Robots Control Your Mind

It’s a classic theme used in fiction: sci-fi writers and filmmakers create a dystopian future where robots use twisted logic around Asimov’s seminal 3 laws to decide that humanity can’t protect itself and therefore, must be imprisoned and controlled (I’ll admit, a bit of a stretch). Humanity, in its ever-present struggle for laziness and infinite-sigma efficiency, will go to lengths so extreme as to create an artificial consciousness that will one day overthrow us all. Sure, it seems like the stuff of…well, sci-fi…however, an even greater stretch is my argument that even without achieving the nirvana of robotic artificial intelligence, robots may already control the way we eat, sleep, work and generally, live.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me first preface these crooked words. As an undergraduate engineer, I lucked upon the opportunity of a lifetime. During my degree I worked part time and summers at McGill University’s Ambulatory Robotics lab: one of the world’s leading labs in the robotics movement of the early 2000s. While I went into the role thinking I would spend my days playing with strange, futuristic toys (I did), the lab and the people around me made me realize that robotics was about so much more. Robots had already become pervasive in our society to the point that individuals barely acknowledged them as robots. A microwave, a thermostat, ATMs, RC toys, pacemakers, coffeemakers – all are examples of robots: machines capable of carrying out multi-stage actions autonomously.

And while a far cry from padded-room imprisonment, in many ways, robotic technology has already drastically altered the way we live our lives. Some of these alterations have been improvements in efficiency, increases in public safety or departures from menial, pointless tasks. However, in losing many of these traditional touch points, so have we evolved as a species and lost pieces of ourselves. We have allowed robots in all shapes and sizes to define some very integral elements of our lives and in doing so, removed much of our own ability to take care of ourselves.

Whereas once, we were a society of people who slept and woke by the sun, accurate telling of time and perhaps the most vile of technology’s satanic spawn – the alarm clock – changed our sleep patterns, and more importantly, set the tone for a culture driven by hyper efficiency and to-the-second timing. First thing each morning, we allow a small machine to scream at us until we begin our day and in doing so, lock ourselves into an unnatural state of existence; living by the artificial construct of the 24hr clock instead of the age-old guide, the sun. We wake ourselves when we’re still tired and we sleep in when we don’t need to knowing that we have a “few more minutes.” This practice was found so unnatural that it even facilitated another key invention in the digital time-keeping era: the snooze button.

Within the workforce, robots have been changing our social structures, economic behaviors and primary tasks for nearly 100 years. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution and assembly line manufacturing, business has strived to algorithmise operations, remove inefficiency and where possible, take human interaction completely out of the equation. The impact of robotics in the business world is impossible to ignore and has caused a rapid acceleration in the evolution of job functions, particularly in western nations. Our great-grandparents were primarily tradesmen, our grandparents began to explore greater entrepreneurialism, our parents became office managers and our generation has become an army of digital workers. Robots are slowly but surely heralding the death of the blue collar.

But should we be concerned by any of this? As I described before, the process is an evolution – one where “fittest” is defined not by survival but instead by task automation. We are changing as a society and while elements of this change are undeniably unnatural, human beings have adapted to worse and will continue to adapt. We will continue to distance ourselves further from skilled labor, connection to the earth and the humility of working with our hands. However, only time will tell the true impact that this will have of the human body, mind and soul.

Just remember, Will Smith won’t always be around to save us.

Traveling Without Moving

At the tender age of 30 (the new 20?), I’ve had the opportunity to travel more than generations prior could have ever dreamed (I’m two continents short of the full set). My parent’s generation, while definitively embracing the ability to travel, still lacked the speed, ease and affordability of travel options that exist today. Increasing globalization has opened up borders and options for travel that have never existed before.

However, could my generation be the peak of global travel?

As communication technologies become more ubiquitous and lifelike, we are starting to see a decreased need for individuals to travel the world. Even in the face of reduced travel costs and relaxed political regulation, it is often difficult to justify a trip when so many global interactions can be experienced from the comfort of your own desk. Unquestionably, there will always be a demand to see the sunset past the Eiffel tower with your own eyes, to smell the air at the Cape of Good Hope or to hear the echo off the inside of the Taj Mahal. People will always have a desire to explore, adventure and to see the world.

But what of more mundane travel? What of long business flights? What of lonely hotel rooms? What of expensive travel per diems?

I recently had the opportunity to attend a meeting in a Cisco Tele-presence room. While the experience wasn’t quite up to the promise of fooling me into standing to shake the client’s hand at the end, the technology was impressive and left very little lacking in the way of non-verbal communication (which, as you know, I went on a bit of a rant about recently). Was this experience as good as a face-to-face meeting? No. However, it provided a close enough approximation at a fraction of the cost. More importantly, the cost is steadily decreasing and the technology is rapidly improving (hell, we’ve almost caught up to Star Trek).

Yet what of the leisure traveler? Will there always be a demand for people who want to experience culture first hand? In a word (or four), yes, but decreasingly so.

Globalization, while bringing the world’s population closer together than ever before, has had a reverse effect on our need to explore the planet. Whereas previous generations had to travel to Japan (or the most exclusive, expensive restaurants) to sample sushi, our generation buys $8.99 lunch special bento boxes two doors down. Culture, food, music, art, sport, design… even people… have spread so rapidly and ubiquitously around the world that we no longer need to travel in order to experience other societies; we simply walk 10 blocks. If this trend continues, then soon we will live in an era where the planet is one big societal melting pot that speaks English and Mandarin (flies in renegade spaceships, lives as outlaws and runs from oppressive governments and crazed space-monster humans).

Google is not without blame for our increasingly sedentary lives either. The Web has afforded us near instantaneous access to a vast bank of knowledge and a platform for global communication. It used to be that to find out what the Blarney Stone tasted like, you’d have to get over to Cork and kiss it yourself. Now, one can read hundreds of in-depth reviews describing the texture, look, sounds, smells, tastes of the stone and likely even a recipe or two for someone’s Blarney Stone soup. If you think I’m exaggerating both the level of fidelity and the coverage of information that Google provides, why not take a brief trip to the Antarctic?

Me, I’m a bit of a puritan. I believe that to truly appreciate a culture, one must immerse themselves in it and experience it first-hand. However, not everyone is like me. Some people are happy with pictures of the Pyramids. Many argue that the best curry in the world exists around the corner from their place. Certain individuals may even prefer to program their treadmill to simulate the Great Wall instead of visiting it themselves.

However, to everyone else, I implore you:

Go out and see the world before it comes to you.

Not Who I Say I Am

Do you think that your social profile is an accurate representation of who you are? Sure, we can learn a thing or two about individuals by reading their profiles, however, to what degree are these content feeds an accurate representation of self and to what degree are they calculated, overly filtered bullshit?

We’ve all done it – detagged hideous Facebook photos, retweeted articles we didn’t even fully read or perfectly crafted the words on our LinkedIn profile to make the ideal corporate elevator pitch. At the core, social media platforms are like diet versions of ourselves; you get the rough flavour, but don’t have to worry about any of the unhealthy sugars or fats. However, is there a digital aspartame that exists as a result of our social preening; one which, much like the chemical equivalent, raises large questions about a potential cancer growing within our society?

This is by no means a new phenomenon. Humans have been misrepresenting themselves in society since the dawn of man. The first cavemen likely exaggerated about the size of the mammoth they caught each time they told the story. There was a Pope who historians believe was a woman. Tchaikovsky supposedly had a thing for young boys. Einstein was a philanderer. Churchill was a big racist. Clinton inhaled. Clemens juiced. And each and every one of them went to grandiose efforts to cover up their social malfeasance.

However, we Millennials have been afforded a very unique situation through the advent of social media. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Youtube have enabled us to exchange more “rich” information than ever before, however, this information lacks important social context that people have typically used to develop an understanding of one another. Our misrepresentation exists under three very different conditions than that of previous generations.

First, social media depersonalizes communication and human interaction, making it incredibly difficult to gauge the authenticity. Simple things such as body language, vocal tone, eye movement and poise are pieces of information that we subconsciously process when speaking to another individual in order to frame the conversation. Through text, this information which I previously touted as being “rich” has suddenly lost all social context, leaving us with no way to gauge the intangible elements of in-person communication.

Second, social media has changed the very way we communicate. Whereas historical communication was typically an interaction between a small group of individuals (often two), social media has turned communication into a process of broadcasting and lurking. When posting on Facebook, we are broadcasting to hundreds or thousands of individuals and therefore, don’t frame our message for a tangible individual or group, but instead for a vague interpretation of what we call our network. Equally, when receiving information, we passively consume content: we lurk on Facebook photos, we scan through vast RSS feeds or tweets and we read up on a known or unknown individual’s social profile.

Lastly, electronic communication (social media, text, email) allows us to revise and edit our words to perfection before releasing them upon the world. Sure, this ability is fantastic when sending something off to a boss or client, however, it erodes one of the most important aspects of human life: failure. Blurting out the first thing that comes to mind in conversation can lead to awkwardness, confusion and embarrassment. Yet it is these very moments that break down our emotional walls and allow us to grow together. No one wants to live in a perfect, padded world where spontaneity is absent and things run like clockwork.

At least we still have auto-correct.

At the core, this change in communication manifests itself in one very simple but important takeaway: your social media profiles are not authentic representations of you. They are ideal aspirations of yourself that you consciously or subconsciously tailor for the whole world to consume and think better of you for it.

For organizations attempting to play in the social media sphere, this outlines an important learning about the value and quality of social graph data. For individuals trying to get to know one another and have genuine, honest relationships, this raises a frightening red flag about the way we interact and what this type of disingenuous communication may be doing to our society as a whole.

…Then again, I might be saying all of this just to appear smart.

Failure is Always an Option

"I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work."

-Thomas Edison

It takes a lot of internal strength to fail, or as Edison has shown above, perhaps a distorted view on the very definition of failure.  My point is that failure is not always easy to come to terms with. However, if history as shown us anything, it is that the world’s greatest failures are often also the world’s greatest successes.

I started a new job two weeks ago.  In my first week, I was given a task that I felt was completely misaligned with my skillset and frankly, a rather foolish thing to have me doing. I’m not sure if I was given the task because my supervisor lacked information on my capabilities, if they had a pressing need for the task’s completion or if they simply wanted to test me out of my depth.  Either way… I failed at the task, however, I didn’t fail in the right way.

Yes, there are most definitely different ways to fail.

If in approaching a task, you are able to keep an open mind and accept the distinct possibility of failure, you will mentally document each step and pay closer attention to your actions so that upon your blunder’s post-mortem, you can see where you went wrong.  If however you act as I did and charge into the problem like a western gun-slinger with a penchant for brushes with death, you will not maintain the state of mind necessary to monitor your shortcomings.

This isn’t to say that we should enter new territory with the expectation of failure, however, I believe that we should always approach the unknown accepting the possibility of failure. By doing so, we remove so much of the apprehension and fear associated with failing.  We actually think through what it would mean to fail and are able to mitigate the risks of failure or even realize that the consequences of failing may not be that great.

It’s a challenging concept to accept but failure is not always bad.  As Edison’s quick turn of words in response to a nosey New York Times reporter reminds us, failure is an essential element of success.  Accepting failure allows for risk. Risk allows for progression, innovation and the unexpected… all things that ultimately lead to breakthrough success.

You may be wondering what happened to my first week at work.  As I mentioned, I failed the wrong way by the end of my first week as I didn’t accept the possibility of failure and didn’t learn anything.  Ok, I’m lying a little.  I did learn one important thing that I carried into my second week of the task which has drastically improved my work approach, and outcome:

Failure is always an option.

Forget Your Passion, Find Your Challenge!

“Be passionate about your job and you’ll never work another day in your life.”

I call bullshit. Sure, this quote gives us that Hallmark warm and fuzzy feeling way down in the sub-cockles of our heart (which by the way, the word “cockles” is nothing more than an incorrect latin translation of the word chocleae, which referred to ventricles… go warm your ventricles, people), however, there is a very harsh reality that this quote ignores.  If everyone in the world followed this quote to the letter, we would have a ridiculous number of rock stars, hoards of mediocre professional athletes, and such a high demand for accountants that they would be the highest paid individuals in the world.  My point it is that sometimes, it isn’t possible to follow your heart.

When I was 18, I was an optimistic farm boy, preparing myself to leave the small town and enter the city for University.  I had gotten into a number of schools and was torn between two very different paths: engineering or music. I still recall a conversation with my Aunt, the conclusion of which told me that music would always be there for me no matter what, but engineering wasn’t really something that people did as a hobby.  “Besides,” my Aunt concluded, “if you pursue music as a career, it becomes work, and you can never really love work.”

While I may disagree with my Aunt on that last point, that conversation was quite possibly one of the most important defining moments of my young life. The difficulty was, had I followed my passion and pursued a career in music, I would probably end up among the huge statistic of struggling artists who barely make ends meet working shift jobs at cafes and pubs, trying to chase a dream that has less than a prayer’s chance of coming to fruition. The issue here was a problem of demand; there simply wasn’t enough of it to justify another guy like me trying to play music for a living.

This isn’t to say that one shouldn’t be passionate about their work, however, don’t feel as though you have to be so narrow-sighted in the pursuit of your goals so as to ignore the opportunities around you and find a way to achieve both passion and success.  I, for example, have made a damned good life for myself as an engineer turned businessman. This has afforded me the luxury of playing in a band during my free time to satisfy my need for music. Win-win, right?

You may still be wondering if this means that work must therefore be a monotonous drudgery until the day we retire with our only respite being the hobbies we pursue in our leisure time.  Foolish earthling, give your head a shake. Research into human motivation has shown that there are a number of factors that drive our work habits (particularly things like mastery, autonomy and purpose). I would argue that in order to enjoy your work on an ongoing basis, you need to find a job that challenges you.  We humans seem to be addicted to the positive feelings of accomplishment and few things give that junkie’s fix like overcoming a big challenge.  There is a certain element of pride and strength in the knowledge of overcoming a meaningful problem though independently learning and applying new knowledge and skills.  For me, this problem solving high is only slightly less enjoyable than the feeling I get from being on stage with a guitar and a captive (albeit slightly alcohol-fueled and inhibition-lowered) audience.

All that said, if you wake up every morning knowing - absolutely KNOWING - that you will one day be the greatest ballerina that ever lived… by all means, follow your passion.  However, for the rest of us who have our doubts, a good challenge can be a great substitute for passion and something that I for one, can get passionate about.