Contemplative Cloudlifting

I sit sipping a deep and dark cup of java staring out the large window of my hotel room at the clouds casting a welcome gray pall over the landscape. It’s perfect weather for a 3-hour drive south to Lakeside in San Diego County where I’m about to reconnect with 2 of my high school pals for the next 24-hours catching up on 37-years since I left La Mesa, my home town, for college. I enjoy a gray day for writing and solitude, so this morning without sun is a welcome respite from the lower-80’s temperature of the past few days here at a conference I attended for Digital Media and Small Business Educators to connect and learn how the two sectors must increase our association with each other. Most students in digital media will obtain work as entrepreneurs in the burgeoning gig economy while businesses need digital media content creators to enhance their visibility.

The days of a hireling workforce are numbered. We now have robots that can easily handle the menial tasks of serving you fast food, taking your bank deposit, and even driving you. A hireling is a human who works for pay in a menial and boring job with little or no concern for the value of the work. I attended a session titled “The New Digital Media: Advance Tech” guided by Computer Scientist and Entrepreneur Strategy Technologist  Barbara Bickham who prepared us for the emerging tech landscape that includes the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR) in a dazzling array of how our lives will change in the next 5-years. Since she has been on the development teams at various companies for this brave new world, she deftly described exactly how our lives will be lived. Would you like for me to share?

First, let’s cover the IoT: it is the interconnection (networking) of physical devices like your car, home, handheld devices, health monitoring systems and much more. Check out this wiki.

Here’s a simple graphic to help explain:

Consider this: Echo and other Alexa devices let you instantly connect to Alexa to play music, control your smart home, get information, news, weather, and more using just your voice. How many people do you know who bought such a device this past holiday season? Amazon sold more than 11 million with the uptick of 9 times as many in Dec 2016 as the previous year.  Echo and Alexa are monitoring your every move to learn all about you ostensibly to make your life easier while collecting your data. Imagine in the near future that you have a driverless car that awaits you after work. The minute you get in, the car senses that you have had a particular type of day, so it plays you some nice music that it already knows calms you down. En route to your home, the car alerts your home space that you will arrive in x-minutes and the it should prepare for your entry by playing a TV show you like; the refrigerator can have a glass of chilled white wine ready for you, and the temperature of the home can be set to your liking. You haven’t had to do a thing to make this happen save for all of the times you’ve told Alexa your likes and dislikes. She has stored all of your data.

Remember these “A Day Made of Glass” by Corning back in 2012? Take a peek if you never saw them or need a refresher. That was 5-years ago. We are further along in the development of much more.

That’s enough for now. This is one of those sit and simmer moments. Stay tuned…