In addition to making trillions from people’s data and giving them nothing in return, tech is largely breaking the basic interpersonal bonds on which society is based. Those two things are creating major social, economic, political and mental problems, while also making it very difficult to solve major problems.
However, ooverse is building an ecosystem in which people depend on each other to make their lives much easier and benefit from their personal data.
My vision for ooverse is for users to make it into a unique shared value ecosystem that can be applied to more socio-economic problems than my team and I have the creative capacity and collective experience to think of. In support of that vision, I believe it is important to grow a user base that not only uses our products, but also identify with the culture of mutual support and social responsibility on which said ecosystem is being built.
The possibilities of leveraging the economies of scope of the envisioned ecosystem are endless. Some of these possibilities, as ooverse extends into hardware, communications infrastructure, and IoT, have been discussed with Dr. Thomas Mensah, co-inventor of fibre optics and a pioneer of nanotechnology. Dr. Mensah is a dear friend and officially a member of ooverse’s board of advisors.
Given the rapid pace of innovations in materials science and digital fabrication, it is conceivable that many communities can localise supply and value chains, becoming virtually self-sustaining in the not-too-distant future. My concern, however, is what then becomes of communities that have historically been passed over by substantial investment and left out of important global decisions, even though the world continues to heavily depend on their resources. It seems obvious to me that these under-privileged communities may be completely left in social and economic darkness in the not-too-distant future, as wealthier communities gradually lose the incentive to engage with them at all.
I was privileged to get the opportunity to briefly share these thoughts with Neil Gershenfeld (Director of MIT Center for Bits and Atoms), Alan Gershenfeld (Co-founder & President of E-line Media), and Joel Gershenfeld (Professor in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University). Neil, Alan, and Joel are the inspiring co-authors of Designing Reality, which speaks of a near-future of digital fabrication, localised supply chains, and localisation and globalisation existing side-by-side. I sought to explain that it seems to me that localisation of supply chains erodes the fundamental psychological and economic drivers of globalisation. Thus, localisation and globalisation might actually be in conflict.
I think that people tend to look elsewhere to meet needs mostly because, until now, they have lacked the power and opportunity to meet many of the needs in their own communities. So as communities grow into the consciousness that they can finally produce anything they want and supply chains become localised, value chains may follow suit, especially in communities that can afford it. i.e. “If we can make anything we want, why don’t we invest into increasingly better and more efficient ways of doing so? Better digital designs, better practices at our fab labs, etc.? Since we know ourselves quite well and what we want, and we’ll be producing for ourselves, we know the investment is a sure bet, anyway”. Furthermore, on a personal level, individuals may value being relevant to familiar people at a place they call home much more than being relevant to strangers elsewhere. So they may invest their time and abilities accordingly. That is, they may be pre-occupied with solving local needs and making life in their community as optimal as possible, which seems to me like a list of infinite needs they can solve.
Could this not create a situation whereby needy communities and countries are abandoned to their own fate? “Who needs them?” E.g. There’s a history of rural communities in poorer countries with the highest mineral deposits remaining the poorest communities in the country, although mining and gas corporations from richer countries have done business there for generations, absolutely refusing to make any substantial investment in those communities. If this is the extent to which those communities have been engaged when they are actually needed in the global supply chain, one ought to ask: “What happens when no one actually needs them?”
On that account, I am very interested in helping to build global ecosystems that involve those communities, both within and beyond the ooverse universe. Particularly, in (1) education, so that they can increasingly meet their local needs, or contribute to the global marketplace of ideas and therefore stay relevant, (2) tourism, so that they can continue to attract residents of wealthier communities, and (3) public health, because a disease-infested community is of little value to itself or anyone else, and certainly attracts fewer tourists. While I'm not quite convinced that globalisation shall endure on the basis of such investments, I'm totally confident that if such investments are not made now, the incoming wave of technological revolution will unleash an unthinkable level of global inequality that will feed unprecedented levels of global organised crime, civil strife, and terrorism.
Deriving A Real-Time Map Of Socio-Economic Developments From Social Media As A Global Point Of Assembly.
Clearly, social media is playing an increasing role in shaping public discourse, and impacting negotiation and resolution of conflicts among enterprises, between enterprises and their customers / employees, between people and their governments, and among governments. My research focusses on a phenomenon which one might call the Perfect Picture Phenomenon (or, simply, P3). P3 views social media as a global point of assembly, and explains interactions on social platforms in terms of the axioms that observation impacts reality, and that while being observed by others, agents may act in such a manner as to make some intended impression. The hypothesis is that (1) Agents have local behaviours, which correspond to socio-economic realities in which they interact with more familiar agents in more defined contexts. And (2) Their behaviour becomes increasingly global, and deviates from their socio-economic reality, as they interact with less familiar agents in less defined contexts.
I would argue that traditionally, public discourse happens in small gatherings, forums, town halls, classrooms, places of worship, etc. And such assemblies are organised for specific reasons largely known to participants. That is, agents more familiar with one another interact in more defined contexts. Therefore, the effect of P3 on public discourse, and, accordingly, on policies, strategies, interventions, and negotiations it drives is rather insignificant. However, for the first time in the history of human society, hundreds of millions of people assemble in real-time and engage as though they were at a single gathering! Accordingly, public discourse is now being had at “locations” where everyone has assembled for no particular reason (as in, participants are there because other participants are there). Thus, agents much less familiar with one another are interacting in contexts much less defined, even virtually non-existent. Consequently, P3’s effect is much more pronounced, causing participants’ collective behaviour to significantly deviate from any participant’s local behaviour, and therefore from the reality of their respective socio-economic circumstances. Therefore, policies, strategies, interventions, and negotiations driven by social media interactions may tend to be based on (the “perfect picture” of) global behaviours instead of on (real) local behaviours which may easily go unobserved even from the viewpoint of policy makers, business leaders, and expert negotiators. Two serious risks follow from this possibility. Firstly, policies, strategies, interventions, and negotiations may fail to address real issues. Secondly, pursued outcomes may create unintended and unforeseen problems which, by definition, may be difficult to diagnose, much less solve.
My research would seek to develop a qualitative theory on which more quantitative descriptions (that could be modelled with partial differential equations, for example) can be based to account for variations between observations obtained via social media, and observations in the real-world, translating social media statistics into the socio-economic realities they may not directly reflect. This way, a real-time map of local socio-economic developments can be derived from the global point of assembly that is social media. Paradoxically, the largely undefined context of social media interactions suggests that our statistical interpretations can be made in much wider contexts, so that as long as those interpretations can lead us to socio-economic realities, we conceivably end up with results which tell us a lot more than what we may have found had we focussed on traditional public discourse which limits the scope of agents’ interaction to more specific and therefore much smaller contexts. We see a larger spectrum of events and a wider web of causal relationships among socio-economic developments. This leaves our observations much less open to interpretation, and therefore significantly reduces the effect of observer bias.
The resulting theory, which one might call Perfect Picture Theory, could have far-reaching applications in modern social science, political science, strategic management, and behavioural economics, subsequently, guiding policy making, social intervention, corporate strategy, negotiation, and conflict resolution in today’s world. With traditional political and geographical maps, we were able to outline towns, nations, continents, and the routes between them. With digital maps, we were able to outline specific locations, and crowd-source efficient ways of moving between specific locations. With behavioural maps (which we can derive from social media), we will be able to outline real-time socio-economic developments in specific geographies, and crowd-source efficient ways of resolving complex conflicts, achieving strategic corporate, diplomatic, and national security objectives, and engineering specific socio-economic outcomes.