An alternative to predicting future

“If you wanted to count every product and service on offer in New York – there are 10 billion of them – it would take you 317 years. This is how complex the economy we’ve created is” – Tim Harford, in his Ted Talk – Trial, Error and the God complex.

Taking into account the complexities of economies, we can’t expect any prediction about the future to work. But to unlock unique business opportunities, its required to engage with the complexities around us and make sense of the future. This article is all about that.

Distribution of intelligence

Nicholas Negroponte in his book Being Digital talks about “Distribution of intelligence”, as a way to understand the growth of mass media. He says, “Instead of thinking of the next evolutionary step of television as increased in resolution, better color, or more programs, think of it as a change in the distribution of intelligence – or more precisely, the movement of some intelligence, from the transmitter to the receiver.”

He is not trying to predict anything, instead, he is giving a perspective. Let’s apply that way of thinking to patient care. The three major “intelligent” parts are Drug manufacturers, Hospitals and Patients.

Drug manufacturers specialize in making drugs and hospitals focus on curing patients. Imagine a scenario where intelligence from Drug manufacturers flows to the Hospitals. It’s already in NYTimes that hospitals are trying to manufacture their own drugs. Think around what else can accelerate the process, 3D Printing of drugs? What can stop this?. Instead of predicting, we are trying to understand the process in play, towards shaping the future which makes more sense than a prediction.

Let’s also consider the fact that with the advanced analytics, IoT and decision support systems, we can have devices that do the diagnosis for patients or aid the doctors far away. The research of Yoram Levanon, Beyond Verbal’s chief scientist, can predict your illness with up to 70% accuracy from your voice. Imagine this in your smart device and there we have intelligence flowing downstream from hospitals to the general public. This elevates patient care to new heights where patients recover faster at the comfort of their home.

We now got a different picture of patient care, to build upon, instead of a prediction.

Subtraction

One more way to think is “Subtraction”, which Peter Levine of a16Z talks about in his presentation “The End of Cloud Computing”- “Everything that’s popular in technology always gets replaced by something else. Subtract something that’s important today and fill it with something. And you will start to think out of the box”.

He puts to the audience an exercise to subtract “cloud” from self-driving car technology. His argument is, as devices collect more data that needs to be processed in real time, devices (cars) cannot afford the latency of getting it processed at a central cloud. The solution is to process it in real time, and that’s why cloud becomes obsolete because of very sophisticated processing that can happen on devices.

Let’s think. Let’s subtract self-driving cars from the cities of the future. What do we get – Roads? Can we make the roads smarter?

Instead of making cars intelligent we can make the infrastructure intelligent, intelligent enough to drive people around in smart cars, just like trains, but without rails. Is such an infrastructure possible? How about Uber coming up with Air-taxies?