Popular Techonomy: Is society ready?

Why should you have four posts to choose from, covering the opening session? As Kevin Kelly said, technology expands “choices and possibilities…”

The onscreen title of the main opening session of the conference was listed as “Popular Techonomy: Can the world be turned into a technomic direction?” (Future topic for followers of the coalescing Techonomy brand: Technomic needs an “o” after “n”? Or not? Discuss.) The panel included Citigroup’s Deborah Hopkins, Wired Magazine’s Kevin Kelly, Harvard University’s Lisa Randall, and Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. Techonomy’s Dave Kirkpatrick guided the conversation.

Though the discussion wound across a range of topics related to popular uses of technology, it ended up coalescing around the impact of information technology on society and the economy – and how it will affect personal privacy and freedom.

Kelly set the emotional tone of the session – an optimistic one – offering an upbeat assessment of the impact of new technologies. “It’s absolutely positive,” he said. If you deduct all of the negative effects, he maintained, “…what it expands is choices and possibilities.” Society, he claimed, needs to stop fighting it and start embracing it. “We shouldn’t just tolerate progress. We shouldn’t just tolerate technological advance. What we get for it is, usually, these choices and possibilities.”

But Eric Schmidt set the intellectual tone of the session, pointing to some of the inevitable – and potentially negative – results he sees of the massive amount of data we continue to create. “Society is not fundamentally ready for the questions that are going to be asked by the explosion of technology,” he said. “There’s an avalanche of information coming. And we think people ought to be ready for it.” For example, one statistic he quoted: We create as much data as we did from the beginning of human history until the year 2003 – every two days. The reason, according to Schmidt? “User-generated content.”

Though people in the audience probed for the negative as well as the positive impact of technology – what other conference has questioners like Strategic News Services’ Mark Anderson and Whole Earth founder Stewart Brand? – it’s clear that panelists like Schmidt and Kelly believe that we sit yet again on the cusp of a wave of technological innovation, perhaps unlike any we’ve yet seen. Key to that future, however, is how we deal with issues related to online identity.

Schmidt offered some tantalizing insights into just how much information is available about the average person online – and how government will deal with it. Is your image on Flickr? “You have 14 pictures [online], we can predict who you are,” said Schmidt. You want others to be able to verify who you are? Today, you probably use Facebook – but that may change.

As I’ve said in recent lectures, Facebook is trying to do something that’s really hard: Create an open identity platform for the planet. With 500 million registered users, they’re well on their way. But it’s not easy. Facebook sits in the middle of the social network ecosystem, with Twitter to the far left (an open communication platform with nearly zero friction) and LinkedIn far to the right (with high friction by design, allowing only a few degrees of separation to be visible to the average user). Mark Zuckerberg’s approach is for Facebook to reduce friction as much as it can. Twitter will remain relatively unscathed because it’s a utility and LinkedIn because it’s a walled garden  – but an open-identity perspective keeps Facebook vulnerable to the kind of privacy eruptions that can continually shake user faith in the platform.

Schmidt seems to agree.  “I think it’s reasonable to say that we need a name service for humans,” Schmidt said. “Governments are going to require this.” And they’ll do it for a variety of reasons, such as needing to determine that you’re a real human being – and, Schmidt maintained, they’ll probably step in to set rules about personally-identifiable data. “My guess is the information ‘about us’ will be regulated over time.”

gB

Gary A. Bolles, CEO, Xigi Inc., gary [at] xigi.biz

Comments

[Brent Schlender]

Good catch on the typo, Gary. Even nicer insights into this panel.

[William Carleton]

Awesome stuff. The penultimate paragraph, in italics--who said that? And where are the referenced lectures? I'm interested, but confused about where to look for more...

[garyabolles]

Sorry, Brent, it's an annoying habit from my days as editorial director at Interactive Week. Congenital flaw: typos on a page jump out at me...
-gB

[garyabolles]

Apologies, William, I should have made it clear: I take the blame for everything in italics, those are my comments.

-gB

[William Carleton]

Oh, very good, thank you!