Micro-Robotics Firefighting

Micro-Robotics is probably the topic that excites me more about future technologies.

You may find some articles I wrote about it in 2009 with the tittle of Micro-Machines. Now I see it wasn't very smart to use such an expression instead of micro-robotics.

It isn't so amazing to say that I identified some patterns 2 years ago, as most of them are a mash of science films and common knowledge about technologies and neural networks.

Now, very small automated machines are using the group orientation patterns to help fire-fighters detecting humans that may be trapped in a fire.

Certainly this decade will be full of great usages for micro-robotics, and this video is a great example.

The place is Carnegie Mellon which is no surprise.

Touch&Go Vs. Last Mile

Touch and Go is a psicologycal and cultural Trend that is becoming very powerful, and might be very destructive by it’s nature.

An easy way to understand is looking at how kids relate to their toys, specially Legos.

I am from a time, when kids didn’t have so many toys. We had plenty, but not so much that we could play with a toy just one time. Today it’s normal for a kid to receive so many toys that he plays with each one just one time. They assemble their puzzle or they Lego, then they disassemble it, and it goes straight to the shelf where it will stand indefinitely.

Now looking at grown-ups, we can spot the same pattern. For some it’s clothes, for other it’s technologies and phones. There is a buy it, try it and throw it pattern that is very common.

Some people would say that this is the face of capitalism and consumism, but it’s important to understand that this is a different kind of consumism. In the limit, this could bring to the end of the concept of property.

Previously, on this blog I have spoken about the reducing importance of property, and the touch&go culture which is very much related to the disengagement trend.

The good side about touch&go is that people are becoming more open minded, trying a little bit of everything which breaks a lot of communication barriers, like we had in the 90’s. The 90’s teenagers were divided between stereotypes: geeks, heavies, athletes, etc. It was harder than today for individuals from different groups to interact.

The down side is the incapability to practice the last mile effort. Last mile is a concept that relates to that little bit of extra effort, that so often makes the difference between failure and success. On sports it’s common to hear about it, when that lust push-up when your arms are hurting makes more benefit than all the others. On martial arts, a lot of athletes give up just before they get their black belt.

On Work and businesses, the last mile usually makes the difference between failure and success. There is a great cultural gap between going for sufficiency or making that extra effort, which makes all the difference.

If on some trends is good to go with the flow, on this specific trend is important for individuals and educators to understand this, and in a way contradict this trend within them.

The 'S' shaped shift and the gay marriage aceptance in USA

A recent article from the New York Times shows that the American opinion on gay marriage has turned favourable recently with a slight increase on the speed of change in the last 3 years.

This increase of change is common in such progressive changes, happening in a S-shaped rhythm. A similar phenomenon occurred in Portugal on the topic of violence over children back in the 80's. Before it was common for parents and teachers to use violence as a consistent method of education.

This S-shaped phenomenon means that there are some early adopters that slowly show a different opinion from the mainstream. At a certain point, the entire society starts changing at a very high rate, until it slows down as a few late adopters insist on maintaining their old habits. This is what happens usually, obviously with exceptions. In some cases, inversions are normal.

What is odd about the case presented in the article about gay marriage in USA, is that the S only took shape around 50%. Usually this happens somewhat between 10% and 30%.

I see two logic explanations for this difference. The first is about the specificity on the thematic, which afects directly more than 10% of the population that has a lot to gain with this aceptance.

The second and most significant is the size of the USA, and the diferences between liberal and conservative states. If such a study had been made in each state independently we would certainly observe the S shape begining at 20% or 30%. Also, if we look at states individually some of them would have a very high rate of acceptance, where others oppose strongly.

This happens because making oppinions is a social experience, and although we all like to think that we make our own oppinions, someone who doesn't take other's oppinions in consideration can't be considered healthy.

Better means of communication improve and acelerate this social process of changing oppinions. Internet allows constant and intensive communication between citizens from different states and countries. This adds steepness to the S-shape, making it happen in lesser time.

Workshop "Automobile Sector in 2020"

Yesterday I gave my first Future Studies Workshop.

This project started by a request made by Innov-XXI, a portuguese company developing a Roadster, Asterio.

This event had also the suport from Beta-I, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Association, and WouldSteps, CoolHunting Association.

Using a process based in Manoa, the output of this Workshop were 4 Scenarios for the sector in 2020:

- Car as a Toy. With development of Economy and Public transports worldwide, most cars are bought for fun. They are very different from each other, consumers know a lot about them, including engineering. The consumer is part of the design and building process. High taxes for cars, oil, parking, highways and cities. Before buying the car, the driver makes a first test drive trough the Playstation.

- Car for Use. For most families, the car is a deep need, but resources rocket and it's hard to buy and keep a car. Consumers are very informed, trough the web about caracteristics and services but not mechanics. Fewer brands worldwide, and personalization is inexisting. Sharing, and renting plans are common. Hibrid cars with plug in are very popular.

- Caos. Oil price is very volatile and lobbies from diferent energy sources make lots of pressure and live in constant conflits. Consumers know a lot about mechanics and make adaptations from one energy source to the other. Taxes and subsidies achieve a very complex dimension.

- Kitt. New cars are mostly eletric, very high-tech and some drive by themselves. The driver never pops the engine, which is sold as a close piece, and knows nothing about the technology. Everything is automatic, like the door that opens when the driver is near, and every information appears to the driver by sms or Augmented Reality. Cars are bought trough the internet, and dealerships disapear. Using Nanotechnology, the exterior can change it's collour according to the driver request.

Thank you to all the participants that were involved.

Full Report

Economic Crisis may be Over

If we could trust economic agents to be rational, it would be fair to say that the economic crisis would end now, with a strong cameback.

America's economy is starting to grow steadly, slow but steadly. The Chinese economy also shows signs of healthy grow. Europe still shows fragilities, like the Portuguese and Spain Economies, but the aid capacity is larger than the risk. Whether EU and FMI came to the rescue of Iberian Economies or not, they are not a risk for EU and the global economy.

This means that the risks are controlled. It also means that the possibilities for growth are really strong.

In this reality, stock-brokers should start buying, and companies should start hiring and investing in acquisitions.

On the other hand, gold has raised too much and might go down, as investors sell gold to buy stocks.

Soros, one of the world top investors has already claimed that this is the moment to sell gold and invest in health and biotechnology. He goes further saying that gold is the last bubble.

But we know that agents are not rational, and the insecurity raised since 2007, made investor more cautious. Maybe too cautious.

Is it possible that we all remain frozen in panic waiting for someone else to start investing?

Disengagement

Some people have the determined idea that younger generations are worse than older generations. Others have the opposite idea. I see myself in this second group.
Nonetheless, this trend, disengagement, tries to resume what younger generations are loosing in terms of personal relations.
By this expression, I mean that younger generations might have less capacity for engagement, which is different than commitment.
It’s easier to understand the meaning of engagement if we think about conflicts. The person who is getting involved in a certain type of battle is engaging.
In a personal relation it’s possible to have commitment without engagement. For example, in a love relation it’s only natural that someone is committed to the relation as long as the other person acts under a certain way, like being faithful. This means that he is fully committed, but not totally engaged.
An example for the extreme of engagement would be someone who knows is being cheated, or even a victim of domestic violence, but still, holds to that relation with every possible effort. Like everything else, the extreme of engagement is bad.
But the opposite is not necessarily better. If our standards for friendship are so high that no one can comply, than it becomes impossible to have long lasting relations.
This concept can be applied to a much wider field than personal relations. It can also be applied to studies, work or a sport.
A top student who is giving a great effort into his studies may change his behavior dramatically when he finds some kind of contradiction like a severe teacher or being in a class where other students are smarter than he is.
What this tell us about future generations, is that they will search for commitments in order to feel like part of something, but it’s becoming ever more increasingly hard to resist to contradiction.
This might mean that we are loosing our capacity to deal with frustration and contradiction.

Maturity in Social Networks

In this particular post, by Social Networks I mean every technology oriented for communicating, including chats, blogs, micro-blogging, comunities and specifically social networks.

All of those tend to have a boom period, when is fashion and cool and everybody wants to give a try. This boom period can be longer or shorter according to the experience it provides to the users. The more complete that experience is, the longer it lasts. This is why Facebook had such a long boom period.

But, sooner or later, they all reach maturity, and a lot of users, abandon it, by shutting down, deleting, or just forgetting about it.

In the boom period, the tipycal user is young, and somewhat of a social geek. On the other hand, after reaching maturity the tipical user is older, with a selective and more professional profile.

A good example for this pattern, would be Twitter. Most teenagers had a twitter account sometime, but found it hard to keep track or a visiting routine. Now most twitters are older, with professional motives.

For everyone who is trying to create the next Big thing, this pattern means a great problem. In order to make it popular and be successful social networks have to be thanked for teenagers, but in order to be sustainable it has to have real advantages for grown-ups.

During the 90’s when someone wanted to look into the future of technologies it was common to look at teenagers. It was assumed that what was being done by teens, would later be done by everyone. But nowadays, we understand that teens can not be a reference for the rest of the society as they are mostly driven by excitement, not utility. If we want to understand the future of a certain technology we should look at 35 year old women, who usually can use technologies, but won’t do it just for curiosity. They will use it, when the utility of a certain technology outcomes the difficulty to use it.

Technologic integration – Myth or Reality

There has been some discussion whether technologic integration is an urban myth or reality.

Usually consumers are always expecting integration. Will facebook integrate with google? Mobile with computers? Wikipedia with Forums?
On the other hand, innovation brings us new disrupting concepts constantly that are not integrated with existing technology.

My previous post, explains the difference between patterns and trends, and this should help us better understand this dilemma of integration.
If we look at integration as a trend, we really can’t get nowhere. Are technologies more integrated today than they were five years ago? I can’t answer this question correctly and I doubt that anyone can. The problem is that we don’t have a way to measure integration.

Instead, if we look at patterns, the answer becomes much more clearly. Whenever there are new disruptive concepts or technology they are usually disintegrated from the existing ones. It makes only sense, that the settled players are not negotiating with the new arising players.

But once that new technologies or players are settled and they find their space close to the consumer, then all the others want to integrate.

So there is a clear pattern. When something new appears it’s disintegrated, and over time it tends to integrate. This doesn’t answer if the future will present us with more integration or disintegration, but it tells us that what today is disintegrated will be integrated in the future.

So if innovation keeps growing there will be more disintegration, but if innovation slows down, than integration will occur.

Patterns Vs Trends

Usually Futurists don’t concern enough about the difference between trends and patterns, talking about both as if they were the same. But they era actually different and we should take those differences in consideration, in order to form better methods which are the basis for our work and investigations.

A trend is a change with a direction that is generally kept in a certain period of time. That period could be longer or shorter, and sometimes it can be interrupted to be continued later, but this is the mais idea. Increasing or decreasing trough time.

A patter is a repetition based on a condition, and is usually stated as “When A occurs, B occurs”. That repetition may be global and with no time limit, or it may be limited to a certain context. An example for a pattern could be “morning is the time of day with more stock market transactions” or “Monday is the day when more heart attacks occur”.

If we look at the first example we may transform the sentence so it doesn’t look like a condition, but it always maintains that relation between two events: morning and transactions.

If we look at the second condition, then it becomes clear that the country where this statement was made is a Christian country. This only happens because Monday is the first day of work, so in a country were Sunday was a working day, then Monday wouldn’t be the day with more heart attacks.

Back to the methods, the reason why is important to distinguish trends from patterns is that both of them have different methods to be detected and validated.

The best professionals to identify and validate patterns are not futurists, but historians and scientific investigators. Probably historians are better at discovering patterns, and scientists are better at validating, understanding and defining the conditions for patterns.

Trends on the other side, are usually better detected, understand and validated by futurists, or field professionals. The reason why historians and scientists are not so useful at identifying and studying patterns is that they are mostly focus on the past being limited to identify and study emergent change.

On an horizon scanning, both elements should be considered. Usually futurists tend to focus on trends, asking “what change is happening”, but we must never neglect patterns that comes in “How does change happens”, or “Why does change happens”.

When we use the Iceberg analysis, we usually justify smaller trends with bigger trends, but on a macro scale trends can not be totally justified by other trends. That would be the same as saying that “change happens because change happens”, which doesn’t justify how go from inaction to action. Only pattern analysis can justify the first existence of change. For a very simple example let’s consider that we have a lion and a zebra in the same space. The pattern says that if a zebra in a Zebra are in the same space, the Lion will chase, and the Zebra will try to escape. From that point Change is justified, and other changes will occur over time. If the lion is faster than the distance between both will decrease, but if they run at the same speed, then over time exhaustion will increase. So patterns are at the bottom of the study and trends are at the surface of change.

The patterns and trends that we identify in scanning must be crossed during the analysis. Futurists always ask how patterns will be changed by patterns, but it’s really important to analyze how patterns interfere with existing trends.

Will Facebook last Forever ?

Last night the news about young people abandoning Facebook dropped as a bomb. The article was based in a study of interviews made to teenagers, where they presented a lot of arguments to quitting facebook and social networks in general.

First, I must say that the way we use the expression “social networks” for everything really bothers me. Suddenly everything on the internet is a social network, even the internet itself. Supposedly a social network is something were individuals publicly add each other simultaneously as friends.

Linkedin is the pure social network, which serves the purpose of social networking exclusively. And most people do not spend hours a week in a social network, unless they are something like a head-hunter or a sales person. Most of us are just part of a social network so someone else will find us, or maybe in a certain situation it may be useful to track someone else.
So it is not fair to say that Social Networking is dying, it’s just there when we need it. There is no need to go there every day.

Now, Facebook is much more than a Social Network. It has micro-blogging, picture and video sharing, groups, fan club, and a lot of applications like Quizzes or games.

The great platform for micro-blogging is Twitter, which does nothing else than that one purpose that is micro-blogging. Now, kids and teenager don’t like micro-blogging. It’s usually skilled professionals who use it to share and learn from their professional community. For example, Foresighters use it all the time for trend-hunting. One particular difference between micro-blogging and social networks, is that in micro-blogging adding is not simultaneous. Person A might be following B, without B being following A.
Micro-blogging is not dying either. Sure it has passed that fashion momentum, but now it’s used by who it is supposed to be.
You might want to remember all of this, next time someone says that Google Buzz is a social network.

Now, before I get into the dying of Facebook and Social Networks let me explain the concept of layered information. All of us, at a conscient or inconscient level, assume that some information is more important than other. So, a more important information would be a top layer. It’s fair to assume that most people would have this order: personal talk, phone, email, and micro-blogging. Of course, this is not the same for everyone, as some of us would consider s.m.s. over e-mail and others the other way around.

After all of this let’s look at facebook and bring that question “Will facebook last forever?”. Considering that in internet terms, “forever” means something like a decade.
Facebook is a social network, which represents no reason to visit it often. But then it has micro-blogging in it, with the problem that you don’t choose who you follow. You just choose who is your friend. When we think about all that useless information, there really is no reason to go there, because all those posts about who likes what are at the bottom layer of all the information we receive daily.

A few months ago, Facebook Quizzes were really cool and funny, but we got tired of it really fast. That is something else that will not keep our attention, whether we are teenagers or grown-ups.

Groups and Forums is something that facebook never had great success. A lot of people sign in, or push the “I like” button, but then forgets about it. So that is not the way either.

And now, facebook has something that scares all teenagers away: their parents. In a place where all your friends talk about your personal life, and everybody comments, you don’t want your parents around. It’s not about being a teenager. Nobody likes to have their parents snooping around their personal life. No matter what age we are.

So this leaves one reason to go back to facebook often. Yes, you are right. That reason is Farmville, or mafia wars, or whatever networking-game you are playing.
The problem with networking-games is that they are only fun for a certain amount of time, even when you are addicted to games. This is why we have so many games with a name ending in vile or city. They all want to be the next big game, but always very similar to the ones already existing.

So, if facebook, doesn’t want to perish into oblivience, it has to find something else that Is appealing and great. To survive, facebook will have to find the next big thing in order to call the teenagers back in.

Or maybe Facebook will be the new grown-ups platform, which is the most probably scenario. In the internet world, teenagers are the early adopters, and grown-ups follow them. And big corporations will be there announcing their products and services, and a lot of professionals will try to organize lobbying events, and debate their activities. And we will have a lot of people over 30 playing Farmville.

Oops. That is not the future… It’s now

Self-learning – "Applying" for Mega-Trend

A few years ago, the big buzz was about e-learning, but in a certain way we can say that e-learning has failed.

Following someone else’s process over the internet is somewhat demotivating for a generation who is highly individualist and wants everything instantaneously. And according to experts, we lose 60% of the communication witch is non-verbal.

B-learning (blended learning) on the other hand is proving to be a perfect combination. The student learns over the internet the main concepts, and in a classroom he practices everything he learn in an interactive environment. Related to this is the transformation of the teacher from a speaker into a facilitator.

On the other side of this puzzle we have the “google it” culture. Young and most dynamic professionals like to learn from themselves searching for meanings and tutorials. Individualism and a knowledge society demands it from us.

Self-Learning is not about learning about one specific theme, but to grab knowledge from as many sources as possible. Why would someone pay to receive a learning program, when he can learn at his own speed and taste for free?

The biggest driver for self-learning is the complexity of knowledge.
One or two decades ago, the traditional courses in universities where a good answer for learning needs. One could learn physics, or law, or engineering. But today’s and tomorrow’s job demands that we know a little bit about various unrelated areas.

And each person is learning from a very specific topic in a highly specific point of view. Even if universities allow students to build their own curriculum they can’t attend to each specification, and the student finds himself loosing time and resources learning from something that is not appealing or adding value.

So we have, in new generations, individuals with outstanding learning abilities, desire for control, individualist values in an extremely complex context and ever-changing reality.

We can see some strong signals for this trend in very practical areas like design or programming, where students who were in college for more than 5 years are often run by those who never went to college, but learn a lot by tutorials, internet forums and professional experience.

Of course this doesn’t mean we should stop sending our teenagers to college. What it means is that universities will have to adapt making their teaching skills more interactive, the contents more adaptive, encouraging self-study, reducing the time for courses and interacting more with personal and professional experiences.

The self-learner is not someone who learns from one topic, over Wikipedia during 3 years. He is instead, someone who learns about very different and complex topics, on diferent platforms: Small courses, search engine, wikis, books, seminars, conferences and workshops, debating with colleagues and in forums. He may as well go to college, but he doesn’t limit to what teachers give him.
And let’s not forget, that as he jumps from job to job he is constantly learning new skills with different people.

In this context, High School and basic training in general, doubles it’s importance as it needs to prepare teenagers to learn from themselves in a very competitive environment. So the need for focus in Languages, computer skills and thinking (mathematics, philosophy, debate) is even greater.

For Self-Learning to be considered a mega trend it has to obey 3 criteria:
Deep Impact
Transversal Impact
Long lasting Change

It certainly has big impact, has it is changing the way we learn, thus the way we look at the world.

It’s changing our learning life, our professional life and our personal lives. It’s breaking barriers between different academic backgrounds and is creating the new professionals for the workforce of the future.

This trend is still starting, as not so long ago, the internet had a reputation for poor knowledge, and books and universities were considered to be the only trustworthy sources for knowledge. Now we are finally seeing internet as a channel, with access to many different sources; some more trustworthy than others.

The new and the next generations are the ones that will live this trend, as they grow in a information-rich environment. They will have learning and scanning capabilities that we just don’t understand. The next generation of teachers will not fight against internet, but instead they will encourage it, and teach their students to produce knowledge out of the abundancy of information at everyone disposal.

The XXI century will be the stage for the constantly increasing world of the Self-Learners.

Listeners – a new approach into psychology services

Have you ever felt the need to be heard? Being heard is a wonderfull way to fight loneliness.

But in a money oriented society where everyone wants to be heard and no one is prepared to listen, it’s just expectable that someone will pay to be heard and someone else will be paid to hear.

In a way that is what shrinks do. But a shrink has a lot of skills, training and payment expectation for someone whose job is only to listen.
On the other hand, such a job would require training. Some basic skills and a diploma to increase perceived value would be needed.

This kind of services is typically provided under a brand and a somewhat pyramidal scheme. Something similar to NLP or Swasthya Yoga should be selling training, defining levels, and professionals would keep their incomes.

Such a service would lead us into great social arguments. Someone will oppose saying that we cannot sell “friendship” and such a service is only a lie. Others would defend this service saying that it is a great way to fight loneliness and if it feels good we should do it.

Micro-Machines V – It’s Happening

Some people reading the previous articles about Micro-Machines were seeing this trend as something from science fiction as it is not something visible yet.

But although it is not yet visible, it’s already starting to happen.

The most costly activity for humanity is still agriculture. Farming Limitations are the main responsible for water shortage, food prices, global warming and high energy prices.

So, in such an area the concept of micro-robotics would be highly valuable for gaining efficiency.

Let me remember that the concept of micro-robotics is that smaller robots tend to be more efficient, and so they should be getting smaller and smaller.

The paradigm of farming machinery seems to be taking a huge drift from giant tractors to small robots.

A full article, with the proper arguments can be seen here.

Micro-Machines IV – Waiting tables

The concept of robots waiting tables is not a very interesting one. This is something that humans do very well so it’s not very appealing for machines to do it.

Maybe we will have some projects of robotics table waiting, but it won’t certainly be something mainstream for the next hundred years. As machines do more and more tasks human relationship services will be more valuable.

But let’s understand how such service could be performed by machines.

It wouldn’t make any sense to have human shaped robots walking around. To wait on tables a robot doesn’t need a human head or 1,5 meter shoulders.

A simple tower as high as a table, large enough to carry a plate on the top would be effective for the job. It would just bring your plate next to the table, and then it would slide it into the table.

But such towers sharing moving space with costumers walking is not comfortable at all.

A balcon based Restaurant might be the answer. BBR are restaurants where a balcon separates people from servants who serve the food directly in front of people. In order to have clients face-to-face BBRs might have tables perpendicular to the tables.

In a robotic BBR, the kitchen, the balcony, and the client tables would be same height. Micro machines would push around the plates and even clean the tables after the clients.

Micro-Machines III – Intercommunication

Intercommunication is one of the most important details about the concept of micro-machines.

Coordinating the work of several machines is an overwhelming challenge. Instructions from a central unit can only go so far. In a more complex system there needs to be an independent thinking that leads into a pattern.

A way to understand that pattern is to look at the flying of ducks. All together they form a pattern but they are not controlled by any central command. They all have a similar “programming” that makes them work as a group.

Groups of machines should follow the same logic. However to increase their efficiency they must communicate with each other. So we might expect for great development in communication between machines in the coming years.

Another area where inter-machines communications is growing is automation of cars.


In the automotive sector, cars are slowly closing in to automated driving. You may read about this in previous articles, but the turning point resides in communication between the cars. For example, if one slows down, the one behind receives a signal to slow down immediately. This way it doesn’t have to wait for visual interpretation.

Let us take a moment to look at the batteries development. With the common use of mobile phones and laptops batteries become cheaper and more efficient. When electric cars were raised as a need, batteries were already much more developed. So there was a kind of technology transfer.

The same should happen with machine intercommunication. Automated cars and micro-machines use the same technology. This improves the chance for development. With cars automation on the horizon micro-machines intercommunication should be easier.

If we wider the horizon, the development of robotics will be highly dependent on machines intercommunication.

Micro-Machines II - Locomotion

Since we were kids we hear that an ant can carry up to 30 times its own weight. Of course we wonder “If there was an 100 kilos ant, could it carry 3 tons?”. The problem is that such a big ant couldn’t probably lift her own weight.

The movement of a small animal or machine is much simpler than a big one. Whether is on the surface, on water or on the skies a smaller creature can move better, change directions easily, accelerate and brake easily and even coordinate movements.

Also smaller animals don’t need so big neurologic networks as the processing of their locomotion is easier. So micro-machines should use simpler ones as well. Once, we pass the tiping point of building a small enough processor for little machines to move around it will just get easier and easier build even smaller and more efficient ones.

The agility of a flying system is measured in a way by it’s turning radius. In other words, for it to take a 180º turning how many meters differ from point A to B?
A jet fighter has a smaller turning radius than a jumbo plane, therefore is more agile, but an eagle has an even smaller arch and a fly beats them all. This makes the fly’s manageability outstanding. It’s also interesting to point out that small birds have very bizarre flying methods with very small wings. On the other hand bigger birds usually fly faster but not that much.

In conclusion, while there is a wish full goal for robots playing soccer in 2050, we can expect much sooner for highly efficient means of locomotion for smaller machines.

Micro-Machines

The futures of robotics is in micro-robotics.

Whatever a big machine can do, 10 smaller machines can do it better. Whether we are mining minerals, exploring space, performing surgery, fighting an army or building a skyscraper it’s usually more efficient to choose smaller machines.

If we compare a machine one meter tall, with two of half a meter we realize two things. Altough they may use the same amount of material it’s cheaper to build two smaller, because the second one uses the some molder as the first one. And the smaller ones are more flexible, adjustable, they can fit in narrower spaces and it is easier to do maintenaince without stopping their work.

If you are thinking: Then let us make4 machines ¼ of the size, or 8 machines 1/8 of the size and so on. So where does it stop?

The limits are: miniaturization, inter-communication and of course in some cases there is reasonable size for what you are doing.

For example if you are chopping down trees you better have one machine capable of grabing an entire tree.

Inter-communication is a very interesting topic that I intend to develop on another post.

Miniaturization is the work of every hardware and robotics developer. And it is a work with consistent results. Processing equipment is getting smaller and smaller, and nanotechnologies will allow them to get much smaller.

Two other problems related to micro machines are: energy and the coming back.

Energy is always a problem when we are talking about machines and robotics. It’s a challenge for any machine to carry enough energy so they must have a way of collecting them easily.

And of course when we are talking about mass production we should consider the need for them to come back for re-use and recycle.

But once we get around this challenges miniaturization of robotics should be entering an exponencial growing rate.

After all, bears do not form colonies as efficient as bees or ants.

Economic Crisis - After the Storm, the Earthquake

While we are expecting for the financial turmoil to pass, we might be missing a bigger one coming our way.

Before the burst of the late 2008, we had high oil prices, economic development, controlled inflation and low interest rates.

The high oil price made inflation grow, and that was one of the elements that made life harder for families triggering the debt crisis.

So the “before” situation was: economic development with high oil prices. It was a “inflation” scenario.

The crisis situation was: economic recession with low oil prices. It brought us to a deflation situation.

But nothing tells us that economic development and oil prices go hand-to-hand. So, we have two other situations to consider:

The optimum Scenario with economic development and low oil prices - Of course this is only achievable with alternative energies.

And the worst possible Scenario with high oil prices and low economic development – This would be a stagflation scenario.

So the question is: what happens faster? The economy recuperation or the rise of oil price?
If the rise of oil prise goes extremely high again, most of world economies can not sustain the burst of inflation that will arise. And in reaction to the rise of inflation the European Central Bank will be forced to raise interest rates.

Such a situation will be unsustainable for the citizens and families who have to pay interests for their loans. The situation that we first tried to avoid could be coming our way.

The key point is oil price. If it goes above 80 dol. It’s a sign to be worried. The contingent reaction is investment in alternative energies. Investment in alternative energies is not something we should do only to protect the environment. It should be done to protect our economies.

The Purpose of the Futurist

"The Purpose of the Futurist is not to tell you what the Future will be.
Is to remind you that it's not written yet."

Why drive when you can surf?

People who don’t read in public transports don’t really understand the great advantage that is doing it.

If a person takes an hour in public transports 2 times a day but is reading during the trip, is taking a better use of his time than someone who takes half an hour by car, but then takes a few hours every weekend to read a book.

But not everyone likes reading. On the other hand, everybody (specially younger generations) likes to surf on the web.
Of course, using your computer on the train is not very confortable.

Unless your computer is one of the modern really small computer with a 7’’ screen.
Some people say “what am I going to do with such a small computer?”.

But others see its potential on portability. Those computers are as powerful as the big ones. The only thing you need to be comfortable is to have a workstation (big screen and a keyboard) at home, and another at home.

This way is very easy to carry. And when you get in the train, just take it out of your pocket, and start surfing.

So why drive when you can surf?