Vision video

Here's an inspired video by Microsoft on how we might interact with our digital devices in the future:

There's a number of interesting ideas here to ponder.

First, notice how all the devices interact with each other. While she's in the taxi, her handheld device beams tomorrow's meeting details to the cab's display, which then highlights the building her meeting is in the next day. As she enters the hotel room, the hotel display lights up recommending running routes, and so on. This isn't something that will be very easy to build: Just imagine the security and privacy implications of having your handheld beam personal data to the cab opportunistically: The cab may not have driven by her next day's appointment, so the handheld would have needed to send more than was displayed to the cab. We'll also have to figure out how to keep these devices connected, as cell network connectivity is still very limited and short-range network technologies like Bluetooth wouldn't allow for the instant connectivity as demonstrated here.

Also notice all the gesture-based controls in the video. People are touching and swiping on surfaces, but also waving their hands to flip pages, whether at close range or sitting on the hotel bed paging through recipes on the hotel TV. I wonder how hard this will be to build. We've seen gesture-based controls in Kinect and Wii, but they only work with extensive calibration and the controls are imprecise at best for the types of interactions shown here, for example cropping and zooming the world map back at HQ. Then of course you'll have to teach humans how to use all these fancy gesture-based controls, which will require a lot of thought.

I love watching videos like this that show how the computing revolution is far from over. Lots of work left to do.

Living in the 21st Century

Here's a fascinating chart from the The Economist's Daily Chart blog, slightly edited for size [*]: 

The world's population and economic output are growing exponentially. No surprise there. But there's an interesting angle to look at population: Instead of counting the total number of people on the planet, you count the number of minutes lived by humans in a particular century. In the first 10 years of this century, we've out-experienced the 17th century.

We love comparing ourselves to others, and we see more people than ever having more experiences than ever. With Facebook, Google+, and Twitter permeating our lives, others' experiences are more accessible, so we're bombarded with things to compare ourselves to, giving us lots of opportunities to feel inadequate.

On the bright side,  humanity has certainly earned how to make products and services. With the 21st century already at about a third of of the output of the entire 20th century, people are living healthier, more productive, more comfortable lives than ever.

[*] I realize the y-axis in the chart is a percentage, and by cutting off 1st to 8th centuries so the chart would here horizontally, they no longer add to 100%. Yet I feel like the central point of the chart still remains.

Less stuff, more happiness

A great TED talk about how owning stuff makes you happier, and how this century will be about editing rather than the relentless pursuit of more.

What's in the box?

The Caller from Canada

My new car has Sirius satellite radio which comes with around 140 channels of niche channels, including one channel called POTUS which is mostly politics talk.

There's a show on POTUS called "Standup with Pete Dominick", where a former comedian talks politics with random callers from all over. When I was driving back to SF from Google on Thursday around 10 pm he couldn't fill his hour-long slot, so he offered any caller 30 seconds to talk about whatever they wanted to say. (Note that there is a 7-second delay to the show to bleep out coarse language.)

One of the callers was from Canada and his advice for Americans was to have more confidence in investing in the future of their nation. Dominick put him on the spot, and asked what specifically Americans should invest in. The caller fumbled a little bit - "there's really a bunch of stuff" - and before his time was up, the only example he could come up with was "running shoes".

Running shoes are clearly not the prime example of what America needs to invest in[*], but as the clock hit 10 pm, I found myself turning off the radio and thinking about what the right answer should be.

It's clear that the US needs better infrastructure - fix the roads, improve road safety, and build faster, better trains. We need more solar panels on roofs so we can burn less coal, and more wind farms that feed into the grid. We need better education and better educators so that kids no longer drop out of high school, but prepares them for the jobs of the century ahead. Better and cheaper health care, better medical records, the list of big-ticket items goes on and on ...

One problem is that the US is a country that's in love with the quick fix, and the things we need to do are long-term investments that need years and decades. And that requires confidence. The caller from Canada, while wrong on the running shoes, was right.

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[*] To the caller's credit, he got cut off before he could launch into an argument. Maybe he was going to propose a scheme to give everyone running shoes to decrease obesity and thus long-term health care costs.

The only time you'll buy and read print magazines

In the future, the only time you'll buy print magazines on paper is at the airport. The only time you'll read them is during taxi, takeoff, and landing. That's when electronic devices have to be switched off.