Solar Will Be ‘Sustainable’ in 2014

 

 

 

This is a good example of TechCast’s ability to forecast breakthroughs with accuracy. The following article and our forecast of solar power in 2010 proved remarkably prescient as solar did actually take off about 2015.

 

There are no shortage of headlines trumpeting various advances in the solar energy industry. Those have been adding up, and now the European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA) is reporting that the global capacity for solar has passed the 100GW line.

Germany still leads the way (thanks to government subsidies) but the American, Chinese and Japanese markets were the primary growth areas in 2012. China is expected to add 32GW over the next four years with America adding 27GW and 20GW each coming from Japan and Germany. According to the EPIA, the global capacity of solar is now on par with about 16 medium sized nuclear power plants, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts global capacity to exceed 200GW in less than five years. The IEA’s forecast is for cumulative, grid­connected photovoltaic capacity and doesn’t include concentrated solar power, which means total global capacity of solar should be even higher.

All of this is leading Deutsche Bank to forecast that the global solar market will move from subsidized to sustainable next year.

Thought Power

Using brain-computer interfaces, scientists have taught a monkey to “walk” a robot by simply thinking.  

Researchers at Duke University trained a monkey (Idoya) to walk on a treadmill, and electrodes were implanted in her brain to capture electronic signals. The signals were translated into computer instructions and sent via high-speed Internet to the lab in Kyoto, Japan, where the robot “Computational Brain” (CB) resides. The monkey could watch the robot on a large monitor and was instructed to control CB through her own walking motion. As Idoya walked, CB also walked at roughly the same pace with minor time delays. The lead scientist, Dr. Migeul Nicolelis, said “We have shown that you can carry brain signals across the planet to control devices in the time scale that a biological system works.”  

But that’s just the beginning. The researchers stopped the treadmill, leaving the monkey standing still and continuing to stare at the video of the robot. Whereas before Idoya was merely thinking about its own walking, now it was asked to make the robot walk using its thought alone.  For 3 minutes, Idoya “walked” the robot using sheer thought power. The team plans to demonstrate that human thought can operate an exoskeleton (robotic body suit).

TechCast was first to identify this exciting new technology and to define it as “Thought Power.” We forecast that intelligent brain-computer interfaces enabling people to communicate mentally with distant objects and people are likely to arrive commercially in about 1 decade.  

Technology Giveth and Technology Taketh

Uber’s disruption of the taxicab industry is the latest case in which IT “disintermediates” a business sector, driving out the middlemen and making huge profits. This article brings together a few of TechCast’s 130 international experts to analyze this economic upheaval and outline where it is going.

This is only a short essay, rather than the type of in-depth forecast we normally do. But it illustrates how our research method can provide the value of collective intelligence on almost anything.

 
Creating the Digital Economy

These economic upheavals caused by Uber, Airbnb, and a host of new ventures are now possible by harnessing the growing power of information technology (IT). The first mover, Uber in this case, creates a new communication system to automate some process, giving them an unbeatable competitive advantage. 

But the smashing success of Uber, has, in turn, attracted about a dozen competitors. Even cab drivers are building IT apps that offer the same flexibility in bringing together passengers and drivers. With the playing field leveled, what determines who succeeds and who fails? Will it be the first mover advantage of Uber? If it’s reputation and safety, cab drivers could come back fine. 

These industry transformations leave no question about it — IT is an irresistible force, one of the ultimate realities of nature, which is why controlling it confers great power. But this power is temporal and passes in time. A wave of tech disruption yields to a successive wave, and then another does the same again.  Film cameras were replaced by the digital camera, which were replaced by the smart phone. To put it in biblical terms, technology may giveth, but technology also taketh.

Here’s what some TechCast experts said:

Mark Sevening, Northrop Grumman Corporation  “Good point about how technology gives and takes.  In essence, it enables change and innovation, and those who stand still are left behind. 

Tom Abeles,  On-The-Horizon  “Both Uber and Airbnb found a market niche that grew so rapidly that even the standard participants such as cab drivers found that they could bypass the middle parties. It’s the same deal with e-insurance.”

Rupam Shrivastava, ePlanet Capital  “Both Airbnb and Uber are a direct result of the drive for market efficiency. The stock market went through this process in the â??50s, commodities in the â??70/80s, and derivatives in the â??90s. Retail made the change through eBay and Amazon, airline tickets through Expedia, and real estate through Zillow/Trulia in the early/mid 2000s. Now Uber is doing that in transportation and AirBnb is in home rentals.”                                  

Ken Harris,  Consilience “The automobile sales industry is being disrupted by Tesla.  Traditionally auto dealers have been the middle men between car buyers and manufacturers.  Tesla is upsetting that model by direct factory sales to car buyers, even successfully challenging state laws that actually mandate sales by dealers. But there are backlashes against these companies.  Uber drivers and Handybook cleaners don’t get employee benefits and have no control over their schedules; they are beginning to organize.  In addition, there are disasters waiting to happen that could become front page news.  What if an Airbnb renter turns someone’s home into a brothel or rents an apartment in a large building for the purpose of making it a terrorist target or using it as a terrorist base?”

Verne Wheelright, Personal Futures Network “Uber may be simply a forerunner to selfdriving cars.  As the technology becomes available and enabling legislation is in place, Uber may simply replace their drivers with self- driving machines. Reliable, automated door-todoor transportation will allow more people to get along with only one vehicle per family, and eventually, no owned vehicles.”                                       

Marcel Bullinga, Futurist & Trendwatcher  “Uber will not die as soon as self-driving cars arrive but become a platform for connecting people to machines (cabs). The cab driver can probably make more money than he does now â?? not by doing the driving but â?? by renting the self-driving car he owns.”

Robert Finkelstein,  Robotic Technology Inc  “The drivers for Uber and the Uber business model are temporary.  With the advent of driverless cars around 2020, a car owner could send the car out to make a living as a taxi or delivery vehicle. Uber might still provide a management service for the vehicle owners, or they might become independent, facilitated by software and communications providers.”                                                  

Olivier Adam,  5Deka Inc.  “Uber is more advanced than car sharing using ZipCars. Car sharing is a somewhat marginal phenomenon. It is not cheap and only slightly more flexible than ownership (most of them force you to bring the car back at a specific location, before a specific time). Imagine if you can press a button on your smartphone, a car shows up, brings you to your location and goes on to pick up another passenger. This is what Uber does, and a driverless car is a simpler version, reducing the costs and increasing even more the flexibility. Everyone would want their own private car, and they would want to avoid public transport. The Uber model of peak hour fares would then be key as there would be incentive for public transport use. When driverless cars become the norm, I predict the number of cars sold worldwide will be halved by 2025 (it has steadily been increasing up to now). Car fleet management then becomes a big source of employment, with individuals inspecting the cars and cleaning them up as needed. Car insurance companies disappear as the private ownership of vehicles is only done by the well-off as a sign of luxury.”

 
Economic Disruption is Everywhere

In addition to the many examples of disruption just noted above, there has been the passing of encyclopedias, travel agents, newspapers, and now possibly movie theaters

(Netflix). Which industry or profession is next? Medicine? Teaching? Law? And where is this economic transformation heading over the long-term?

Our TechCast experts see this happening everywhere:

Anamaria Beria, University of Maryland  “I think healthcare is next. We see everywhere an emphasis on virtual medicine, both from the policy and the insurance points of view. We also see more and more often a “pairing” between lifestyle and preventative medicine. I think the lifestyle-healthcare- finance axis is deeply connected and this is where IT can possibly disrupt the most. There are health tracking apps and studies based on “Big Data” regarding epidemics and the access to more information about healthcare, patients, doctors and research. I have also seen companies that are providing diagnostics and prescription online. But there are many situations where the doctor has to meet the patient face to face. This means that the evolution of virtual reality, robotics and IT, together, have the greatest power to disrupt the medicine industry. But we still have not understood the impact of these technologies on society and the social changes that come out of all this. So I believe the

21st century will belong to the social sciences.”                                            

Clem Bezold,  Institute for Alternative Futures  “I concur that health care will see significant disintermediation. One of my primary care scenarios for 2025 is “I Am My Own Medical Home.” This scenario considers how health care would interact with IBM’s “doc Watson,” digital health coaches, and increased personalization using genomics, epigenetics, zipcodeomics, and other Big Data. Education and legal services are other sectors where IT will make humans more productive or take over their jobs altogether â?? leading to higher unemployment.”

Dan Abelow,  Expandiverse  “A new book Medicine 2025 includes these examples of what is coming in healthcare automation:

  1. Patient zero: preventing a new pandemic
  2. Ground zero for medical emergencies: immediate diagnosis anywhere, anytime
  3. Digital medical coordination between organizations, including emergencies     
  4. Containing a lethal contagious disease, or bioterror attack, in an unexpected hot zone
  5. Delivering digital medical service to anyone, including under developed countries     
  6. Treating and curing infectious diseases at the source
  7. Bringing digital transformation inside the first world’s medical system
  8. Turning medical drugs into a “strategic stockpile” for treating diseases worldwide                         

Chadwick Seagraves,  North Carolina State University  “As both a librarian and IT professional, I see traditional libraries being forced to evolve and compete with technologies of all types.  The profession has had to focus on value added services and roles the library plays in addition to providing information.  Placing emphasis on being able to find “authoritative information” has been a focus in our profession for over a decade. Redefining library services to compete with the plethora of tools that replace a flesh and blood mediated experience has driven a massive development of applications and platforms for libraries to serve up deep web content that the average Googler has no idea exited.”                

Carlos Scheel, TEC de Monterrey  “I would say that Earth Sciences are next to be transformed. The planet has lost its resilience and is unable to recover its land, water, and air from the consequence of an irrational industrialization. Distinguished technologists must shift their efforts to finding solutions for drinkable water, soil recovery, clean air, equal food distribution, infectious decease.”                                                  

Govindaraj Subramani, PA Consulting Group  “A recent article in the Wall Street Journal quoted workers of on-demand services like Uber and Handy saying â??We are not robots.’ There are signs of rumbling discontent in the shared economy.”

Will TV Networks Be Next? Much the way major newspapers fell into decline when the web took over, signs point to something similar for the big TV NetworksSigns of the imminent decline is newspaper readership were visible years before the fortunes of the NY Times and other prosperous papers fell off a cliff about 2005. As people switched to the web for their news, selling stuff, and other forms of e­commerce, printing and distributing papers that consume forests of trees no longer made much sense. And the general nature of mass media could no longer serve the complex tastes of modern societies. Print newspapers will always fill an important niche, but big changes in consumer behavior always sweep away outmoded industries. Something similar seems likely to happen for TV Networks. With Smart TVentering the picture, people are increasingly choosing shows they want when they want them, avoiding paid commercials, finding movies and TV shows they prefer, and watching all this on PCs, tablets, smart phones, and other devices. And with good speech recognition, a la Siri, we will soon just talk to all these platforms. The U.S. cable TV industry lost more than 400,000 subscribers in the second quarter of 2012, according to a Sanford C. Bernstein estimate reported in the Wall Street Journal. The figures are fueling speculation that American homes are “cutting the cord” on cable TV in favor of free or cheap alternatives such as services from Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube. Our forecasts suggest it may take a few years for this profound shift in consumer behavior to reach mainstream. But it appears that TV is likely to suffer the same fate that befell newspapers when their business model collapsed.

 
The Value of Collective Intelligence

This simple article nicely illustrates the power of collective intelligence.

Starting with the few paragraphs outlined by the TechCast Team, our Global Brain Trust of experts quickly fleshed out this analysis with insightful points. The many examples of IT driven economic transformation in the quest for market efficiency. The temporary advantage of Uber being replaced by self-driving cars leased out by private owners. The likely transformation of healthcare, professions, libraries, and even the environment as next steps in this inevitable unfolding of a high-tech society based on invention.

 

TeleWork

TechCast expert Steve Lowe provides a report on TeleWork from the trenches. Steve is a consultant working out of London.

 

TechCast’s forecast makes it clear that the argument for teleworking seems a “no-brainer,” offering lower costs and greater agility than traditional on-site employment. Yet, there are important barriers to its adoption. I have seen many of them as a consultant to telecoms and tech companies and in corporate finance supporting tech start-ups. Here are some insights drawn from these years of experience:

By 2025, some 30 percent of employees in the industrialized nations are likely to be teleworking two to three days a week. If that estimate seems low, it is because fewer than half of today’s jobs are suitable for telework. Today at least, drivers must work on location. Ditto teachers, doctors, farmers, care givers, shop workers, uniformed personnel, and many others.

There are several more issues to consider as well:

Although it costs little to link a home-worker to the office in this digitized age, associated expenses can build up quickly. This is especially true if the job involves dealing with private commercial or third-party data.

Many employees in the industrialized world have broadband, but their homes may lack space or other facilities they need to telework effectively.

Most people enjoy being part of the team. Periods apart can erode this sense of belonging, and therefore worker satisfaction.

Traditional offices provide dedicated spaces for impromptu meetings, telemarketing, admin, training, and ideation. High-performing businesses use them to help optimize their performance. The ability to move among such spaces enriches the employee experience. Full-time teleworkers miss out.

Belonging and variety form the positive side of corporate life. Office politics and management structure can be the negative. People have a strong defensive wish to be where they can preempt any maneuvering that might harm their careers. Because of this, adopting telework often requires changes in corporate structure and culture. The net impact is that teleworking has tended to penetrate entire organizations, top-down or bottom-up.

Top-down situations are relatively uncommon. They tend to occur after senior management calls in consultants or systems houses to help implement Business Process Reengineering or “Lean” (continuous improvement) programs. Such implementations tend to have all the bells and whistles, including tailored virtual conferencing environments, structured training, and written protocols.

Bottom-up deployments often are ad-hoc mixes of free or cheap services. Unlike top-down programs, major long-term commitments are rare, and groups learn by doing.

Either approach can work well, depending on the company culture and employee buy-in.

The huge growth opportunity for teleworking is in servicing middle management: beneath the C-suite and above team managers. Improvements in cloud-based technologies and growing interest in collaborative tools and citizenship make this a good time to reap its rewards.

Yet, the best use of telework requires one more key innovation: a way to give middle managers the kind of agile, tailored support that basic ad-hoc services cannot. These services need provide security, tailored virtual environments, and user support, but without the high costs of today’s top-down implementations.

Imagine, for example, a team of 20 regional salespeople coming together for an hour-long virtual meeting. At $0.20 per minute each, the gross cost of their service will be just $240. It would take a huge number of meetings to cover the supplier’s development costs and overhead, but that massive scaling is now feasible. After a few years of frenzied activity, these services probably will come from just two or three dominant global suppliers.

The next big change will be in the teleworker’s location. Working from home can be great, particularly if you have an air-conditioned office and the discipline to maintain both good work and your health. However, many people find it physically and emotionally draining.

Since the dawn of digitization, people have talked of teleworking centers, where people could “touch down,” but these facilities have never become common. Today, shops are becoming vacant in communities from tiny hamlets to big cities. This offers a chance to revisit the idea of community-based teleworking. Many teleworkers could find this alternative very inviting.

Until recently, the capital cost of equipping such centers would have been enormous. Fiber broadband, today’s Wi-Fi, and users able to “tunnel” through this with their own secure networks, using their own devices, have made them practical. Are today’s coffee houses and flexible workspaces already serving this opportunity? Not quite.

New business models are required to deliver the drop-in flexibility of a Starbucks with the mix of task-focused facilities available in a small innovation center. Users must able to protect sensitive data, even when talking on a video or audio connection. They will want more screen space than they can be expected to carry. They will need the safe and ergonomic workspace any employer should provide.

One can imagine local authorities and businesses backing such workspaces, as they will help keep local high streets vibrant, reduce employee commuter miles, and help big employers operate more sustainably. Telework also will benefit the environment, the vitality of dormitory towns surrounding urban centers, and those employees who get to keep their jobs because they can work remotely. This appeal could make public workspaces important community centers.

One big market for them will be among self-employed “portfolio workers.” Large companies already use on-demand workers in growing numbers alongside their regular employees. By enhancing their “virtual proximity,” community workspaces could make portfolio workers still more attractive.

Better teleworking technologies also should benefit the rapidly growing number of nonemployees. Given reasonable procurement policies, the self-employed will be able to use them in agile, virtual teams, to compete better against big companies. Retirees also might find an opportunity to build a second career. If local authorities and agencies support telework, the unemployed and vulnerable should be able to feel part of a more inclusive society.

Telework is of course just one of many innovations now bringing change. Organizations, public and private, have a duty to embrace these developments and make tomorrow better than it might otherwise be. Innovations in telework are likely to be more enabling than most.