Resistance to Virtual Worlds

I am a big advocate of Virtual Worlds. I think that it is where the Web is eventually going to go.  Unfortunately, when I try to explain the future potential for Virtual Worlds to people, I encounter a lot of resistance. In this post I am going to restate some points from previous posts and see how they apply to the resistance against virtual worlds.

First, technologies that appear to be essential elements of our modern world faced resistance when they were new. The resistance to the telephone was no different that resistance to Virtual Worlds. Both we new and different in their time and difficult to understand.

Second, people tend to evaluate an emerging technology in terms of the world into which it is emerging rather than the world of the future that it will create. People think of Virtual Worlds in terms of the current physical world. In the physical world we have many adaptions to our physical presence which would not work in a Virtual World. So, people raise these issues as challenges. You cannot hug people. You cannot see their faces and so forth. However, to see the folly of this reasoning, just reverse it. Imagine that we all lived in Virtual Worlds and somebody suggested that we should meet people face to face. Just think of the resistance that you create. You might get germs from other people. Big people will take advantage of little people. People may just you based upon your looks and so forth.

Third, no matter how compelling an argument may be against a technology being accepted (consider the engineering argument against the telephone) unpredictable things may occur which make what originally appeared to be infeasible in the present, feasible in the future. Who is to say that the technology won't advance enough at some point and the fidelity increases to where you can actually read faces and body language. There are other more compelling arguments against Virtual Worlds such as how do you keep everyone from talking at once or how do you keep too many people from invading the same space. But, even these arguments evaporate in the face of realistic advanced in technology.

Fourth, people who resist new technologies simply because they are new and different will always bring out what I call 'the talking points'. These are points that are meant to comfort people who feel threatened by new things and are not serious barriers to the acceptance of new technologies. The real barrier to Virtual Worlds at the moment is not the resistance talking points but the lack of applications. When applications such as support for remote meetings, distance education or virtual tourism become mainstream all the resistance points will be forgotten.

Can We Learn Anything From the Telephone?

I intended to write an entry each Friday but I have gotten way behind. Life can get hectic at times especially at the end of the semester. So, despite the lapse in time, I wanted to wrap up the thread I was developing for the telephone by summarizing what we can learn from it.

First, technologies that appear to be essential elements of our modern world faced resistance when they were new. So, before we reject emerging technologies we must allow for the fact that they as well might become essential technologies of the future. This is far from a certainty. But it is also far from an impossibility.

Second, people tend to evaluate an emerging technology in terms of the world into which it is emerging rather than the world of the future that it will create. If we want to fairly evaluate new technologies we need to consider their potential impacts on our world and daily lives. Then we need to evaluate them in the context of those impacts.

Third, no matter how compelling an argument may be against a technology being accepted (consider the engineering argument against the telephone) unpredictable things may occur which make what originally appeared to be infeasible in the present, feasible in the future. The telegraph relied on nonexistence battery technology, a technological barrier that was eventually over come. I can recall a conversation I had years ago with a colleague who presenting a compelling engineering argument as why streaming video would never be possible. And yet, Netflix is doing very well with it.

Fourth, people who resist new technologies simply because they are new and different will always bring out what I call 'the talking points'. These are points that are meant to comfort people who feel threatened by new things and are not serious barriers to the acceptance of new technologies.

There are numerous emerging information technologies that are battling or will battle acceptance. There are virtual worlds, video games, intelligent web interfaces, analytics and big data, and artificial life to name a few. There has also been a note or two in the press about holograms and drone delivery of packages. So, there is much to talk about, many patterns to identify, and some tentative conclusions to be drawn.

More Resistance to the Telephone

In my previous post, I mentioned that the engineers at Western Union had dismissed the idea that someday there would be a phone in every home as being impossible since the combinatorics of switching would require everyone in the country to become a telephone operator. But, this engineering analysis was not the only resistance to this new invention. There were social barriers to overcome as well. 

One of these issues was the result of the fact that people simply did not understand how the telephone worked. From the perspective of most people, the telephone produced a disembodied voice from a person who was many miles away. How did that work? It appeared to employ an occult force. An occult force is merely a force for which you don’t understand the mechanisms by which it occurs. So, for most people, the disembodied voice was produced by an occult force. Once you are into occult forces, all kinds of other things are possible. If you can talk to somebody many miles away, can you also talk to dead people or people in the future? Today, since we understand how this all works, these questions seem silly. But to people who don’t quite understand, these things these are distinct  possibilities.

Another problem created by the telephone was how to greet people who were calling. At the time there were social conventions dictating how people greeted each other based on their relative social classes. But, when somebody calls you on the telephone, you have no idea who is calling and hence you do not know their social class. How do you answer? Eventually, this problem was solved by introducing a new work into the language. We still use this term today. When the telephone rings, we pick it up and say “Hello”. But, at the time, this was a major concern.

To add to the problems the telephone was having gaining acceptance was the problem that most telephone operators were young unmarried women. As operators, these young unmarried women were talking to men to whom they had not been properly introduced. This was considered by some to be the depths of depravity and their lack of moral standing led to the derisive title – call girl.

The point here is that that when new technologies face resistance due to social or economic pressures we cannot assume that those pressures will be enough to prevent its acceptance. Many times, new technologies just run roughshod over these barriers and gain acceptance in spite of them.

Well, enough about the telephone and its struggles for acceptance.  Next time I will turn to an emerging technology – the holographic image – and see if we can apply anything we have learned to that.

Will the Telephone Catch On?

Following in the vein of the previous post which asked “Will Cell Phones Catch On?”, I will take on an even older question and ask “Will the Telephone Catch On?” As hard as it may be to believe that there was a time when people were skeptical about the prospects of cell phones catching on, it is even more difficult to believe that there was a time when people were very skeptical about the prospects of the telephone catching on.

In the famous battle between Alexander Graham Bell and Western Union over the rights to telephone patent, the court decided to grant patent rights for the telephone to Bell. Western Union agreed to stay out of the telephone business and Bell agreed to stay away from the telegraph business. In hindsight, it is astonishing that Western Union would have accepted such an imbalanced judgment.  But, at the time, it did not seem so short sighted.

Why didn’t a company as wealthy as Western Union just fight the case in court until Bell ran out of money? Well, as it turns out, an internal memo from the engineering staff at Western Union cautioned the company against wasting good money on Bell’s folly. In a respectable analysis, the engineers said that Bell’s claim that there would someday be a phone in every home was preposterous on the face of it.  The problem they cited was in the combinatorics of switching.  Avoiding the math and cutting to chase I can sum up their argument by saying that in order for there to be a phone in every home, the demand for switching would require every person in the country to become a telephone operator.  Hence, Bell’s vision was not plausible.

A point about predictions that I should inject at this point is that even if we wait for things to play out we may never be able to determine if a given prediction really did come true. In the case of the combinatorics of switching one might claim that it did not come true as automated switching and eventually computerized switching took over the job of the telephone operator. So, the prediction did not come true. On the other hand one might also claim that since we enter a number on our phones to set up the switched circuit, we have indeed, as the engineers at Western Union predicted, all become telephone operators.

But, it wasn’t just technical problems inhibiting the expansion of the telephone. There were social problems as well. And that we will turn to next time.

Will Cell Phones Catch On?

One of my favorite stories about predicting future trends comes from an MBA class in Telecom that I was teaching in the early 1990’s. I was doing the exercise that I described in the previous post and said “One of the things you will tell your grand kids is that back in 1993, if you were expecting a phone call, you had to be by the phone to get it.” Of course, back in 1993 cell phones were still a curiosity, very big and very expensive. I went on to say, “In the future, you will carry your phone around with you and the network will find you.”

Well this was just too much for these practically minded MBA students. They put down their pen, folded their arms across there chests, and refused to even take notes on an idea as preposterous as this. After a few minutes of looks, ranging from curious to disdainful, the challenges began.

First, the practical concerns,

“Phones are way to big to carry around”

“And the portable ones are far too expensive for everyone to have one”

Then the some deeper issues,

“When I am away from the phone, I want to be away from it.”

“Yes, I don’t want to be accessible 24/7”

“What about privacy? Isn’t ‘having the network find you’ a violation of personal privacy?”

And, finally, the real issue,

“I just don’t see this happening,”

Of course, since we know how this turned out, we find this resistance amusing. Today, many people would go into shock if they had to give up their cell phone for a day. But, what I really like about this story is that is provides us with several teaching points.

First, no matter how much change people have seen in their past, they don’t think things will change in their future. Science fiction ideas like flying cars don’t bother people because they don’t really think they will happen in any time frame that will concern them. But when you talk about changes that will affect their daily life in profound ways, they just resist the ideas.

Second, this resistance always takes the form of talking points. On any given technology there seems to be a standard set of talking points that people use to comfort themselves. It isn’t about the probability of the technology being developed or catching on. It is about preserving one’s comfort with the known.

Thirds, one of the biggest mistakes people make when considering the value of a future technology is that they evaluate the technology in the context of the present rather than in the context of the future that the technology helps to create. Had these students known about texting, cool apps, Siri, taking photos or customized ringtones they may have felt differently about the prospective technology.

The pattern here is that you cannot rely on the opinions of people in the present to help you assess if a new technology will catch on.

Getting Perspective

It is very difficult for people to imagine the future. There is something, very stable in our minds, about the present and the status quo. No matter how much change we have seen in the past, we do not see that much change in our future. For example, I am pretty sure that at some point in the future web interfaces will be both intelligent and three dimensional. But it is very difficult to convince anyone of either. We can imagine robots and flying cars as long as they stay in our imaginations. When we think about our lives being different, we reject the notions.

One of the techniques I use to overcome this cognitive resistance is to ask people to imagine that it is fifty years into the future. In this scenario, they are sitting with their grandchildren on their lap explaining what life was like back in the year which is current when I am doing this exercise. The kids ask “what was life like back in …. “ At which point they say to the grandkids “You won’t believe this but back in …… we used to ….” And they fill in the blank with something that is a mainstay of the current day but will probably be gone and forgotten fifty years hence.

Here is an example. Fifty years from now people will tell their grandchildren that back in 2013 people would get up every morning and sit in traffic for an hour or more driving to the building in which they work. In the future with advances in both telecommunications and virtual worlds, the idea of everybody having to be in the same physical building will become impractical and arcane. People will go to work by logging into their home computer. What that home computer may look like is another thing entirely. But, I use this example as a starting point for a whole host of other changes.

This exercise is useful because we are more used to looking back at the past and seeing how things in the present are different than we are of looking into the future and seeing how things will be different. I will come back to this technique from time to time to illustrate other principles.

Does History Repeat Itself?

The question of whether or not history repeats itself is often asked in drawling contemplative tones as though it were a weighty philosophical question. Actually, it is a silly question. Clearly history does not repeat itself otherwise we would have multiple Golden Ages of Greece, multiple Roman Empires, and pyramids all over the place. Travel in China would be impossible because of Great Walls across the landscape blocking roads. It’s bad enough today when tenth graders have to read Plato’s Republic. If they had to compare volumes of The Republic from different instances of the Golden Age of Greece, nobody would ever finish high school. Unemployment would go up. Economies would crash. Surely it would be the end of civilization as we know it. OK, maybe I got a little carried away. But, it merely goes to support that notion that the idea of history repeating itself is prima facie ridiculous. Prima facie is Latin for “on the face of it” or “at first glance”. Using Latin phrases helps shore up your credibility and balances any predictions you may have made about the end of civilization.

But the more serious question is – do the patterns of history repeat themselves. There answer here is a qualified yes and there is abundant evidence to support this claim. There are cycles of feast and famine. There are economic cycles. Empires rise and fall. There are times of expansion, either economic or geographic, and times of contraction. Despots rise and fall. Some get their due and some don’t. There are repetitive patterns to history because we look at history and organize it, to the extent possible, into repetitive patterns. And the patterns continue to repeat, if imperfectly. And therein lays the rub.

Patterns do repeat and can be used to predict future events. And the veracity of those predictions depends on how well the patterns fit and how well we recognize their imperfection.  The patterns of history are the key to predicting the future. But, figuring out how to identify and apply them correctly is the challenge.My approach to predicting the future which is limited to the emergence of technology and key ideas is based on recognizing patterns. As this blog unfolds, I will attempt to explain how that works.