Opening Keynote live blog notes - Andrew Zoli

June 24, 2007

Opening Keynote Part 2 - the main guy

He took the stage, MAKING BAD JOKES ABOUT HIMSELF

He is a founding partner of Z+ partners, is an explorer with National Geographic, Popular Science, American Demographics, and NPR’s marketplace.

He is also the creator of poptech.org

He says we’re all in the communications. History of communications, MORE JOKES, IN sign that says not an entrance.

Sign about caution water on road in rain. He asks why we need signs to tell us there’s water on the road when it rains.

Do not touch this sign, it has sharp edges. Also the bridge is out. MORE JOKES, FUNNY PICTURES

A gymnasium with an escalator leading up to it.

Preamble before we get into the change. This is the Innovation Imperative.

Will we deploy educational materials across mobile devices?

Will we have open source and creative commons licensed work to share?

Will we close the digital divide?

He is confident because he’s watching an exponential curve of new connectivity, new speed limits, and a concurrent curve driving the cost of that stuff down.

In the future, virtually anything that can be done by computer will be done by computer.

What in our optimal future will be left for us to do?

We are left with a world with a single priority to amplify our own creativity. That deep creativity is in all of us.

He is talking about turning off the filter that filters what we see. Dustin Hoffman and the 254 matches from Rainman.

In a world of commoditized computation we have to find out creative center.

The corporate world, organizations use cognitive styles to solve problems. Innovation is finding new sources of value in advance of new demands.

Think, look, play, imagine.

Lock good thinkers in the closet and then scream at them that we need desktop cold fusion.

Think model = 15% non-incremental 85% failure

Small groups of people - hard to come up with amazing new innovations

Look = 70% incremental, 30% failure

This is folks in the world. They discover that no one can get ketchup out of the bottle, so they invent the squeeze bottle.

Play - 40% redefine the problem, 40% incremental - 20% failure

Imagine - N/A since it’s solving the problem that doesn’t exist

What emerges is the network model, and in the future corporations will hire the people we’re training today that are living in a networked society. Most of the folks here were not trained to think in network terms.

Diagram about social networks. Source is Valdis Krebs.

In the first generation we lived and died by Metcalfe’s law.

Now we’re in the participation equation.

Five areas that are going to shape the future. We are listening to weak signals, those are going to dominate our world tomorrow.

1. Demographic transformation. - this is hugely important but we don’t get trained in it

It took 40,000 years to go from a few people to a few billion. It’s an L curve, taking off. Today 6+ billion, by 2050 9+ billion.

Population increases in Latin America, Africa, Asia, Oceana and North America. Declines in England and Russia.

We became an urban society.

Three major cities in 2040 are in China and haven’t been built yet. Dubai in 15 years has changed the entire landscape.

Showing a population pyramid.Typically the highest number of babies and lowest number of old folks. Average pyramid form shrinking as you go up. More likely to die as you get older.

Middle section pays into social service at the top and education at the bottom. Right now around the world there is a new population architecture emerging.

70% of Morocco is under 30 years old.

He is talking about being Italian and making jokes.

He says that intergenerational complexities.

Comparing boomers, optimism, trust, diversity, socialization, participation

Boomers love hanging out with their friends.

Gen X’ers are alienated and don’t even like hanging out with themselves.

The millenials are all off the charts. Demographic change can change an industry. The music industry has figured out that older folks like music and have the money and don’t know how to share it online.

MTV building credibility ahead of the demand. Music industry rates music G for older folks.

As boys fall farther and farther behind we’ll have to address boys’ individual pedagogical demands.

2. Innovative by nature

We are undergoing a global change about our views on the environment.

NRA and eco-bullet.

Eco-vation, ecological innovation.

Every year people die making computer chips. Some sea sponge have a level of precision five times better to produce silicon.

Someone we educate will win the nobel prize for solving some ecological problem.

3. Learning places

He wants to acknowledge we’re all primates. We are all social animals. We share four traits, we’re strongly group oriented, hierarchy, individuation, knowledge sharing.

With six of us on a boat, one will be the captain, one the oarsman, one the complaining passenger, etc. We like hierarchy.

We also trade knowledge and innovation for status.

How do we create an environment for discovery and innovation?

We have preferred habitats.

There are places in our society where no one has to demand that we come. Instead of sending kids there, we send kids to school.

Picture of cubicles - not a place for innovation. We systematically reintroduce the natural world as a reward, closer to the window, etc.

4. Coping with choice and complexity

What is the effect of enabling technologies on our lives? Almost anything we want to buy, there is an ever-increasing array of companies is creating a surplus society.

Showing picture of aisle 7 at his grocery store, it is the bread aisle.

Lots of choices for bread, he doesn’t do well with choice.

There are 40,000 choices and we can only process roughly 160, so lots of noise.

It’s getting harder for kids to get through that maze of choice. The technology of managing choice will become more important.

When you add choices, people like a few, then it levels off, and then decreases with too many choices.

Lots of choices for jeans when he goes shopping at the Gap.

5. Redefining literacy

In the post war period when Russia launched Sputnik we created a social definition of literacy.

You are smart if you passed a certain score on a certain test. Alex Trebeck model or Albert Einstein. Either more than those around you or different than those around you.

Picture of scan tron bubble in sheet.

Today kids can bring in programmable calculator. What are we testing when kids can bring in the cloud of human knowledge.

It is inevitable that people will bring the tools with them and then we’ve changed the nature of assessment. We are learning to find, exclude, search for information. Johnny is connected to 15 other people, and who does he have working on his bench?

Shifting to a more synthetic definition of intelligence, how are we defined as smart? How will we be?

To read is to author, to be tested is to author.

Really we have nowhere near the kinds of criteria to identify what people know and should know.

Applicants are showing trustworthiness using ebay seller feedback since we lack metrics.

An endnote: Bias, Blindness, and the Futures we choose.

Every society, every individual has within it an image of the future.

50 years ago we drew a George Jetson style future.

Early 19th century thought we’d all wear balloon hats.

Why do we always get it wrong? Our ideas of the future, that is.

In 1977 there were only 4 members of the Professional International Association of Elvis Impersonators, now over 4,000, if continues at this rate in 2050 one in three people on earth will impersonate Elvis.

Two risks that confront us as a species.

Hussein, bin Laden, bad dudes. Real danger to all of us.

Global warming, glaciers melting.

Chance of risk from bad dudes 1 in 28,000,000 but chance of risk from environment is 1 in 6 and we spend little money on it but we spend one trillion dollars on the bad dudes.

We don’t like it when an individual confronts us with a risk.

The personal trumps the impersonal.

The tangible trumps the intangible.

The present trumps the past and future.

Desirability trumps responsibility.

We must bake those four items into the standards by which we hold ourselves accountable,

END

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