Institute For The Future

The Future of Presence

I spent a few days last week in Newcastle, England - a real gem of a town for tech history enthusiasts and urbanists. Newcastle is where the first steam trains and railways were built at the dawn of the industrial revolution. It was the demonstration of Robert Stephenson's Rocket in 1829 in Newcastle that you might mark as the beginning of mass mechanical mobility. Less famously, but relevant to our Future of Work theme, there is also a building on the quayside, that my friend Professor Andy Gillespie pointed out was one of the first office-only commercial buildings ever built.

 

I was there for the Design of the Times (Dott) 07 festival, a year-long event sponsored by England's Design Council, and organized by John Thackara (of Doors of Perception fame). It was an amazing exhibition at the remarkably restored Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, an old flour mill cum gallery. This year's Dott was organized around understanding sustainability, and featured a number of funded project that had been running throughout Northeast England all year.

 

My talk was the keynote for the first of a series of Dott 07 debates, on Movement. (others include Food, Health, and School). The topic I took up - "Must we keep moving?", as I thought more and more about it, became about the Future of Presence. As you'll see in the text of my speech below, I was trying to unpack some of our hopes and fears about the prospects of emerging immersive telecommunications technologies to displace high-energy, high-impact air travel.

 

Full text after the jump....

 

I'm delighted to have this opportunity to speak with you, becuase I think framing the issue as a dilemma around movement is the right way to look at it. While we gain so much from mobility - exposure to new ideas and people that stimulates innovation - we are also are quickly seeing that the way we are doing it now just isn't sustainable. And I also think that the situation is more complex that many in the world of transport or city planning realize.

 

So what I want to talk about is not the future of mobility but rather, the future of presence. By 'presence' what I mean, is that if movement or travel is a means - then presence is the end. And so I want to broaden the discussion of mobility to include technologies and practices of telecommunication - ways of being "present" at remote locations.

 

The Synergy of Telecommunications and Travel

 

Now the idea that presence is something that can be achieved by other methods than just physical travel isn't a new one. Over the last 50 years we've seen a simultaneous rise in both business telecommunications and travel. In fact, I don't think we appreciate that the second half of the 20th century was about two intertwined revolutions, the telecom revolution we hear about all the time but also a quieter mobility explosion, whose ripples are just now being felt in the big developing economies.

 

At many times people on one side of the debate or the other have wrongly forecast that one side of this equation would overtake the other - we would see the death of cities, the death of distance, and the end of travel. But what's important here is that these things happened because of each other, not in spite of each other. This particular kind of presence, international business presence, is facilitated by a hybrid set of infrastructure and human activities - making calls and getting on planes.

 

Now, today, the Internet, for all its distance-diminishing potential isn't really breaking this relationship. In fact. much of what we use our network technologies for is arranging travel. If you look in your email inbox or keep a diary of mobile phone calls - a safe bet is that 75-90 percent of the messages are about arranging travel or planning meetings. So right off from the start I want to break you of any mental habit of thinking that the Internet is going to make us stop moving.

If anything, its going to make things worse. For instance, the Internet is a fundamental part of low-cost airline business models. They are utterly dependent upon the efficiency of Internet bookings, and they are now the biggest driver of expansion in air travel from London to Lahore. For instance, on any given flight of Brazilan low-cost carrier Gol, 1 of every 3 or 4 passengers is flying for the first time ever.

 

Now, this issue of 'presence' is an intensely personal issue for me because last year I moved back to New York from California but kept my job at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. As a result, on top of all the travel I do for clients and conferences, I commute about once a month to California by plane. I'm what Eric von Hippel of MIT might call a 'lead user' of the air transportation system - the kind of person that seeks to hack and tweak the system.

 

And lately what I've been seeking is ways to hack the system so I don't have to actually use it. To be tele-present in Palo Alto as much as possible, both to deepen my collaborations with colleagues and to reduce the amount of time I spend in airports and on places.

 

But the biggest motivator has become the guilt of what my lifestyle is doing to the atmosphere. And this is a real dilemma, because just giving up my job and trying to find something closer to home isn't an option for me right now. My livelihood depends on travel - my market is small and scattered - and i have a baby coming next year, so I won't be switching careers anytime soon

 

And so this journey is making me realize how complex the interplay between virtual presence and physical presence is getting. I keep looking at the map of my social network on Dopplr, a site that lets people share trips, and realizing that young people are defining their very identity through mobility, and network-enhanced and augmented mobility. We need to appreciate just how deeply embedded this high degree of personal mobility has become in our lives, and plan for lots of it rather than pretending we can socially engineer ourselves to stop. This is not just my group here of globe-trotting hipsters, its also the millions of Britons who'll holiday in Spain and Greece this year.

 

And so to digress for a second, i want to define just how bad for the atmosphere air travel is. Earlier this year the Institute decided to do some internal brainstorming about how we could reduce our organization's carbon footprint. Many of the suggestions were things like printing on both sides of paper, or turning the air conditioning down. While noble, and in the right direction, I grew increasingly frustrated by the lack of understanding of how our business consumes energy.

 

So what I did was try to calculate our carbon footprint for various kinds of mobility. For our daily commuting, I guessed about 5 people taking a 60-mile round trip train ride and about 15 people driving 20 miles round trip. That works out to about 6 tons per month. Then I calculated the impact of a trip we took to Shanghai in March for a client workshop. The five business class round-trip seats represent about 16.5 tons of carbon.

 

The result are astonishing - just one trip is almost three months worth of our combined daily putterings to/from work and around the office. So what that told me is we really need to rethink the impact of our air travel and search for alternatives.

 

Must We Keep Moving?

 

So, there's the problem. We're addicted to high-energy mobility. But what can be done? There's a couple possibilities.

 

The first option is to use existing transportation solutions more efficiently. There are all kinds of incremental improvements we can do to make air travel more efficient, like make planes bigger (the new Airbus A380) or lighter (the Boeing 787).

 

Second, we could develop new transportation technologies or repurpose old ones. By most estimates, aviation biofuels are decades from the market, but there are some interesting ideas to move air cargo onto a new generation of airships that are 1/10th as carbon-intensive as jet planes, and fast enough for even many express shipments.

 

The third is to use offsets to mitigate the impacts of emissions from say jet travel, by financing something that will absorb carbon elsewhere - like replanting forests. I bought a TerraPass for $150 to offset 100,000 miles I expected to fly this year. Yet something tells me that this price can't be right. If it were, then global warming wouldn't be a problem. We're clearly not capturing all the externalities. Furthermore, there's been great debate about the efficiacy and accountability of carbon offsets. And they don't really send the right message - that we don't need to change our behavior at all.

 

But what's really interesting today that just a number of drivers - particularly for global corporations are coming together to make travel less appealing. These include:
-controlling rising travel costs and the impact of high oil prices
-addressing security risks of exposing employees to terror and aging infrastructure
-reducing executive burnout from travel
-and finally (and until now usually last in the US), carbon emission reduction

 

At the same time, we're seeing a number of very rich, immersive kinds of telecommunications mature:
-virtual worlds like Second Life
-sensors and robotic technologies to give computers ears, eyes and limbs
-high definition. multi-screen videoconferencing

 

And so this door opens for a fourth option of what we can do about the movement dilemma, which is is to try tweak that connection between business travel and telecommunications - even just a tiny bit, and try to substitute for some of the travel, or just slow growth. Essentialy, what this means is focusing our attention on re-designing the way we manage space and time to create 'presence'.

 

I think talking about 'presence' is useful because it gets us away from two dead ends of the debate that are so easy to fall down.

 

The first dead end is telling people they can't have mobility - some say this is the kind of massive social re-engineering we really need. But I haven't found a place yet on earth where its going to feasible anytime soon. China wants to produce 80 million cars a year by 2030, and is buying airliners as fast as they come off the assembly lines in Toulouse and Seattle.

 

The other dead end, is fantasizing that the Internet will become so rich a means of communication, that we'll all just sit at home and conduct our affairs online, and demand for movement will inevitable decline. This is a very popular view in Silicon Valley, though California ironically is a place where no one is actually 'from' - they all got in a plane or a car to get there. Parking at the airport on Thanksgiving or Christmas in San Francisco will prove that.

 

And so talking about 'presence' lets us transform the question from 'Must we keep moving?' to 'can we make moving part of a much larger set of tools, choices that we have for projecting presence?" Or alternately, 'how can we combine moving with other things to move less?'

 

So if you can, imagine a spectrum: one end where we're constantly engaged in high-energy intensity mobility like airplanes, the other end where we're locked in our bedrooms playing World of Warcraft. Its in this spectrum where we can create interesting combinations, leverage telecommunications technology to alter the way we move, that help us live our lives more sustainably. As a designer, imagine a dial that we can use to move along that spectrum - as we dial down movement, we dial up telepresence - but never fully substituting one for the other.

 

And so I want to spend the rest of my time briefly sharing some stories about 3 technologies that i think will play a major role in re-designing presence: virtual worlds, telerobotics and high definition videoconferencing.

 

Virtual Worlds

 

The last 5 years have seen the rise of a number of virtual worlds - simulated, immersive online environments that are essentially the 3-d web that was envisioned in science fiction dating back to William Gibson's Neuromancer. The most popular are game worlds like World of Warcraft, where millions of people are playing incredibly elaborate, immersive and social fantasy role-playing games.

 

But more general purpose 3-d web infrastructures like Second Life are now being built along an open, web-like model. These are environments in which both amateur and professional designers have free reign to build all kinds of additional functionality and create content.

 

What's important is that Second Life has become a place where people are experimenting with new forms of presence: virtual offices, virtual conference rooms, and virtual stores like you see here.

 

Even more interesting is that real world data and objects are being sensed and projected in real-time into Second Life. IBM, which is really pushing Second Life (so it can sell consulting and private versions) re-created the 2006 Wimbeldon center court, shot by shot in Second Life using real sensor data on ball position.

 

Interestingly, these worlds have real economies, and their currencies actually float and are convertible (Linden dollar is 267, WoW gold is 10.20 to the USD) Not quite as bad for American travellers as the UK!

 

Telerobotics

 

Looking the other way, we're also seeing virtual selves projecting themselves back into the real world.

 

Tele-robotic experiments like Eric Paulos' (UC Berkeley, now Intel) 'Personal Roving Presence' demonstrations shown at the bottom here - 10 years ago demonstrated the potential of having a physical presence in remote areas as well as a visual one.

 

This idea is just starting to enter the 'netizen meme pool, but we're seeing people hacking solutions like this robot created by a software developer in Nova Scotia to be telepresent in his office of a Toronto software developer. And consumer versions aren't far behind - the first consumer telerobotic product - the iRobot Connectr, is basically a Roomba vaccuum with a camera on top.

 

These seems silly now, but personally I've found a great desire for this kind of telepresence. With something like this, I could easily participate in the dynamic work culture of our office in Palo Alto - moving between meeting rooms, having water cooler conversations... which I can't do now because my videoconference setup there, while always on - is a fixed, desktop installation.

 

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