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Predicting the future from the social media swamp
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About 20 years ago my techno-utopian friends in California began to have a strange glint in their eye. It’s the sort of glint people acquire after joining a religious cult, and they were obsessed with a new idea. What they believed was that with so many people now communicating via the internet, what they called a “Hive Mind” was beginning to emerge. And from this we could derive people’s thoughts and intentions.
Some even hoped it would help replace today’s … Read More
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The Cult of the Business Guru, and the pop psychology anecdotalists that business doesn’t need
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“Some people can only think in anecdotes, it appears, and are deft at using them as a social currency. In recent years, it is this group that has been in the ascendancy in many organisations.”
How Malcolm Gladwell created the template for modern business fads. Read more at The Daily Telegraph. … Read More
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Self-driving cars are going nowhere
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In this column at the Daily Telegraph, I explain why so little progress has been made in autonomous driving, and ask – why did we ever think this was a good idea? There’s no evidence that consumers ever wanted them.
Demand for Autonomous Vehicles has come from people who talk about technology for a living, rather than do it: public officials, and future-gazers, largely. It’s an exercise only made possible by cheap money and a disconnect between engineering and public … Read More
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Like kicking dead whales down a beach: understanding the Great Hydrogen Delusion
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Engineers will rarely tell you something is impossible, even when your proposal is a very bad idea. Computer scientists at Stanford and MIT in the 1970s came up with a wonderful expression for this, an assignment that was technically feasible, but highly undesirable. They called it “kicking a dead whale down a beach”. The folklore compendium The Hacker’s Dictionary defines this as a “slow, difficult, and disgusting process”. Yes, you can do it like that. But you really don’t want … Read More
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Electric cars have a very dirty secret
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A new restaurant has opened in town. Only the portions are small, the food is cold and tasteless, and the service is grumpy and indifferent. The owners appeal to the Government, who promptly ban all rival restaurants in a 25-mile radius.
If this sounds madly improbable, it shouldn’t. The principle is alive and well in the UK, and beginning to define how we live and work. Lobbyists have discovered that the only way to advance their deeply flawed and inferior … Read More
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Let them eat bugs: on meat and the English class system
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