The Future of X

When architect Victor Gruen designed the nation's first enclosed shopping mall in Edina, Wisconsin in 1956, his vision was of an indoor plaza reminiscent of the cafes in Vienna: "livable, lovable" spaces that encouraged newly relocated suburbanites to socialize in a large, welcoming shared space. Shopping was to be a secondary experience, meant to provide the impetus for getting away from the isolation of the suburban home and automobile. His creation was an unrivaled success; his vision was decidedly less so.* For almost half a century, the modern shopping mall dominated the model for retail sales ... that is until the Web. It's true that most people didn't notice the death of the American Mall until the Great Recession, but it was the Web that's done the most to disrupt retail (just ask Borders). The question now becomes what to do with all these dead malls.

The simplest and most common proposal has been demolition. That seems an awful waste of space. And property. And infrastructure. And you get the idea. Malls as community assets still retain a large segment of their value, they just require re-purposing.

One promising idea is to convert them into office parks. Enclosed office parks. The advantages of this are immediately obvious. Small and medium-scale businesses currently seeking rental space in low-rise office towers along the outer belt would bypass the built-in higher rents of new construction. Ample parking and access to major highways and public transit are pre-fabricated; the site's proximity to residential housing is also built-in. Large corporations seeking to establish satellite offices further from downtown could use the multi-floored space previously occupied by anchor stores. With current workplace design trends rewarding open floor plans that foster collaboration, anchor stores would require little structural reconversion. The smaller retail stores could be renovated to stand-alone business use that formally might've occupied a derelict strip mall or been buried anonymously on an upper floor of one of those afore-mentioned outer belt office towers. Because non-retail corporations are more immune to the economic volatility endemic to retail, tenant occupation rates would be more stable. Not only do the property managers win, so do the utilities no longer worrying about supplying service to dead business centers.

Vestiges of the mall's original purpose could still live on. Retail that caters exclusively to the needs of this new corporate population would be easily accommodated. The food court would continue largely unchanged, save for cosmetic upgrades. Employees from all the disparate businesses in the mall could congregate and interact over meals at Panera or Chipotle, same as shoppers currently do. Onsite facilities that cater to the more corporate needs of their new residents such as dry cleaners, urgent care clinics, and shared daycare facilities would nearly complete Victor Gruen's original picture of what the mall's purpose in the community could be.

Reading the technocrati’s speculation about Google Glass this month, one gets the impression we will soon be visited by aliens among us; fellow humans in nerdy eyewear and no one, including the wearer, will be quite sure what to make of it all.  I imagine a lot of these pundits thought the same way when iPhones started to become a thing, or social networks before that. I chose those examples specifically. Because when AR apps and the attendant gear that run them begin to launch, the adoption of this technology will be so universal and rapid that some of those pundits will be the last to notice how quickly the world has changed.

It isn’t a question of how many people will use AR, it’s a question of what everyone will use it for. The answer is equally as immense. We will use AR for everything. It will change what we see in the world, how we see it, and how we relate to it. The information and guidance that AR will provide us in just about every function we undertake, especially the mundane things (driving, communicating, shopping, entertainment) will so transform how we perform those actions that we will feel naked and powerless without it in the same way we currently do without our smartphones.   And speaking of smartphones, Dick Tracy had it half right: we will wear our phones, just not on our wrists. AR won’t replace discreet mobile computing platforms, but for designers lamenting the ubiquitous slabs our devices have become ... smartphones in their current iteration are headed for extinction.

The Glass demo shows people traipsing about in parks and busy city centers, all while fed a unique stream of location-aware data to help them navigate and manipulate their environment. Advertisers are salivating at the opportunities this presents. But who will control what you see in these advertising augmented spaces? Will consumers be able to turn ads off if they don’t wish to be bothered? Will our newly augmented landscape be divided into premium classes? Pay the opt-out fees and corporations will leave you alone? I suppose the cost of being poor will go up again: the plebes will see their environmental Realities™ crowded by more digital pollution than the 1%-ers will.

Our surveillance state will become a true surveillance culture. AR will enable us to record everything we see and hear. Every conversation, every experience, every interaction. We will become infallible (Fair) witnesses to our own and anyone else's life stories. Even if I choose not to record something intimate, my partner might not want to be so discreet. That will make for some interesting relationship wrinkles. This will also add deeper layers to our conversation about expectations of privacy in public spaces.

I imagine many locations will want to institute limits on what AR apps will be permitted to run in what areas. This will require complex policies impacting not just personal privacy (like bathrooms or locker rooms), but corporate R&D labs and boardrooms. Employers who already monitor their workers for productivity will have snooping tools at their disposal that will be truly Orwellian. If you’re wearing something that records everything you see and hear in the office, will employers demand (and receive) the right to that data – will they own not just what you produce, but what you experience while there? Not only will our workplaces be transformed, so will the state of our security and police apparatus as we all become passive citizen watchdogs. What rights to our privacy will governments and corporations be further permitted to erode?

And when imagining the shape of these AR devices, who says they have to resemble personal appliances. Google took some good-natured ribbing about the chic-factor of those awkward-seeming glasses. Who says they have to be worn? The next gen of AR enabled devices will be us. We’ll be the AR appliances with electronic tattoos, ocular and brain implants, and (in a lazy analyst’s version of Godwin’s law) nanotech.

"Google's driver-less cars are already street-legal in three states, California, Florida, and Nevada, and some day similar devices may not just be possible but mandatory. Eventually (though not yet) automated vehicles will be able to drive better, and more safely than you can; no drinking, no distraction, better reflexes, and better awareness(via networking) of other vehicles."

The New Yorker article on truly intelligent machines goes on to suggest that by the time most of us are our parent's age, human-controlled driving will be illegal altogether.

I agree with their presumption that in twenty to thirty years, almost all of us will be relegated to the role of passenger in our own cars, but I think anyone who wants to drive will still be able to get licensed and be able to do so ... thing is, who will want to? Think of the convenience of not having to deal with traffic. You'll be able to play and chat and surf on your mobile device with gleeful abandon, never having to even look up from your screen if you choose not to. With networked GPS (and its successor systems) and an always networked location-aware OS under the hood, you just tell the car where to go and then ignore the ride. The 1950s dream of robotic, electric cars finally come true. Another couple of generations and the notion of having to drive yourself anywhere and worse still, not know how to get there, will seem sneeringly quotidian.

Here are some of the ways I foresee driverless cars altering the social fabric:

The elderly (you know, Boomers and later, Gen X'ers) will still be able to maintain the independence of having a car without the they or the rest of society worrying about who'll they'll injure or kill once they slide behind the wheel. This means they'll retain much more mobility (literally) and as of consequence, be able to stay in their homes longer, which will boost stability in certain segments of the housing market.

Long commutes won't be so detrimental to one's mental well-being and family life because the stress of navigating traffic will be alleviated by not having to drive, and many traffic issues related to poor driving will be eliminated due to a networked traffic system of linked automobiles that'll literally be smart cars. Professionals on those long commutes will be able (and expected) to work on the ride. Make of that what you will. Or one could simply snooze on the way and say they worked. Either way, anything that makes commuting palatable again will be a boon to that previously dying segment of American ecology known as the suburb.

A lot of service industries related to driving other people around (taxis, limo services) will be disrupted, which is management-speak for, not something one should plan for a career in. Same goes for ambulance drivers.

If all cars are networked, who will get to see where everyone is at any one time? Parents will obviously want to track their kid's travels. Will police/HomeSec have broader powers to track people as well? What about the ability to remotely take control of those cars? Civil libertarians need to be in front of this one.

The whole youth culture built around owning your own car and the increased perception of freedom that awarded is already on life support. Tomorrow's kids will see cars much as today's do: as appliances, not romantic passports to adventure.

As for the New Yorker's prediction that driving will be illegal because humans' safety will make operating such dangerous vehicles unethical, I really don't see anything that dire. Driving will still be legal for licensed individuals, the difference is, only iconoclasts or a select few who need to drive will get licensed. For the rest of us it will be a useless expense of time and money.

Since few of us will be actually responsible for how our cars get us where we want them to go, we also won't be responsible for much of the liability costs associated with that, which means, everyone's insurance rates go way down (except for the software company running the car's OS)

A lot of e-ink has been spilled documenting the supposed demise of traditional book publishing. It usually precedes lamentations on the dearth of reading in general and the doom that will inevitably spell for Western Civilization. Both arguments quickly collapse under even rudimentary examination. Thankfully, I’m not here to bore you with datasets and economic tables. The video below though, is very much tied to the future of publishing, how we’ll get our books, and even what role Amazon may play in all this. 

Many people will continue to read for pleasure in the future – written stories captivate us in a way that is irreducible by other means, and reading, like the creation of music, will continue to be an activity whose allure will be satiated by any with the will to do so. It is also inevitable that e-books will continue their climb in marketshare, and yes, at the expense of print editions. Amazon famously announced that sales of e-books had superceded those of bound editions back in Spring 2011. I hope, however, that publishing houses don’t regard this evolution with the same flailing panic the double –AA’s (RIAA and MPAA) have come to view the digitization of their media.

For those readers, and there will be many, who will still prefer their books to be physical objects that don’t require a battery or smell like plastic and glass, portable printers (or one similiar) in the video will come to occupy a huge piece of publishing and distribution real estate. If you can print any book, on demand, in minutes, stores can operate in a fraction of the space, with far less surplus stock and publishers won’t need to maintain warehouses of unsold inventory. This gives publishers the room to concentrate on marketing and discovery and eliminates the manufacturing and warehousing side of the business. Books can now exist entirely as data, to be downloaded to screens or on-site printers as ordered. Books, and the means they’re consumed, are evolving, not going extinct.

Where does Amazon fit into this? Amazon has distribution centers all over the country and their ultimate goal is same-day delivery for most orders, to every major city. Instead of warehousing and shipping multiple books, they can print any order as it’s placed in any center and ship it in hours with no costs associated to storage and stocking.  Enterprising bookstores can follow the same lead. (One near Harvard already does.)

Wired has a review of the new Borderlands 2 hybrid shooter that dropped this week, and the reviewer asks: "Does Borderlands exist in a little niche all its own, alienating both shooter and RPG fans alike with foreign gameplay concepts? Or is it a gateway drug, allowing nerds of both stripes to experience the joys of the other side, and ultimately leading to experimentation with harder stuff?"

The conceit of both Borderlands games is that you run around shooting things as in your standard FPS, but in an open-ended world where you take quests from NPCs, collect tons of loot which you equip for the boost in stats, and gain experience -- all to level your character up, to make him more powerful, so he can shoot bigger and badder badasses. The author in the article wonders if the FPS and RPG worlds would have a tough time blending, or whether devotees of one gameworld could coexist in another.

I would suggest what Borderlands accomplishes isn't so much the bridging of disparate genres, but the expansion of both (or to be honest, the evolution of the FPS). The hidden-in-plain-sight secret of RPGs is that people play them because: yes, they like to explore, role-play, aquire shinies, level up, etc ... but they also like to kill things. It's just in an RPG, when you kill things, you're rewarded for it. Not just the accomplishment of the kill but with the dice-roll chances of finding nice treasure or with gold, and usually a smidge of experience. This isn't to suggest that FPS players are satisfied with more witless entertainment; just that the reward options are a lot more diverse in the RPG world.

I got an offer from ATT today to switch my carrier. I don't normally get offers to switch and my first thought was: what a coincidence, my contract with my current carrier expires in a couple months. Of course it wasn't a coincidence, but it got me thinking. I wasn't unnerved that ATT knew; it's an innocuous bit of information about me and I've not exactly been coy with my friends about when my contract renews (mostly because it happens just in time to upgrade when somebody's new phone launches.) It (my contract info) was certainly nothing I was surprised to see getting passed around among companies. I understand, though, how quite a few people might be bothered by this.