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Ken Hollings

Ken Hollings is a writer and broadcaster who explores the relationship between culture and technology, specifically how they shape and influence each other. His books include Welcome to Mars, The Bright Labyrinth and The Space Oracle.

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future as business narrative

Business has long imagined strange and wonderful futures, and it’s not done yet

  • Future tech
  • min read
    • "We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives," declared US celebrity psychic The Amazing Criswell, famous in the 1950s and 1960s for his wildly improbable predictions. In books, newspaper columns and TV appearances he informed the US that a craze for devouring human flesh would sweep the nation, the laws of gravity would cease functioning and the first humans on the Moon would be three pregnant female Soviet cosmonauts. In 1969 he also predicted television personalities would no longer be seen smoking, which doesn't seem so outrageous today. It's hard not to think about Criswell while contemplating what the future might hold after the disruptive events of 2020. Making predictions has always been risky, so why should we still do it? One reason might be because the future has become an important part of the business narrative over the past century. No matter what a company is selling, its best product is often a vision of the future. The customer's world would soon be one of ease and leisure, speed and convenience. The future gives meaning and direction to all those quarterly projections, strategy documents and planning sessions. The future is 14-lane highways and smoking robots A look back at how this message developed over the decades suggests we need it now more than ever. Take, for example, the General Motors 'Futurama' experience at 1939 New York World's Fair. 1939 General Motors Futurama ride at the New York World's Fair With the Great Depression finally over, the fair's opening pitch was 'dawn of a new day.' It was the first time the world of tomorrow had been used as the theme for an international exposition. General Motors offered its visitors a filmic 'ride' over a transport system for the year 1960. Laid out below them were fourteen-lane highways, self-driving cars and residential complexes with landing strips for private aircraft. It didn't matter that General Motors didn't make any of these things – the public flocked to Futurama, just as they packed Westinghouse's Hall of Electrical Living to marvel at Elektro, the Moto-Man: A walking, talking robot that smoked cigarettes. At the time, Westinghouse was best known for its toasters and radios, but these were now part of the promise of tomorrow. In fact, the company doubled down on this association, burying a time capsule at the fair's Flushing Meadows site, not to be unearthed until the year 6939, some five thousand years into the future. 'Cheap and reliable' can change the world One visitor to the 1939 World's Fair came away with a clear idea of where this was all heading. Vannevar Bush, head of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, drew upon his impressions of the exposition when writing 'As we may think' in 1945. First published in The Atlantic, Bush's essay on the future of information technology would become a key text, influencing generations of engineers and designers. Recalling the typewriters and computing machines he'd seen back in 1939, Bush made an important discovery: The modern world, he declared, had "arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it." The prospect of sophisticated pieces of technology being both cheap and reliable would have far-reaching implications. They brought complex engineering into the home, connecting it directly with the world of tomorrow. Big science and big business came as part of the package. Popular Mechanics' December 1952 issue featured an article on playing safe with atomic rays alongside one on selecting your Christmas tree. The future can be both familiar and new The reliability of such devices had implications for new marketing concepts like brand management, increasing a product's perceived value with the customer's sense of reassurance. But reassurance can breed familiarity. The more a consumer takes a product for granted, the more its perceived value declines for them. The promise of tomorrow starts to wear thin. Or as future president Ronald Reagan put it in a 1950s sales pitch for General Electric, "Progress is our most important product. If you're sitting back at General Electric you're probably falling behind." The product should not appear too reliable or familiar. After all, who wants to buy a used future? "Suddenly it's 1960!" Chrysler proudly announced when marketing the '57 Plymouth as part of its 'forward look' campaign. Bringing out a new model car every year had become standard industry practice by then – marketing your latest design features as 'three years ahead of their time' was simply the next step. As chance would have it, 1960 was also the year Vance Packard's The Waste Makers was published – a book that introduced the term 'planned obsolescence.' Famous for his exposé on advertising techniques, The Hidden Persuaders, Packard argued companies were deliberately engineering products to limit their future usefulness, making it easier to replace them than repair them. Tomorrow became a malfunction waiting to happen: A point eloquently made with the opening of 1964 New York World's Fair. Built on the same Flushing Meadows site as the 1939 model, it was an update on the same message. General Motors opened another Futurama ride that "takes you into the future and makes you feel like you are there – in outer space, beneath the sea, in unbelievable places watching believable things happen." More ambitious than the 1939 version, if offered visitors a glimpse of what life would be like in the year 2024. 1964 General Motors Futurama ride New York World's Fair As the fair drew to a close, business insider Alvin Toffler published his essay 'The future as a way of life,' later expanded into the bestselling book Future Shock. Published in 1970, it argued society was psychologically incapable of responding effectively to rapid technological change. "I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened," media guru Marshall McLuhan observed in a television interview that same year. "The future is not what it used to be. It is here." McLuhan spent most of the previous decade advising corporations how to survive in an age of rapid networked communications. Tomorrow gets darker In 1968 Stanley Kubrick's movie epic 2001: A Space Odyssey connected corporate America with the future by placing familiar brands in the 21st century. Those on display included IBM, Howard Johnson and Whirlpool. Some, however, had disappeared by the time 2001 came around. Pan American airlines, shown flying a shuttle service into low Earth orbit, folded in 1991. Kubrick's 2001 showed confidence about the future that had all but drained away by 1999. By then people were already asking where their jetpacks and videophones were – shouldn't the future be here by now? The paperless office of the future, first introduced in a 1975 Business week article, remained as far away as ever, despite assurances that "the use of paper in business […] should be declining by 1980." As an indication of how gloomy the business of the future had become by the mid-1980s, Apple Computers announced their Macintosh desktop in terms of a more dystopian world of tomorrow, promising viewers of their launch ad, "you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984."" Apple Macintosh '1984' ad There was also the chance that on new year's eve 1999, every computer on the planet would cease functioning the second it recalibrated itself for the year 2000. The millennium (or Y2K) bug, as it was called, would cause planes to fall out of the sky and nuclear power plants to melt down. Thanks to engineers and programmers around the world working to ensure January 1 would indeed see the dawn of a new day, the new millennium began with few disruptions. The problem hadn't just been a technical one, however. Life in the year 2000 could never have matched its hype in advertising campaigns over the past fifty years. RCA, for example, marketed an advanced '2000' color TV "set of the future," appropriately priced at 2000 US dollars. In France there was a mania for adding the number 2000 to everything from beer to pet grooming salons to emphasize a connection with the bright promise of tomorrow. Death of the cultural and technological decade The one thing that truly stopped working from the start of the 21st century was our collective ability to map out technological and economic progress in decades. From the 1930s, this incremental ten-year unit became the steppingstone to the world of tomorrow. As each decade came into focus as the decade of the future, separating itself from what came before it, so too did the concept of associating them with a significant cultural, social or political change. To mention the 1960s, 70s or 80s was to call up a specific set of products and designs. It was what allowed Marshall McLuhan to advise business leaders that 'the future's future is the present,' a statement that could have applied to any decade in the latter half of the twentieth century. This perception became increasingly blurred once we entered the new millennium. In the twenty-first century it is no longer possible to identify progress through a decade's look, mood or direction. The only people to talk about 'the noughties' with any consistency were journalists, and even they didn't seem convinced. Upgrades as the new measure of time The old mode of reckoning didn't mesh with the new century. Cars today, for example, tend not to feature the year in which they were first rolled out as an added value. The upgrade has now become the new unit of measurement, whether it's an operating system, a platform or a device. Before the coronavirus pandemic, customers around the world had been known to queue all night outside Apple stores to buy the latest iteration of the iPhone. Apple has continued what the US car industry started in announcing a new model every year. Not surprisingly, the tech industry has also been accused of factoring new forms of planned obsolescence into their products. The contemporary term 'future-proofing' reflects a growing concern with anticipating the disadvantages brought by changes that have not yet been made. It's planned obsolescence 2.0 – the post-millennial version of Future Shock. Meanwhile, in a gesture that General Motors and Westinghouse would have appreciated back in 1939, Elon Musk fitted his own 'midnight cherry' Tesla Roadster to a Space-X rocket in 2018 and sent it on a rendezvous with Mars. It may be the first roadworthy vehicle in outer space, but it's still just a car. And that's the point about the future: It's a narrative that lets business communicate with its times. Has anyone received an Amazon delivery by drone since the idea was first announced in 2016? Narratives are useful for planning and communication, but we shouldn't let ourselves grow too comfortable with them. The future is a narrative meant to help us think more freely, not a foregone conclusion.
space technologies shaped business

IT came from outer space: How space technology conquered the world

  • Technology
  • min read
    • The Russians started it all. The timeline that ends with you reading this on your smartphone began on October 4, 1957. That was the day the former Soviet Union announced it had placed the first artificial satellite into orbit around our planet. Designed to look futuristic About the size and shape of a basketball and weighing little more than 84kg, Sputnik took about 98 minutes to follow its elliptical path around the Earth. A polished aluminum-alloy orb with four long antennae pointing straight out behind it, Sputnik had a futuristic dynamism not seen before in the West. Sergei Korolev, who designed both the satellite and powerful R-7 rocket that carried it into space, meant it to have that effect. He'd foreseen the satellite's technological impact and wanted to see Sputnik replicas on display in the museums of the future. He wasn't the only one who'd foreseen its impact. Back in 1947, James Lipp, head of the US's RAND (Research and Development) Corporation Missile Division, remarked: "One can imagine the consternation and admiration that would be felt here if the United States were to discover suddenly that some other nation had already put up a successful satellite." Sputnik's long-tailed impact RAND was one of the first organizations to study how space technology might shape human behavior on Earth. When it came to Sputnik, the anticipated "consternation and admiration" had unexpected long-term consequences for information technology. The satellite's launch marked a high point in the International Geophysics Year. Its organizers, the International Council of Scientific Unions, had approved a resolution calling for artificial satellites to be placed in orbit around the Earth to study its surface from above. As a simple telemetric device capable of being tracked across the sky from Earth, Sputnik marked the start of the collective mapping of our planet, revolutionizing global navigation, travel and communication. The GPS trackers in smartphones are just one of its many outcomes. Netting the unexpected consequence It's often the unintended consequence that has the most profound impact. Rattled by the Soviet Union's lead in space, the US concentrated resources on closing that gap and pulling ahead in areas where they already had an edge. President Eisenhower had just appointed a new Defense Secretary: Former Procter & Gamble Promotions Manager, Neil McElroy. McElroy's consumer goods experience brought a more integrated organizational approach. The individual initiative became subordinate to a larger, more coordinated system. McElroy's principal achievement was to revolutionize funding for scientific research by establishing the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA.) In 1969 ARPA developed the earliest model of the internet, ARPANET. This breakthrough was an unexpected outcome of the Soviet Union taking such a decisive lead in the Space Race with Sputnik. Putting connection at the center of innovation ARPA funneled resources into areas where the US was ahead of the Soviets: Developing data processing, computers and communication networks. ARPA funding meant companies like IBM, Western Electric and Bell Telephone were soon working with Massachusetts Institute of Technology's national security research and development lab, Lincoln Laboratories and the Jet Propulsion Labs at California's science and engineering institute Caltech. By the end of the 1950s, ARPA's approach to experimentation and innovation – connecting academics with business strategists, researchers with engineers, designers with manufacturers – had a counterpart in NASA, the US's newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Satellites, spies and videotape At the same time, the RAND Corporation had turned its attention to low-Earth orbit. Working with audiotape company Ampex, it developed a satellite-based video system to spy on enemies. Throughout the rest of the 20th century and well into the 21st, the impact of videotape on how television shows and films were made, distributed and seen would be enormous. This video system captured Vice President Richard Nixon confronting Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev over the USSR's missile technology in 1959. While Nixon and Khrushchev clashed in public, NASA displayed its first astronauts at a press conference. The 'Mercury Seven' fast became media personalities. "We have faith in the space age," one astronaut told the press. "All of us have faith in mechanical objects." Perhaps not quite enough faith, as it was Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin who became the first human launched into Earth's orbit. This great leap was really a series of tiny cautious steps. The physiological problems of life in space remained unsolved. Breathing like a cyborg How would humans survive outside the protection of the Earth's atmosphere? One unusual response came from scientists Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in a magazine article published in 1960, Cyborgs and Space. They suggested: "There may be much more efficient ways of carrying out the functions of the respiratory system than by breathing, which becomes cumbersome in space. One proposed solution for the not too distant future is relatively simple: Don't breathe!" Coining the term 'cyborg,' Clynes and Kline imagined ways machines might help human biology adapt to the hostile environment of space. "If man attempts partial adaptation to space conditions, instead of insisting on carrying his whole environment along with him," they argued, "a number of new possibilities appear." The key possibility was an expanded understanding of how human physiology can interact directly with advanced engineering techniques in the form of prosthetics, exoskeletons, wearable technology, robotic limbs and implants – all now firmly established areas of scientific research and startup ventures. According to one estimate, people automatically check their smartphones for images, locations and messages 80 times a day. The symbiosis between humans and machines underpins both space exploration and data processing. For astronauts interacting with the artificial work environment aboard the International Space Station, the ease of use of sophisticated technology can be a matter of life and death. Astronauts survive in space only because they're kept safe in a seamless technological bubble. Every aspect of life on Earth must be replicated in space, from the most extraordinary to the most banal. Space race makes powdered drink mix sexy Urban myths link NASA to many materials, fabrics and gadgets. In fact, they didn't invent Teflon, Velcro or the powdered drink mix Tang. Teflon had been around since the 1930s, Velcro since the 1950s and Tang was on the market just as NASA was finding its feet. Mercury astronaut John Glenn drinking Tang in orbit as part of an experiment did, however, do a lot for the brand. NASA may not have invented these products, but it helped to popularize them. Having your product associated with astronauts and the space race connected it with science and discovery. Sometimes the association was so close misunderstandings persist. A private company invented and developed the chrome-plated Fisher Space Pen, capable of writing upside-down and in zero gravity. Both NASA and the Soviet Union space program became their customers. Space research that became consumer products It's not as if NASA wasn't producing enough of its own tech spinoffs. In 1976, NASA started its Technology Transfer Program to ensure there could be commercial licensing for innovations resulting from space exploration. Nearly every aspect of our lives has benefitted from this approach. For example, NASA sponsored research into using algae to recycle waste in outer space, only to discover that it made an excellent nutritional supplement for developing infants. Water purification systems devised for the International Space Station have improved water safety on Earth, and NASA studies in high-altitude wind resistance have led to more aerodynamic truck design. Smartphone cameras in space NASA's experiments miniaturizing cameras for use in space led to the active pixel sensor now used in the standard smartphone camera. Today's smartphones also benefit from embedded web technology used onboard the International Space Station to conduct experiments remotely over the internet. This led to the Internet of Things (IoT): Remote wireless connectivity between devices in smart homes, smart cities and all manner of wearable technology from watches to glasses and bracelets. Mapping technology currently focused on the surface of Mars is used to create detailed geospatial views of Earth's cities. Smartphones use space technology, but they've also become space technology. CubeSats are small square satellites, a fraction of the size and weight of Sputnik, that give academic science its own space program to expand knowledge and research. Started in 1999 as a collaboration between California Polytechnic State University and Stanford Space Systems Development Laboratory, they can be used as single units or in orbiting networks. In 2013, NASA technicians launched the first CubeSats fitted with iPhones to take pictures from space and transmit the data back to Earth. Almost 60 years after Sputnik circled the planet, a smartphone took the first space selfie. The possible uses for such large-scale real-time data are astronomic – for meteorology and cartography, logging and agriculture, oil and gas, insurance and transport. We may inhabit a tiny planet in a vast expanding universe, but the space surrounding us is getting smaller and cheaper to access. Good business, as always, is where you find it. Perhaps now is the time to consider how space technology can help your company gain a competitive edge.
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