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Monthly Archives: June 2015

Cave Painting in the Digital Age

25 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by Burning Manager in Uncategorized

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cave painting, cave painting; twitter; Shakespeare;, Charles Dickens, emoji;, Emotional Intelligence, EQ, iphone, James Joyce, Mark Twain, Millenials, Patrick White, Twitter, W B Yeats

tumblr_static_95p88l86si88ks4w4wws04wk8

I wrote recently about the inexorable rise of digitisation in our lives and the workplace and made some pointed comments about the need for the workforce to be able to adapt and stay ahead of automation. I do my best to stay at the leading edge by keeping up to date with technology. Yes I’m even contemplating an Apple watch…apparently the big decision to be made is which strap to choose!

Not long ago I did a software update on my iphone to the latest iOS8.3. I was interested to see what was new with the update and it appeared at first glance that the key change was an increase in the number of emojis. Exchanging texts with my millennial children is a good way I find to stay in touch with things (as well as Spotify of course). I’ve noticed lately that they have wholeheartedly embraced the use of emojis within their text language.

Today’s text exchange with my daughter is a case in point. Our family have had a special connection with Amy Winehouse over the years to the point that my daughter has a treasured personal note written to her by Amy. I read a film review for the movie Amy which is the story of her life; both fantastic and tragic and thought I would let my daughter know that it had just been released. I got back a text that contained no text just two emojis, but which spoke volumes.

 followed by .

That made me think. Some of us have long lamented the lowering of the standard of English, particularly in the work environment where the age-old wordsmith skills seem to no longer be held in such high regard. The wonderful writings of the classic authors is being lost on our younger generation and as we now communicate more in electronic form, our ability to use the English language at its best is being quite quickly eroded. Emails were the start, but the minute SMS messaging came in so did the truncation of words and the tossing aside of grammatical rules. Twitter (of which I am a frequent visitor/contributor I must admit) has further exacerbated this situation by limiting our prose and long-form expression to just 140 characters.

If we look at the development of written language, the earliest form is cave painting of which Australia has many shining examples. There is the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians and we move through the different languages as exhibited in the Rosetta Stone through to Old and Middle English and the language we have today. We get Shakespeare and the wonderful Dickens, Twain, Austen, the Brontes, Hardy, Joyce, Yeats, White etc. Lately though, it would appear that our linguistic skills and expression in written form is not capable of matching the complexity and beauty that our forebears were able to capture on paper. And perhaps that is the key missing ingredient; paper. The lack of complexity or beauty in modern day writing when viewed on an electronic device does not jar half as much as it does when that same message is committed to paper.

Now it appears we are about to come full circle. To make things easier and save writing words we now have a large and ever expanding ‘library’ of emojis to do more than just express our emotions within a written message. Indeed emojis are now being used to replace words altogether. The other day when I asked my son what his mark was in an exam rather than him responding with “I’m not going to tell you” I got three emojis:


It didn’t take me long to work out the message, but there is a world of difference between the exact meaning of this in words and what interpretation I might ascribe to it on the presumption that I understand what the three monkeys mean anyway.

As more and more emojis are created, and we pepper our messages with them, it will become incumbent upon us to learn to adeptly read visual rather than linguistic/written comprehension cues. We know from management studies that good leaders have highly refined emotional intelligence. An extra aspect to that EQ may well turn out to be the ability to read simple emotional graphics to understand the joy, heartache, disappointment, sadness, boredom or excitement of the writer. Indeed our very business survival might depend upon it.

The Shortage of Flushing Loos – What a BIMmer

04 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by Burning Manager in Uncategorized

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2029, A-i, analogue to digital, Artifical intelligence, Automation, BIM, building information modelling, digital futures, digital native, digital natives, Forbes Magazine, Google Glass, human in the loop, Kurweill, Oculus Rift

phone-in-toilet

Kurzweil is a smart bloke. He predicted the internet. He predicted the rise of artificial intelligence and has set a date, 2029, when robots are smarter than us. Not so said the millennial/digital native who served me at a servo (petrol/gasoline station) recently. I tried to pay using a fuel card and the cashier demanded the plastic card’s PIN number. ‘Not required’ was my riposte having used the card hundreds of time previously without any PIN. And so ensued a discussion that increased in heat as the queue of people wanting to use that terminal to pay grew longer. The machine was telling him that a PIN was required. I was adamant that he was wrong. Having a choice between a human with the experience of the situation and artificial intelligence (his terminal) he chose the latter. This guy is already pre-wired for the age of artificial intelligence. No need for a human in the loop for this bloke – he had his full trust in the machine. I of course asked for a supervisor – an old baby boomer response honed from years of call-waiting and jobsworths on the other end of the line. No supervisor was available and frankly he didn’t quite see why one was needed.

Like it or not the digital age is upon us and the rising tide of automation is inexorably taking jobs that were previously regarded as quite skilled and technical out of the workplace once and for all. Banking is a prime example where some quite smart people are being let go because a machine has been shown to be quicker, smarter and yes cheaper. As far back as 2013 Forbes magazine was reporting startling facts on mobile phone ownership. 6 of the world’s 7 billion people have mobile phones – only 4.5 billion have a toilet. The water closet is several centuries old they remind us, while mobile phones have been around for a maximum of say 30 years. The rapid adoption of this technology over a critical public health measure (the loo) tells us a lot about how quickly our lives are going to change as a result of the digital connector in our pocket.  For some, life expectancy will be cut short despite having a device in their pocket that can provide them with the full scale drawings of how to build a flushing toilet – merely because they committed their expenditure to connect widely rather than to evacuate safely.

No industry is immune from the rise of digitisation. The key will be getting ahead of trend and staying there. For many in the Baby Boomer and Gen X demographic it may already be too late to effect the transition from analogue to digital world; from analogue thinking and problem solving to digital mastery of the environment about us. For construction, the paradigm is changing with our very own analogue to digital transition taking place. It’s called BIM standing for building information modelling and will likely be the most transformative thing since the invention of the hammer back in …errr well a long time ago; quite possibly the Bronze Age. BIM has the potential to be an exciting democratisation of the design, build and operation of a structure, or the new technology that leaves behind a forgotten generation whose skills sets could not adapt to a new way of working. BIM even at its most rudimentary is changing construction and reducing the amount of re-work that is necessary. It is encouraging communication across trades and is allowing for, and indeed encouraging, in-situ problem-solving. The amount of waste and re-work alone should reduce build costs and the carbon intensity of our built environment. Being such a large contributor to global warming it is high time that those designing, building and maintaining/operating structures played their part in ameliorating the impact of climate change.

bim-photo-1_news_featured[1]

BIM at its farthest reaches is about the integration of modelling, gaming architecture, project management, computer-aided design and virtual technologies like Google Glass and Oculus Rift giving incredible knowledge to the person at the coal-face. Those kids who spent all those hours in their bedroom playing Minecraft or Call of Duty etc are well versed in absorbing data presented in the digital realm and turning this quickly into decision-making. You don’t have to be a weapons expert in Call of Duty you just need to know how to react when a mission critical bit of data appears on your screen. Similarly you may not need to be a qualified tradesman but just need to interpret data when presented to you by a smart operator sitting at a console perhaps a world away.

There’s always the argument that someone has to paint the wall, or sweep the streets but this week comes news that researchers in France and the US have developed new technologies that enable a robot to recover from an injury in under two minutes, similar to how animals do it. This news breaks pretty much at the same time that we find out that at MIT their cheetah robot now sees and jumps over hurdles autonomously as it runs. You can’t tell me that soon it won’t stand on its hind legs and cut-in with a paint brush better than a Block contestant.

The future is bright, or the future is bleak – we don’t know which yet. One thing we can say with some assurance is that the future is digital. If we don’t start thinking now about how we equip humans to master this new paradigm we might find 2029 is here and those much smarter than us robots don’t really need us anymore.

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