The Wisdom of Nicolas Negroponte: Digital Convergence - You don't know the first thing
“Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only by its absence not is presence” said Nicolas Negroponte about the blurring of the boundaries between our digital and physical world.
Negroponte is a Greek American architect and founder of Emritus MIT Media Lab and the One Laptop per Child Association, he is known as one of the most prominent future thinkers of our days.
The Digital Revolution will soon be over and digital would just be, he predicted in 1995. Digital convergence is in the making. We are now embracing it into our physical world. The online and offline worlds are converging and will be increasingly integrated.
In a recent blog-post of ours we explained how data and the Internet of things will be talking to us and knowing us, operating like an Augmented Intelligence, because different information and elements, will be able to communicate, thorugh the web.
Already today, we as consumers are expecting the digital world to be aligned and integrated with our physical world. As Negroponte predicted it is not a question about whether the digital would should or should not be present in our physical experience. It is instead a fact that we notice the absence of the digital, when for example shopping in the physical world.
You have your boarding pass, payment cards and discount vouchers on your phone in the passbook or wallet and have them linked directly to your payment card making it easy to pay for anything anywhere and get redeemed with no fuzz.
Shops are implementing mobile devices as payment counters, making it easier for customers to pay and merchants to accept payments. Customers are running price checks in-store and in real time and deciding on where and when to make their purchase while shopping.
But this is by no means news. What is new is the possibilities for development this brings with it – we are looking at endless possibilities if we merge our online and the offline world.
Negroponte argues how we are controlled by blindness similar to the one, blinding previous generations. Namely the blindness of the present, which fixes us to the things, we can imagine and see coming.
However technology today moves not only in the pace described by Moore’s law, but at an exponential pace we are not able to imagine.
Not so long ago, I read this story describing the current pace of technological development in places like Silicon Valley:
“Imagine you are in a normal sized football stadium, sitting on the top row with the best view. A guy comes in, with a magic pipette, and pours a drop of water on the grass, he waits a minute and does the same only this time the double amount of water comes out (hence the magic), now he continues to do this. Every minute. And every time the double of the previous amount comes out of the pipette. Exponentially increasing the amount every minute.
How long will it take before the stadium is full of water?
- The answer is 49 minutes.
About 45 minutes in, the only thing you will see is the water covering the grass, meaning that within the last 4 minutes the stadium will be filled with water.
Now, you have been watching this development take place right in front of you, but could never imagine how it would develop in the end.”
This means that within the last 4 minutes, what you can do is simply to get ready to take a swim. There is no way of escaping the water once it is just covering the grass. The water will cover the entire stadium before you can grasp it happening and find your way out. So there is only one thing to do - take a swim. This way is much more fun anyways.
After reading the story I told it to my room-mate, who looked utterly worried. His thought being “but how can we stop this, or control it”. He was clearly frightened by the pace of development and I could see his point. But the fact is that there is no reason to try to control it, much rather we should embrace the developments.
Development of convergence between the online and offline world will most likely take the same turn as the water in the stadium. The drops have already started to fall, but what we can see now, is merely a small spot of wet grass on the playing field.
We can foresee that the grass will slowly become wet.
Already now the convergence between mobile devices, telecommunications and media allow you to pay for groceries with a single click on our phone, or even collect loyalty points in real time while shopping and allow you to compare and check prices.
But it won’t stop here; you will know in advance what you should buy, because you checked with your home fridge what is in there, whether the milk got too old, and what recipes you can use, if you want to make something with those eggs we would otherwise throw out the day after tomorrow.
The fridge’s built in sensor signals to you that there is a good pie recipe, which is also fitting your diet programme. You have a date over tonight, which is in your calendar, and the fridge’s computer doubles the portion but also comes up with a new menu more appropriate for impressing a date.
The merchant you are shopping at will be able to see data from the purchases you make, and your transactions become available for him to analyse. How these in collaboration with all the other information coming from the Internet of things can give the merchants real-time information about the customer stepping into their store.
We will be able to create links between our online consumer behaviour and our offline purchases, showing merchants the actual effect of any online marketing effort without having to bother the customer. This lets the merchant know us. He can now give us personalised and relevant information.
These are just the developments we are anticipating today.
Negroponte finalized his Wired back-page era, stating that not only the digital and physical world will converge, but we will see a convergence of fields as nanotechnologies, biotech and managing nature converge with the augmented reality as well. The future hardware will not be stationary computers but rather become smaller and smaller and in the end be integrated into the gadgets we have around us in our everyday life, which are something else than computers.
There will always be developments we will not be able to foresee especially when it comes to the possibilities created by convergence of our online and offline world.
At Birdback in London, we are ready for the water to grow and have already put on the water wings and cannot wait to take a swim.
Let us converge the digital with the physical and let the possibilities come.
We’re betting on digital convergence, come have a coffee before the flood :)
