Episode 80 – Things that sound like science fiction are already here

My guest on the show today is John Rich. John Rich is the V.P. of FutureX Labs at Moxie. Never...

The post Episode 80 – Things that sound like science fiction are already here appeared first on Sideways8.

My guest on the show today is John Rich. John Rich is the V.P. of FutureX Labs at Moxie. Never before has the combination of new technology and shifting consumer behavior unfolded at today’s current scale and speed. Entire industries worth billions of dollars are now created and up-ended, not in decades but in a matter of years or even months. Today’s businesses must know how to navigate this changing future by taking advantage of new opportunities and mitigating the threats that emerge.

That is John’s specialty. He is a guide for this future. By sifting through the deluge of new technology trends and ideas, it becomes apparent what is relevant and disruptive and what is noise, and with this insight prototypes can be built, refined and scaled to future enable organizations so that they can thrive in this exponentially advancing technological landscape. John’s specialties include scenario planning, technology forecasting, brand ecosystem modeling, speaking and presentations, social business planning, mobile strategy and digital strategy. 

 

Adam: 00:09 Welcome to the Good People Good Marketing podcast, a podcast about digital marketing and how to make it better so that good people and good organizations can have good marketing as well. I’m your host, Adam Walker, co-founder of Sideways Eight, a digital marketing agency, and 48in48, a non-profit dedicated to hosting events that build forty-eight websites for forty-eight non-profits in forty-eight hours.

00:29 My guest on the show today is John Rich. John Rich is the V.P. of FutureX Labs at Moxie. Never before has the combination of new technology and shifting consumer behavior unfolded at today’s current scale and speed. Entire industries worth billions of dollars are now created and up-ended, not in decades but in a matter of years or even months. Today’s businesses must know how to navigate this changing future by taking advantage of new opportunities and mitigating the threats that emerge.

00:58 That is John’s specialty. He is a guide for this future. By sifting through the deluge of new technology trends and ideas, it becomes apparent what is relevant and disruptive and what is noise, and with this insight prototypes can be built, refined and scaled to future enable organizations so that they can thrive in this exponentially advancing technological landscape. John’s specialties include scenario planning, technology forecasting, brand ecosystem modeling, speaking and presentations, social business planning, mobile strategy and digital strategy. John, welcome to the show.

John: 01:34 Well, thank you so much for having me, Adam, and after hearing that, I probably… it sounds like I need to do less.

Adam: 01:40 I think you need to blog, first of all. You’re the kind of guy that clearly needs a blog so that I can read it and get insights on what’s coming up, so I know what to focus on and, more importantly, so that I know what’s noise because there’s a whole lot of marketing noise out there, my friend.

John: 01:57 Yes, absolutely. The shiny objects syndrome is something our industry is known for.

Adam: 02:03 I’m really good at it. I can get a new, shiny object, platform, tool, whatever, and just lose an entire day. It’s just gone, right there. The whole day is just gone. So, I don’t know where it went, but it’s gone. So, there you go. Well, let’s talk. We’ll go ahead and dive in and, of course, as we’re talking, if you want to sort of shift the conversation towards anything more future-focused, I’d certainly be interested in that. So I’ll let you lead as far as that goes, but I’ll start with my standard questions. So related to digital marketing, can you tell us something that is working well for you?

John: 02:35 Yeah, I think, at the heart of what I think is working here at Moxie, and I’m seeing this more and more in our industry, is the investment in innovation, trying to understand both the threats and the opportunities that technology is presenting to all of us. And before I probably talk about our lab and prototyping and the specific things I think that are beginning to work really well, I should probably talk about the underlying principle that we operate on here, which is this idea of the law of accelerating returns.

03:14 It’s something that was created by an inventor, futurist, he’s currently the senior engineer at Google, Ray Kurzweil, and it’s this idea that technology is advancing exponentially. So we, most of us think in a linear way. It’s kind of how we’re wired, how we’ve evolved to think and so it’s very non-intuitive when something doubles, say, every eighteen months or every two years, like computational processing power. For the same Dollar, it’s doubling every twenty-four months approximately.

John: 03:53 And so that’s the kind of factor that creates these almost impossible scenarios, right? Because you probably have a smartphone that, if it’s not in your pocket, it’s probably within reach of you right at this moment; probably most of the people listening to this podcast have one. And that is essentially a supercomputer that compared to the most powerful popular computer in the Sixties, which would have cost $5,000,000, would have occupied an entire room and which would have barely had the processing power to move a single pixel at a decent speed on our smart phone.

John: 04:36 We now carry that around in our pockets and purses and it’s kind of amazing, but we often don’t think about that and we don’t think about where this exponential advancement is taking us. And it’s not so much that I think that the technology is changing us, it’s just allowing us to do the things that we want to do at a scale and a speed that was never possible before.

John: 05:05 So I often think Facebook didn’t make us social, but Facebook allowed us to be social in ways that were unimaginable even a few years before that, a decade before that, where we couldn’t have a thousand friends and we couldn’t have those relationships unless the people were close to us. And so that’s what the Lab is predicated upon, that sometimes things that sound like science fiction and seem like they’re going to be decades away, they’re actually already here and they’re very close, maybe more of a two to five year time-frame away from starting to be adopted by a large number of people, and so that’s going to have a big impact on marketing.

05:57 And so because of that what we try to do is look at the key technologies that we think are going to affect our industry, that are going to affect our client’s businesses. We then bring those technologies into the Lab. Usually they’re at still kind of a developer level and we then do two key things with those technologies. One is we let clients experience them; and then the second thing is we build prototypes that can show the possible business use cases that the technology could achieve moving forward. So I’ll give you a couple of examples of that.

Adam: 06:38 Yeah, because I was about to ask for examples. Please, give me some examples.

John: 06:42 Yeah, so, in terms of clients experiencing that technology, I often use the example of virtual reality. You could read a million words about virtual reality and what it is and how it works, but you don’t really understand it until you’re in it. That’s a good example of understanding a technology viscerally, you have to experience it. Then the second thing is clients aren’t going to buy this new solution or this new product unless they can touch and feel it. So, the example I use is about four years ago, we believed that augmented reality, virtual reality, would become a real channel, medium, that was going to be relevant, and so we created augmented reality posters at one of our open house events back then. One of our clients saw that and those became augmented reality posters that were in most of the Mo Stores for quite a while.

07:47 We created two generations of those posters; and our work in virtual reality, where we developed a prototype that used your heart rate in real time to alter the virtual reality experience, that again, seems an edge case or further out in the future, but even clients seeing that we could build virtual reality with that extra layer of technology embedded in it, creates confidence then that we can create, say, a future of banking experience for Wells Fargo, which we did a couple of years ago.

08:22 And, so, I really see the Lab as trying to figure out what are those, again, products and services that are going to be relevant to marketing in the future, building those early prototypes, and then what happens is that capability moves throughout the organization. The other thing I should say, when I talk about employees in the Lab, there are essentially three of us full time and we can’t build all this stuff, but that’s the other benefit of the Lab is – and we’re lucky here at Moxie because we have UX people, we have developers, we have people working with machine learning, we have great designers, writers, art directors – so, what happens is when people have a cool idea, the team kind of organically is assembled from current folks here at Moxie and then you get this extra benefit of the organization gets that learning and knows how to build that new capability, like augmented reality, virtual reality and, soon, mixed reality.

09:31 I think that’s a way that an organization can evolve, by investing resources in this space of innovation; and I think it’s really going to be essential for all of us to do it in different ways. I know we have some advantages because of the size of Moxie and because of the diversity of the people that are working here, and not all marketing companies have all of those opportunities necessarily, but I think there’s other ways to approach innovation and get ready for that future that we want to make.

Adam: 10:11 So, for my next question, let me tweak my normal question here just a bit, and so, what I’m curious to ask you is, as you’re looking at future emerging technologies, you’re trying to identify the ones that are going to be the winners essentially over what you call the noise. What technologies are you seeing that are dying off or are going to die off? Can you give me some insight into that?

John: 10:38 Well, yes, so, I’ll give you an example, and this is one that we are very focused on, although we haven’t thought through all the implications yet because the new possibilities of what’s going to replace it are so wide that it’s very hard to fully understand, but we’re heading in a couple directions with it.

10:59 I’ll make a prediction here, which I may be very embarrassed about five or seven years from now, but I would predict that in the next five to seven years, two dimensional screens will become a dying technology in that they will become a minority of the way that most people engage with digital information and media. What I mean by that, what I think is going to happen is, most people will be operating in a state of mixed reality. Adam, are you familiar with that technology or should I explain it a little bit?

Adam: 11:43 You definitely need to explain it because I’m quite certain the people listening are not fully familiar, so, yeah, give us the CliffsNotes version.

John: 11:49 Okay, great, so, augmented reality – and most people have probably experienced this through things like Pokémon Go and augmented reality, you hold up your phone or your tablet and extra digital information is added onto an object you’re viewing, and that’s augmented reality. Virtual reality is generally where you put on that headset, the “real world” is completely blocked out and you’re completely immersed in a new reality, a new world, whatever form that takes.

12:20 Mixed reality is the mixing of the two. So, I am now seeing my physical space. I am seeing other people that might be in that space. I can interact with them normally, but because of, say, the glasses that I’m wearing, I am now getting this extra digital information that is being integrated into my immediate reality. I guess what’s important between, say, augmented and mixed is – I’m not sure if you play that Pokémon Go game, but Pikachu could end up on the floor in the room you’re in or out on a sidewalk where you were, but the Pikachu has no awareness of its surroundings.

13:05 So, if there was a table in the room with you, it couldn’t interact with that. With mixed reality, and if we were playing Pokémon Go, the Pikachu could run and hide under the table, as an example. So, yeah, that’s one thing where we’re creating sort of three dimensional digital objects and experiences in it. Of course, you can add overlays of information.

13:29 So, all the ways right now that we interact through a two dimensional screen, it’s obviously been transformative, but if we think about it – I made the analogy that we have this super-computer that we carry around in our pockets now – but the input/output of the two dimensional screen is incredibly limiting; how much information it can give us, that little tiny screen and us poking it and tapping it in terms of putting data input into it, is a very inefficient, low-resolution way to interact. And so you can now imagine, and the first technology we’re working with is the Magic Leap glasses and …

Adam: 14:12 I was going to ask you about that. Okay, nice.

John: 14:15 Yeah, so we’re getting them ordered. They’re only available in six cities right now. Fortunately, we have an office in New York, so we can get them delivered there. Atlanta’s not currently on that number of the six cities. But why we’re excited about Magic Leap – and I’m not saying it’s Magic Leap glasses that everyone’s going to be wearing five years from now. It could very well be Apple or Google or some company we don’t even know about – but why we’re excited is we think Magic Leap is that first real step forward in the sense that – I don’t know if you or listeners have tried Microsoft HoloLens, but essentially they place little screens in front of your eyes and therefore that holographic information that is created is very ghostly and the field of view, if you look too far up, you look too far down left or right, the experience kind of disappears and it really diminishes the sense of complete immersion in it. And so why we’re excited about Magic Leap is your field of view is much, much wider and, probably the most exciting thing is, the information is not projected onto a screen in front of your eyes. It’s projected directly into your eye, into your retina.

Adam: 15:41 Interesting.

John: 15:42 And when I say that people often go, “Oh, that sounds dangerous”, but if we think about it, as you and I and listeners are looking around at this moment, our sense of reality is indirect, right? All it is, it’s light reflecting off of objects, being processed via our eyes, through our brain, and it’s being converted into information. That’s what tells us where the floor is and where the wall is and where someone we’re talking to is and what they’re doing. And so, if I mix digital light – let’s take the example of the Pokémon again – and I mix it with the “natural” light of how I’m assembling my sense of reality, well, then from my brain’s processing standpoint, things are going to get really muddy because those objects are going to be much more opaque, more real-feeling.

16:44 Also because the glasses have all these external cameras that are three dimensionally mapping the space around me that I’m in at that moment, those digital objects, as I said before, can directly interact with my physical world and so, much like people who have done higher end VR, like HTC Vive Pro – I always remember the first time I did it years ago at CES and the strangest experience I had was about ten seconds in. I realized I had forgotten where my real body was because my brain was so impacted by all of the things I was seeing and experiencing that it was actually believing I was in this. I can’t remember what it was, it was like on a planet with some space creature popping up or something – and so if you think about it, and why we think this is so disruptive, if we think about our industry, really most of the things we create are created on two dimensional screens for two dimensional screens.

Adam: 17:47 That’s right.

John: 17:48 So imagine what kinds of possibilities are afforded us when suddenly the entire world becomes a screen.

Adam: 17:56 Wow!

John: 17:57 Anywhere we look, we could be parking our social media feeds behind our heads somewhere and they could just notify us if something important happens. We could have so much information – I use Waze all the time, to get home and I used it to get here this morning to work – well, I won’t need that little separate screen that I’m sticking next to my windshield anymore…

Adam: 18:21 It’ll just be integrated.

John: 18:22 Because relevant data’s just going to kind of be out in front of me on the road ahead and giving me information about what I should.

Adam: 18:27 Wow! Yeah, I mean, I really like that. That’s a very bold claim, but if you think about it, what’s interesting about what you’ve talked about so far is that computing power is advancing at this just alarmingly exponential rate almost, but if you think about screens, yeah they’re advancing, but is the wide screen that I’m looking at right now really that far away from the big, fat, huge, deep monitor that I looked at ten years ago? It’s really not that different, right?

18:58 And all things considered, it feels like it hasn’t advanced as quickly, and I think what you’re talking about is going to be a departure from sort of being chained to that 2D reality. It sounds pretty amazing. And maybe you’re right, maybe Magic Leap is the first step in that process.

John: 19:13 Yeah, and as I said I’m not predicting Magic Leap, what I’m predicting is that that technology will happen.

Adam: 19:21 That idea, right.

John: 19:22 Yeah, and I have, I’ll be honest with you, I sometimes have overly-aggressive predictions about the rate of adoption. Generally I get there, but I’m counting on that exponential curve to align with my prediction this time around.

Adam: 19:38 Right. Wow! So I think I already know the answer to this question, but I have to ask. Is there any technology that we haven’t talked about that’s coming up that you’re truly excited about or is it this idea of this mixed reality technology that has you the most jazzed at the moment?

John: 19:55 Well, I would say the technology that I’m most both excited about and terrified about is machine intelligence and machine learning. I think, and people smarter than me have made this analogy, if we look back and we think about the impact that the industrial revolution had on society, where we essentially, for all practical purposes, we created artificial muscles because up to that point, if we were farming or if we were trying to manufacture something, we had to use our own physical strength and capabilities or we had to use animals, their capabilities and strength, with the horse-drawn carriages and wagons and plows and all of that.

20:43 So if you look back and you just see the industrial revolution had such an amazing impact on society, and of course there were downsides now we know, with pollution and environmental issues, but if you look back, you can see human lifespans increasing dramatically because suddenly we could produce more food. We could produce more necessities cheaper, because we could run these factories, and we had these power sources to operate these things. And so, I think about how the industrial revolution and “artificial” muscles transformed our society, and then I think, well, we’re on the verge of artificial intelligence and I think that will have an exponentially bigger impact on society moving forward because, if you think about it, we like to think of ourselves at the top of the food chain, calling the shots here in the world day-to-day. Yet we’re not the biggest animal on the planet, we’re not the strongest, we’re not the fastest. The only thing that differentiates us is our intelligence.

21:58  And we are on the cusp of creating an intelligence that quite likely will equal us and go beyond us and potentially very, very quickly. There’s this idea of called ‘the intelligence explosion’ because many AI researchers believe that if we get to a general level artificial intelligence, which people like Ray Kurzweil are predicting will happen in 2028/2029, which is a crazy short time period away, unless we can somehow constrain or align that artificial intelligence to our values and goals, it could very well supersede us in a matter of minutes or hours or days if it’s unconstrained, because in artificial intelligence, unlike us, our brains are sort of limited. They’re biological, biochemical, our neurons, the speed that they fire, but yet a computer is going to operate essentially at the speed of light, the way chips do already.

23:07 They’re electrons transmitting the information. So even an AI that had sort of equal human level intelligence or the ability to learn to learn, it would be operating potentially at millions of times faster than us, and that’s just one reason why a number of people are concerned and are investing in things like Open AI, which Elon Musk is quite well known for being a big part of, is trying to create some of these constraints, ways for us to make sure that it doesn’t get out of control. So that’s kind of the bigger position of it, but in the meantime, we are using machine learning here at Moxie. I would say that’s our number one technology we’re working with because there’s all kinds of business use cases for intelligence in terms of being placed against businesses, for business needs.

Adam: 24:09 Right, yeah, I love that. There’s a lot you can do with machine learning related to marketing to really improve our customer’s experience and deepen their engagement.

John: 24:19 Absolutely, yeah. Personalize it, make things relevant for the individual when they need it, the context of meeting their day-to-day or minute-by-minute needs, there’s huge opportunities there.

Adam: 24:32 That’s great. Well, John, let me see if I can recap what we’ve talked about so far. I’m just going to hit the high points because some of the stuff with some great details, but my note-taking ability is only so far. So, let me make sure I’ve got this.

24:44 So, starting the conversation with what’s working well, you mentioned the law of accelerating returns; that technology is advancing exponentially and not linearly, but we tend to think about things linearly and so, because things are moving so fast, sometimes we don’t fully appreciate the new advances that are happening. Your comment that I thought was very insightful was, Facebook didn’t make us social but allowed us to be social in new ways that we could not imagine before; and sometimes things sound like science fiction that’s decades away, but in fact are already here and have just not been fully adopted yet.

25:17 And you said that you look at key technologies for industry, the way you work with new technologies, you look at key technologies for your industry, you bring it into the Lab, you let clients experience them, and you mentioned VR as an example, and then you build prototypes to show what’s the possible use of this technology for business cases. You mentioned the augmented reality posters that you ended up doing for Mo’s and the heart rate used to alter the VR experience.

25:42 Then I asked what technologies are dying off or going to die off, and we talked about two dimensional screens, how it really is going to become a dying technology in the future, and it’ll be really a mixed reality technology where digital gets almost seamlessly integrated to our physical reality and where digital can even interact with our physical reality. So there may be a digital thing that, in our vision, is sitting on a physical desk, for example. So it’s an actual full mix of reality there, the digital meets the physical. And then, for what you’re excited about and also semi-terrified of is, I think like many of us, is machine intelligence and learning. I think the comparison you made with the industrial revolution is kind of brilliant.

26:26 I mean, the industrial revolution was in a very real way, artificial muscles and the ignition of AI, to some degree, could become artificial thinking and artificial thinking that can supersede us in an extraordinarily short amount of time, and so, we have to be very careful and aware of that. And then, of course, you also mentioned just using machine learning for digital tech, for digital marketing, is one of the main things that you’re working on at Moxie right now, which I think is really important and we’re going to see the rise of that in the marketing space. Did I miss anything from that recap?

John: 26:57 No, I think that was a fantastic summary.

Adam: 26:59 Fantastic. Well, do you have any final thoughts you want to share with our listeners then?

John: 27:03 Yeah, I guess what I would encourage everyone to do is, the things I’ve been talking about, I think, for some people maybe sound like, again, they’re very hard to fully understand or to get involved with, but there’s never been a better time and an easier time to really take advantage of these things. You don’t have to be an employee at a large company.

27:31 There are so many free online courses that are available to create awareness about this. The cool thing about new technologies is if you invest even a relatively small amount of time, you can become expert level compared to most people. You know, I got into 3D printing five years ago and I’m probably the 3D printing expert at Moxie at this moment, with not that many hours relatively speaking. So I guess I would encourage everybody to try to become more aware because I think it’s the decisions that all of us are going to make, moving forward, that’s really going to shape the future we live in.

28:12 And then I’d finally like to say, and encourage people if they’re interested, one of the other things we do at FutureX Labs is we put on conferences about emerging technology and we do talk about their implications for marketing, but we also obviously touch on their broader implications for things like increasing lifespans and autonomous vehicles, because basically all of these things affect marketing in some way. And so these conferences are called FutureX Live, and I could always send you the URL after this for the website, and there’s more information there about upcoming events.

28:53 And we’re planning a very large event next April at Georgia World Congress Center, and it’s going to be very expansive. It’s going to be called The Next 10 and we’re going to look at ten key technologies and how they can apply today and how they may play out over the next ten years. And I’d love for listeners to, if they’re interested, check out the website.

29:20 At some point we’ll get the ‘Save the Date’ out there, I think in the next few weeks, for that big event and the goal is not so much to showcase Moxie or what we’re doing here at the Lab. The real goal of this conference is to bring all the amazing people from different disciplines across Atlanta and the region together and showcase nationally just what an amazing a place Atlanta is right now in terms of innovation and creativity. I really think we’re lucky to be here and I think really exciting things are going to happen, coming out of our area.

Adam: 29:56 Yeah, I totally agree. That’s fantastic. Thanks for sharing that and thanks for being on the show. This is really fun. I’d love to stay in touch and maybe chat again as we see the continued leaps forward in some of this technology.

John: 30:08 Fantastic. Thanks again, Adam.

Adam: 30:10 Thank you.

30:14 Thanks for listening to the Good People Good Marketing podcast. To get more resources about digital marketing, make sure to go to goodpeoplegoodmarketing.com where you can find more podcasts, blogs, and other fun resources. Also, if you want to find me, your host, you can find me on Twitter @AJWalker, and on my blog at adamjwalker.com where I blog about leadership, productivity, habit building and the craziness of having five kids. Thanks, and tune in next time.

The post Episode 80 – Things that sound like science fiction are already here appeared first on Sideways8.