“What do you mean, digital technology is starting to influence the physical world?!” A friend asked, “You mean that we will have chips in things like mugs, cars, and cows making them all some kind of Internet of Things device?”
Nope, not really, that’s not it, I replied.
“Please tell me you are not talking about that super-evil-AI-that-will-control-us-without-us-knowing it, that thing that will turn us into paperclips, the thing that Elon Musk is so afraid of.”
Well, I said, the premise is not that it will turn us into paperclips, and, he does have a point, but, no. That’s not what I mean either.
What I mean to say is that the way we stack bricks to build buildings, the way we grow our food to feed ourselves, the way we create entertainment, the way we construct the physical world around us, will change because of digital technology while not necessarily through digital technology. It has to do with the methodologies and frameworks that are used in the world of bits and bytes and which are slowly being put to work in the world of molecules and atoms. I not only believe that this is the reason why companies like Facebook and Google are building cities and neighborhoods and why SpaceX lands a rocket after only 10 years of research and development. I also believe that they can do this exponentially faster, better and cheaper.
“It has to do with the methodologies and frameworks that are used in the world of bits and bytes and which are slowly being put to work in the world of molecules and atoms.”
Digging
My hypothesis did not develop overnight and although I did give a few talks last year about “breaking the fourth wall with digital technology.” The concept was still very abstract. I did not quite have a handle on what it would mean in a practical sense to apply knowledge of the digital world in the physical. I did have a hunch though, and when a few things started happening around me, I became more certain I was onto something.
The first time I sensed it was when I studied the business writings of Peter Thiel. In his book Zero to One, Thiel describes how the business world in “bits and bytes” works differently than its counterpart in the worlds of “atoms and molecules”. He shared insights and methodologies which I knew could also have a profound effect on the physical world. Furthermore, Google’s moonshot company X was doing a lot of physical projects in which there surely is a lot of digital technology involved, but the physical part of the projects seems profoundly different and unique too. But all that just triggered my idea, my feeling, my hunch that there was something more there. I just wasn’t sure what yet. It wasn’t until the winter of 2017 that I knew I was on to something more.
While at a dinner, I had a discussion with my dad - who has decades of experience in the field of construction - about a Wired article describing the Boring Company’s plan to build a tunnel under Los Angeles. My dad’s reaction was a firm and skeptical “that is simply not possible”. As support for this, he cited the North-South line in Amsterdam which is a project to build a metro tunnel from the north to the south of Amsterdam. This was being built for roughly the same number of kilometers that the Boring Company was aiming at. The Amsterdam project went 40% over budget and took about 16 years to realize. In another Wired article, Gary Brierley -who has the same background as my dad, stated: “He [Elon Musk] thinks people who have been doing this all their lives wouldn’t improve this if they could?” And no surprise my dad agreed with Brierley. They believed that the ideas of the Boring Company were just as absurd, if not more so, than the most optimistic people working on the Dutch metro line.
Seven Hundred Productions
I stored this idea of the Boring Company, and especially the skeptical response of my dad, in my mental “freezer-of-ideas” and left it there. It was only a few months later that I could take it out to thaw, while at the wonderful How the Lights Get In philosophy festival in the beautiful English Hay-on-Wye with a group of friends. One of my friends has a career in television, radio, podcasting, and theater. One night during dinner, we discussed Netflix’s plan to release around 700 original shows in 2018. “You must have been reading that wrong, why on earth would you release 700 shows in a year?” she asked. Even when I showed her the article she spoke those words, those two words that I had heard a few months earlier which I had dismissed at the time as irrelevant and uninteresting. She said that is was simply “not possible.”
Two similar moments where people with undeniable expertise in their respective fields could not believe how new companies, could do things so radically different. Was this just coincidence? And then I realized I had seen all this from close by before in my own practice.
“The one thing we’ve been able to do is keep a foot firmly rooted in Silicon Valley and a foot in Hollywood”
Brick and Mortar
Around the turn of the year, I was working as a smart building consultant. I was helping some clients to define ways how a digitally smart building platform could improve the experience of the inhabitants of their buildings. When I get such a gig, the first things I do is to explain how a “digital platform” enables the creation of an efficient ecosystem. I know this sounds a bit abstract. But it becomes more lively by visualizing the building as a human body. The digital platform would function as the brain of the building, receiving stimuli (id est, data) from the building directly, to allow it to “observe” the state of the building. Taking the idea further, the platform could also control the muscle of the building, like sending an elevator to a floor, adjusting the light and temperature). To achieve all this, we would need a nervous system in the form of physical cables. And just like the body -where via one nervous system- the nerves that transmit the signal of tickling, are the same that transport the signal for heat or pain.
Most producers of hardware know this, that is why elevators, air conditioners, lighting installations, solar panels, doors, etcetera are connectable through one type of cable speaking one kind of digital ones-and-zeros-language, like the signals from your fingertips are the same that are coming from your toes. All this would allow for one, super efficient, scalable and relatively cheap infrastructure thanks to the single digital platform.
During my research on how to achieve this, I came to learn that the status quo in the construction field was something quite different from the approach mentioned above. I learned that development in construction is very siloed, meaning that the people responsible for the light would take care of the actual lighting, the power cables, the data-cables and the software. The people responsible for fire-alarm did the equivalent for their domain, the ones for security for theirs, and so on. Each field of expertise would lay its own cables, designs its own control and monitoring mechanisms. Even on the small scale, this work is extremely labor intensive and therefore prone to error, misalignment and cost overruns.
What an opportunity! I thought. If we would collaborate from the perspective of the digital smart building platform -like we would in a software project- it would end up in a positive sum game for everyone! And writing the business case was easy. It was more efficient, future-proof and cheaper!
How flabbergasted I was, to learn that my proposal was deemed flawed. It was too cheap and even if it would work, it was believed to be too good to be true. And besides that, who was I, a techie, to think that people who have been doing this all their lives wouldn’t improve this if they could? It was simply deemed not possible.
Where did I hear that phrase before?
A Rule of Thumb
“But what about cognitive bias?” one of my friends asked, “could it not be the case that those people are right? Can those companies actually pull this off?”
The proof is indeed in the pudding, but the more you look for it, the more you’ll see it. The Boring Company is planning to have people go for a test drive through the tunnels this year, Netflix is releasing 700 shows, and Facebook is building the city. “They are not only preaching, but they are also practicing.”
All this left my friend pretty convinced if it wasn’t for this last big question. “Why is it so hard to change the status quo? If it all worked so well, why do so much people find it so difficult to understand?”
Changing Status Quo
In business, there is a rule of thumb that states that you can do only two of the following three things combined. You can be better, faster or cheaper. As given as an example: “Dell is cheaper and faster, but not better. Ikea is cheap and fast, but not better”. If you argue this from status-quo in the physical world today, sure. But I believe that companies that became juggernauts in the digital technology revolution are breaking this paradigm, they are creating a new status-quo and they broke the spell, they are better, faster and cheaper.
This is also why it makes absolute sense that Amazon buys Whole Foods, SpaceX builds reusable rockets and Facebook builds cities. Yes, they do use many different cutting-edge digital technologies to achieve this. But not for the sake of technology. They know that using digital methods and frameworks will create better user experiences, and if there is one thing we have learned from the Web, it is that people go and buy where the experience is best.
“And about people not understanding,” I said, “the best answer to that question was handed to me by a colleague, in the form of a quote from 1935 by the American author Upton Sinclair.” He wrote:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
