Presentation by David Wood of London Futurists at COMIT 2016: Digitally Building Britain, September 2016 More information: http://www.comit.org.uk/liveblog

1. The acceleration of disruption
David Wood, @dw2
Chair of London Futurists
Principal, Delta Wisdom
Opportunities and threats for construction

2. Robots threaten 15M UK jobs, says Bank of England's chief economist
“Admin, clerical and production
tasks most at threat”
50%
The Guardian@dw2

3. 137M (56% of salaried workforce) from 5 SE Asian countries at high-risk
Cambodia,
Indonesia,
the
Philippines,
Thailand
and
Vietnam
Straits Times@dw2

4. Foxconn factory employees reduced from 110k to 50k, thanks to robots
Kunshan, in Jiangsu province
South China MP@dw2

5. “Computerisation should have little effect on the
percentage of the work force engaged in these tasks…
“Non-routine manual tasks: physical tasks that
cannot be well-described as following a set of If-
Then-Else rules, because they require optical
recognition and fine motion control that have proven
extremely difficult for computers to carry out…”
“Examples include driving a truck…
Frank Levy
MIT
Richard J. Murnane
Harvard
@dw2

6. Completed <5%
of the course
Sandstorm: Winner of 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge
150 miles in
the Mojave
Desert region
of the US
2005 Challenge:
Five vehicles
completed whole
course


@dw2

7. Truck drivers Taxi drivers
Insurance
salespeople
Lots of other professions?
…
Creative professions?
Professions with human insight?
Self-driving flying cars!
@dw2

8. https://anticipating2025.com/preliminary-information/previews/
“What’s interesting in Go is that
there’s been a lot of progress in the
last decade…
“The best Go programs are now at a
stage where they can give a few
stones handicap to a top Go player, a
world-class Go player, and beat him.
“This has happened quite recently -
much to the amazement to the top
Go players.
“I would guess that we are 20 years
away from having a Go program that
can play at a level equivalent to
Kasparov or Carlsen.”
David Levy 1976 Interviewed in Dec 2013
1968 (£1,250) -> 1978  -> 1983 ($1,000)  -> 1989  (Deep Thought) -> 1997  (Kasparov)
@dw2

9. AI, Deep Learning
=> Pattern detection
(Artificial Intuition)
2016
AlphaGo 4,
Lee Sedol 1
@dw2

10. The third machine age
1. Machines replaced human muscular effort
– They manipulated energy
– They produced motion
2. Then machines replaced human calculation effort
– They manipulated information (using algorithms)
– They produced numerical results
3. Machines are now replacing human creative effort
– They manipulate “learning data” to reveal cause-effect patterns
– They produce algorithms (using information)
– They progress from a seed algorithm to unexpected new insight
@dw2

11. “A group of young people playing Frisbee”
AI, Deep Learning
=> Computer vision
@dw2

12. “A person riding a motorcycle on a dirt road”
@dw2

13. “A yellow bus driving
down a road with green
trees and green grass in
the background”
Photo via
Andrew Ng,
Chief Scientist,
Baidu
@dw2

14. BN
CI
NBIC Convergence

15. Atoms Genes
Bits Neurons
Bio-
Tech
Nano-
Tech
Cogno-
Tech
Info-
Tech
Software
Hardware
BiologyPhysical

16. Performance-enhancing drugs
Nootropics
Cognotech: IA
BN
CI

17. Performance-enhancing headsets
“This Startup Gets You High On Dopamine, No Exercise Required”
@dw2

18. Augmented
Reality (AR)
via smart
glasses
@dw2

19. “Smart Glasses Market 2015” – report from AugmentedReality.ORG
@dw2

20. “Towards 1 Billion
Shipments
… within 10 years”
– Ori Inbar
Glasses phase 1 -> phase 2 -> phase 3 -> phase 4…
@dw2

21. Design,
Manufacturing
Computers
Positive feedback cycles
@dw2

22. Software tools
(debuggers,
compilers…)
Software
Positive feedback cycles
@dw2

23. AI tools
AI
Positive feedback cycles
@dw2

24. Education
Technology
Positive feedback cycles
@dw2

25. People
Technology
Education
Networks
Tools
Positive
feedback
cycle
Designers
Entrepreneurs
Engineers
EducatorsIntegrators
Artificial Intelligence Deep Learning
The acceleration of technology
The acceleration of disruption

26. 1. Improve your strategic reviews
2. Improve your foresight skills and trend
management
3. Practice agile futurism
4. Practice collaborative futurism
Surviving accelerated disruption:
Four takeaways
@dw2

27. Implications for strategy
Strategy = choice: what you’ll do, and what you’ll not do
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
Sources of upside
Sources of downside
Internal
(company)
External
(environment)
Forthcoming
Opportunities
Forthcoming
Threats
Future
(scenarios)
Strategy = preparation: readiness for key changes
SWOT
Increasingly crucial
@dw2

28. Opportunities
Threats
The set of
possible
future
scenarios
Foresight… … is hard
Acceleration of
technology
Multi-convergence
of factors
Business as usual

29. Trend management: seeing what’s credible
1. Identifying trends: establish your catalogue of trends
– Technological trends
– Social trends
– Political trends
2. Cultivate sources of insight
– Customer insight
– Competitor insight
– Employee insight
– Research insight
– Futurist insight
3. Build and review scenarios
– Combinations of trends – both disruptive and incremental
– Consider what to put in, and what to leave out (e.g. formerly key DNA!)
=> Decide what’s desirable
Gain insight
in stages
@dw2

30. Inertia (Waterfall)
• Elaborate planning
• Painstaking execution
• Stick to the plan!
• Big Design Up Front
• Executives’ intuition
• Secrecy
• Execute a single scenario
• Typically disappoint market
Agile / Lean
• Experimentation
• Sprints deliver incrementally
• Be ready to pivot!
• Iterative Design
• Customer feedback
• Customer feedback
• Search for insight on scenarios
• Anticipate market delight
(early & often)
26/09/2016 30
@dw2

31. Drawback of non-Agile execution
What the market
would, in the end,
like to have
What the initial plan
estimated the
market would like
Time
in the (non-agile) case
when “the plan is king”
Delivery
Measure of
market
dissatisfaction
Don’t lock into
scenarios too
early
@dw2

32. With Agile development
(and regular customer feedback)
What the market
would, in the end,
like to have
What the initial plan
estimated the
market would like
Time
following agile
(adaptive) planning
Delivery
Measure of
market
delight
Improve your foresight
planning with regular
feedback from wider circle
@dw2

33. People
Technology
Education
Networks
Tools
Positive
feedback
cycle
Designers
Entrepreneurs
Engineers
Futurists!
Scenarios
EducatorsIntegrators

34. 1. Improve your strategic reviews
– Futurist perspectives add a third column to strategy reviews
2. Improve your foresight skills and trend management
– Trend analysis, consider interactions
– Create & assess multiple scenarios
– Identify “canary signals” in advance
3. Practice agile futurism
– Review your trends and scenarios (at least) once each quarter
– Fail fast, fail smart, fail forward – pivot to new experiment
4. Practice collaborative futurism
– Benefit from the positive feedback cycle for foresight
– Prepare for “smart acquisitions” if fast changes make them necessary
Positive
feedback
cycle
Surviving accelerated disruption:
Four takeaways Intelligent sustainable
visionary urgency
@dw2

35. Source material for preceding slides
2 http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/nov/12/robots-threaten-low-paid-jobs-says-bank-
of-england-chief-economist
3 http://www.straitstimes.com/business/millions-of-southeast-asian-jobs-may-be-lost-to-
automation-in-next-two-decades-ilo
4 http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/1949918/rise-robots-60000-workers-
culled-just-one-factory-chinas
5 http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Division-Labor-Computers/dp/0691119724
6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
7 http://telematicswire.net/self-drving-cars-after-google-its-baidu-carmakers-and-technology-
companies-competing-together/
8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-Rk6rtLc-E
11,12 https://medium.com/backchannel/google-search-will-be-your-next-brain-5207c26e4523
13 http://www.slideshare.net/ExtractConf/andrew-ng-chief-scientist-at-baidu
@dw2

36. Source materials (continued)
17 http://futurism.com/this-startup-gets-you-high-on-dopamine-no-exercise-required/
18 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/golfscape-gps-rangefinder/id382051762
20 “Smart Glasses Market 2015” – report from AugmentedReality.ORG
Further reading
londonfuturists.com
deltawisdom.com
Blog dw2blog.com
@dw2