2020 technology-landscape

2020
TECHNOLOGY
LANDSCAPE
April 2015

Contents
Executive Summary
Retail and Finance
01
06
Trends Update02 Work Transformed03
IoT Special Feature
05
Innovation Special Feature04
The Future of Education
07 Healthcare of Things
08
CITRIX 2020 TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE | APRIL 2015

GUY BIEBER – MANAGING EDITOR / LEAD AUTHOR
Guy Bieber leads the production of the Technology Landscape as Citrix’s chief futurist. Guy is the Director of Strategy and
Architecture for Citrix Labs and the CTO Office. Guy drives strategy, advanced research, and architectural initiatives. Guy
previously served in the CTO Office at General Dynamics having worked on advanced military research and architected
billion dollar programs. Guy has worked on everything from large command and control centers, to wearable fighting systems,
to intelligence and surveillance systems, targets for the Patriot missile, and many other systems. His diverse background gives
him a unique view of the future.
REUVEN COHEN – AUTHOR (FINANCE AND RETAIL)
Reuven is recognized as an early innovator and thought leader in cloud computing. He leads worldwide advocacy efforts
for Citrix, with a particular focus on increasing the reach and influence of Citrix’s extensive portfolio of technology solutions
used by more than 330,000 customers and 100 million end users across the globe. A serial entrepreneur, Reuven founded
Enomaly, which was among the first to develop a self-service infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform in 2005, and was
acquired by Virtustream in 2012. Reuven also founded SpotCloud in 2011, the first commodity style cloud computing Spot
Market. Reuven writes The Digital Provocateur column for Forbes.com and co-hosts the DigitalNibbles Podcast, sponsored
by Intel. He is the co-founder of CloudCamp (300+ Cities around the Globe), the largest unconference where early adopters of
Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. He has served as a board member to the Information Technology Association
of Canada as well as a strategic advisor to Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com, York University, and others.
KURT ROEMER – AUTHOR (HEALTHCARE, SECURITY)
As Chief Security Strategist for Citrix Systems, Kurt Roemer leads the security, compliance, risk and privacy strategies for
Citrix products. As a member of the Citrix CTO Office, Roemer drives ideation, innovation and technical direction for
products and solutions that advance business productivity while ensuring information governance. An information services
veteran with more than 20 years experience, his credentials include the Certified Information Systems Security Professional
(CISSP) designation, he served as Commissioner for the US public-sector CLOUD2 initiative and he led efforts to develop
the PCI Security Standards Council Virtualization Guidance Information Supplement for the payment card industry while
serving on the Board of Advisors. Kurt is an active member of the ETSI NFV (Network Function Virtualization) specification
team, and is Rapporteur for developing NFV Security and Trust Guidance.
TRENTON CYCHOLL – AUTHOR (EDUCATION)
Trenton has been part of the Citrix team for over 17 years. He has a proven track record of successfully implementing technology
and solutions that have helped Citrix scale and transform. Currently, he is Managing Director of Apps and Integration
Management within Worldwide Operations. His responsibilities include enterprise applications, integration technologies,
business intelligence technologies, and application architecture. His innovative leadership has brought evolution to Citrix
through the use of cloud technologies, mobility platforms, and strategic use of APIs at Citrix. Trenton holds a Bachelor of
Science in Mechanical Engineering from Florida Atlantic University.
Staff
MATT HYNE – AUTHOR (EDUCATION, HEALTHCARE)
Matt Hyne is the Director of Strategy and Communications in the Citrix Technology Office and a member of the Citrix
CTO Office. Matt is responsible for researching new technology and market opportunities that will develop into new
business areas for Citrix. Matt is also the co-lead for the Citrix Future of Healthcare initiative that is looking at applying
new technology innovations to improve healthcare. Prior to Citrix, Matt held R&D leadership roles at Cisco, Ericsson and
CSIRO where he developed some of the most innovative technologies that make what the Internet is today. Matt was
also General Manager, Asia with Myriad Group where he led commercial engagements with major service providers and
mobile vendors including Samsung, LG, Vodafone and Softbank.
KYARA-LOMER-CAMARENA – COPY EDITOR
Kyara Lomer-Camarena is the strategist for the Information Experience team at Citrix, where she interacts with customers and
across teams to create and curate top-quality technical information experiences. Kyara is also the communications director
for Citrix CubeFree, an app that helps mobile workers find great places to work outside the office. Prior to Citrix, Kyara was an
award-winning journalist with Tribune Co., where she has been a reporter, TV correspondent, newspaper editor, and managing
editor of a parenting magazine. She has created more than 10 new publications and played a critical role in shifting traditional
print journalism to a community-based online experience.
DEBORA AOKI – ART PRODUCTION
As Senior Information Experience Designer at Citrix, Deb uses both her 15+ years of experience in interactive/online content
development and marketing, plus her 20+ years of experience in comics/illustration to facilitate brainstorming, develop
storyboards for user testing, and illustrate user personas, customer journeys, and flow scenarios to drive customer-centric
product development.
DON CLAVETTE – DOCUMENT PRODUCTION
Don Clavette is a Senior Graphic Designer who brings a wealth of experience in both traditional art and digital design to
the team and is known for his imaginative illustrations and expert draftsmanship. He joined Citrix in 2002 and has since
worked on designs for print, web, events and motion graphics. Don’s prior experience includes illustrating book and
magazine covers for more than 10 years for publishers such as Ballantine Books (Del Rey), Berkley Publishing Group and
Warner Books to mention a few.
CITRIX 2020 TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE | APRIL 2015

CITRIX 2020 TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE | APRIL 2015 3
Executive Summary
01
“Innovation - Dramatically and irreversibly changing the
world for the better.”
-Chris Hylen
Since last report we landed on a
comet, saw the first car printed in
just 44 hours, India went to Mars
for 9 times less than the U.S. mission,
Apple entered the wearable market
with the Apple Watch, robot sales
assistants arrived at Lowe’s, nanobots
are under development to treat
cancer, small nano-satellites image
the Earth every 24 hours, Microsoft
HoloLens jumped into the intersection
of gaming and wearable technology,
3-D printing got 25 times faster,
and so many more amazing things.
Innovators are moving at an
astonishing pace to improve the
world. This brings us to this year’s
theme for the Technology Landscape:
Creating Your Future. We want to
provide you the information and tools
not only to anticipate the future but
to create it.
-- Trends Update
-- Work Transformed
-- Internet of Things
-- Innovation
-- Finance and Retail
-- Education
-- Healthcare
-- What It All Means
IN THIS CHAPTER
FPO

CITRIX 2020 TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE | APRIL 2015CITRIX 2020 TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE | APRIL 2015 54
Each year, the Citrix CTO Office updates you on the latest trends. This year, we added a special feature on work transformation,
talking about the forces shaping the workforce and the impacts of those forces. We added a special feature on innovation
best practices from the outliers who consistently get unusual results and who outperform everyone else: moonshots, unicorns,
and the crazy ones. There is also a special feature on the Internet of Things, which represents the biggest expansion of
computing and IT ever. We also will give you our view of these changes’ impacts on various verticals, including finance/
retail, healthcare, and education.
If you go on this journey with us, we will help you make sense of these dramatic changes. We will make your work more
meaningful and five times more productive. We will help your company reinvent itself through innovation, and as always,
we strive to help you work better and live better.
Trends Update
We see new, specialized computing architectures (neuromorphic,
vision, hearing, no power) dramatically changing how we
can sense and understand the world. We predict that simple
cameras and mics will be replaced with depth cameras and
directional audio in the next five years. Just like smart TVs have
all but replaced TVs, simple mics and cameras will be a thing
of the past. These sensing gains represent the end of data
entry and the beginning of computing that understands us,
improves our senses, and creates anticipatory experiences.
We believe there will be tremendous productivity gains driven
by hybrid intelligence and robotics. Hybrid intelligence will
enable specialized artificial intelligence and people to work
together in ways that dramatically outperform either alone.
Machines are surpassing humans at some tasks. Deep learning
over massive data sets is able to build super-human capabilities
for some human tasks such as voice recognition and facial
recognition. The interface to people will open up dramatically
as the virtual world and physical world blend with technologies
such as Magic Leap and Microsoft HoloLens. These interfaces
will allow us to maximize use of our spatial memory to process
more information, understand more, and work faster.
The highest-impact robotics that will occur in the next five
years are driverless cars. This will forever change public and
private transportation, delivery, safety, parking, traffic, and
car utilization (we currently utilize our cars 5 percent of the
time, while they sit idle 95 percent of the time). The robots
are here; they’re just not widely distributed. Robots are
invading sales and inventory, cleaning, security, manufacturing,
agriculture, health care, homes, and humanoid robotics are
making great strides forward. This combined with cheap
renewable energy will create productivity gains like we
have never seen before.
Work Transformed
We see tremendous forces reshaping work as we know it.
Work is no longer a place. For employees, we see more
meaningful jobs, coping with “infotoxication,” freelancing,
remote/flex work, productivity improvement, and automation.
For employers, this includes accelerating the speed of
innovation, better use of facilities, and major IT shifts (cloud,
SaaS, BYO). These forces are driving a workplace flip, where
employees co-locate 20 percent of the time and work
elsewhere 80 percent of the time. This may be at customer
sites, partner sites, coworking spaces, or home, often allowing
them to reclaim hours of travel time each day. The office is
becoming a reconfigurable activity-oriented workspace
designed for collaboration. Workers are losing large amounts
of productive time because of unnecessary email (1.2 hours
a day), ineffective meetings (1.6 hours a day), and interruptions
(2 hours a day). That is over half our typical day. No wonder
people are compelled to use mobile technology to reclaim
downtime for work.
This rebalancing will drive changes in the individual/
collaborative work ratio to optimize productivity. We believe
the quantified self-movement will extend to the other half
of our lives—in other words, work. Quantified work will be
like having a confidential executive assistant that helps free
cognitive bandwidth (keep us present), optimize for flow (five
-time increase in productivity), and help us process information
at our fastest productive rate. This virtual executive coach
will be extended with specialized hybrid intelligence that
will blend human and artificial intelligence together to
significantly outperform either alone.
Innovation
This year’s landscape is themed “Creating Your Future,” so we
thought we would share all of the cool stuff we have learned
about innovation. You probably already know about lean
startup, design thinking, and agile development. We looked
to role models to find the outliers of innovation, including
PayPal, Apple, Google, venture capitalists, DARPA, PG, and
more. We have been seeking unicorns, moonshots, and the
crazy ones to create innovation gravity. Gravity is a key force
behind the formation of planets and life. Innovation gravity
aligns the forces necessary to create continuous innovation in
your company. In addition, we discuss the advantages and
pitfalls of “intra-preneurship” and the amazing amount of
innovation activities at Citrix.
Internet of Things
The entirety of the physical world is coming online rapidly.
Gartner predicts we will go from 4.9 billion network connected
things today to 25 billion things in 2020. Smart things will
soon outnumber every other kind of computing device,
generating more data, causing more network traffic, and
using more cloud computing and storage. The Internet of
Things (IoT) promises efficiency gains, productivity gains,
and better experiences by closing real-world control loops
to enable new levels of automation. Things with APIs add
to the growing number of cloud-based services with APIs.
“Integrate Everything” will be the new mantra where cloud
services and services provided by things work seamlessly
together. IoT will represent the end of data entry as we will
sense and collect all the data in real time. This represents
the biggest expansion of IT ever by bringing operational
technology to industries that traditionally did not have IT,
such as agriculture, construction, and city infrastructure.
Hybrid intelligence will enable
specialized artificial intelligence and
people to work together in ways that
dramatically outperform either alone.
• Self-Selected
• Troublemakers
• Small to go Big
• Friends
1 Many viable independent tries
2 Stories not ideas
3 Teams not ideas
4 Burn the ships to embrace risk
5 Learning, not failure
6 Think bigger
7 Data-driven value creation
8 Scr-happiness
9 Open innovation
10 Foster collective genius
Innovation Gravity Top 10
Pareto’s
Law
1% to 4%
Timebox
• Good Questions
• Prototype, Don’t Pitch
• Accelerated Hacking
• Iterate with Customers
• Time-boxed Experiments• AARRR Metrics
• Adoption / Value
before Revenue
• Creative Abrasion
• Creative Agility
• Creative Resolution
• Crazy Secret
• Painful Constraint
• Break Assumptions
• Seek Intersections
• Seek Perspectives
• Avoid Competition
• Disruption Bias
20% EFFORT
80%
RESULT
Illustration by Guy Bieber

What It All Means
Today is amazing, and the future will be even more amazing. We hope to leave you inspired, in awe, and with some
practical advice. The software-defined workspace will continue to improve your quality of life and business productivity.
Here is advice for individuals for over the next five years:
Learn faster – Leverage the tools that allow you to learn new skills faster.
Embrace the quantified self for work – Seek the tools that will give you mass productivity gains.
Rebalance work – Rebalance your workday for big productivity gains.
Leverage hybrid intelligence – Learn to work with AI to dramatically increase your performance.
Prepare for intimate computing that knows you and anticipates
your needs.
Enable robotic co-workers – Prepare for robots entering your workplace. They will offload mundane
tasks and create different jobs.
Here is our advice for companies for over the next five years:
Flip the workplace – Enable the tooling to get the most out of your remote / flex workforce, create
better activity based workspaces, and reduce your facilities cost.
Seek productivity gains – IoT, hybrid intelligence, and robotics promise mass productivity gains over
the next five years.
Create innovation gravity – Use innovation best practices to make disruptive innovation part of how
you do business.
Please accept our deepest gratitude for going on this journey with us, and please tell us what you think!
For things, location really matters, and location will be
a major factor in the sharing and onboarding of things.
Location is as important for sensors on a pipeline as it is to
fleet tracking sensors or to the light bulb or to the TV you
want to control. Low power, power mining, and wireless-
power technologies will soon break the last cable to things:
the power cord. All this new sensing will create privacy
challenges, but we will come to good compromises. In the
process, we hope to make dumb things smarter without
adding complexity (for instance, onboarding, security,
interaction, sharing, and maintenance). IoT includes the
challenges of connecting devices, automating workflows,
and learning behaviors. Intelligence without complexity is
the core challenge of IoT.
Finance and Retail
One of the biggest disruptions occurring today is being felt
in the retail space, and the stakes are huge. The estimated
global retail sales market is forecast to hit $28 trillion by
2018. Globally, almost 6 billion people now have access to
a mobile phone. The next generation of retail and the money
to be made are enormous. A cashless future for businesses
may require the complete overhaul of how many in retail
think about payments. In developed countries, money has
been digital for sometime, but in the rest of the world, cash
is still king. As mobile technology drives a shift in how we
buy things, the revenue that the payments industry extracts
could grow tremendously. The growing use of wearable smart
technology may allow for nothing more than what you’re
wearing as form of ID. Payment authorization could be
nothing more than a smart watch, ring, or glasses—simply
tap, swipe, or blink an eye.
Education
Education is one of the last major industries to experience
significant technology disruption and transformation. For
years, the education system has been modeled after factories
and “manufacturing” knowledgeable individuals for use in
the work environment. We are moving to a world where
education is more about learning experiences personalized
to the student. Learning can no longer be a set amount of
time that aligns to specific foundational degrees or training;
it can occur anytime and will continue to occur while
“students” enter the workforce. Technologies are bringing
contextual opportunities to the learning experience as well
as enhancing the learning experience and the “classrooms”
where learning occurs.
Healthcare
Deeply insightful data from “Healthcare of Things” is
transforming the management of personal health for
individuals, caregivers, and medical professionals. Wearables
will enable doctors and insurance companies to have a
heavily incentivized 24/7/365 picture of your key health
parameters. The routine office visit and annual physical will
be retired—and instead will be performed continuously.
Transformational medical insights and research will be
globally enabled through massive volumes of continuously
collected sensor-based data. But all is not rosy—traditionalists
will fight this new model in the name of regulations and
resistance to change, citing a longstanding healthcare
model. Security and privacy challenges abound, and your
healthcare data may be used against you if not properly
protected and authorized only for specific uses.
As mobile technology drives a shift in
how we buy things, the revenue that
the payments industry extracts could
grow tremendously.
Transformational medical insights and
researchwillbegloballyenabledthrough
massive volumes of continuously
collected sensor-based data.

Trends Update
02
-- Evolved Computing
-- Hybrid Intelligence (HInt)
-- Aware, Anticipatory, and Amazing Experiences
-- The Bots Are Here Now, Just Not Widely Distributed
-- Middle Class Renaissance
-- Big Impact of Small Things
-- The New Utilities: Compute, Networks, Free Decentralized Energy
-- Security / Mobile Security
IN THIS CHAPTER
“The pace of technological process is decoupled from
the economy.”
-Steve Jurvetson
Each year we highlight the key
trends and predictions. It’s been
another exciting year with many
past predictions coming true and
a finer focus being put on the
future. Each year we examine where
investments are going for startups
(2x2 innovation: 2 years and $2M
to disrupt), prize-based innovation
(4x4 innovation: 4 years and $4M to
disrupt), exponential trends (things
that double every one to two years),
and intersections of technology.
The chart below summarizes the
key trends, and the sections below
explain these trends in more detail.

NEUROMORPHIC CHIPS (NPU)
The Human Brain Project has made significant progress in mapping the brain; they have
achieved a 20-micrometer detailed map of the human brain. We have achieved a 300,000-
molecule model of a single synapse. This knowledge is being used to design new computing
architectures. One example of these new architectures are neuromorphic chips, which are
modeled after the neural networks of the human brain. DARPA Project Synapse with a
neuromorphic computer chip gives a small quadcopter the ability to navigate indoors. Google
and Stanford are applying neural networks to image understanding and can decode CAPTCHAs
with a 99.8% accuracy. Though neural networks can run on traditional computing architectures,
they are much more efficient on neuromorphic chips. The United States Department of
Defense expects these chips to be truly autonomous machines.
IBM’s neuromorphic chip has 4,000 cores (mimicking 1 million neurons and 256 million
synapses). This chip processed the DARPA NEoVision2 Tower dataset, which recognized
objects with 80 percent accuracy, processing a 30-frames-per-second (real time) video, and
only consuming 63mW of power. That is a truly amazing accomplishment for visual computing.
Qualcomm and others are investing in these neuromorphic architectures to put vision and
hearing coprocessors into phones.
REPURPOSING GRAPHICS PROCESSING UNITS (GPU)
Highly parallel GPU architectures are being reprovisioned to solve new problems. NVIDIA
outperformed Google Brain (1,000 servers, 16,000 cores simulating 1 billion synapses—enough
for a honey bee; the human brain requires 100 billion synapses and 100 trillion connections)
with 12 GPUs (18,000 CUDA cores) using 100 times less energy at 100 times less cost. Currently,
neural networks are cartoons of the brain because we still don’t know how the brain works,
said Andrew Ng. There are a tremendous amount of GPUs idling in client devices (thin clients,
PCs, and laptops). We have even had vendors request the ability to run workloads (like actuary
calculations) on these devices when not in use. Imagine a compute buyback program to
handle peak cloud loads.
One of today’s most interesting use of GPU/neuromorphic chips is in deep learning, an
approach to machine learning where no feature engineering is required. It is at its most
interesting when used with massive amounts of data. Andrew Ng spoke of a Baidu voice
recognition project that ignored phonemes by leveraging more than 100,000 hours of
speech, which was unprecedented, as was the ability of that system to recognize language
in noisy scenarios.
QUANTUM COMPUTING WANTS YOUR KEYS
Microsoft and Google are aggressively working on their own quantum computers. Google
has been making breakthroughs in making quantum computing more reliable. This type of
computing will be able to crack encryption keys very quickly. This could be five to 10 years
away, but this will dramatically challenge today’s security and encryption architectures and
potentially lead to next-generation encryption.
POWERLESS
As the Internet of Things distributes computing everywhere, supplying power to these devices
becomes a real problem. Several companies are trying to overcome this limitation to create
Evolved Computing
Moore’s law already drives today’s computation to double every 1.5 years, but we are now seeing curve-jumping compute
architectures. These specialized architectures can solve various kinds of problems faster with much less power than traditional
architectures. We are seeing compute architectures customized to solve specific problems. We expect dramatic compute
architecture changes in the next five years that will affect IoT, mobile, networks, and cloud computing workloads. Workloads
that will enable hearing, vision, contextual sensing, and driverless cars. We also will see vision and speech coprocessors on
a chip bring computing to the edge of the network.
GOOGLE AND STANFORD
ARE APPLYING NEURAL
NETWORKS TO IMAGE
UNDERSTANDING
AND CAN DECODE
CAPTCHAS WITH A
99.8%
ACCURACY
NEIL JACOBSTEIN – ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE (PART 1 OF 2)

more autonomous and green IoT solutions. Psikick is a batteryless sensor chip for IoT that runs
on less than 1 percent of comparable chips’ power. EnOcean is building a suite of technologies
for energy-harvested IoT. Energy harvesting collects energy from the environment through
many means, including solar, motion, heat, and even RF energy. EnOcean includes core wireless
sensor technology and a suite of home security products. In truth, energy is everywhere;
we just need better ways to access it.
MAKERS AND MICROCONTROLLERS
We are seeing tremendous innovation in the easy to use microcontroller space. The Arduino
has made it easy for amateurs to connect analog and digital IO to computers. Cell phone class
computing is showing up in many maker platforms, including the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone
Black, Intel Edison, Intel Galileos, and many others. This inexpensive, powerful, and simple use
computing allows makers and entrepreneurs to rapidly prototype their ideas. This is driving
a tremendous wave of innovation in hardware.
Hybrid Intelligence (HInt)
Last year we discussed attention economics, where we have more information coming at us
than we can filter, process, or act upon. We are in an environment of surprise and information
growth that we can’t handle without help. Hybrid Intelligence (HInt) enables computers and
people to work together to significantly outperform what either can do separately. Computers
continue to augment our intelligence and decision making. Automated intelligent specialists
will work with us to solve bigger problems, cope with greater quantities of information, and
outperform computers or humans alone. We saw that moderately skilled computer chess
programs and human players working together could beat chess champions and the most
advanced computers. Hybrid intelligence helps us make more connections, which are the
essence of creativity. We are seeing tremendous advancement in understanding unstructured
data and making inferences with everything from IBM Watson to Quid. We are moving
from search to found, from found to answered, and from answered to done. What is
possible is becoming a matter of the quality of questions we can ask as opposed to what
the system can answer.
Befriending or Fearing AI
There is a lot of fear around AI. Some books like “Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence
and the End of the Human Era” envision a very dystopian world where we create something
that grows in intelligence so rapidly that it soon outsmarts us and takes over (not just reaching
human intelligence, but superhuman intelligence). IoT and robotics mean computer-controllable
and computer-connected things can sense and manipulate the physical world. There certainly
is an AI war going on for everything from search to stock market trading. Ultimately, whoever
controls intelligence and connects to the controllable physical world will have huge impact
on everyone. For now, AI boils down to counting, statistics, and relating things (Deep Neural
Nets, Bayesian Networks, Hidden Markov Models, Random Forest, etc.). There is no intent
or nonhuman goals in it now (it is simply as good or ill intended as its creators). The benefits
of this kind of AI to help us better understand and manage our world are tremendous.
Artificial intelligence that can self-replicate, self-improve, and
have intent hasn’t arisen yet (though we have seen aspects of
each of these in isolation). Most successful people realize that
serving others is how they can have a lasting impact; perhaps
that is what a super-intelligence would conclude. That is why
the once richest man in the world (Bill Gates) spends his time
and money trying to solve world problems. Alternatively, it could
be like the movie “Her,” in which the artificial intelligence finds
humans painfully slow to interact with and boring. They simply
decide to leave and do their own thing. For now, we haven’t
crossed the true AI bridge yet.
Assistants Become Specialized
Computers will become colleagues, coaches, and executive
assistants for all kinds of professionals, including doctors, lawyers,
artists (music creation), etc. Laws are getting so complex that
software is being developed to help lawyers merely understand
the complexity of law. Services are being developed to significantly
reduce the cost of e-discovery. Your next lawyer may be more
AI than a person. In fact, IBM Watson is being trained to be a
C-level assistant, participating in and contributing to executive
meetings. Pandora uses its specialized knowledge of what
people listen to to help musicians plan tours (for the price of a
free concert). Sports analytics help athletes optimize performance
(like Moneyball on steroids). Algorithms are helping design things
people couldn’t do alone. For software developers, DARPA is not
only working on auto code completion, but also auto-code
suggestion (anticipating your intent and writing the code for
you). This will become more than software specialized for a
particular field, but instead intelligent assistants that dramatically
improve performance. This is due to improved natural language
processing and learning technologies that enable contextual
understanding and anticipatory behaviors.
Present, Focused, and Optimized: Anticipating So You
Can Be Present
The best executive assistants allow their executive to be
completely present. These assistants have everything planned
and anticipate needs before their bosses realize they even
have them. The average worker will soon have these kinds of
assistants available to them virtually, whether they’re building
software or building roads. This includes helping us optimize
focus and performance through awareness of emotional and
mental states (some robots can now understand trust and
regret). Though we think we are good multitaskers, only about
2.5 percent of us do it well. These assistants will act more like
encouraging coaches that empathize and help us achieve our
best performance.
“I don’t work
on preventing AI
from turning evil for
the same reason
that I don’t work
on combating
overpopulation on
the planet Mars.”
– Andrew Ng
“There is no end to
our desire to have
computers answer
more complex
questions.”
– Eric Schmidt

Overcoming Cognitive Bias
We are all blinded and served by our intuition. The trick is knowing the difference.
– Guy Bieber,
Senior Director of Strategy
and Innovation at Citrix
Our intuition both serves us and deceives us. We can’t always tell the difference, but hybrid
intelligence could help us overcome these human cognitive limitations. There are more than
50 different cognitive biases that can negatively affect our perception. Biases such as
anchoring (how a previous event anchors perception of a following event) or confirmation
bias (actively seeking things that agree with our mental models) can be detected and
potentially overcome by hybrid intelligence acting as an impartial observer. Overcoming
anchoring in an ideation session will generate 20 percent more ideas that are 40 percent
more original, according to the book Creative Conspiracy.
New HInT Cloud Workloads
We believe HInT will drive new cloud workloads (like IBM Watson and viv) and will further
move us from apps to an invisible servant that automatically anticipates and serves our needs
in real time. For example, when someone says they are hungry in the car, the system
recommends restaurants we have gone to in the past and new ones based on everyone’s
preferences. The movement away from apps—or rather the invisibility of apps—actually
creates a better user experience. People will do less work (selecting and starting apps) to
get better results more quickly.
Aware, Anticipatory, and Amazing Experiences
Contextual computing has long been a dream of computer scientists—computers that
understand us and our situation, and anticipate our needs. When computers see, hear, and
understand, everything changes. Next-generation systems will include specialized vision
and hearing coprocessors. The dream is slowly coming true. Movidious, Intel, and Freescale
are all working on vision co-processing chips. Here we will discuss how seeing cameras and
hearing mics will replace their simple counterparts. We will also describe how the world itself
is becoming a display (augmented reality). We will talk about wearables and the rise of intimate
computing. We will begin to see how all of these technologies will make interacting with
computers much more natural.
SEEING CAMERAS WITH DEPTH
Smart depth cameras will be the norm in five years. Smart depth cameras will be used for
everything from mapping a place to recognizing people and objects to eye tracking. Depth
cameras with appropriate software will provide deep spatial understanding. The first
generation of the sensors included things like Microsoft Kinect. Intel’s main focus at the 2015
Consumer Electronics Show was the Intel Real Sense depth camera. This allowed them to
3-D model people in real time and insert them in virtual environments. Intel showed this
camera embedded in tablets and laptops. Google Project Tango is adding depth cameras to
smart phones. At CES, many vendors were bringing less than $100 eye trackers to market
(eyetribe for instance).
It’s not just depth understanding that is making these sensors amazing. These cameras can see
your pulse, build 3-D models, detect emotion, detect things, detect people, and navigate
the world. Google achieved autonomous indoor flight of quadcopters with Project Tango.
Companies like Dyson are adding vision systems to enable robotic vacuums (there are many
light detection and ranging—LIDAR—based robotic vacuums on the market already).
Computers can now recognize faces more accurately than people, and this is becoming a
real privacy issue. Michael Rubinstein created software to detect people’s pulse or detect
the breath of a baby from normal video feeds. From high-rate video feeds, he is even able
to visually capture sound off anything that moves with sound (like a potato chip bag; this
requires high-rate video capture). Google is able to predict crime rates just by looking at
Google Street View, which creates images from the visual light range. We will likely see
more multispectral cameras with infrared capabilities (the Microsoft Kinect already has
infrared cameras, but others are adding this to phones).
HEARING MICROPHONES WITH DIRECTION
Smart beam-steering microphones that separate sounds by direction will be common in
the next five years. We are already see this technology in gaming with Microsoft Kinect, in
conference rooms with Clearone, and in the home with Amazon Echo. This enables
computers to listen to many conversations at once (the robot Asimo can understand
multiple speakers simultaneously; humans are limited to about two conversations) and
locate and identify sounds. Using cell phones and a bit of audio software, Topher White
was able to listen for illegal logging to save the rainforest. Directional sound has long
been used in the military to detect where sniper fire comes from (Boomerang system).
Speech recognition quality keeps getting better, and voice-based assistants are becoming
more popular, including Microsoft Cortana, Apple Siri, Google Now, and Amazon Alexa.
Human language recognition is in the range of 96 percent to 98 percent. Depending on
the study, English machine recognition is in the range of 95 percent to 99.4 percent but
is far worse for other languages. Natural language processing is predicted to be a $9.8
billion market by 2018.
THE WORLD IS THE DISPLAY - VISUAL SURFACES GET BIG
We are visual thinkers yet, the majority or creation is still done by typing text, whether
coding or writing a book.
– Guy Bieber
Fifty-inch+ 4K displays, large touch systems (like MS Surface Hub), projected systems, and
virtual reality headsets and augmented glasses will significantly increase the spatial interface
between people and machines. A large 4K display with a thin client stick (like the new Google
Chrome Stick) could be a pretty impressive workspace. These large displays surfaces are going
to drive new interaction models, information visualization, and information manipulation
software paradigms on the scale of the interface change that happened with multi-touch
smart phones. Projection mapping (like Microsoft RoomAlive) and augmented reality
transforms small spaces into huge ones to surround people in information. This will enable
new computing interaction models.
Flawless augmented reality is almost here with Microsoft HoloLens and Magic Leap. Solutions
that occlude vision for virtual reality are here in large numbers (Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR,
Sony Project Morpheus, etc). At CES, many vendors had headgear that transformed a
smartphone into a virtual reality head-tracking system. Google even gave away a cardboard
system for Android phones at Google IO. This technology can create a large-screen gaming
experience or immersive virtual work experience anywhere. Imagine a meeting where people
are projection-mapped into your whole room, and you interact with walls full of virtual content.
MICROSOFT DAY OF
PRODUCTIVITY
$9.8
MARKET PREDICTED FOR
NATURAL LANGUAGE
PROCESSING BY 2018
Large displays
surfaces are
going to drive
new interaction
models, information
visualization, and
information
manipulation
software paradigms
on the scale of
the interface
change that
happened with
multi-touch
smart phones.
BILLION
43.4%
THE GLOBAL WEARABLE
MARKET IS GROWING AT
We expect doctors
to prescribe more
wearables as
medical devices
in the future
CAGR forecasted to
be $30.2B in 2018

Companies like Fidelity are already designing software to help you visualize your investments
with these technologies. Others are writing software to enable sketching in 3-D. This represents
the intersection of gaming and productivity software. It means we can dramatically increase
the spatial memory interface between computers and people (spatial memory is our highest
bandwidth interface and represents a huge opportunity for us to cope with more information).
This has the potential to be a transformative productivity enhancer.
INTIMATE COMPUTING: WEARABLES / EMBEDDABLES
The long predicted rise of wearables is upon us. Every major vendor made or announced a
wearable in 2014: Moto 360, Samsung Gear, Microsoft Band, Apple Watch, etc. According to
IDC research 19.2 million shipments this year will build to a global market of 111.9 million
units by 2018. The global wearable market is growing at a 43.4% CAGR forecasted to be
$30.2B in 2018. We see new principles arising for intimate computing:
1. Superhuman extension of you (hear better, see better, produce more, etc)
2. The world is the interface (moving focus to the world not the device)
3. Act cool and be polite (aware of when it’s a good time to “talk”)
4. Respect the human condition (intimate computing requires privacy trust)
5. Keep me present (anticipate for me)
6. The right fit (like clothing it needs to be comfortable)
7. Invisible or fashionable
We are seeing a variety of worn, attached, projected, and ingested / implanted devices
(mainly medical). The uses of these intimate computing devices are endless.
Fitness and Health
Consumer wearables initially focused on fitness and track movement or steps. Now these
systems can detect pulse, temperature, and cardiac rhythm. They can talk to your fitness
equipment and understand your workout. Wearables are starting to move into the medical
domain. Accelerometers can be used to detect epileptic seizures and request help (empathica),
to capture gestures to control things, monitor sleep, assist in physical therapy, help athletes
optimize performance, etc. Google is working on a contact lens that will continually monitor
blood glucose; this gives doctors and patients continuous feedback.
Many wearables are being designed to help the blind using sonar to acoustically (range
sensing wrist band and creating a 3-D soundscape of the environment) or haptically
(vibration) tell them how to avoid collisions and which way to go. Directional audio can
help the deaf understand what’s around them, such as a car honking its horn, for instance
(car to pedestrian communication to help people cross the street safely). There has even
been an embeddable brain interface that allows paraplegics to control their world wirelessly
via a 48 mbps brain interface that operates on 30 mW of power. For elderly care, wearables
allow children and caregivers to know if their parent is conscious, healthy, able to get out
of bed, etc. We expect doctors to prescribe more wearables as medical devices in the future;
asking “Are you OK?” may become an archaic phrase because they will already know.
End of Passwords / Keys
Mobile phones and wearables are becoming the tokens of physical logons (something you have).
Combined with biometric fingerprints, cardiac signature (nymi or Valencell), etc., wearables
are significantly reducing our need to enter passwords (something you are). Microsoft
Windows 10 will support FIDO to enable this password-free world for Windows. Some people
are even experimenting with embeddable RFID to get rid of physical keys (don’t try this at
home). Your mobile phone and web browser are becoming the keystores for your hundreds
of accounts. Big changes are coming in this space.
Delightful Retail
A recent WIRED article explained how Disney redesigned their retail experience with their
new Magic Band. Disney’s design goal was to remove all the friction from a Disney vacation
experience. Everything from paperless entry to the park to restaurants that know who you
are. You can make a reservation for a restaurant and order food on your phone. When you
show up, the host greets you by name, and you can sit anywhere. Your food automatically
starts being prepared and magically shows up at your table. You don’t have to wait for a
check or even pull out your wallet to pay. The system allows Disney to track you in the park
and create very personalized experiences for you. Imagine a “chance” encounter between
your kid and their favorite Disney character; the Disney character will even know their
name and what they like.
Safer Driving
Many driver-assisted features are available in cars today. Wearable headsets with accelerometers
will be able to tell if you nod off while driving. Wrist wearables will be able to detect sleep
indicators, such as a drop in heart rate or lack of movement. These sensors will also be
able to detect hard braking, slingshot lane changes, and other indicators of insurance risk.
Of course, self-driving cars will obsolete many of these technologies.
UNDERSTANDING YOU, ANTICIPATING NEEDS, AND NATURAL INTERACTION
With the smart sensing and machine learning in mobile computing, wearable computing, and
the Internet of Things, computers are going to be aware of what is going on, be able to learn
your habits, anticipate your needs, and create amazingly delightful experiences. Gartner calls
this cognizant computing and believes it will have a tremendous impact on mobile computing.
It will also set the bar in consumer space for productivity software in the business space.
What’s an App
Anticipatory computing represents a shift in what we mean by applications. On a desktop,
the file system acted as an index of what we could do; we went to a file system and clicked
a file to launch an app. Mobile apps are the directory of what we could do; we click on an
app, and it sends us to content. In the anticipatory world, the app and data boundary vanishes,
and we are presented with activity-appropriate content and interfaces. Understanding you
is the next step in intimate computing. Google Now presents what is most appropriate
based on context derived from our email and web browsing; it provides a glanceable card
that might tell us the status of our flight or a package we ordered. Software that understands
our intent by learning our habits will be able to do much more. It will know when we get up
MICHAEL RUBINSTEIN: SEE
INVISIBLE MOTION, HEAR
SILENT SOUNDS
PERCEPTIVE INTELLIGENCE: THE
FUTURE OF COGNIZANT
MACHINES AND DEVICES
Computers are
going to be
aware of what
is going on,
be able to learn
your habits,
anticipate your
needs, and create
amazingly
delightful
experiences.
$1B
IN THE SALES OF
SIM CARDS FOR
CONNECTED CARS
BILLION
ATT HAS
ALREADY MADE
DAVID EAGLEMAN: CAN
WE CREATE NEW SENSES
FOR HUMANS

and what we like to do, perhaps news or music or both. It will help us prepare for the day
and keep us ahead of schedule without us having to worry about it. It is human-optimizing,
comfort computing at its best.
Learning software will be able to predict everything. Uber can predict where you are going
before you get in the car. Microsoft Oslo offers information, context, and contacts based
on what you’re working on. Maps will be aware of your schedule and pick more pleasant
routes when you have time.
Natural Interaction
Natural interaction is about interacting with a digital world effortlessly, just like you would
gesture, touch, speak to a person, and get visual, acoustic, and touch feedback. Gesture control
is not only happening in watch form factors, it is happening from rings to armbands. The
Apple Watch changes behavior based on your movement. Amazon Firefly is making it easy
to do visual searches for anything your phone can see. The new Amazon phone sports hand
gestures with its front-facing camera. Google is working on a completely hands-free phone
operations also. Adding a mirror to your iPad camera and a little software, and you have physical
objects that can be recognized in virtual space. We are seeing a merging of virtual and
digital things with iPad apps that bring in everyday objects to control the interface.
The next generation of software will be much more aware of you. It will understand your
mood, where you are, who you’re with, and what you’re doing, and anticipate what you
would like to do. Mood tracking is becoming important to optimize cognitive performance.
Yes, and there is an app for that, called Moodit. Emotiv’s new headset enables disabled
patients to control the real world with their mind. We even now have the ability to add senses to
our bodies. It’s an amazing time to see the change in how people and the digital world interact.
The Bots Are Here Now, Just Not Widely Distributed
In the next five years, robotics will drive dramatic increases in network traffic, cloud workloads,
energy consumption, and workforce productivity. In fact, Google’s chief economist thinks
we are grossly underestimating the productivity gains coming for robotics (Google has
acquired many leading robotics companies). These technologies challenge social norms
(much like the industrial revolution), and current laws (for example, adding autonomous
drones into the commercial airspace).
Lots of countries are making big bets on robotics (EU $3.9B, Japan and the UK). Manufacturing
has long benefited from specialized robotic automation. We are now seeing low cost and
generalized robotics showing up in many places. Robots that work for and alongside humans.
The rest of this section covers the numerous examples of where robotics and people meet.
DRIVERLESS CARS
The benefits of driverless cars are almost innumerable: saved lives, saved time, reduced
traffic, reallocation of parking space in cities, reduced insurance costs, car sharing, cars on
demand, etc. Driverless cars can’t come too soon for many industries. The trucking industry
is facing a severe shortage of drivers (30,000 short today and 239,000 short by 2022). Daimler
says its driverless truck will solve the problem by 2025, and Mercedes is trying to crack this
market, too (besides their efforts in consumer driverless cars). Driverless cars can’t come
too soon for cities either. Manhattan has 1.6 million residents who make 410,000 taxi trips
per day, and the average New York City commuter spends an average of 59 hours a year
stuck in traffic.
Driverless and driver-assisted cars are already here. They are being fine-tuned for consumers.
The cost of the primary sensors for driverless cars has dropped from $89,000 to $8,000 and
are on the path down to $1,000. Freescale will be releasing a vision chip for self-driving cars
in 2015. Intuitive is also releasing a vision chip. NVIDIA announced a suite of driverless
hardware and software at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show.
There are still many things the Google driverless cars can’t do: go to the mountains, go off
grid, understand traffic cops, and avoid squirrels. Despite that, Google plans to bring its driverless
car to market by 2020. The Tesla Model D has several driverless features including autopark
and freeway autopilot (lane following, speed sign recognition, and safe follow distance).
The Model X Tesla will have the hardware to be self-driving later this year. Elon Musk even
commented that cars with drivers may soon be outlawed for safety reasons. Volvo will bring
its self-parking car to market by 2017.
Driverless cars need to be connected to communicate with infrastructure (notifications of
accidents) and other cars (notification of traffic conditions), provide telemetry, and get
up-to-date maps. Nokia Here is working on driverless quality maps. Delivering this safety-
critical information to vehicles will be a big business. After all, if hackers compromise
autonomous vehicles, it could create spectacular hazards and accidents. ATT has already
made $1 billion in the sales of SIM cards for connected cars. Uber, on the other hand, has
the software to allow a swarm of cars to efficiently deliver people to their destinations. Today,
Uber’s system works with human drivers, but that might not always be the case. If you think
Uber has had pushback against its service that displaces traditional cabs (Uber is banned in
Germany with a hefty $327,000 fine per illegal ride), just wait until they go robotic.
WELCOME TO MATTERNET - DELIVERY BY CAR, DRONE, AND ROBOT
Last year Google started a same-day delivery service for food and goods. This combined with
its ambitions in robotics (including delivery drones, driverless cars, and humanoid robotics)
could completely change the last 10 miles of delivery. Delivery drones are already delivering
medicine to villages. DHL and Amazon are testing drone delivery. Amazon’s warehouse robot
deployments (kiva) already have automated the warehouse end of delivery, having reached
10,000 robots by the end of 2014. You can already get overnight delivery from Amazon on
many items (often less than 24 hours).
Consumer drones are expected to reach $102 million in 2015, according to Forbes (49 percent
growth over last year). Use cases include photography, delivery, agriculture, games, security,
traffic monitoring, etc. Flying drones in the U.S. is so problematic that Amazon wrote a letter to
the U.S. government saying it will likely move its delivery drone research out of the country.
Surprisingly, the regulatory discussion around drones was far more complex than those of
driverless cars in the U.S. Companies are looking for simple and clear “free fly zone” rules for
drones. Though regulation is lagging innovation, reasonable regulation will be based on size,
weight, speed, and proximity to potential hazards. In the meantime, companies like Airware
and agencies like NASA are trying to solve the air traffic control problem for drones.
“The best
user interface
is no user
interface.”
– Ninjablocks
ROBOTS WITH CAT
LIKE REFLEXES
TOP 3 DRONES
YOU SHOULD BUY
“Disruptive
technology starts
with fear, then social
normalization,
and finally
indispensability.”
– Guy Bieber
THE DARPA ROBOTICS
CHALLENGE
“Technology has
changed work,
not eliminated it.
Unemployment rates
have been amazingly
stable over the years.”
– Guy Bieber
iROBOT AVA MOBILE ROBOTICS
PLATFORM
AMAZON PRIME AIR
MERCEDES-BENZ F 0 15 LUXURY
IN MOTION RESEARCH CAR
KIVA SYSTEM ROBOTS

SALES AND INVENTORY
Lowe’s is trialing the OSHbot robotic sales assistant in their stores. This robot inventories
the whole store automatically at night to know where every bar code is. This is an example
of the end of data entry that robotics, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things
could achieve. It can speak many languages, and you can tell it or show it what you want,
and it will take you there. The biggest challenge may be getting people comfortable
engaging with these devices.
CLEANING
Big chunks of janitorial work will be replaced by robots, or rather, the janitor will work
with robots. Robotic vacuums have become a popular consumer item. At the Consumer
Electronics Show, there were industrial window cleaning robots that could replace window
cleaners on skyscrapers.
PHYSICAL SECURITY AND PUBLIC SAFETY
Microsoft deployed Knightscope security robots on their campus. These robots can navigate
large areas, operate for 24 hours, and alert human operators or the police if there is someone
where they shouldn’t be.
MANUFACTURING
The trend of people and robots working in the same space is intensifying on the manufacturing
lines. We have seen robots like Baxter and other robotic arm systems hit the market in the
last year. The same commoditization and miniaturization trends we see in other domains are
affecting robotics for manufacturing. One firm says manufacturing robotics can pay for
themselves in an average of 128 days. Then financial benefits will be a driving force behind
adoption. Three-dimensional printing continues to evolve for manufacturing also; 3-D printers
have even been able to print a functioning rocket and medical devices like hearing aids.
There are now 3-D printers that can print 25 times faster with greater structural integrity.
It is exciting times for custom and small-batch manufacturing.
AGRICULTURE
3D Robotics and many others (literally hundreds of vendors at CES this year) are trying to
apply drones to improve crop management for all kinds of crops including vineyards.
Agricultural bots are expected to increase crop yields by 25 percent. High-tech farm equipment
is needed to compete these days, but it comes with a significant repair cost. Data-driven robotic
agriculture is upon us. These efforts include replacing large-scale equipment with smaller
autonomous vehicles that more accurately spray, water, and harvest crops for maximum yields.
HUMANOID ROBOTICS
DARPA Robotics Challenge finals will occur in June 2015 with untethered robots and
degraded communications. These are very expensive robots, but they are proving humanoid
robots are both doable and valuable. Though robots require maintenance they don’t require
motivation or a human resources department, they are always 100% engaged.
HEALTHCARE
Healthcare will make up one-fifth of the U.S. economy in a decade. This, along with aging
populations, is driving the need for innovation in all aspects of healthcare, including robotics
for elderly care. The age of bionics is upon us. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved
a robotic exoskeleton for paralyzed patients to walk. Second Sight created the first bionic eye,
and BrainGate has built an embeddable brain interface for paralyzed patients to interact
with the world.
HOME
Robots like Jibo and Amazon Echo are becoming control mechanisms and personal
assistants in the home.
MILITARY ROBOTICS
The U.S. Navy is trying to automate many of the hazardous tasks on ships and is building
on-ship fire-fighting robots. Its latest concern, though, is defending against swarming
robotic boats while simultaneously building robotic swarms of its own.
Drones carrying 10-pound payloads could easily be weaponized or just cause havoc like the
open-source graffiti drone. Five thousand dollars worth of weaponized drones beat a convoy
of armored vehicles in one exercise. These drones are easy to build; in fact, there are now
military-grade drones that can be printed in 3-D anywhere.
PLATFORMS/CLOUD/NETWORK WORKLOADS
We are starting to see a proliferation of general-purpose robotic platforms, such as the
robotic operating system and iRobot’s new Ava platform, which allows third-party integration.
Stanford is working on robotic cloud solutions, which provide a robotic brain in the cloud,
as is the European Robohow. We predict robotics will drive cloud and network workloads in
the next 10 years, and will be a major productivity booster across industries.
Middle Class Renaissance
The worldwide middle class has grown to 1 billion. There is evidence that Internet-connected
smart phones help drive poor countries out of poverty. Worldwide, the middle class is
growing rapidly.
THE POWER OF ABUNDANCE
The world and quality of living continues to get better. We get more for less all the time.
In the past we talked about the power of abundance: free services on the Internet (from
education to maps), sharing economy (cars, rooms, meals), giving economy (free startup
capital), and better value for just about everything (software, streaming services, all-you-
can-read books). Give people unlimited knowledge and cheap powerful tools, and they
will amaze you. These forces provide a tremendous amount of assets to anyone with a
network-connected mobile phone. The prices of smart phones continue to drop well
below the $100 mark without a contract bringing more of the world online all the time.
25%
AGRICULTUAL BOTS ARE
EXPECTED TO INCREASE
CROP YIELDS BY
ORCHARD SUPPLY
HARDWARE’S OSHBOT
DARPA’S REVOLUTIONARY
NEW TANK FOCUSES
ON AGILITY
CYBORG THE FUTURE
OF HUMANITY
“In a few hundred
years, when the
history of our time
is written from
a long-term
perspective, it is
likely the most
important event
the historians
will see is not
technology, not
the Internet, nor
e-commerce. It is
the unprecedented
change in the
human condition.
For the first time —
literally— substantial
and rapidly growing
number of people
have choices”
– Peter F. Drucker
THE K5 SECURITY ROBOT
THE COLLABORATIVE ROBOT
BAXTER

In 1900, only 3 percent of U.S. homes had electricity. Today you can rent a solar energy
system that will cut your energy costs in half. Even the poorest countries are getting access
to micro-credit where they can get capital to start a business, simple solar power kits, or
inexpensive filter systems for clean water. At no other time in history has so much been
available to so many.
FASTER CHEAPER WAYS TO BETTER JOBS
The barrier to training for better employment is being lowered. A four-year degree and
the debt it creates isn’t the only path to better employment. One study estimates that
by 2020 there will be a 10 percent shortage of highly skilled workers and an 11 percent
surplus of medium-skilled workers. The U.S. currently has 500,000 open jobs that require
technical skills. Automation, Robotics, and IoT will certainly cause a shift in jobs to more
skilled labor (or at least labor these technologies aren’t good at). Jacob Morgan of Forbes
also highlights the need to move from knowledge workers to learning workers due to the
speed of technology evolution, i.e. the job skills “use by date” is shorter than ever before.
Through the TechHire Initiative, U.S. President Barack Obama is trying to fill these jobs
with people who have the skills but don’t have the degrees by rapidly training the middle
class for better jobs. During the U.S. State of the Union Address, Obama even suggested
that community college be made free for everyone (college education is free in many
other countries). Knowledge for better employment is not a question of access anymore;
its a question of desire and time, and it can be achieved in less time without the debt of
a four-year degree. Udacity offers three to nine month nanodegree programs to learn a
skill such as web programming. Some students are choosing to go to Make School instead
of MIT and then into a startup (one high school graduate landed a $90,000 job this way).
In the U.S. alone, there is a $1 trillion education debt bubble caused by student loans.
The average college degree has gone up 1,120 percent since 1978 with 44 percent of
graduates being underemployed (however, people with a bachelor’s degree or higher still
have the lowest unemployment rates).
GROSS DOMESTIC HAPPINESS
There is a growing shift in perception on the nature of success and growth. The modern
measure of the success of nations—gross domestic product—has only been around since
1937. Now countries are trying to measure quality of life with Gross National Happiness.
Millennials tend to value experiences over things; the biggest car, biggest house, or big
office on the top floor aren’t the goals anymore. Generations X, Y, and Z want to be more
independent by freelancing (see section on the transformation of work) or starting their
own businesses. Success is not measured solely in monetary terms anymore.
Big Impact of Small Things
Between chemical computers, nanotechnology, understanding the brain, and robotic swarms,
small things are making a big impact.
CHEMICAL COMPUTERS - DNA GONE WILD
Sequencing genomes isn’t the problem any more (Illumina estimated 228,000 human
genomes were sequenced in 2014); now the computing needed to decode this data is
required. We are starting to understand the impacts of many genes (KL-VS on aging,
diabetes treatments, better hearing transplants, genes for weight control, controlling
cholesterol, understanding evolution), and this changes the meaning of “know thyself”
and likely how we improve ourselves. Soon we will understand why a particular jellyfish
is immortal. Soon we will be able to do anything a chemical computer (cells) can do on
demand. We are getting much better at manipulating the code of life with the genome
compiler, printing DNA, and booting up cells. This capability has become so mainstream
that the band OK Go offered their latest album printed in DNA (not sure how you play
that). That may be a publicity stunt, but it is amazing none the less. We are also making
progress in regenerative medicine at printing bigger things like organs.
NANOTECHNOLOGY
Arguably really small things have already been driving innovation. We carry the miracle of
nanotechnology in the phones in our pockets. We are inventing nanoparticles that detect
cancer in blood. We are creating gecko-inspired adhesives that allow us to scale buildings.
Nanostructured materials are improving material strength and batteries. Nissan even
invented a new paint that enables a self-cleaning car. The miracles of nanomaterials are
affecting many industries.
REVERSE ENGINEERING THE BRAIN
As part of the $100 million brain engineering project started by U.S. President Barack Obama,
DARPA is working on a brain implant to restore memory and a $70 million program for an
implant to control emotions. As previously discussed, this research is driving new much
more efficient neuromorphic compute architectures.
SWARMS VERSUS GOLIATH
We are finding swarms of intelligent things can overcome large systems. The U.S. Navy is so
concerned about swarming boat threats that it’s working on a design that will thwart it. In
one exercise, $5,000 of weaponized drones beat a convoy of armored vehicles. SRI is using
research in swarming smart things to construct anything, Disney is using it for entertainment,
and Harvard is using it just because it can. Groups of smart small things will continue to
have significant impacts.
The New Utilities: Compute, Networks, Free Decentralized Energy
We predict networks, computing, and free decentralized energy will be treated like new
utilities as critical infrastructure.
COMPUTE
Cloud infrastructure including compute, storage, and worldwide deployment continues to
drop in price. 451 Research has created a Cloud Pricing Index. Today a typical web application
costs between $7,000 ($0.80 per hour) and $15,000 ($1.70 per hour) per year. This low
starting cost and linear growth model is driving more corporations to the cloud. With
corporations and governments moving to the cloud, the cloud is becoming critical
infrastructure to run the economy.
“Two things we need
every morning: coffee
and hope. Joy is free.
At that price, I will
have it every day”
– Guy Bieber
“There is a widening
skills gap where the
existing workforce
has been educated
and trained to obtain
the jobs of yesterday
and not the jobs of
today and tomorrow”
– Jeff Weiner
CEO of LinkedIn
MICHIO KAKU: WHAT DOES THE
FUTURE LOOK LIKE?
WHAT IF 3D PRINTING WAS
100X FASTER

NETWORKS
Many of our computing experiences today require a reliable network connection just for basic
functions for everything from Chromebooks to mobile apps. We are becoming less tolerant
of unreliable networks and more reliant on networks in general. Whether that is a business
with poor connectivity, hotels, planes (in-flight Wi-Fi is undergoing a major upgrade from
4.9 Mbps to 70 Mbps per plane), or just to watch videos that don’t skip (video now represents
52 percent of mobile traffic). We expect businesses to provide free Wi-Fi, and people are more
than happy to provide personal information to get access. Openwireless.org is even trying
to get everyone to share their network connections via a free router firmware upgrade.
As of 2014, 3 billion people are now online, and this Internet growth is challenging the routing
tables in existing router infrastructure. Google project loon is delivering Internet connectivity
to previously unreachable parts of the world like the Australian Outback (though not the
primary focus). They have already traveled 3 million kilometers and stayed in the air for 130
days. Elon Musk is considering microsatellite technology for worldwide Internet coverage.
5G technology is coming by 2020. Others like Artemis and Dish Network are working on a
networking solution that’s 1000 times faster than 4G to beat 5G to market. It is clear that
networking speed and access will define the type of society we live in.
Fiber and gigabit connections to the home are becoming more common. Beside delivering
higher-density content to more displays (4K TVs for instance), this bandwidth reduces the speed
and jitter to cloud computing resources. Delivering a virtual computer to your home over
this type of connection will be really fast. For many homes where the only wired connection
goes into a wireless router, this may require a wireless router upgrade to realize the benefits.
The networks connecting our mobile phones, critical Internet of Things devices, and soon
driverless cars/robotics are becoming safety-critical. Machine-to-machine traffic over mobile
networks accounts for 3 percent of mobile connections but is growing at 35 percent annually.
Spark even announced an IoT microcontroller with a pay-as-you-go cellular plan. U.S. President
Obama is even in favor of classifying the Internet as a utility while debates still rage on net
neutrality with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission voting for a Internet fast lane.
The United Nations has even declared Internet access as a basic human right.
FREE DECENTRALIZED ENERGY
Last year we talked about improvements in power generation, storage, reduced charge
times, and increased efficiency. These trends of improvement are continuing. We are
also using less energy. The U.S. used 12 percent less energy in 2013 than in 2010, while
increasing devices from 2.9 billion to 3.8 billion.
Costa Rica and Iceland already run on 100% renewable energy sources. The U.S. is producing
renewable energy much more efficiently. New solar designs convert 25.6 percent of the sun’s
energy into power. This breaks a 20-year record of 25 percent. Organic solutions from nature
suggest we can reach 95 percent efficiency. Other technologies like adaptive lenses could
cut the cost of solar power in half. We are making progress on better techniques for converting
solar power into hydrogen. Futurist Ray Kurzweil believes solar power will be unlimited and
free in 20 years.
Lithium air batteries are doubling the life of car batteries. SolidEnergy is building a lithium
ion battery that stores two times the energy, and graphene promises four times the density.
Singapore has a new technology that can charge a cell phone in two minutes. Many
technologies are enabling batteries and solar cells as thin as paper. Progress is being made
on other energy sources, with Lockheed Martin claiming it can bring nuclear fusion to
market in the next 10 years.
Electricity as a utility, besides becoming more renewable, is more decentralized. BMW and
Tesla offer free charging networks for their electric cars. First Solar provides home solar systems
based on cost-saving sharing. The U.S. military even believes that inexhaustible energy is
coming. Solar Impulse is actually attempting the first around the world flight with a completely
solar powered plane. Companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook are building solar farms
to run their data centers. The technology is improving so fast that it is probable that countries
with little power today will have free abundant power for a very small investment. We could
even drop the power cords with technology like the one being developed by Witricity that
can wirelessly send power for 15 feet. The impact of unlimited almost free renewable
energy on society will be dramatic.
Security / Mobile Security
Mobility is not an option. In fact, it’s the default state of work and play. Security is equally
not an option; it is required. Coupled with privacy and safety, security will be much more
ingrained and augmented in our daily lives and routines. As both evolve into 2020, it is
critical to be simultaneously more mobile and secure. Technology must augment policy to
balance security and functionality into an experience that consistently meets the demands
of both enterprise and individual—and is easy to understand, use, and maintain.
Predictions for the intersection of mobility and security in 2020 include:
•• Your digital life becomes your default persona, dynamically managing
individualized security and privacy objectives.
•• Wearables replace smartphones as the primary mobile device—and as primary
security factors for authentication and authorization.
•• Connectedness to vehicles, homes, and healthcare instrumentation require
physical security interfaces to be mission-grade.
•• DNA-augmented authentication and authorization uniquely identifies you as you
and makes it difficult to be anonymous.
“Security be damned—we have to get this product to market” will be a vendor slogan of
the distant past.
35%
MACHINE TRAFFIC IS
GROWING BY
ANNUALLY
MICHEL GELOBTER –
THE FUTURE OF ENERGY
TOP HACKER SHOWS US HOW
IT’S DONE – PABLOS HOLMAN

Work Transformed
03
-- Forces Driving Workplace Change
-- Flipping the Workplace
-- Rebalancing Work
-- Quantified-Self for Work
-- Hybrid Intelligence at Work - Meet Your Robotic Coworker
-- Changing Spaces
-- Talent Matching - I Will Create My Own Job Thanks
IN THIS CHAPTER
Citrix always has strived to help
people work better and live better.
There are moments in time where
work has made a major shift, for
instance from rural agriculture to
urban work or from craftsman to
industrialization. The workplace is
undergoing another major shift
from a physical workspace to a
software-defined workspace, where
the experience, flexibility, and security
are central. Flexibility means working
from anywhere, at anytime, on an
device, with anyone. Societal views
on job satisfaction and the best way
to improve productivity are changing.
In fact the core relationship between
employers and employees is changing
as we shift to more of a freelancing
economy. The Internet of Things is
the next wave of IT that is turning
everyone into knowledge workers,
from farming to construction.
“Enlightened vendors will take responsibility for the entire
experience.”
Saul Gurdus
President of Insights and Enablement,
Customer Experience, at Citrix
It’s more important to improve people’s lives than sell
them a product
Apple Sales Training

Forces Driving Workplace Change
There are many forces driving workplace change for employees and employers. Much of this can be tied to productivity
and operational gains.
EMPLOYEE FORCES
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to
be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the
only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found
it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart,
you’ll know when you find it.”
– Steve Jobs
Meaning / Engagement
“Most of motivation is feeling good about what you’re going to be doing.”
– Guy Bieber
A recent Gallup poll found 87 percent job disengagement worldwide. Another survey found that 74 percent of workers want
to leave their job. Yet another survey found that 83 percent of Americans are stressed out at work, with 80 percent working
more than 48 hours a week. These statistics represent an epidemic of job dissatisfaction. Millennials will become the majority
of the workforce in 2015, and they value experiences over things. People want to have more meaningful and engaging work.
Infotoxification
Last year we talked about the rate of information growth and amount of information we
are expected to filter, understand and act upon. We are overwhelmed; we are “infotoxicated.”
Tools that are used to help us communicate now consume big chunks of our workday.
According to McKinsey, 30 percent of work time is spent on emails, and half of that time is
wasted. Another study suggests that only a quarter of emails are actually essential. We
need better tools to manage our work information life.
Freelancing
Freelancing has grown dramatically. Forty percent of the U.S. workforce is expected to be
freelance by 2020. That is a huge number and trend. Uber is essentially an app driven labor
market (as is 100s of other platforms like Elance). Though freelancers get less corporate
perks (like stock and 401Ks; some wonder if they can ever retire), their earnings have grown
50 percent year over year for the past five years. Freelancing is often in very skilled labor
such as patent law, programming, and investment research. The rise in freelancing may be
related to the desire of people to have better control of their time and the desire of corporations
to go really fast by getting the precise talent they need (for a shorter period of time).
Remote and Flex Work
By 2020, it’s expected that half of the workforce will be remote. This is not only something
employees are demanding, but it is being legislated in countries like the UK. One survey found
that 43 percent of employees would take a flex work arrangement over a raise. There are many
big-name companies that support remote work for a surprising variety of jobs. Flexibility
includes the option to work less for less pay; for example, a four-day work week. Flex work
is extending into vacation policy with companies like Netflix and Virgin moving to unlimited
leave policies to help drive productivity of creatives in an outcome-based work environment.
According to “The Digital Renaissance of Work: Delivering Digital Workplaces Fit for the
Future” remote workers see a 20 percent to 55 percent increase in productivity. This is also
generating significant facility cost savings for organizations like NASA (saved $21 million in
2012) and Glaxo Smith Kline ($10 million annually).
Productivity
Procaffeinating: The tendency to not start anything until you have had a cup of coffee.
– Facebook
Productivity gains drive economic growth. There are many things detracting from our
productivity. We lose two hours a day to interruptions. We waste 31 hours a month in
unproductive meetings. A FranklinCovey study of 351,000 workers found that 40 percent
of our workday is spent on unimportant things—things not central to what we were hired
to do. If we could stay in a flow state for work, we could increase our effectiveness by 500
percent. One Gartner study estimates BYOD could claim 32 hours of down time for work
on a personal device. There are huge opportunities for productivity gains here.
“You can’t beat more
productivity out of
knowledge workers.
The only way you
can get people to do
more is to make them
relatively happy.”
– Phil Libin
Evernote CEO
RSA ANIMATE –
REIMAGINING WORK
Changing
Relationship of Work
Forces Transforming Work
Freelance
40%
Remote / Flex
50%
Automated
47%
Productivity
-4.8h
Facilities ROI
45%
Innovation
Speed
15-50%
Infotoxicated
2x
IT Shifts
C.A.B.S.
Meaning /
Engagement
87% Cloud Automate
BYO SaaS
Information every 1.5yr
Job Disengagement
by 2020 in US
50% YOY earnings growth
by 2020
US Jobs at risk in next
10 to 20 years
-2h (interruptions)
- 1.6h (meetings) - 1.2 (email)
Utilized Second
Largest Expense
CEO Desired
Disruptive Growth

Automation/Push to Skilled Jobs
Making everything look effortless isn’t.
One Oxford study found that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk in the next 10 to 20 years. Fast Company highlighted the
10 most at-risk jobs in 2014, which include jobs like mail carriers and farming. Much of IT administration is expected to be
automated. In fact, the cost and speed of automation continues to decrease and create a mashable world. With the speed of
knowledge obsolescence, reinvention is becoming a major job skill.
EMPLOYER FORCES
Speed of Innovation
“Innovation is a team sport.”
– Martin Duursma,
VP Citrix Technology Office
Companies that don’t continually innovate quickly disappear. In fact, one survey found that that CEOs expect 15 percent to
50 percent of their companies growth to come from disruptive innovation. Some companies like 3M enforce the 30 percent
rule, which says 30 percent of revenue must come from products brought to market in the last year. That is a significant
disposition for innovation.
Return on Facilities Investment
According to Unwork, facilities are the second-largest corporate cost but are less than 45 percent utilized. This is a very
poor return on such a large investment and has companies rethinking how they should utilize space. Forrester estimated
61 percent of information work happens outside the office.
IT Shifts - Cloud, SaaS, BYO
IT continues to move more things out of the data center into the cloud. IT is also using more SaaS services instead of
self-hosted services. IT is supporting more BYO-Everything from devices to identities. This is shifting what IT does and
forcing them to move toward new value propositions like creating better organizational workflows, personalizing
solutions for individual employees, and managing the new information workloads of the organization.
Flipping the Workplace
In conventional ideas of work, you spend the majority of your work time bound to an office and maybe 20 percent of the
time at other locations, such as customer or partner sites. This tyranny of location can limit talent pools, create wasted
commuting time, and damage employee engagement. We believe that the workplace will flip because of remote and
flex work, the rebalancing of the work activities, and technology (technology that will enable virtual teams to outperform
co-located ones). Of course, some types of work, like restaurant work, will still strongly bind employees to where customers
are. We believe that the new normal will be 20 percent co-located at a traditional worksite and 80 percent at nontraditional
workplaces, including home, third spaces (co-working spaces, coffee shops, etc.), customer sites, partner sites, etc. Often
being at the office is part of the productivity problem due to interruptions and distractions; people will go where they are
most effective and can have the most impact.
PROBLEMS WITH BEING THERE
Is the most efficient work location always “the office?” Modern offices have become interruption factories (Remote:
Office Not Required). Co-location helps communication, but only to a point. Sociometric Solutions has found that team
interactions break down very quickly over distance. People on different floors of a building might as well be in different
countries. Co-location quickly breaks down with scale. Co-locating a 10-person team can be very beneficial (very
common in startups), but does co-locating 10,000 employees really help you?
Co-location to drive serendipitous connections is like limiting your significant-other selection to people you can find at
a particular bar. Why isn’t there a Match.com for serendiptious work connections? CubeFree is an example of such an app
that not only allows you to find places to work, but to make serendipitous connections with others. Often problems are solved
more quickly by posting to social tools rather than direct emails; most often problems are solved by people the requester
didn’t even know. Limiting serendipitous connections by how many people you can put on a campus seems a foolish
approach for the digital age.
Travel time has a real human cost. As the book “Remote: Office Not Required” points out, even a half-hour each way commute
costs more like 1.5 hours a day. That’s 7.5 hours a week—almost a full work day. The book “The Custom-Fit Workplace” talks
about the importance for adjusting all aspects of working conditions to enable greater employee productivity. Work-from-
office advocates and work-anywhere advocates agree on at least one thing: people still need a private productivity space.
BENEFITS OF DECOUPLING WORK FROM LOCATION
Decoupling work from an office has a lot of benefits. Companies have a larger talent pool to choose from. Companies are
more decentralized and disaster tolerant. Companies can reduce their facilities costs. Employees have the opportunity to
spend more time with customers and partners. Employees can have less interruptions and more flow time. They can save
time for commuting. Employees can work where they feel most productive. All these factors lead to increased
productivity.
BENEFITS OF DECOUPLING WORK FROM TIME
Decoupling work from a specific eight-hour period has many benefits. It enables easier interactions across time zones. As
Citrix CEO Mark Templeton has pointed out in the past, it allows the interleaving of work and life activities. It also enables
talent to come from any geography and enable 24-hour operations. Much like we have deferred viewing with devices like
Tivo, Roku, or services like Netflix, we often need deferred work interactions. This happens through email, social tools, and
even chat.
ACTIVITY-ORIENTED WORKSPACES
Given the expense and underutilization of facilities, how can we use this investment more effectively? Offices are becoming
a hub for face-to-face collaborative work instead of a place to store employees for eight hours a day. Activity-oriented workspaces
provide environments customized to the work being done there. Maya Design has neighborhoods that people choose as a
home (often multi-disciplined), project work spaces that are allocated on demand, as well as kivas, which are round rooms
that have white-board-covered walls for creative activities.
Tyranny of Location
Tyranny of Time
Commute Times
Tied to the Ofﬁce
Un-scalable Physical Collocation
Expensive Facilities
Dedicated Facilities
BEFORE
Remote Work
Flex Work
Time Saved
More Customer / Partner Time
Digital Scalability
Facility Cost Reduction
Activity Based Facilities
AFTER

IDEO has neighborhoods with all the tools of creation out in the open, eliminating the friction to action. IDEO encourages
employees to sit in different locations to mix ideas. Co-working spaces have a lot of these characteristics and the added
benefit of providing access to knowledgeable people you didn’t have to hire; co-working spaces have become the modern
communes of creativity. Many of these spaces offer access to specialty tools, provide training and mentoring, provide
startup funding, and help with prototyping. Co-working spaces, much like universities, have a concentration of different
skillsets in a small space. That is a recipe for intersectional innovation.
DIGITAL NOMADS: TRAVEL LESS, UNLESS THAT’S YOUR THING
We will do less travel for work—unless we really want to. There is a growing group of digital nomads who travel the world
and work. There are even services to help arrange your travel and companions for nomadic work. The idea being that they
are increasing their worldview, running into more interesting ideas, and generally having more fun.
Rebalancing Work
What is the right balance of individual work, collaborative work (relationship building, meetings, group work) and chance
encounters for optimal individual and group productivity? There is a core tension of effective individual and group work.
Many studies suggest work activities are overdue for a rebalancing (see the forces shaping work). One study says our main
communication tools, emails and meetings, are our biggest source of lost productivity. Your ratio of collaborative and
individual work depends on how much organizational learning is needed. Startups practicing extreme programming
may work collaboratively the majority of the time.
INDIVIDUAL WORK
If we can increase “flow” just 20 percent during individual work, we can double productivity. Flow states have the added
benefit of increasing employee engagement. As we previously stated, research suggests that the optimal period of focus
is 52 minutes followed by a 17-minute break. During that 52-minute interval, we need to eliminate interruptions. Remember,
interruptions on average cost us eight hours a week. So we need to reduce interruptions and have them occur at a preferred
time. This means turning off email notifications, SMS message notifications, chat message notifications, etc. The trend
toward 50 percent remote work can help create the conditions for ample uninterrupted work time.
COLLABORATIVE WORK AND RELATIONSHIP BUILDING
Research suggests we can cut meetings in half (remember the stats on half of meeting time being wasted). Why do meetings
take 30 or 60 minutes? Are all problems only solvable on 30-minute intervals? Why not 20 minutes or 40 minutes? Why not
end the meeting as soon as you have achieved its purpose? Keep the rest of the time open for meeting reflection, what
actually happened in the meeting, followup, and important human needs such as rest breaks. It is worthwhile to experiment
with how short you can make meetings and still achieve your goals (having clear goals is a good idea, too). Why not optimize
meeting times for when it’s optimal for everyone, like when they are available and not in a highly productive flow state?
We believe that these types of rendezvous meetings will be more common.
In a flipped workplace, face-to-face meetings are as much about collaborative work as they are about relationship building.
Meeting in a context outside work helps people get to know each other, relax, and get into a group flow state riffing off
each others ideas (like great jazz musicians). Great teams truly like each other and hanging out together (according to the
book “Zero to One”). How we run innovation meetings can use a change, too. We actually should ideate individually then
mix ideas as a group; this is due to the cognitive bias caused by grounding. Again, this can shorten meetings and make
everyone more productive.
Tools like Google Docs allow you to see when other people are working on the same thing as you, much like an Xbox allows
players to know when their friends are playing and enables instant communication with them. Tools like this can also be used
to do ideation sessions with virtual stickies. It allows everyone to contribute at once, which is key to good innovation meetings.
SERENDIPITY AND GETTING UNSTUCK
One benefit of co-locating a small team is they can help each other get unstuck. They are aware of the speed of production,
and when they get stuck on something, workmates can help show them the fast way of doing things. The truth is that this
effect can be achieved virtually and often more effectively.
When someone is looking to solve a problem in email, there is a limited group who may have encountered their problem.
You are much more likely to get an answer to your problem if you can crowdsource instead of collaborate. By that we
mean going to the appropriate crowd via a wiki, bulletin board, or even Twitter. This increases your chance of success by
casting your net wider. Typically on these types of networks, the answers don’t come from people you know. That is
creating your own serendipity.
Another way to create serendipity is to create random meetings with co-workers virtually. Hallway conversation effects
are limited to the people who happen to be in the same hallway. Just like dating, we have tools to help match people; we
can match people in the organization who should meet. We can create intentional chance encounters.
Quantified-Self for Work
The personal quantified self-movement uses fitness-tracking wearables and mobile apps to improve fitness and health.
The quantified worker will have continuous mood, focus, interaction, and productivity feedback. In Trends, we talked
about hybrid intelligence providing specialized AI assistants that boost performance. The quantified-self for work gives
employees tools for optimizing their personal performance. This is not part of a performance evaluation system. This is
much more like the private relationship between an executive coach and an executive. This is a digital personal coach that
helps you will all aspects of your job.
Individual
Work
Re-Balancing Work
Collaborative
Work
Free Cognitive
Bandwidth
5x
50h3x
Create
Serendipity
Timebox
Avoid ProductivityYour Information
Processing
Use Flow for
Remote
Work 20-50%
Productivity
Boost
• Kill the Commute
• Batch Activities
• Shorten Meetings
• Interruptions
• Context Switching
• Decision Fatigue
20% EFFORT 80%
Results
Use the Crowd
5X the productivity
Drop-off

Many companies like BetterWorks and Sociometric Solutions are entering the quantified
work movement. Sociometric is wearables meets big data for work (Moneyball for work).
It has a badge holder that understands posture and movement (for engagement), conversation
flow, speaking time, voice tone, speed of speech, cortisol level based on tone of voice, speech
volume, etc. Each badge contains a microphone, infrared, accelerometer, and a Bluetooth
connection. This opt-in system (90 percent opt in on average) allows Sociometric to understand
the physical interactions of workers. By recommending a few changes in how the social
network of the company worked, Sociometric was able to increase sales 11 percent in a
business that had flat growth. Understanding individual and group performance can lead
to significant returns.
FREE COGNITIVE BANDWIDTH
We place a tremendous mental workload on information workers (infotoxificated). The
first step to helping improve performance is freeing up cognitive bandwidth. The book
“The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload” brings together
the learnings of neuroscience to explain how we can free cognitive bandwidth. Our default
state is mind wandering, and we need this to let our subconscious mind work. Our focus
on task state is managed by the central director. The central director gets fatigued by making
decisions regardless of whether they are important. The attention filter is what looks for
stimulus that might be important to us (our name being called in a crowded room or the
sound of a predator coming up behind us). The last element in this model is the attention
switch, which causes us to focus on the new input (like the tiger coming up behind us).
To free up cognitive bandwidth, reduce decision fatigue (central director), reduce interruptions
(attention filter), and reduce expensive context switching (attention switch). Presidents
reduce the number of unimportant decisions to enable better decision making. Fewer decisions
and simplicity will drive systems that are more productive. Turning off notifications will reduce
interruptions. And creating environments where unwanted interruptions are avoided will
reduce expensive context switching.
So we talked about cutting meetings in half. We have a similar problem with email. We spend
30 percent of our time on email, and half of that is wasted. That means we should read half
as much and send half as much email. Easier said than done. Practically everyone is trying
to reinvent email to get the connectivity without the distraction; Microsoft Outlook for iOS
even has a focused inbox capability that clears away clutter. Helping people filter email by
subject line is helpful. Prefixes like “FYI:” or “REQ:” give people an idea of what the email is
about. The book “The 4-Hour Work Week” recommends batching email to read twice a day.
Part of the issue with email is it generates a lot of context switching because emails come in
about every random topic imaginable. Email has moved from being an excellent communication
tool to being a source of job dissatisfaction. “You’ve got mail” is something we would like to
hear less these days. Similar problems exist with the messaging and social tools becoming
popular in the workplace.
OPTIMIZE FLOW
“The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.”
– James Taylor
We are just beginning to understand and realize the productivity gains that can be achieved
from flow. One study of executives concludes if we could stay in a flow state, we can increase
our effectiveness by 500 percent; this means that 20 percent more flow doubles creativity/
productivity. Perhaps a truer measure of productivity is how much time you spend in flow,
not how much time you spend at work. This is the difference between workaholics (busy
people) and high -performance employees (productive people). So what exactly is this magic
focused yet defocused state? Flow is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our
best and perform our best.
The book “The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance”
identified the brain physiology of flow. In the brain, flow is characterized by alpha (8 to 12 hz)
and beta (12 to 28hz) brainwaves (this is similar to the brain waves caused by meditation).
Systems like Muse can help us understand when we are in flow state and train us how to
get there more often. During flow, the brain is flooded with chemicals norepinephrine (focus),
dopamine (focus), endorphins, anandamide (lateral thinking), and serotonin.
The flow genome project is dedicated to understanding the flow state and triggers to get
us into that state. Psychologically, a flow state turns off our inner critic (fear of failure or
imperfection) and our sense of time (lose track of time). The part of the brain responsible for
these functions actually shuts off during flow (dorsolateral frontal cortex). The U.S. Army
has enabled sharpshooters to obtain proficiency twice as fast by magnetically shutting off
this part of the brain during training. The inner critic drives anxiety and depression. Anxiety
is the voice in your head worried about the future. Depression is the voice in your head
that worries about the past. Presence happens when those two voices stop talking to each
other. The flow genome project has actually identified 17 triggers by studying extreme
sports enthusiasts (who are particularly good at hacking flow, for survival purposes). The
performance gains are so significant from flow that we expect this to be a major area of
focus for the quantified-self-at-work movement.
Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time
We have discussed how to free cognitive bandwidth and the benefits of the flow state.
Exceptional productivity is driven by managing your energy, not your time. The Draugiem
Group did a study that recommended the optimal work/break ratio is 52 minutes of work
and a 17-minute break (other systems like the Pomodoro Technique suggest similar breaks).
The Draugiem study wasn’t about the average employee; it was the top 10 percent of
productive employees. They didn’t work longer hours. In fact, with breaks, they worked fewer
than eight hours a day. A study from Stanford shows productivity sharply drops at 50 hours
a week and drops so dramatically after 55 hours that there is no benefit to working longer.
Studies show our energy drops most around 2 p.m., which may be the best time to take a
walk. Interestingly, Charles Dickens typically worked from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
In the “The 4-Hour Workweek,” author Timothy Ferriss describes ways to increase productivity.
He talks about the Pareto principle, which states 20 percent of the work has 80 percent of
the results. Ferriss also talks about Parkinson’s Law, which states work expands to fit the
“Understand the
subtle distinction
between work
(activity you have
to do) and play
(activity you want
to do). These can be
manipulated.”
– Guy Bieber
“Asking questions
may make you feel
foolish at first, but
really it prevents you
from being foolish
forever.”
– Guy Bieber
HACKING THE GENOME OF
FLOW: JAMIE WHEAL AT
TEDXVENICEBEACH

2020 technology-landscape

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