middle class poverty and the social web

It is very obvious that the lower income end of the middle class is struggling, and even the middle income ones too. Under our current government, a great deal of income redistribution has taken place towards those on low incomes or on welfare, but this has come mainly from those on middle incomes. The result is that the middle classes are often cited as the new poor, having only marginally greater spending power than those they are being taxed to help. As prices have increased, especially for energy in all its forms, along with greatly increased taxes, this large group has much less spare cash, and is now reducing expenditure on optional items. And as spare cash is eroded, every extra price increase has a proportionately larger effect.

Media articles on middle class belt-tightening have been abundant recently. Today, the Times features a graph showing a steep increase in sales of value products, with sales of premium products falling sharply.

But shopping changes are not the only ones. The web is really starting to pick up now as a platform for social entrepreneurs. I was very impressed last year when I discovered freecycle, which was a great way of getting rid of surplus stuff when we merged two households. Many of the people on the receiving end were short of cash, but many weren't. I found that interesting, but it is fully in line with the Time's other article on the subject, which pointed to a growing area of the middle class that is socially confident enough to penny pinch in one area to liberate cash for another, to turn up in a newish Mercedes to collect some free toys. And another that really doesn't see this as penny pinching at all, it just doesn't feel any social need to pay more. Price status has evaporated as a key issue for them. And as it is the middle classes who create such sites, and will create the future ones, pressuring them via financial stress will accelerate social use of the web.

So, some interesting weak signals are coming through here. Firstly, designer stuff is no longer a good indicator of social status. Even people who can afford to pay more are very happy to shop around more, to use discount vouchers, or shop in places that previously were frequented only by those on low incomes. And they do so without losing their social confidence. This applies much more to the middle and upper parts of the middle class than to the lower middle class. If designer labels are being reassigned further down the social hierarchy to wannabes rather than achievers, that will be a very interesting trend indeed.

Secondly, a refocus on value rather than image will destroy a great deal of what was a very strong trend indeed, the Dream Society, as Rolf Jensen called it in his excellent book. Image is important, and accounts for a great deal of the purchase price - up to now. That may be ending, or at least taking a long pause while the recession plays out. Companies will focus much more on product offerings that give high functionality and value, rather than trying to go for image.

Thirdly, this is all happening against a background of hightened environmental awareness. Indeed, this is the cause of at least some of the price rises. As value becomes more important, and frills are stripped, there is often an environmental benefit too. Freecycle was mainly intended to tackle landfill problems. The new frugality is also environmentally friendly, reducing waste.

Fourthly, community is likely to benefit. People are more reliant on each other. Freecycle and its ilk encourage social mixing, awareness of others, and various other benefits. Expect many other social enterprise groups to spring up on the net that will use cost savings as a booster to otherwise modest business plans or finance other community benefits.

Fifthly, as social use of the web accelerates, political activism will grow too. The middle classes are good at articulating their concerns, and can well understand basic IT. The extra pressures on them will bring forth many activists who would previously have sat at home watching TV. We should expect political debate to grow, and actions to be taken. Political casualties will litter the corridors of westminster and local council chambers. Brown is expected to be evicted any time now, but there will be many other targets in the revolution.

Finally, well, mainly because I am suffering post-lunch dip now, we will see a refocus on quality of life issues around relationships. Hard times can bind people together, providing a common enemy.

So all in all, the middle classes might have less cash, and plenty to whine about, but there will be some nice long term benefits as a result - a less wasteful world, more efficiently using resources, where companies focus on substance rather than spin, where basic human values take over from acquisition, and the care economy takes another big step forwards.

Microchip's 50th anniversary

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments demonstrating the first microchip.

I like TI. My first proper calculator was from Texas Instruments. In the mid 1990s they also invented the micro-mirror, which is now used in a lot of video projectors, and I believe will evolve into the basis of most future active contact lens displays, raster scanning tiny laser beams onto our retinas.

Computing today would still be a toy for big science and the military were it not for the microchip. As the basis of almost all of our IT, as Gartner's Jim Tully observed "integrated circuits are so woven into our lives that it would be hard to imagine a world without them". And certainly we have a great deal to be grateful for, with the quality of our lives far higher than would have been the case without chips.

Although I have a lot of respect for Gartner, and I fully applaud the huge impact the chip has had on our lives to date, and am happy to agree with their short term prediction that the number of integrated circuits produced annually will rise to 330 billion by 2012, it is always a good idea for futurologists to explore the future without prejudice, and most empires crumble eventually. It is a bit early to say that chips have had their chips, but they will not be around in today's form for ever.

So what of the future? Moore's Law will continue for a good while yet, but miniaturisation of circuit components will hit the stops eventually due to quantum effects. Using multiple layers as well as multi-cores will take chips gradually away from the 2D limits of today. As the number of cores multiplies, in due course, it will make good engineering sense to sever the direct links between the circuits and to suspend them in gel, where cooling will be easier and free-space optical interconnects can replace the complex on-chip wiring that takes up so much space
and creates so much of the manufacturing difficulty. It is then that the integrated circuit itself comes into the final phase of its empire. Once circuits are no longer directly hard wired, self organisation can come into play. Starting with a soup of a family of generic circuit components, self organisation can configure them into sophisticated ad-hoc circuits from the ground up, and reassemble them as the task permits. That means that we will no longer need to have a fixed physical chip layout constraining the behaviour of our devices. Hardware level evolution can be utilised along with software, to experiment with different circuits and processes to achieve a variety of tasks. This approach would be excellent for devices such as robotics, where they can develop appropriate control and sensory interactions to get the best out of their physical capability, learning how to use 'limbs' and so on. As insights come in from neuroscience, direct implementation of these into hardware initialisation, followed by evolutionary tweaking, could quickly emulate a lot of the sensory and cognitive processes used by nature. Results can feed positively back into neuroscience and AI, accelerating the design loop even further.

I believe this will be the route for most strong AI development. We don't know how consciousness works, and conventional research is slow. Utilising a strong positive feedback loop of neuroscience, nanotech, AI, self organisation, evolution and gel computing, the promise is much greater. Gel computing allows the much greater flexibility of configuring circuits that can be complex mixtures of sensors, actuators, memory, digital and analog processing, and adaptive neurons. We will accomplish intelligent machines, conscious machines, a long time before we fully understand their working principles.

I have long since estimated that we will see the first conscious machines with human level intelligence some time between 2015 and 2020. Most other IT researchers think this is ridiculously optimistic, but I stand by my estimate and see no reason to move it yet. Not much has happened so far towards that goal except the weak signals on research direction, but that is always the case right up to the last few years of development when fast exponential or even super-exponential development is involved. The first 10% of the work may have taken a million years. The last 90% will take a few months - in a few years time.

$30 per barrel for oil by 2030

Oil is a valuable commodity and the subject of a great deal of panic right now. The panic is based on ill-informed doom-mongering, with little basis in reality. Some long term perspective might be useful.

By about 2030, as a result of technology development, stimulated at least in part by high oil prices today, solar energy farming will be a big business. Already, work is under way to start building solar farms in the Sahara, where suitable land is both plentiful and cheap.

The staring point for a calculation must be the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil, since that is the prime purpose of oil today. Each barrel contains approximately 6 gigajoules of energy.

Assuming that solar panels can be mass-produced, with a sunlight conversion efficiency of about 12%, at a cost of $200 per sq metre, in today's money, a 1 sq metre panel will generate approximately 8.5kwh of energy per day, equating to 1 barrel of oil every 6 months. The land also needs to produce a good income for its developer, who would presumably be happy with a return of $50,000 per hectare for otherwise worthless land, i.e. $5 per sq m per year, and assuming that 50% of the land is covered by panel, that translates into $10 per panel + depreciation costs, of say $50 per year for a 4 year write-off. With total revenue of $60 per panel per year, 6 months is $30.

If the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil can be generated for $30, it is reasonable to set this as an upper limit on the market value of oil, when used for fuel. Prices of oil for other purposes such as plastics manufacture or specialist industries may be higher.

However, since oil is mainly used for fuel, substitution in this market by cheaper alternatives such as solar power will lead to a gradual collapse in the oil market as supply far outstrips demand. Therefore, most oil will probably be left in the ground, and it will be much cheaper than today in real terms.