Still Another Presentation on the Future of Technology

Luckily for me, the future of technology remains exactly that, the future, so I can continue to update and present such presentations unless, or until, The Future is NOW, becomes reality and not just a slogan.

Last Friday, September 11, I was invited to give the keynote talk at a conference held by the Modern Technology and Management Institute (MTMI) in Virginia Beach, VA. MTMI is a non-profit which supports:

• Bringing academicians together to look at management, technology and related areas,
• Provides training for physically challenged individuals, and
• Provides distance education opportunities for third world nations.

The presentation is here: MTMI Presentation.

My focus was to talk about what I think were broad trends in how technology is affecting society as opposed to trying to make a bunch of predictions about specific technologies.

Thus I talked a bit about three examples of newer technologies:

• 3D Printing
• Internet of Things (it is very important to always talk these days about IoT)
• Shared Economy (like Uber)

One of the common themes with all of these developments was the increased involvement/participation of what were at one time customers. With YouTube for example, YouTube provides a warehouse for video’s but the users provide the content. With Uber, the largest taxi provider in the world who owns no cars or AirBnB the largest provider of rental hotel rooms which owns no hotels, the line between the organization, providers of the actual service and customers is pretty blurry.

One of my favorite subjects is why is all of this happening. For this we need to look at Ronald Coase who talked about transactional friction. The Internet makes transactions friction-free or nearly so, the long-term impact is dramatic.

I ended up by noting that historically technology both destroyed and created jobs. We are used to having the number of created jobs being greater than those destroyed. Thus, while there was serious dislocation, especially if you held on of the destroyed jobs, one could pretend it was all good because the job count went up.

That seems to be in the process of changing in two ways. First, middle-class kinds of jobs are not coming back. Second, the total number of jobs does not seem to be going up. This feeds into the current narrative of income inequality and general social disruption.

I was able to tell my story about having a half-vast knowledge of police systems, first mentioned in this blog post.

I was honored to be invited and enjoyed the visit very much. Being in the Virginia Beach area where I first sold and supported police dispatch systems many (many) years ago brought back many memories.