The amount of
information that is circulated every day and that is made easily available via
smartphones has created an augmented reality that has in turn created a very
different way of living from the beginning of the 21st Century. We
ae blessed and cursed at the same time because we have access to more information
than we can consume. New services are aggregating the photos and videos shot by
thousands at a major event to create a better record of that event than any one
user could create on their smartphone by themselves.
People can forget
things now because it is so easy for technology to remind you later. The glory
that was once credited to memory is stolen because technology makes a hero of
everyone’s memory. People who can search and locate things stored in various
clouds are far more productive than people who rely on their good memory. Given
the abundant availability of information as smartphones meet big data, how will
innovation drive productivity?
Big data to help us learn from mistakes
People say that they learn from mistakes but most people
don’t. Memory tricks most of us when it comes to our mistakes. With our
smartphones big data collects millions of digital artefacts. The texts we send
, the photos we take and from where we take them is all scattered around the
Internet. How can we build software applications that utilizes these digital
artefacts to help us to learn from our mistakes by highlighting patterns and
delivering up to the evidence so that we focus our time and attention on the
most valuable options we have before us?
The massive amount of data that can be fed, extracted,
circulated and evaluated using smartphones, allows big data to be used effectively
to create algorithms that aid decision making at strategic levels by avoiding
past mistakes and following the most productive precedents.
The wisdom of crowds
As we use online calendars, to do lists and contacts, the
wisdom of crowds could remind us that the last time we did what we are about to
do it did not turn out well or when other people followed this particular path
their project faltered. Can the Wisdom of the Crowd help us as it helped Amazon by telling us
that the people who bought this book also bought these other books. Can the
data from millions of people doing much the same things be shared to help each
of us achieve more valuable outcomes; can LinkedIn monitor who we are dealing
with on this current project and inform you that they have the connections,
track record and capability to achieve your objective. We have until now had to
make these decisions by ourselves or with the help of our manager but in the
emergent order, applications on smartphones connected to these technologies and
data sets can use patterns and relationships to significantly improve our
choices as to how we spend our time and allocate our precious resources.
How smart is a
smartphone when it meets big data?
Innovative
smartphone technology combined with big data is beginning to radically change
business in many sectors such as healthcare, insurance, food and infrastructure.
A cardiologist can now see the cardiogram of a patient who is sitting in a
different part of the world on his smartphone. Eric Topol says that the
technology (called airstrip technology) that allows a person to check all vital
signs such as rhythm, blood pressure, oxygen etc. on the smartphone just like
checking emails is already available.
Think about the
GPS on your phone. It dynamically collects data as you travel and at the click
of a button can return you home. Maxwell Smart only used his shoe phone to talk
to 99. How else can your mobile devices collect valuable data and turn it into
valuable guidance to improve how we work, learn and live?
The human factor
The wise and
conscientious will trump the smartest as machines augment human capacity. A
combination of human and computer teams can still beat Watson. With smartphone
technology enabling access to all the needed data, Tyler Cowen predicts that a
person who is successful in the future is not the one who knows more but the
one who is conscientious enough to listen and complement the machine by asking
the right questions. The person who is
able to complement artificial intelligence through innovation and take
advantage of current market trends to drive productivity will be the person who
is looking into the future.
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