Automation vs piloting skills

Interesting article about how “automation addiction” has eroded pilots’ flying skills, to the point that it is has contributed to “hundreds of deaths in airline crashes in the last five years”. Scary, one more point for the whole “technology is making us stupid” (example here) point of view.

Pilots’ “automation addiction” has eroded their flying skills to the point that they sometimes don’t know how to recover from stalls and other mid-flight problems, say pilots and safety officials. The weakened skills have contributed to hundreds of deaths in airline crashes in the last five years.

Some 51 “loss of control” accidents occurred in which planes stalled in flight or got into unusual positions from which pilots were unable to recover, making it the most common type of airline accident, according to the International Air Transport Association.

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Myths of the near future

Here is an interview I did for Canvas8, to discuss our constantly changing, sometimes troubled relationship with technology and the impact it has upon our lives. I explain why we already use the technologies of the future every day but barely notice them.

What are the biggest cultural shifts/drivers influencing technological innovation at the moment?

I think people themselves are making the most impact on technologies. It has been quite a shift, one that took a lot of time to happen. Back in the early days, technologies would show up without much effort being put into their usability. As users we simply had to adapt to them, and because technologies were mastered by a small elite, there was barely any feedback coming from the bottom to the top. Technologies provided such a leap from the past ways of doing things – the leap from the typewriter to the word processor, for example – that the general attitude would be “it’s good enough, I can live with the unfriendly interface and limitations”.

Then users started to be more savvy, to feel better about their own capacity to have an idea that could make a particular technology better. Many technologies became the work of teams open to feedback, and some projects even turned completely transparent and open source (not only in software, but also in hardware). Today, innovation is really driven by users, in all their diversity, with all their specific needs, and they are changing technology more than the technologists themselves, creating new uses for a specific tool by  translating it into their own languages, contributing bug reports and new ideas, and hacking commercial devices to make them better suited to their needs. For example, Twitter has developed into its own self-perpetuating ecosystem through the input of ordinary users.

What were the hot topics at Lift ’11 – the ideas that particularly resonated with people?

Two ideas really struck me: one speaker, Kevin Slavin, talked about the importance of algorithms. I heard again a couple of days ago an expert on financial markets explaining how the recent movements in the markets were “driven by computers” who “probably lacked some form of human supervision because of the August vacations”. Machines are playing a huge role in our society, to an extent that I was not aware of, and this raises a lot of questions. For example, who will be responsible when an accident happens involving an automated car?

The second idea which I found fascinating emerged from the talk of Hasan Elahi. He showed how technologies can be turned back, and provide a form of privacy through over-sharing. He basically games the system of surveillance, and gives us a nice hint for the future. We might not be losing our privacy; privacy is simply not something you are granted at birth as in the past. Now you have to build a smokescreen around your identity.

Why do technologies fail? Is it enough to create something that’s relevant or useful – and how do you define those terms?

Because we mostly think about technologies, rarely about their usage. For a long time, innovation was in the hands of people who could not necessarily show the appropriate level of empathy. What I mean is that it takes a certain mindset, and some distance, to be able to say “this is how people will use my product”. Most of the time, we fall in love with the technology we create, and we forget to take that love out of the equation when evaluating whether our work will be used by people or not. It is a basic mistake, very true in video games for example. People get fascinated by their own creation, only to find out that it has no appeal to the general public. The truth is, users determine whether a technology is successful. They don’t care about the technical achievement, or the beauty of a particular solution. They want answers to their problems, and some technologies provide that, while others bring more complications than solutions.

To what extent does adoption of technology play into social dynamics?

Adoption mirrors social dynamics. Think of Facebook or Google+: if you are the only user, these technologies have no interest at all. Just like in social dynamics, we need groups to achieve certain things, and technologies do not allow us to escape life’s fundamental rules. We are connected, but still talking about views, attention, feedback, likes, visits. Technology mirrors ‘real life’ most of the time.

There’s been lots of discussion and development but, beyond science fiction, why are robots relevant to us now?

Robots are not science fiction. They are part of our daily life, but we barely notice them. Movies brought the dream of having an humanoid helper in every home – and the bestselling robot in 2011 is an autonomous vacuum cleaner. This revolution is happening, but most people (and the media) are missing it for two reasons: it has been promised to us for such a long time it is hardly at the front of many people’s minds, and what we expected is not what is happening, hence a false sense of inertia while it is one of the most active fields today.They are relevant to us because their logic is increasingly part of our lives. Robots are basically a way to automate tasks we don’t want to do, or that can be done better by computers. And when we look around us we see more and more automation, more and more self-controlled devices.

There’s an emerging trend for quantifying the self and others, driven by a desire for self-improvement. How might this evolve?

We are not just using machines to do what we do not want to do, but rather to do supplementary things, to augment our lives. This opens new possibilities that I find interesting, because we could become more aware of how we live. At the same time, this quantification is scary. I believe all the technology in the world will never replace a good discussion between a patient and a doctor, and this computerisation of our lives also disconnects us from more natural processes. It’s like talking to a friend to know that you are not doing enough sport, rather than having your watch remind you your body fat just went up.

What, to you, is the most significant technological development of the last five years and how do you see it evolving in the next five?

I think open and free-for-all collaboration was massive. The evolution of Wikipedia is interesting. At first, it made sense to open contributions to all, as there was no structure inside the community. There were no experts, nobody had a track record of providing consistently good information, nobody wanted to vandalise the pages because a Wikipedia page was meaningless. That was the first step, when we discovered the potential of opening things up, and letting people collaborate.
But then success came in, and brought with it a number of side effects: a link from Wikipedia was worth a lot, so people started to pollute articles with links to their own sites. Vandals defaced some pages and many debates opened up on controversial topics. Rules had to be put in place to limit openness, and several fundamentals had to be reinvented. People were not equal any more, and super users began to appear.

I find it fascinating how collective intelligence will evolve under the attacks of ‘massification’ and success, how those processes of open collaboration and trust will scale to millions of people and projects around the world. That’s a very, very hard problem and I believe a new order will emerge in the next five years.

How do you see technology use shifting in the near future, and what’s driving it?

I believe one of the things that will happen is that we will push back technology. An increasing number of people are worried about the effect of technologies on their life. For example, the more we connect on Facebook, the more we seem to disconnect from the things that matter to us (real friends). Or the time it takes to deal with email, which at this pace will soon become an ‘unproductivity’ tool.

The next evolution I see happening with some early adopters is that technology is put back in its place: as a tool, not an end in itself. People control how many networks they participate in, choose to shut down their phones more often, declare some ‘no-email days’, and decide to delete all emails that came during their vacations. More and more signs point to us reclaiming a bit of space from those technologies that have invaded our lives to an extent that was barely imaginable 15 years ago.

Interview conducted by Debbi Evans

Full article on canvas8.com

Kids confronted to technologies “of the past” (1980…)

Funny video where French kids are presented with floppy disks and vinyls. They try to guess what these technologies are about…

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TeslaTouch, the touch screens that touches back

This is the graal of touch technologies: a screen that feels like real keys when you touch it. Nokia has been experimenting with such technologies since 2007 (project Haptikos), and came with another solution last fall (electrovibration), but no product has yet reached the production stage.

TeslaTouch, developed by the Disney Research Team at Carnegie Mellon University, is another technology using electrovibration that could change the way we experience touch screens.

TeslaTouch lets your fingers actually feel what the screen shows. When you move a file on the screen with your finger, you can feel how big it is. Because TeslaTouch can provide a wide variety of tactile(or haptic) sensations such as textures, friction and vibration, Disney calls it the “future of feel.” [...]

A virtual keyboard on a touch screen equipped with TeslaTouch would allow users to feel the location of the keys and learn how to touch type. When users click on a file to drag it into a folder, they would be able to feel the weight or size of the file and know when it had successfully reached its destination. Larger files such as movies could also be made to feel heavier than smaller text files. Artists drawing on their touch devices could feel paint and paper.

But just like the Nokia technologies, TeslaTouch has big limitations, and does not seem ready for mass production just yet:

Currently TeslaTouch only works to provide tactile feedback for a sliding finger, not a finger at rest, and it does not work with multiple fingers — so multitouch capabilities such as that found on the iPhone is out of the question for now.

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Conférence TechnoArk 2011: Internet + Mobiles = Nouveaux Consommateurs?

La Conférence TechnoArk revient le 28 janvier 2011 à Sierre pour une sixième édition consacrée à l’équation: Internet+Mobiles = Nouveaux Consommateurs?

Origine des produits, informations nutritionnelles, comparaison de prix, achat par mobile, partage d’avis ou d’expérience au sein de ses différentes communautés, consommation de médias, chacun de ces nouveaux services innovants fait naitre chez les consommateurs de nouvelles questions, de nouvelles exigences, voir de nouveaux arbitrages et donc autant de nouveaux défis pour les fabricants et distributeurs de produits de grande consommation, comme de contenus médias.

INTERVENANTS

Venez résoudre cette équation avec les acteurs les plus avancés de l’Internet Mobile:

Stéphane Hugon, sociologue, professeur à l’Université Descartes Paris V (Sorbonne)
Diane Taillard, solution director – GS1 Global (Bruxelles)
Georges Edouard Dias, digital corporate – groupe L’Oréal (Paris)
Philippe Azan, innovation manager – The Nielsen Company (Cincinnati)
Laurent Sciboz, responsable des instituts de recherche IT du TechnoArk
René Le Caignec, CEO MoWo Technology (Sierre)
Jean Christophe Hermann (TBC), directeur marketing digital – Groupe CARREFOUR (Paris)
Scott Poynton, directeur de l’ONG TFT- Genève
Xavier Comtesse, directeur romand d’Avenir Suisse
Laurent Haug, fondateur des conférences Lift, assurera la modération de l’événement

More information and registration.

Tech companies in American media

A new research by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has come up with several interesting findings. The study “was designed to examine the media coverage that occurs when technology news crosses beyond technology-oriented outlets or news sections to the top of the American news agenda—to front-pages, the national nightly news, cable prime-time and other general interest news outlets. It did not delve into specialty publications or sections.”

• The press reflects exuberance about gadgets and a wonder about the corporations behind them, but wariness about effects on our lives, our behavior and the sociology of the digital age.
• The mainstream media’s coverage of technology was not vast. It made up less than 1.6% of the total coverage over the course of the year, ranking it 20th out of the 26 identified topics. That puts technology news in same range as the environment, sports and education. And while it trails far behind crime (4.7%), it comes in ahead of religion (.6%) and immigration (.9%).
• The study examined which technology companies generated the most media attention in these venues. Apple, with its flashy press events and often drawn out releases of new products, narrowly outpaced Google in total coverage. Twitter and Facebook ranked third and fourth. Microsoft, on the other hand, once the feared technology behemoth, fell far behind—attracting just a fifth of the coverage of Apple and less than half that of Twitter.
• For Apple, the most heavily covered technology company, 42% of the stories described the company as innovative and superior, and another 27% lauded its loyal fan base. But there were doubts. The most common such negative thread, that Apple products don’t live up to the hype, appeared in 17% of stories about Apple. For Google, the company’s advancements in making content easier to find topped its coverage at 25%. But it was only half as likely as Apple to be framed as having superior, innovative products (20%).

Link

Overload messages

Update: see more humorous messages from a recent New Yorker article.

Early adopters are increasingly using auto-responders to manage their email overload. And I am increasingly interested in tactics used to avoid overload. Here are two messages I came across recently:

A-lister blogger covering technology:

I am now getting emails at a level that I can’t respond to everyone.

Thanks and sorry if I don’t get back to you.

Another A-lister, this time Swiss

I will probably not be able to get back to you this week. For emergencies, please use Twitter (@xxxx) or SMS (+xxxxxxxxxxx).

Thanks for your attention

Multitasking, iPads and learning

Schools get in the media for tuning to iPads, the device will allow multitasking this fall, and brain scientists worry of the effects of multitasking on learning. Adopting a new technology early means playing with fire?

The iPad has been an instant hit for millions of consumers following its recent launch. It has also been a great success in the IMD classroom. “After having piloted the iPad in a partnership program with Allianz Global Investors at the beginning of May, I am convinced that this device will revolutionize executive education,” stated IMD Professor Bettina Büchel. “The feedback from IMD Faculty, staff and the participants was overwhelmingly positive.”

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Apple: Multitasking coming to the iPhone this summer, iPad in the fall
One of the biggest criticisms leveled at the iPhone and the iPad — that it can’t run third-party apps in the background — will be fixed at last [when] the major OS revision will arrive this summer for the iPhone, while iPad users will have to wait until the fall.

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Russell A. Poldrack, the director of the Imaging Research Center and professor of psychology and neurobiology at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote: “Our research has shown that multitasking can have an insidious effect on learning, changing the brain systems that are involved so that even if one can learn while multitasking, the nature of that learning is altered to be less flexible. This effect is of particular concern given the increasing use of devices by children during studying.”

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Putting technology back in its place

The Fifth conference published a short piece on one of the theme I am thinking about a lot these days: the need to push back technology into it’s place of being useful and convenient, rather than invasive and interruptive.

As curator of the Lift Conferences you have a privileged view of some of the more interesting ideas and debates on technology. Thus, what in your opinion are the most interesting technology trends coming our way?  

The main issue I’m grappling with is the increasing mismatch between the information coming at us and the way we’re able to manage or process that information; and I’m not only talking about information overload here.  Overload is a recurring feeling, and a look at history puts things in perspective. In 1613, English author Barnaby Rich wrote “one of the diseases of this age is the multiplicity of books; they doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought forth into the world“. Every time a new technology comes we feel overloaded by it, the internet is no exception.

What I am talking about is a broader issue. I am wondering whether technologies are really in line with the way we function, and if not what the consequences are.

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Slow IT, did we actually even ‘think’ today?

Technology is culture – as Basile Zimmermann explained at Lift10 (find the video here) – and it starts to be obvious there is a gap between the Anglo Saxon and the European vision. Here comes slow IT, inspired by the slow food movement that started in Italy. The beginning of adaptation of IT to the old continent’s culture?

Dinner in the US is a one-hour business. Therefore when Americans spend time in Italy they really suffer. First they have to wait until about 9 o’clock for dinner time and then they have to stay put at the table for hours. In a way it highlights a cultural clash between the Anglo Saxon world, which is all about speed and a ‘just do it’ attitude, versus the Rhineland model which is more contemplative and reflective.  Not that the one is better than the other off course. The Anglo Saxon approach tends to be more dynamic and innovative while in the Rhineland model we can get stuck in endless discussions.

I come from the IT sector so in a way we helped create the fast, chaotic world we live in today. Clearly there is opportunity to reflect on the way we interact with technology, both on the side of the producer and the consumer.  As consumers we are bombarded by impulses.  But also at the producer side we often run ahead of ourselves. At Capgemini we increasingly receive requests from clients to produce fast, for the short term. There is no time anymore for strategy, for vision and architecture; when these elements are so important.

[Nicholas Carr] is arguing that the internet is changing the way we think. You can clearly see that in the way young people think.  They’re very good at finding information quickly, online obviously, but they lack depth in understanding. The internet offers access to a huge amount of information but we tend to use that information very superficially and that is gradually turning us into superficial thinkers.

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