The final Keynote for Computes in Libraries 2013 was given by Daniel Rasmus. I liked this presentation and even though Rasmus was introduced with the term "futurist", he quickly disabused the attendees of any notion that he was going to have any kind of certain vision of the future. This keynote actually made nice counterpoint with the keynote of the day before which had an overwhelmingly positive vision for the future.
Rasmus identified himself as an "anti-futurist" indicating that he is rather critical of making predictions as we have no data from the future, only data from the past.
The first and main section of his keynote outlined eleven specific uncertainties that we have going forward:
Uncertainty 1 : How Will We Access Information?
Uncertainty 2 : How Will We Represent Books? (PDF, Scroll, tablet, e-ink, HTML 5, cuneiform)
Uncertainty 3 : How Low or High, Can We Go (media size and data storage density) You can now get 128 GB on a microSD card when a few years ago 128 MB was state of the art. 54% of people claim to never use cloud computer yet 95% of them actually do
Uncertainty 4 : How Will We Find Stuff? Will we be using statistics, metadata, semantics, or will stuff somehow look for us?
Uncertainty 5 : What Do We Hire a Library to Do? (Learning Experience, Leisure/Pleasure/Shopping Experience, Outlet to Piracy, Memory, Internet Service Provider, Cultural Experience, Community Meeting Place, Source of data, Digital help desk?) Only about 4,000+ books are in a lendable e-book form right now but 1.7 million books are in a lendable form in paper.
Uncertainty 6 : How Will We Represent Knowledge? (Does your ontology have an epistmology? Too Big to Know by Weinberger)
Uncertainty 7 : What will we need to know? What jobs will exist that we don't even have right now?
Uncertainty 8 : What will be the role of place?
Uncertainty 9 : The Measure of Success (Productivity vs. Serendipity). Does the efficiency of forcing customers to use self-check stations really outweigh the inefficiency of maintaining a checkout staff that engage people in conversation and can make suggestions. Sometimes we make investments that we can't quantify very well because we are looking at them through the lens of industrial age thinking.
Uncertainty 10 : Who Will Document the Trust, Who Will Censor?
Uncertainty 11 : What Rights Management Model will Predominate? (Digital Rights Management vs. Digital Restriction Management)
Following the outlining of these certainties, Rasmus described what he saw as four possible futures toward which we may be headed.
Corporate lifeline – where we live to work and work to live. Corporations are the dominant social entitiies.
Trial Separation – Globalization has fractured; countries and regions are turning inward to shore-up their own societies and infrastructures. Nationalism and state control predominates, the world slowly dis-integrates.
Falling Skies – The old rules have stopped working completely. Local networks manage where national policy fails. People feel numb and there are loud calls for a constitutional convention in US
Freelance Planet – Large corporations have largely become holding companies. Value-webs have taken the place of supply-chains. Individuals create their own, contextual work environments. Technological innovation is rampant and chaotic.
Rasmus ended with these recommendations for dealing with the uncertainty of the future:
- Don't think about the future in a linear way
- Document the uncertainties you face – put the uncertainties on the door so you constantly see it and think about them. Correct answer for “what is going to happen with computers” is “I don't know but I have a robust way of thinking about it.”
- Consider the “ultimate” use or utility of a consumer technology an uncertainty until it becomes obsolete. You can't know that something is obsolete until it's gone.
- Actively engage with the uncertainties when making strategic decisions
- Use scenario planning to help think about possible ways the future may turn out, plan for contingencies and mitigate risks
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