Microsoft have unveiled their vision of the future in a slick tube imaginatively titled Productivity Future Vision (2011). While the video showcases Microsoft “innovations” [rather than an actual vision of the future] some of the the comments are timeless, ensuring this glitzy promo will be talked about for all the wrong reasons…
“I never asked for this.”
“Fake! The World will ends in 2012.”
“OMG, you left your porn on the fridge again.”
“I was expecting more than a better touch screen.”
“Cannot retrieve user data. Data Plan may be exceeded.”
“How about Microsoft stop daydreaming and create some damn jobs for the working class.”
“That mom is having affair with that Japanese administrator, while father is forced to stay home with daughter, cooking like a woman.”
“Where are the fucking robots and flying cars already?”
Interruption-free space is sacred. Yet, in the digital era we live in, we are losing hold of the few sacred spaces that remain untouched by email, the internet, people, and other forms of distraction. Our cars now have mobile phone integration and a thousand satellite radio stations. When walking from one place to another, we have our devices streaming data from dozens of sources. Even at our bedside, we now have our iPads with heaps of digital apps and the world’s information at our fingertips.
I was surprised that the news created quite a stir in me until I reflected on my own simple being. After all, I am primitive psycho-neuro-physical mechanism given to emotional outbursts and flights of fancy, not the stuff that tomorrows IBMers will be made of, or personal computers for that matter.
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment—and even in our dreams—we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value.
There’s something about lofty reports published by scholars with names like Lusardi, Schneider and Tufano that smack of an authority only a fool would challenge.
The time constraints on today’s executives are more numerous than ever before. Between the economic downturn, ever-changing industry regulations, fast-moving information and simple day-to-day management tasks, corporate executives are trapped in the virtual jail cell that is today’s business climate. The unintended result of executive “information-imprisonment” is a workplace where they may have little insight into employee morale, culture, and general goings-on during the workday. Blinded by the reflection of their own to-do-lists, executives are turning to consumer social networks to stay connected to the people that execute on daily tasks inside their organizations.
Ever since I started using WebCite a couple of years ago I have been interested in the idea of online curation. It seems that there has been a proliferation of curator services of late and a heightened sense of the potential benefits that come with the extraction and aggregation of content from tweets, Facebook, blog posts, RSS feeds and what-have-you.
Services like Paper.li, Tabbloid, The Tweeted Times, and Feedly mash-up the linked-to content, typically in a newspaper or magazine format. I am noticing that even sites like LinkedIn are jumping on the bandwagon with the recent launch of LinkedIn Today. Whatever next?
Driven by improvements in technology — and particularly by an explosion in the availability of mobile technology and increased access to broadband — the world of work is changing rapidly. From solving employer-employee trust issues through better communication to cultivating an increasingly mobile, cloud-based workforce, here are the top trends and key issues we found for the future of work in 2011.
The Charlie Rose Brain Series explores one of sciences final frontiers, the study of the human brain. We will also look at scientific discovery and advances in technology, in the hope that someday terrible illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s will be history.
The reason why people must trade dollars is that there is no other alternative, and the computer algorithms that control the value of the currency have yet to tell us otherwise. That’s it, really. The questions remain, how, why, and when will people stop working for it and what will they work for which can replace it?
This will not be as simple as living in yurts, trading cheese cultures and tweeting about it. Complex infrastructure like a judicial system, transportation, medical care, clean water, energy and food production rely on a financial system that can capitalize and securitize whatever the replacement currency may be.
Influence vs. intention
The latest twist in the new currency movement is the idea that on-line influence can be used to support a currency. There is no shortage of noble leaders aspiring to “define the standard” in their own image as a service to the lesser masses who seek their respective place in the great new economic void. PeerIndex and Klout are the two main players that promote a social score based on influence, ostensibly to mimic the credit score upon which all currency depends.
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There’s something about lofty reports published by scholars with names like 
Ever since I started using 
