The Long View

Left brain, right brain, and complexity

Image found on mootblog.

At the heart of this post lies a simple idea. 

The idea that the complexity that envelops our lives today is an asset, and not a liability. And that it is up to us to seize the day, as it were, and use the extraordinary resources of the 21st century that go way beyond anything that was dreamed possible even 25 years ago to create a richer and the richer, more diverse, and, quite conceivably, a more just world.

For this to happen, though, a few collective paradigm shifts must take place.

1. Stop viewing complexity as complication. This is a relatively easy one, at least to talk about. Complication has to do with how we experience complexity when we are afraid of it and worried that we can't see the end of the tunnel. Complexity is, like the sun, the sky and the clouds. Complication is the added layer of our emotional experience of complexity and our instinctive recoil from the additional thinking strain complexity puts on us. The thinking strain comes in part from the fact that indeed, we cannot cope with complexity if we don't use the right tool. And so far, since the dawn of the industrial age when we strated making the world more complex, we have mostly handled complexity with the wrong tool, i.e the left brain. But now, the world's complexity has outfoxed our left brains. We need to start thinking different, to quote no one in particular.
2. Accept that we can build on complexity with right brain activities. Left brain activities will try to dissect it and it will exhaust itself at the task and surrender in frustration: complexity becomes complication. While sounds suspiciously like the previous paragraph, there is one big difference: the vantage point and the value judgment that comes with that vantage point. For many people until today, right brain stuff is for arty people, not real men. Our schools teach us mathematics, reasoning, science, chemistry, even history in analytical, linear and sequential terms. However, as the world is increasingly telling us itself, it is non linear, patterned and parallel and requires synthetic, creative and big picture approaches from the next generation.
3. Create an educational system that is up to dealing with the challenges of the 21st century (and the points mentioned above). They are huge, diverse, and complex and therefore require huge, diverse and simple approaches to solve them. The way our Western type educational systems are set up tend to create dysfunctional people unable to master the skills required for the new age. 
4. Understand that we are inextricably a technological society, and that, as such, we must embrace technological evolution and not fight it. There is much to dislike about the technification of the world. But there was much to dislike about the agricultural world order with its short life spans, hard labour and poor living conditions and there was much to dislike about the industrial age with its labour exploitation, ruthless taylorism (Ford example) and smog pollution. So on the whole, I believe, we are much better off this century than at any other time in history.

Therefore, right brain thinking, a new type of education and creative use of available technologies will produce a radically different world that what we have known. 

And here again, the process is not linear. Like in any major societal endeavour there will be (and there are already) many dissenting voices, many (legitimate) concerns and a few luddite resistors. In the societal evolution process of the coming 25 years, many will feel left out, many will be left out for fact and many will fight.

I don't think that it will hugely impact the change process that we are experiencing. Because of its inherent diversity and non linear evolutionary process, the upcoming century will be hugely more resilient than any preceding age. It can include the resistors, the nay-sayers (as well as the overzealous) and will take on a life of its own. 

Once again, the collective will be bigger than the individual. Individualism comes from left brain thinking. The sense of belonging, of being part of a bigger something that underpins and guides our existence is, in my mind, right brain stuff. 

However, I would not like to create the impression of a new dichotomy where left is bad and right is good (although all our Western languages do already convey that impression…). I also do not want to glorify the right brain over the left brain or to castigate the history of the past 250 years since the beginning of the enlightenment (the rise of the left brain).

I see more of the third phase of a dialectic movement whereby the 21st century will use the whole mind - both left and right brain functions equally well and as mutually completing and complementary (if not complimentary) tools. In order to achieve that, we need to resolutely refocus the left-brainers of this world towards the opportunities that the more powerful usage of our intellectual resources can contribute to our understanding of the world (left), the creation of the next generation world (right) and the powerful integration of the new concepts and realities (left and right).    

Now let's think about that creatively, in a more complex way.

The Third Billion

via www.strategy-business.com

Strategy+business publishes a study on the third billion: women in emerging economies (after the first and second billion: China and India). The research considers that these roughly 870 million women will enter the mainstream economy by 2020.

Some of the factors that will contribute:

• Increased urbanisation
• Better educational opportunities
• Gradual evolution of cultures and customs
• Infrastructure investments that will support greater mobility

The article also outlines some multiplier effects that would accelerate the process:

• We are not talking of one country only - but about women across a large section of the emerging markets
• Economically active women will tend to have fewer children and so they can lead more independent lives
• Women are better savers than men.

Sounds just about right for what the world needs…

About the origins of Earth

Told in a double side-by-side video: the biblical version told in scientific language and vice versa. I particularly enjoyed the description of the 6-day creation process in 21st century industry standard language.

A full version on the Duelity website, where you can also watch each side independently.

11 brief tips for keeping your brain young

Change and speed are two the hallmarks of our knowledge society. Information abundance and creative decision making are two more.

Many feel overwhelmed - their brains register and react to the sense of helplessness and, bingo, here comes the killer: stress.

The good news though, comes from an ever growing volume of brain research (talk of recursive discourse - the brain researching the brain): we can train our brains to cope with new information and contexts and keep it fresh until old age. We continue to learn until our last day, so to speak.

Here are 11 tips that will help you keep your brain in shape:

1. Learn to love change. We are inherently resistant to change. The law of inertia also applies to our brains. But this creates a stressful paradox: Change is here to stay - and so you might as well make the best of it, in small and big ways. While our beloved little routines keep us going, they also dull our adaptability and resilience. Resilience has been shown to be one of the core success factors for our century. So: deliberately build change into your daily routines: changing your route to work, reading a different paper, storing your cups, plates and clothes in different places all make for eye opening and sometimes amusing surprises.
2. Get some physical exercise. Yes, that old chestnut. Enough said. Just do it.
3. Watch your diet. Rubbish in, rubbish out. What works for databases applies also to our bodies and our brains.
4. Meditate. There are many different forms of meditation, and they all help in different ways to keep the brain alert. Sitting still does wonders for the brain. It is not because you don't do anything that you are not doing anything.
5. Listen to music, and, even better, play it. There has been a lot written on the stimulating effects of Mozart's music on children's brains. It works for adults, as well. And if you don't like Mozart, there are many other composers to chose from.
6. Eat your porridge and your broccoli. I know. But they are good for you. Porridge has the virtue of providing the right nutrients for the brain and releasing them slowly into the system. Broccoli increases the ability to learn and helps protect existing and new nerve cells.
7. Regularly go on training programs. For adults there are essentially two kinds of learning: Perfecting your knowledge in a field or area you already know or entering a completely new field. The second is a lot more difficult for the ego (a beginner again…) but also for the brain: progress will take longer. Yet it will expose you to new perspectives and ways of thinking, including a new vocabulary. This will create new synaptic connections. Connections are good, in fact they are the drivers for keeping the brain young.
8. Adopt a creative pastime or five. Origami, dancing, painting, flower arranging, chess, Go, photography, writing, problem solving exercises… whatever floats your boat. More synaptic connections.
9. Meet new people. Many of us feel a slight sense of unease when meeting new people. That is because the brain has to adjust to the new context and the surprise factors related to the behaviour that unfamiliar people may display. Not to worry though - it's the same for them.
10. Keep a check your level and ability of multitasking. The jury is out on whether it is good or bad for you. On the upside, the brain can learn to handle more things at the same time; on the downside, the more interruptions we get, the less we get one task done. So if you feel that you get too many interruptions, create interruption-free blocks of time. Your brain will breathe. If you feel that chatting, texting, emailing and generally being in touch enhances your creativity - go for it.
11. Kill the sleep killers. Sleep, and the dreams that come with it, carries a vital restorative power for the brain. No sleep, no creativity, no brain training. And I am not talking about the odd work-through-the-night sleep deprivation to finish a project, but of the regular sleep disturbances many of us experience today.

Brain stimulation has to do with creativity, and creativity with brain stimulation. In our world of total interconnectedness, tender love and care for our brains matters. Nurturing, replicating, maintaining and enhancing our beloved synapses is a prerequisite for more open minded, balanced and satisfying life until the end.

And, in the process, for a more interesting world.

Mindset v dataset

Hans Rosling is at it again: Let a statistician change your mind about the world. Do you have a "mindset that corresponds to reality at the time when your teachers were born"?

Priceless.

Ever heard of WILB?

A study by the University of Melbourne reveals that WILB can be a productivity booster.

WILB is Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing.

The study, which is also available as video and audio downloads shows some intriguing facts:

70% of Internet users engage in WILB. This increases their productivity by an average of 9%, as long as they spend less than 20% o their time on the net. 

The increase in productivity is attributed to the brain's need for a rest after about 20 minutes' concentration. (When did you last doze off last during a long presentation?). Then, refreshed and restored, it can take up a full workload again.

However, don't use the argument to justify your Internet addiction: too much time online has the adverse affect and kills productivity. A new Internet Addiction Center opened specifically for this purpose. Check if you already got it: Internet addiction creates irritability and stops you from taking breaks when the time is right…

Nice excuse, though.

The eternal quest for motivation

When I work with my coachees, we often have long conversations around what motivates them at work. When I work with managers, we have the same conversations, in particular around how they can motivate their staff. 

My general view is that one cannot motivate people; you can only bring people to motivate themselves.

Motivation is a strong emotion inside that makes us do stuff because we want to do it: so the only effective way of motivation is self-motivation. Hence the limited effectiveness of rewards in the work environment: they will work well for some tasks and contexts (repetitive, left brain environments, but much less for others (right brain, creative contexts).

Sam Glucksberg did some extensive research around intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The following video with Daniel Pink explains the differences beautifully, and, crucially, with a good sense of humour.

Survival dealbreakers for the 21st century

There are three huge challenges for humanity (among the numerous) that outrank all the others, if only because the way we will rise to meet them, will determine their fate… and ours.

Those three major headaches are education, energy and governance.

Education. 

This one has to be top of the pops. Education is fuel; it provides the brain power that drives creativity. Education drives prosperity like ignorance fuels despair. Educated people make for more peaceful living environments (generally…) extremists, of either the religious or the political variety, will garner more support among those susceptible to simple, or simplistic messages.

We need a deliberate collective approach to producing as much brainpower as we can. What our ever expanding server-and-hard-disk jungles does for the storage of ever more complex infinite sets of data, we should consider education, training and skills development as the main vectors for generating our future. Why we don’t, is beyond me, but it has to do a lot with our 20th century wasteful sense of consumption, and the selfish nation-based governance concepts that went with this me-first approach.

Energy.

Someone told me the other day that climate change is more important than energy. I beg to differ.

Climate change is one of the consequences of industrialised societies’ energy management (or lack thereof). The holy grail of satisfying our limitless greed for energy will ultimately not lie in energy conservation. There is just no doubt that we will need more of the stuff, not less.

As our societies delve further into the 21st century, our needs for additional kilojoules will expand, and so we will become more creative about how to get more without emptying the guts of the earth. (Hence the need for more brainpower, above and good governance, below).

The art will be to get our energy from non-depleting sources: the sun above all (since using the sun’s energy interferes least with our ecological systems), but also geothermal, wind and other renewable sources. This also includes the reform of agriculture, since agriculture is really nothing else than the provision of energy to our bodies… and brains. (Not to mention the fact that if one day we really need to escape from here and colonise Mars, that will require unimagined quantities of energy, so we better start thinking now…)

Governance. 

Rising to the global challenges will take global initiatives.
Slowly, and surely, we are moving into that direction. Society of Nations, UN,G3; G5; G7; G8… G20… These institutions can only be successful if there is a sense of shared responsibility for global governance, which today is not the case (with a hopeful “yet” at the end of the sentence). Just witness the recent debates around nations’ commitment (or not) to reducing greenhouse gases.

The (eventual) spread of education, successful energy management and global governance values work hand in hand to ensure that we will still be running about at the end of this century.
In the process we will need to address all the other challenges that living in a mix of industrial and post-industrial societies bring with them, including those that have a currently undetermined impact (synthetic biology, nanotechnology, genetics, genomics…) and, of course, those we don’t even know about yet. 

The 21st century is fast becoming the era of increasing abstraction where science becomes less and less tangible, where more and more people become more “abstract”, i.e. move up in the pyramid of the hierarchy of needs and where interrelatedness of concepts, nations and branches of knowledge create highly complex new entities that ignore traditional divisions and borders.

Governance, energy, education.

Today, our planet has shrunk. It is now too small for the me-firsattitude of nations to be viable. Today, the view has to be global, and while I am not advocating a global government, I firmly believe that we will need to really consider our planet as a global village. Just not quite in the sense that we came to give to that word at the end of the last century.

Harnessing technology and mustering political will for building the next society are the first steps. But long-term progress will ultimately come from actively grooming a next generation that will consider our endeavours as archaic and our debates as those of a previous and therefore ready for the bins of history.

Right now, our educational efforts don't get anywhere near achieving that. And so, we may just be creating the perfect conditions for jeopardising our chances of survival as a race.

The new slaves

I could easily see the rise a new slave era.

No unpaid labour, no shackles, no physical torture. Just regular physical or service work, paid with higher than subsistence level wages, preserving the physical, and to a certain degree the mental dignity of the new slaves.

In many ways, the new slaves would have a better life than most labourers today.

Fully automated production environments will reduce or eliminate the need for any heavy physical work, the expanded omnipresence of robots to do dirty or unsafe tasks will make their lives much easier than today. Sweatshops would be replaced three dimensional printing.

So that’s not the question.

The new slave class will not be compared to the lowest levels of societies of yesterday or today;

The new slaves will be defined by the standards of tomorrow: they will be slaves in the context of an infinitely augmented knowledge base that will be the hallmark of the brain elites as well as the middle classes of tomorrow’s knowledge society.

The fact is that the volume of the human knowledge base already expands at an exponential rate. And so, the tools to required to master and exploit this knowledge become more sophisticated by the day.  (The very real question of sustainability of these exponential growth factors both in evolutionary and statistical terms will be a post for another day.)

Being a full member of society will mean being an active citizen of this currently exploding knowledge empire and the reference points for a life worth living will have moved considerably from physical survival into the realm of the abstract world of knowledge.

Quality of life will no longer be measured by the amount of physical calories available to each individual (that will be a given by then, like air and water have been until the recent past).

Quality of life will be measured by the individual’s ability to access, consume, digest and create bits of information.

Life and the value of life may well be determined on a totally different plane and being human (in the full sense of the future ethical environment) may mean being an active part of this invisible mental universe.

Everything else will be for the robots. Or the new slaves.

How big is the Internet?

Graph: Internet only traffic forecast. Data collated from CISCO, IDS and Wikipedia sources.

This morning, I was wondering about the size of the Internet. It is big and it is another example of exponential change and growth: Cisco estimates that annual Internet and other IP traffic will multiply 5 times between now and 2013, to about 667 Exabytes, actually.

Exabytes?

Yes, that was my reaction, too.

So I got curious and thought I would see how the byte relate to each other. And share it with you.

Meet the Byte family.

Bit (born 1948)

The bit is an artificial word that come from combining the words binary and digit. The bit goes back to the origins of computing when information was still stored on punchcards. A bit can be a 1 or a 0, a TRUE or FALSE.

Byte - Usually consists of 8 bits. It is sometimes (and in France all the time) called octet.

Kilobyte - (1000 bytes, or 1024 bytes, depending on whether you consider the decimal or binary system. Computer storage is usually calculated in the binary system, hence the sometimes odd configuration data that come with hard disks).

Megabyte - 10² bytes. About 500 pages of text, or approximately 1 minute of compressed MP3 music. A standard CD holds between 650 and 800 MB). The old 3.5° computer floppy disks used to hold 1.4MB.

Gigabyte - (10³ bytes, about 1000MB). About one hour of standard resolution TV or about 7 minutes of HDTV. A standard DVD holds 4.7 GB. A drawer full (about 600) of those floppy disks. The new BlueRay disks hold 50GB.

Terabyte (10⁴ bytes). The standard desktop hard drive today is 1TB. It holds about 150 CDs. As of May 2009, the Library of Congress has collected almost 100 terabytes of data. (From LoC website).

Petabyte - (10⁵ bytes). Today, Google processes about 20PB of data each day (Wikipedia). In 2006, Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine wrote in an article in the New York Times: 

"From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks.

Exabyte - (10⁶ bytes) According to a CISCO white paper, annual global IP traffic will exceed 667 exabytes by 2013. 

"Last year's forecast anticipated a run rate of 522 exabytes per year in 2012. The economic downturn has only slightly tempered traffic growth, and this year's forecast predicts 510 exabytes per year in 2012, growing to 667 exabytes per year or 56 exabytes per month in 2013. Global IP traffic will quintuple from 2008 to 2013. Overall, IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40 percent" (from CISCO Website).

The world's computers stored approximately 160EB in 2006 (IDC).

One exabyte is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video. In early 2007, the Wall Street Journal talked about the coming Exaflood.

Zettabyte - (10⁷ bytes). Now it gets hairy. This is the equivalent of 1 billion of today's TB hard disks as described above. A billion.

1ZB: It is estimated that that will be the size of the digital universe in 2010 (IDC).

42ZB: All human speech ever spoken. Estimate by Mark Liberman via Wikipedia).

Yottabyte (10⁸ bytes. We are not quite there yet. 

But we have the word, and so the real thing cannot be that far away…