Online Privacy and Values Readjustment

The disruptions that come with new technology often bring discomfort to those who would rather return to the way things were before (keeping of course the benefit that the new technology brings).

Consider automobiles in the early 20th century as an example. Most of us today drive or at least ride in automobiles but also realize that there are drawbacks. We enjoy the benefit of personal, flexible travel but would like to eliminate the traffic deaths and injuries, air pollution, generalized stress of automobile traffic and a host of social ills such as anonymity and isolation and the alterations to our landscape that the use of autos has brought. We like the mobility but not the public health and environmental drawbacks. These unintended consequences are disruptive and although objectionable to us, they are not enough for most of us to stop using cars.

Things We Used to Do

I guess I'm getting old when I start talking about the way things used to be. I suppose every generation could create one of these lists.

We used to go to the bank on Friday night to get pocket money for the week. Either that or we'd cash a check at a local grocery, liquor or other store. This was before ATMs and at a time when communities were small enough for the local grocer or liquor store owner to know a person personally and trust that his or her check was good.

Self Driving Cars

Whether called "driverless cars" or "robo-cars" the, "auto" mobiles are coming. And although like all new technologies they will bring with them a new set of yet unknown problems, they are being developed  to solve an existing set of problems most of us would like to eliminate.

There has been a lot written about robotic cars and the reader can spend an afternoon reading about the success of, for example the Google car.

While a completely machine-driven vehicle is not on the market today, there are several developments in recent years where sensors and microprocessors already adjust the operation of a vehicle without the driver knowing about it. Anti-lock brakes is one example, as is the parking-assist feature that uses a rear-bumper sensor and other automation technologies.

Many say that once the market is saturated with autonomous vehicles, there will be a reduction in personal ownership of cars in favor of hiring them on demand. After all, a fleet of robot vehicles could easily contain the technology to drive themselves to a person's home when he calls for one via computer. After taking the passenger to the directed location, the vehicle would leave the scene and park itself (perhaps with other idle vehicles) so as to take up as little surface street/lot area as possible.

The system of robots for hire would have a number of ramifications, many of which no doubt I have not thought of yet. But one of them would be to ultimately reduce the competitive nature of car ownership that seems to have dominated the auto culture since the 1950s.

The commodification of cars as suggested by automated cars-for-hire has implications for the physical care and condition that private ownership has in the past addressed. For example, what happens when a renter of these auto-mobiles on demand uses one and leaves trash strewn about the interior or otherwise stains and leaves the interior dirty? The anonymity of the usage of this kind of automobile means that people might be more likely to leave their empties or not clean up after themselves like they would in a public place such as a  bus or subway car staffed by the mass transit operator.

For this reason it may be that driverless cars that we don't own but rather hire on demand will have to look a lot different from the comfortable compartments we know today. For example, they will likely  not have cloth seats but rather hard plastic seats and floors in much the same way that many subway and bus systems.

Like the technological change to sports officiating (see other post) the new driverless cars are certainly feasible within a short time but the test will be whether the public and government (law enforcement, etc.) will accept them. I'm afraid that a lot of people are emotionally attached to owning their own car, one with comfortable cloth seats and carpets and that are bigger, faster and shinier than their neighbors'. This may be the primary obstacle to adoption.

The Boundary Between Man and Machine

Noted futurist, Ray Kurzweil has said that human immortality is probably less than 20 years away. Actually, I didn't hear him say this or even read his exact words. But I read the newspaper headline and that's more than most people do.

I strongly suspect that Kurzweil is predicting the marriage of biomedicine and computer technology so that it will be possible to revive failed anatomical systems (e.g. respiratory, cardiovascular, digestive) and/or replace human organs beyond those that are currently possible (e.g. heart, kidney, lungs). And that therefore it is possible to keep an individual alive indefinitely. Or at least this is what immortality will look like in the beginning.

Some might argue that (if my assumptions are correct) replacing so many parts means that the resulting individual can hardly be considered the same person. I suppose the argument might be made that if I have a 40 year old car and over its life I have replaced the engine, front and rear axles, suspension, interior and enough other components that it really is a misnomer to say I have the same car today that I had all these years.

But no matter, I think that we humans will one day soon have components implanted in our bodies that are intelligent and that are custom designed to respond to circumstances enough so that instead of wearing out over the years, they improve with time. We already have artificial joints and organs so this is not that far off. The big difference is that we will now move into supplementing or replacing our thinking and memory functions in addition to our motor skills, circulation or respiration.This may one day make humans and machines virtually indistinguishable. Or at least humans and synthetic organisms and/or biological parts.

Furthermore on boundary blurring . . .

It seems that boundaries are disappearing everywhere. There is a border between the U.S. and Canada, but aside from a different form of currency, you wouldn't know you're in another country were you to walk across it. I would say the same thing about the boundary between Texas and Mexico; there is very little noticeable difference on either side.

In media, the boundary between the program and the advertisement has been eroding for years. Product placement has been growing in Hollywood film and television programming so that it is not clearly defined which part of the broadcast is paid for by the sponsor and which is part of the creative work.

Shift of Allegiance from State to Corporation

I have written about the corporate takeover of our lives but ought to elaborate here. For more information, see the book with the B-Movie title, "When Corporations Rule the World" by David Korten.

We owe support and allegiance less and less to our government and more and more to corporations. Most Americans today know much more about consumption than citizenship.

Among other things is our attitude toward the central collection of personal information. Many of us resist vehemently a national database run by the government of information such as our names, addresses, habits, political affiliations, employers, income, debts, preferences for books and movies, etc. It reminds us of George Orwell's novel, "1984."

But while we resist the collection and maintenance of a file or dossier on our personal lives by government for fear of a dictatorial state, we actively participate in this data collection when we create online identities. In other words, we don't seem to care that Amazon.com collects this information or that EquiFax does. At least, it doesn't stop us from buying products online or participating in the system that allows this data to be accumulated and maintained.

I read a book recently (Life, Inc.) which had a variation on the Toynbee quote that I posted earlier (http://historicalaccident.blogspot.com/2008/09/title-explanation.html) . This one went something like this:

in the past 500 years, since the inception of state-chartered corporations, people have gone from subjects to citizens, from citizens to workers and most recently, from workers to consumers.

In the 1940s and 50s, the United States experienced a wave of paranoia due to anti-communist sentiments in Washington. A U.S. Senator held hearings recklessly accusing public figures of being communist sympathizers and it ruined several careers. It was common in those days to call a communist an enemy of the state.

But today that label would have to be revised. Given that the U.S. Congress and the White House of either party feels that it is their job to keep America employed, the stock market rising and corporations earning a profit, they would likely consider any threat to those efforts anti-American. But today we have a growing simplicity movement which advocates consuming less among other things. And policy makers in Washington, although they may not admit it openly, would consider the voluntary simplicity movement an enemy of the state in that its end result is to reduce consumption and therefore production, employment and investment.

So it will probably become clear in a short time to everyone that we owe our allegiance not to the U.S. government but to the U.S. industrial state which provides us with much more than Uncle Sam does.

Piracy/Copyright Solution

It is always popular to criticize the wealthy. The vast majority of us harbor stereotypes about the well-to-do: they're heartless, insulated, fragile and interested in profits above all else. This is supported by the fact that it has always been fashionable to support a tax increase on the wealthy given that most of us do not consider ourselves rich.

But the wealthy have made many of the latest products we enjoy today affordable. Often the latest gadget or device to adorn American homes began as playthings of the rich. Business or corporations were the only ones who could afford them, followed by the super rich, accustomed to such luxury.

A good example is flat-screen televisions which were out of reach for most of us just 10 or so years ago. They sold for several thousand dollars each so that only the very wealthy or businesses like restaurants, bars, airports or casinos could afford them. But as more wealthy bought these things once considered a luxury, the manufacturers of the sets could increase production and by realizing economies of scale, reduce the price based on greater manufacturing and shipping volume and efficiency. Soon these sets were under $1500 and many middle class families could buy one. Now that they can be bought for less than $500 they are commonplace in many American homes. That wouldn't have been possible if the very wealthy among us hadn't waded in first.

The same can be said of microwave ovens and videocassette recorders. Around 1980. They sold for several hundred dollars at the time which might be equivalent to nearly a thousand dollars today. They were a luxury that few homes had 30 years ago but as demand increased from commercial or industrial use to luxury item to upper middle class homes and finally into just about everyone's home the manufacturers realized cost-per-unit savings which drove the price down continually and fostered the proliferation.

I wonder if we couldn't solve the problems associated with intellectual property and pirating by following similar pattern of first-use/high-cost with the cost gradually decreasing as usage increases. For instance, it is silly that today one should pay the same amount of money to purchase a movie or a piece of recorded music that has been sold millions of times compared to a newly released film. Demand would seem to be highest for the latest song or movie rather than something that is decades old. It would make sense if the price reflected this demand.

If these entertainment products were very expensive upon release but the costs declined with each subsequent purchase (or block of a thousand or so) the costs of production would be realized much sooner by the artist and production company. And since there are (almost) no ongoing costs to replicate the product into units for sale, the price could drop quite rapidly after an initial windfall. The rich would have first access to these movies and recordings and the poor would enjoy them years after they were released.

Additionally, online retailing has the advantage of easy price adjustment compared with a physical paper tag that appears on goods sold in brick-and-mortar stores. Electronic retailers should take advantage of that.

But the bottom line is: the artist will earn the bulk of the total revenue on a given work much earlier in the process.

Even if the price drop curve was very slight, it would still make sense to make 30 or 40 or 50 year old movies and music available to consumers at a very low price relative to the latest release. The same could be said for music: why should Elvis Presley's Hound Dog sell for the same price as the hottest new single from the hottest new artist? The demand certainly isn't the same. Production companies, studios, artists and rights holders would still make money on the older material and probably likely head off any illegal reproduction if it was affordably priced.

Eventually, after years and millions or tens-of-millions of uses, purchases and plays, these movies and music will be extremely inexpensive to the masses who would otherwise end up pirating them. Current copyright law, which contains fixed terms after which content is in the public domain, is probably based on a similar principle that after a while, works should belong to the culture in which they are created and not to any individual.

Incidentally, I do not favor state-mandated price controls on movies and music but I think the media production conglomerates are beginning to face the facts that their content will be (and is currently) pirated because the price is too high. So it may be in their best interest to re-structure pricing lest they face wholesale theft. This appears to be another case where technology has become too sophisticated for institutions in much the same way that sophisticated financial investment products were not well understood by regulators which led to unfair if not illegal practices.

A recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review uses the examples of eBooks http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/whats_the_right_price_for_eboo.php

Technology and Sports Officials

I have written elsewhere about the changes in sports broadcasting that interactive technologies will bring in the near future.

Advancing user of sensors, microchips and smart materials and networking them may mean big changes for professional sports. Along with training assistance and broadcasting innovation, sports refereeing will likely undergo some interesting changes soon owing to these and other technological advancements. The use of increasingly small and wired components could one day allow some judgment calls in sporting contests to be automatically determined and allow the still-necessary human referees to concentrate on other aspects of the game that require their judgment. It is unlikely that we can or should eliminate human referees, but the use of technology could be a useful tool in allowing them to focus more closely on certain aspects while automating some other rule monitoring.

When most people think of technology and sports referees, they first think of video replay technology. Video technology is a crude precursor to what can be done with current information technology and professional sports refereeing. Video, because of the delays it requires is seen by many as simply inadequate. It has become clear that this is too cumbersome and slows down the game unacceptably for fans and players and everyone except television advertisers who love the extended duration of undivided attention that these delays mean.

Technological application in sports refereeing will be more commonplace primarily due to the great reduction in the size of technological devices today, especially microprocessors. Most of the personal computers of the past decades had a processor about the size of a wallet-sized photo. But of course they have gotten much smaller in recent years. Specialized chips can today be reduced to the size of a grain of rice--or smaller. It is inevitable that these ever smaller, ever cheaper devices will be implanted in sporting equipment, uniforms, the field or playing court and the ball itself.

Implanting a microchip in a baseball for example, could allow sensors, the computers which monitor them and the officiating crew which monitors these in turn, to determine whether a ball was, for example, out of bounds. Or if the home plate in a baseball stadium was wired, whether the ball was inside, outside or right in the middle of the strike zone. It could tell whether a ball was foul or whether it was a home-run, based on which side of the foul/fair pole it passed. (I'm continually amazed at how difficult a call this is for umpires to make).

Perhaps more sophisticated but certainly technologically feasible is tracking the exact moment a fielded and thrown ball suddenly stopped its trajectory and whether the additional pressure of the base-runners foot was applied to first base before or after the sudden stop of the ball's momentum was recorded. Modern GPS and tracking technology will allow sensors to determine the speed and movement of a ball and the exact instant when it stops. This could be compared instantaneously with pressure sensors on the first base bag to determine whether the ball stopped (i.e. arrived in the first baseman's glove) before the runner's foot touched the base.

Similarly, a chip embedded into a (American) football together with sensors embedded along the length of the goal line would allow referees (or their sideline monitors) to determine quickly whether a ball carrier at the bottom of a goal-line pileup actually crossed the line. This might alternatively be done using precision GPS technology. In either case, this would relieve the field referees from disassembling the mountain of 300 lb men in the scrum to find out where the ball is or whether it crossed the goal line during the squirming that takes place even after the sound of the referee’s whistle.

New materials being developed called "smart materials" could be used in uniforms and shoes. These are cloth or other synthetics that can contain sensors without feeling or wearing any differently than normal cotton clothing. For example I can imagine shoes having microchips (as thin as a postage stamp) to record whether a player's foot or both feet were in or out of bounds. It could also likely be used for 3-second calls in the NBA given that the lane could be wired enough to sense whether the same player is standing in front of the basket for more than 3 seconds.

Sensors would be helpful to referees on the field and GPS technology. Tennis lines, basketball lines, the lane, 3-point line, football out of bounds. Sensors are so small and inexpensive these days that they could easily be used to line a field or court along the out of bounds lines or in the case of football, the goal line. In cooperation with sensors embedded in the balls or equipment, they could be used to quickly identify and generate a visible or audible signal for out of bounds or other infractions. As noted above they could identify scoring in a goal-line pileup but they could also be used to spot tennis balls that are served long or otherwise on the line. Currently tennis officials use some form of camera monitoring to see on which side of the line a ball landed. But increasingly we see an aversion to the need for a human to visually review a videotape. Sensor technology would presumably emit an 'in' or 'out' call immediately.

The technology for many of these advances is already available. The only impediment to seeing them put to use and to relieving modern referees from the burden of catching every player's movement on every play is acceptance of these innovations. Agreement would ultimately have to come from sports league owners but opinions of general managers, coaches, players and fans would also have to be considered. It wouldn't surprise me if some of these applications of technology came in piece-meal with media sponsorship of certain components.

Compensation in Question

For many years well educated, experienced (and sometimes well-connected) people have generally earned more than their workplace peers. American labor history has traditionally treated seniority, knowledge and skills as most important in deciding how much to pay someone. But given current trends in the business environment those standards may no longer be applicable. Certainly worker longevity and workforce continuity hold some value to business and other organizations but trends in employee turnover and the corporate emphasis on near-term results has undoubtedly eroded this value. Technology and the ability to measure more precisely a worker's activity and contribution may render obsolete these traditional measures of employee value and displace them with more quantifiable measures of worth to a firm.

Experience and seniority sometimes matter, but the employee-employer relationship has evolved to place much greater attention to a worker's contribution to the firm's short-term goals. And with the exception of unionized and some state employees, few workers expect or negotiate any additional compensation for being with a firm for an extended period of time. Nor can firms today expect to employ the same person for much more than the current product cycle given the fluid and unpredictable movement of global production and supply chains.

Paying wages according to an employee's true value to a firm is increasingly measured in terms of productivity. In the past this been largely limited to piece-work, typically on a farm or small manufacturer where the worker is paid a fixed amount per bushel harvested or other unit of measurement. Many factories in early-industralizing economies pay workers by the piece and therefore the more productive are compensated above others although at a relatively lower wage than those in other industries. Farm workers are still often paid this way. In advanced industrialized economies currently the only system of compensation that factors a worker's productivity are in sales commissions where those who generate the most sales for a firm are more highly compensated than those who don't.

Productivity is broadly meant to mean the level of output per unit of hours worked. In the 1990s, productivity of American workers grew very quickly owing largely to the Internet and the efficiencies that digital communication and information handling allowed workers. Technology has historically increased worker productivity from the time of crude tools fashioned with wood or metals to the telegraph, printing press, telephone, etc.

But if productivity is what firms are buying in today's labor market, and if the application of technology in the workplace results in higher productivity then it stands to reason that employers seek those with advanced technological skills because they produce more per hour worked. In the past 20 years, technological aptitude has accrued to the younger (and therefore) less experienced workers. Management guru, Don Tapscott says, for the first time in history "younger people know more than their elders about the biggest innovation of the day." This disparity between skills and experience leads me to conclude that there will be pressures to limit the wages of the most senior (and generally less technologically adept) while inflating wages of the digital natives and neo-natives.

Information technology makes productivity more measurable and with the skills obsolescence cycle shorter, I wonder how we will in the future decide how much each person earns. I suppose the first reaction is that we shouldn't decide, we should let the market decide. If that were allowed to happen, most of us would be in for big changes. The most productive workers would receive the highest compensation in a purely market-base approach to determining salaries and that would in large part mean the younger are paid more than older workers.

[Postscript: Of course Marx would have added, "Need" as a factor.  "From each according to his abilities; to each according to his need." Would it be fair if a single parent with 4 children who produces as much as I do (a married, childless man) should be paid more based on his need?]

Media Innovation and Over-kill

One thing I've noticed in media and advertising is the over-use of a certain innovative technology well beyond its initial appeal. This can go on for years where a nifty little trick is used in the movies or television and while it is intriguing at first, it is often repeated ad-nauseum. Sometimes the new technique becomes the sole focus of an advertisement.

Let me offer an example. Someone once devised a method to film a human figure and apply some graphics technology to alter the mouth and lips to mimic almost any speech that was played as a sound-track to the film. I think it first appeared in the film, "Look Who's Talking," but I never saw the film (only brief snippets) and it could be that this technique had been used even earlier. The movie featured a baby appearing to speak the lines of an adult. I understand it was very popular when it was released--now more than twenty years ago!

Since then we've seen too many derivatives of that cinematographic maneuver. Animals appeared to talk in the movie, "Babe" and many other movies and eventually a series of advertisements for a financial brokerage launched that showed babies conducting financial affairs under the vocal guise of some adult. It's all been a bit too much.

Maybe financial service firms share a common ad agency because there's another film-making trick going around that's getting old fast. The ad features testimonials from individuals who purchase or need to purchase financial services and are considering this particular firm. The people speaking look almost real but their faces are somewhat animated with regard to skin tone and hair highlights. You're looking at an animation but it's clear that the footage you're viewing has been made from video of a real person. But again, it's too much. This company appears to be going on 4-5 years with little more to offer than a neat video sleight-of-hand. Certainly the substance of what the actors are saying hasn't changed much in that time nor the services offered by the company.

I suppose you could make the same criticism of some musicians who discover a particular sound effect or combination of chords and, lacking any real music-composition talent, choose to release song-after-song featuring little more than their new-found trick.

Still someone, somewhere is entertained by these things and they either don't mind the repetition or don't remember it from one occurrence to another.

Technology and Other Media Consumption

An earlier posting illustrated what could happen to sporting event broadcasts and the impact on Joe Six-pack. I basically argued that interactive media or the Internet, or whatever television becomes could allow the viewer to customize his angle or view of the game through a specific camera among the many that are in place at the arena. Or maybe the viewer could select to display certain game or historical statistics instead of the score or time remaining in the game. S/he could even change the font size or screen location of this information.

Well, I think the technology is in place to do similar things with other content that has been broadcast conventionally on television and radio. Of course, it all depends on the establishment of trust and adoption of a system commonly called, "micro-payments." This is a method whereby a viewer and purchase something online or otherwise through an interactive device in much the same way that we purchase books or other merchandise through Amazon or eBay. Except that in this case, the commodity is priced lower than anything most of us have purchased online previously.

If it were possible to pay 50 or 75 cents, perhaps several times a day without any onerous transaction fee, then a person could request almost any television programming from its owner (United Artist or ABC/Disney or Sony Pictures, etc.) who would in turn be earning at least a little bit on content that otherwise would be idle inventory.

Services like Pandora, and others which have come and gone like Seeqpod and Imeem have attempted something along those lines. While it is now possible to buy songs individually without being forced to buy the entire CD, a system of music distribution could have followed an on-demand model that goes something like this: If I'm having a party at my house, I could pre-select 30-40 songs from a list offered by a digital jukebox. I could pay maybe $20 (thus keeping it below the sale price of each song if purchased separately) and have the music for my party taken care of. Or perhaps I could purchase a 30-song credit from the digital juke-box and select the music as I go along or allow my guests to.

It maybe too late for this kind of service since the "rental" price for music would have to be well below the sale price, which appears to be about $1 per song, these days. Else there may not be much interest. And of course, the music rights owners would need some assurance that end-users couldn't simply make illegal copies of the music as it streams across their computers' hardware.

Of course, $1 per song may be affordable, but buying simple MP3 files and loading up your hard disk is not the same thing as creating a home juke box. The songs, artists, albums and other data have to be searchable and browsable, and it would be nice to include links to skip to another or to just move around the collection easily without relying on the simple files/folder browser. That navigation and search would take some programming effort but is probably a service that some people would be willing to pay for.

Many (but presumably not nearly all) movies, television and music exist in digital form but unfortunately are not being exploited as they could be (or could have been) by media companies. At the right price, this idle inventory could be generating a previously unrealized income for the copyrights holders. Someday it will be.

Are Broadcasters Next?

I listen to a lot of podcasts and increasingly it's becoming clear that some content is not being read by a person and spoken into a microphone but rather the text is converted to voice automatically using software. I can tell not because the voice sounds anything like the 1960s version of what Hollywood thought robots would sound like in the 21st century but because of slight mispronunciations and misinterpretations of the words. Two of these that come to mind are created by BusinessWeek and the Economist.

I wonder if it won't be possible one day to take a text document and use a piece of software to generate a voice narration of the words using the voice of famous people. There are hundreds of hours of archived sound recordings of famous people and presumably machines can parse a person's voice into just about anything you want it to be. So if you fed both the text and corresponding audio files of the entire corpus of Walter Cronkite (for example) into an artificially intelligent machine, then the system could eventually "learn" how Cronkite would say just about any word, syllable or phrase.

This system could then take any text you submit and generate a pretty damn good impersonation of Cronkite reading what you've written whether or not he's ever been recorded saying it. The system will have learned the idiosyncrasies of an individual's voice, inflection, pronunciation, pauses, etc. to fool perhaps even the speaker's family.

The implications are of course huge. First there are legal challenges. Would it be legal to take the voice of Michael Jordan and use it to pitch a sneaker brand that he is not currently affiliated with? Obviously not but in today's lawless web environment, who's gonna stop it? You could get almost anyone to say almost anything, I would imagine, including U.S. presidents making promises that they never made and holding them accountable to them. So there's fraud to be considered.

But how about the convenience factor? Let's say a manufacturer of designer clothes wants Whoopi Goldberg to be their spokesperson. She hasn't got the time to go into a studio and read a bunch of copy several takes in a row. So she signs permission for the company to take her voice and the aforementioned system that can create the illusion that she is talking when in fact she's relaxing at home. She (or her agent) would of course have to authorize the content and use of her vocal likeness, but the bottom line is, I think the technology is probably here already.

But alas, like so many modern phenomena, the law lags behind.

Technology and Televised Sports

I posted something about technological applications in sports refereeing. I believe that the role and responsibility of sports officials will change in the coming years owing to the implementation of advanced (mostly sensor) technology to more precisely measure what these men and women currently have to eye-ball and make snap decisions about. The technology is available; the impediments are economic and cultural. The latter is a question of whether owners, players, coaches, fans and officials themselves are willing to try them. For more, see: http://historicalaccident.blogspot.com/2009/05/technology-and-sports-referees.html

The technology is also available for a vastly different experience for the home spectator of professional sports. With the marriage of television and the Internet, the possibilities of customized broadcasts in sports could create a new generation of sports programming.

For example, in addition to watching the action on the field or court, viewers are also shown a variety of statistics and other graphics (including the current score of the game) which the broadcasters feel are timely or somehow relevant. But soon it will be possible to move those decisions from the producer to the consumer. We at home watching a baseball or basketball game will be given a menu of choices regarding which statistics to display and when. We could view on demand the game's leaders in scoring or hits or yards rushing, for example. We could even change the size and font of the display of the numbers or graphs including moving the score display to the upper or lower left corner. Those with small television screens or with poor eyesight could change the size of the display.

In addition to score or statistical displays-on-demand, there will be other options for television-based sports viewing. Most broadcast sporting events today are covered by several cameras and the number is likely to grow. It is not unreasonable to expect that one day soon certain games--particularly championships--will be covered by a dozen or more cameras. There are overhead cameras, end-zone, side-line and a host of other camera placements at sporting events.

Soon the sports fan at home will be able to choose through which camera they prefer to view the game and when. Replays, currently possible using a digital video recorder, will be expanded to be used in every camera in the arena or stadium. I can see the development of a broadcast feature, something like, "The AT&T Sideline Monitor".

Because professional sports today is like every industry facing a diminishing marginal return on it's investment, it will have to devise new innovations, products or services which tempt the consumer to stay loyal. The interactive nature of viewing sports events is one way in which I believe this will happen.

Free Higher Ed Lectures but is Certification What Employers Want?

College level courses are available to a larger audience than ever before thanks to digital media. Many of them are available at no cost. YouTube for example has an 'edu' channel which carries lectures and other educational videos. This means that a person can essentially attend college classes without paying any fees. They won't take any exams, turn in any term papers or receive any grade and most importantly they won't receive any credit. But at least some of them will learn something about the course subject. Many will fail to stay with the entire series of lectures, but others will become highly engaged and perhaps know as much or more than the on-campus student who pays tuition and completes the course in person.

This has been a long time coming. Since the invention of moving pictures, radio and television, people have been eagerly anticipating a change in the delivery of education and a much broader reach, serving millions of people who otherwise would never receive any comparable instruction.

However, the other (and for many people, primary) objective of higher education is in securing employment. Independently watching hours of college lectures supplemented by readings on one's own offers no such assurance. In the past, employers traditionally have depended on colleges and universities to provide some assurance that job applicants have absorbed the right information and went about learning in a disciplined, systematic manner. For example, at one time the baccalaureate ensured that students are able to compose a thoughtful essay that supports a certain viewpoint and cites facts to that end. But from what I read in the newspapers, many of today's college graduates lack many skills that an undergraduate education previously conferred. It seems today that paying tuition, attending class, completing assignments (for better or worse) and basically acting responsibly are all that seems to be needed to earn a bachelor's degree.

I wonder then about giving away content (in the form of free online lectures) when presumably many people pay tens of thousands of dollars for the same content. Are they paying for the information that could before now only be obtained by enrolling in an institution of higher learning? Or are they buying something else?There is no guarantee that a job is forthcoming for either the independent student or the matriculating, tuition-paying student. The only difference is that the latter (for the time being at least) is more likely to be invited to an interview.

Insurance at Risk

The information access revolution taking place over the past 10-15 years has had a number of unintended consequences. Certain professions have been marginalized as with many technological innovations. The rise of do-it-yourself and sharing among amateurs have allowed us to undertake things with more confidence and without the need to consult an expert in many cases. Personal privacy has been put in doubt and the concept of privacy will have to be re-evaluated. Another unforseen change is an undermining of the notion of "pooled risk," a principle that modern insurance is based on.

Insurance companies offer to pay for personal loss of a subscriber only if the pool of buyers is large enough to sufficiently cover the costs of a catastrophe and if the estimated frequency of such a catastrophe is low enough to ensure that claims do not exhaust the accumulated subscriber payments.

But today we know (and can know) a lot about people including an increasingly accurate estimate of their chances for encountering misfortune. With medical records, increasingly sophisticated actuarial tables, public health data, genomics and other information sources that can more accurately predict the likelihood of certain occurrences, insurance companies will become more discriminating in the policies they write and their premiums will more accurately reflect the chances that a subscriber will one day make a claim. Insurance policies will soon be based on data sources that were unavailable just a few years ago.

Computer models which estimate rates of crime, traffic, health problems and which also assess the monetary level of potential damages from these are getting better all the time. I suspect that soon they will be so good as to almost render the notion of pooled risk inconsequential. The uncertainty accompanying risk will be reduced so much that the marketplace for insurance will become nearly unsustainable.

For example, most of us know today that the vast majority of lifetime expenditures on health care take place within the last year of a person's life. The hospitalization, home care, therapies and drugs that characterize the chronically ill octogenarian's last year dwarfs expenditures made throughout his or her life. Of course, there is the possibility of catastrophic illness throughout our lives (such as cancer or permanent disability from accidents) but if we could eliminate those freak occurrences, we would all delay health insurance purchases until we were at retirement age since we probably won't need much in the way of benefits until the last years of our lives. (Health insurance is an odd case and I only use this example to illustrate the way that emerging information resources could guide decisions on insurance purchasing.) In fact, government regulation is the only thing keeping the health insurance market afloat as many insurers would eagerly cancel policies for those who develop a predisposition to illness. Such as the elderly.

Taken together with the burdensome economic situation that many insurance companies are facing, it may be that we can say goodbye to insurance as we have known it for many years. After all, if we can know so much about a person's chances for encountering misfortune, then the risk is removed for both parties. Only those who learn that their chances of having an accident or illness are high will purchase a comprehensive policy but insurance companies will only issue policies with large coverage to those whose chances of an accident or illness are very low.

This assumes that information flows freely; it is likely that corporations (insurance companies and their finance parent companies) will have an advantage in the collection and processing of this information.

But that's a topic for another post.