I sometimes wonder if trying to build organizations that last a long time is the right thing to do. Businesses have well documented lifespans and if we recognize that fact, like with people, we can plan for different stages of a company's life and adjust the mix of skills needed. Letting businesses die means you can create new businesses that aren't hampered by the legacy culture of their past. New enterprises are far more agile than old enterprises.

Great post, Irving. I remember the time when we were chatting at IBM HQ about blogging, way back maybe early 2004? We both thought that there was nothing to it, that the hype about blogging was just hype. Don't knock it until you try it :) I wrote about some of my experiences with blogging here: http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2011/06/mediawatch_the_1.php It's amazing how much this simple practice has provided me with incredible experiences and insights in such abundance.

It's amazing how little we understand about capitalism. Especially the boom and bust cycles that are intrinsic to capitalism. In the chip industry, the boom and bust cycles happen like clockwork, every four years. And every four years the chip industry says "it will be different this time..." Karl Marx documented these boom and bust cycles in the mid-19th century yet we still think we can do away with them. If we do, then it's not capitalism, it'll be something else... What if capitalism retained its boom and bust cycles but their effect did not cause starvation, poverty, war, etc...? Can we keep the good w/o the bad? Or do we toss the baby with the bathwater each time...?

What happens when the incredible growth in productivity enabled by all our technologies reaches a point where not everyone needs to be involved in the work that supports our society? Is that a stagnation? It's a stagnation under our present economy but not if it were better planned. For example, the US has millions of foreclosed homes sitting empty. This is a massive resource that is being wasted. Why? It seems ludicrous for a society to build homes and then leave them empty. It's like the statues of Easter Island, massive outlays for that society in resources yet useless, and which eventually proved fatal to that civilization. Empty homes won't harm us in the same way, but they are an example of resources that aren't being used because the rules of our economy are based on creating artificial scarcities instead of harnessing all our technologies to create real abundance across many products and services, and drive down the cost of living for billions of people worldwide and moving them out of poverty. We don't have a choice with stagnation because of the boom and bust cycles of our economy. But if we could somehow change the rules of our economy then it would unlock a tremendous amount of innovation and creativity. How we do that I don't know but I'm sure we can figure that out.

Email does a pretty good job in linking a small group of people.

Surely it's the limits of your business model? Companies do not know how to react to disruptive (to-their-business-model) technologies. I've met with tens of thousands of companies large (Sam Palmissano) and small startups. Once a company knows how to make money they stick with it and they are so focused on it that they don't know how to deal with disruptive technologies. They are on a track and even though they see the train wreck way ahead they can't down-size fast enough or change tracks in time, they slam into the wreck. I see it all the time. It almost happened to IBM, it took Lou Gerstner ten hard years to move the company to a different track. Teaching an elephant to dance, indeed...

20 to 40 years away is not very long considering how far we have come. Our species is about 100K old yet we went from cave to moon and now to matrix in about 10,000 years. Wow. If we are so close to the Singularity then we are most probably already in it and we are running through various scenarios for any number of reasons.

Ravit, thanks for a great report, I missed the first half. It's an interesting topic and one that will affect a lot more people. I look forward to more discussions with you on this and related subjects.

Clearly, a horse is nothing like a sports car, but a brain is very much like a computer. Surely, we can learn a lot from hundreds of millions of years of evolution/experimentation.

Interesting comments from Jon Duke. But human neurons are in the multi-billion number range rather than hundreds of millions. But it is an interesting model to consider. Neurons aren't very fast. Yet what our brains can do cannot be matched by the largest numbers of the fastest supercomputers. Are we pursuing the wrong goal? Your excellent post talks about developing faster processors that are very low power consuming. Should we be instead focusing on the software rather than the speed of the individial processors? We could build a "neuron-scale" supercomputer running at just 2,000 calories a day that is 1,000 times as powerful as an exascale supercomputer. That's a big power saving :)

"We sometimes forget that disruptive innovations are indeed disruptive..." I find it incredible when sometimes people will tell me that their company is well aware of the disruption and that they can deal with it. Well, probably not. Disruptive technologies disrupt! You can see the train wreck ahead of you, and you will still slam into it. That's what few people/companies realize. Look at all the companies and people disrupted by PC technologies. IBM barely survived, it had to reinvent itself from a computer company to a computer services company. Often, you can't change fast enough, you can't downsize fast enough, you can't change your company culture fast enough, you can't shift to the new business model, you slam into the train wreck. That's what's happening to many media companies and there's not a whole lot they can do, or will be able to do. The Internet is a media technology and that's where the disruption is being seen. And the dirty little secret is that, now, every company is a media company. Every company is in the path of disruption, whether it makes diapers or publishes newspapers.

PS I mentioned you recently in a post: The Original Gangsters of Blogging :) http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2009/12/5years_the_old.php

There is another aspect to blogging that I find very interesting: it is very difficult to 'fake it.' If I don't like something but pretend that I do, it doesn't come out right, it doesn't read well, it feels like work to write it. You really do have to keep it real. I know this is a catch phrase but that doesn't keep it from being true. The more I blog the more genuine I am online, and offline. If you keep it real it really does make life a lot simpler, and it is a lot less work. I was wondering if you had noticed something similar or an affect of blogging on your offline life...