space of a few minutes. This sounds as if the interview as done around about the time that Ford was bowing out of his fashion and beauty businesses.
Gibbs SR toothpaste
Along with Close Up and Aquafresh; Gibbs SR toothpaste was one of the toothpastes I remember most from childhood. Unilever bundled it eventually into Mentadent and it was quietly taken off the UK market in 2018.
I didn’t realise that Gibbs SR toothpaste was the first advertisement shown on British television. UK law had changed the previous year allowing for commercial television. The creative behind the ad was Brian Palmer of Young & Rubican (now VML).
So, I was listening to the Uncensored CEO podcast Jon Evans when he had Les Binet and Sarah Carter on. One of them mentioned that the above ad was tested recently and scored top scores. It might be novelty, but is unlikely to be nostalgia that drove this test score. What’s more interesting it that Y&R managed to get the creative so high performing decades before the kind of tools that we have now.
Hyper-reality
Keiichi Matsuda took what Apple would call spatial computing to its logical conclusion in this 7 year old film HYPER-REALITY. There are a number of clever aspects to it. Watch when the device reboots in the supermarket and the glyph wearing criminal who escapes identification by the system.
In reality, hardware will restrict how useable that these products will be. Which is the reason why the Apple Vision Pro looks so cumbersome. More related content here.
John Glenn
Great interview with Mercury and Apollo programme astronaut John Glenn covering different aspects of his experience as an astronaut. We hear how astronauts became so involved in the engineering and safety aspects of the Mercury and Apollo programmes.
My mind cast back to one of the first modules I studied at college. There was a lecture on the role of complaint resolution as part of customer services. The idea was that effective complaint resolution engendered trust in a customer service function and was more likely to increase brand loyalty and recommendation to other people. In reality Ehrensberg-Bass Institute have explored this area in more depth and found that customer penetration is more important than customer loyalty.
US National Archives: Approaching Logan Airport. 05/1973 by Michael Manheim
I suspect that the benefit in complaint resolution is more around a premium brand positioning rather than the business benefits of loyalty. This is an interesting frame to consider AirHelp’s global airline ranking. Unlike SkyTrax that focuses on experience, AirHelp weighs its ranking heavily on complaint resolution.
British Airways came 82nd out of 83 airlines assessed, which won’t be a surprise to anyone who has flown with them over the past four years.
Many airlines that would have a high SkyTrax service ranking, didn’t perform as well on complaint resolution.
So there wasn’t a clear correlation between experience resolving lots of customer complaints or a highly evolved service offering.
Emerging car brands scrutinised by Bloomberg and Grant Thornton | Manufacturer – “Chinese brands are dominating the scene with good products, big screens, and impressive interfaces.” However, the challenge arises when considering pricing, as Chinese EVs like the XPeng’s G9 SUV was 72,000 euros competing against the likes of BMW and Mercedes. So they’re going to find it very, difficult and it’s going to come down to price.” Dean pointed out MG’s success in the UK market was achieved by hitting exactly the right sweet spot in terms of pricing. The MG ZS, the second-best-selling battery electric vehicle in the UK, is priced at an average of £31,000, making it compelling in terms of competitive pricing especially in a country where consumers are not fiercely loyal to specific brands. – interesting reading. The way for Chinese vendors to win would be to have Chinese incentivised lease financing, particularly in a time of higher interest rates a la Huawei in the telecoms markets.
American men are dying younger. – by Richard V Reeves – I just don’t think this can be addressed in the current climate of othering and privilege. It would be like trying to hold a meaningful discussion on immigration a few decades ago.
Xi in Nanning; Shanghai and Beijing real estate tweaks; More Hong Kong bounties; Sim Love | Sinocism – the Hong Kong puts bounty on the head of US citizen who has criticised the Hong Kong government in the US. They are all ethic Chinese. So China and the Hong Kong government think that ethnic Chinese wherever they are should be loyal to their respective administrations – in essence their face is their passport. Not even Israel does something similar with the the world’s Jewish community, or Ireland with our diaspora.
Innovation
Quantum Breakthrough: Caltech Scientists Unveil New Way To Erase Quantum Computer Errors – Researchers from Caltech have developed a quantum eraser to correct “erasure” errors in quantum computing systems. This technique, which involves manipulating alkaline-earth neutral atoms in laser light “tweezers,” allows for the detection and correction of errors through fluorescence. The innovation leads to a tenfold improvement in entanglement rates in Rydberg neutral atom systems, representing a crucial step forward in making quantum computers more reliable and scalable.
