1. THE LABORERS-EMPLOYERS COOPERATION AND EDUCATION TRUST (LECET) MARCH 16, 2010 COLLEEN CARMEAN ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY Building Digital: Toward Social Media in the Workplace
11. History Repeats Itself Agriculture Revolution: Steel Plow 1837 – John Deere develops and markets the world's first self-polishing cast steel plow.
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13. History Repeats Itself Agricultural change: Tractor 1907 – Henry Ford begins producing gas-powered tractors. Fifty horsepower engines could pull sixteen plows and harrows, and a grain drill, performing the three operations of plowing, harrowing, and planting at the same time and covering fifty acres or more in a day.
Who am I? Who are you? Where – East, Midwest, South, Southwest, Northwest…other? What- technologists? Employers? Laborers? Facilitators/trust workers? Other..? Facebook users? LinkedIn? Twitter? Sharepoint? Enterprise collaboration tools?
So, I don’t think we get ground ourselves today within the changes swirling around us until we think about how we got here. And to start with the assumption or hypothesis that, despite its chaotic effects, change IS good.
Of course, difficult to do so without admitting that a bit of spare change would be better.
I think it’s very hard to talk about where we’re going unless we establish a joint understanding of where we’ve been and how we think about change.
we’ve been through this before and there’s much we can learn from history regarding planning for what’s ahead. It is not long ago we moved out of the agricultural age in the US
To the industrial age,within which most of us in the room grew up.
To a new information age. Which many would claim we’re still in.
I’m not so sure, so let’s take a brief tour thru recent history.
From the eighth to the eighteenth century, farm life was basically the same. The year is 1800 and the farmers of George Washington's day had no better tools than had the farmers of Julius Caesar's day; in fact, early Roman plows were superior to those in general use in rural and rugged America eighteen centuries later. And then the world changed. A family can now easily manage 50 acres. The valued steel plow became what researchers call a “disruptive innovation” and the birth of a renaissance in the agricultural age. Consequences were large.
And then, a short 70 years later, we leap from plowing 50 acres a family to 50 acres a day. Progress. Innovation. And the end of the agricultural age. We no longer need the numbers or the kinds of workers that have always defined farm life.
And worse, the families that have always defined farm life will not be able to compete with corporate farms.
But we saw great progress. Stabilty. Literacy. Prosperity. Even in our worst of moments, we had the tools to push forward through depression, war, disasters and diseases (anyone here remember polio? If you’re under 50, you really don’t.), I am a story of the industrial age. My father didn’t complete high school, but he served in the war, worked hard, raised five children and sent me to college. My four siblings didn’t attend college. Wasn’t necessary. They’re smart, they work hard, and two of them make more than me. A lot more. I’m sure everyone in this room has a story to tell of how hard work defined an all too short era. The industrial age.
But let’s not forget what’ s waiting on the wings.
In 1973, researchers funded by the Department of Defense created the TCP/IP protocol and the world silently changed. Today, we’re swimming in a giant network of digitally connected computers, laptops, netbooks, smart phones, ipods, ipads, GPS devices, servers, routers, domain controllers and ideas. And this network grows smarter and easier to use by the day. By the hour. By the moment.
This is what we looked like in 1986. The entire internet fit on a diagram of little squares representing routers , small ovals of sites/network locations and the large shapes are long-haul backbone infrastructure hubs owned or created by the government. In 1986, We are not yet a web with redundancy everywhere, but we’re on our way. In 1986, Besides a general plan to move information at times of attack, scientists are using the technology to create a science fiction reading club. They have no idea what they’ve done or what we were about to become.
… That’s today. And I’ve just started. I’m not even going to talk about the unique options, applications, media available on today’s devices. Let’s just talk about devices. Who in this room has a cell phone? Who forgot to turn them off or set to stun? Who has a smart phone? Who could not now imagine life without the device in your pocket?
Don’t get too attached to it. Moore's law describes an exponential growth pattern in the complexity of integrated semiconductor circuits. The current consequence is that technology speed and capability doubles in 3 years.
Kurzweil extends this to include technologies from far before the integrated circuit to future forms of technology. Whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, according to Kurzweil, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier. He cites numerous past examples of this to substantiate his assertions. He predicts that such paradigm shifts have and will continue to become increasingly common, leading to "technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history."
But let’s not forget what’ s waiting on the wings because history repeats itself and as Yogi Berra says…
Again, disruptive innovation has consequences. We’ve seen them before and we’ll see them again…in accelerating and exponential time spans.