Gerard O’Neill April 2013

Saints & Servers Change, Choice & Challenges

on the road to Ireland’s Digital Future

1. Change: only the beginning

3. Choices: no easy options

2. Challenges: Future Shocked

1. Change

1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s

Year in which technology used by majority of Irish adults for first time:

landline Home PC

2005

Mobile 2000

Internet 2007

Broadband 2009

Facebook 2011

Smartphone 2012

€3.7Bn 2012

€5.7Bn 2016

€11.3Bn 2016

2. Challenges

“In the very near future your casual behavior and activities will be

trackable with the precision and detail only possible today in the confines

of a lab. Every device, object or surface will potentially be a sensor. The

physical constraints assumed by the current legal framework and that

balanced the power of individuals against corporate and government

interest are disappearing. The digital representation of you that was

once a rough tile mosaic is coming into focus for vendors and

government as a hi-def, crystal image.”

“Our system of legal privacy protection is based on a world of atoms and

embeds the implicit assumption that cost imposes a natural limit to the

extent of surveillance. The move to bits breaks that foundational

assumption in ways that are not obvious and potentially catastrophic.”

T. Rob The Odd is Silent blog

“Sometimes people seem to think that when I talk about the

hemispheres this is ‘just’ metaphorical. But it is not. There is

evidence that autistic spectrum disorders and anorexia

nervosa, both of which mimic, and almost certainly involve,

right hemisphere deficit states, are on the increase. But it goes

much further than that. It affects us all. After a talk I gave

recently in Toronto, a member of the audience came up to the

microphone. What she said struck me forcibly. ‘I am a teacher

of 7–11 year-olds’, she began. ‘My colleagues and I have

noticed in the last three or four years that we have started

having to teach children how to read the human face.’”

“These teachers reported that in just the last few years their

children had become unable to carry out tasks involving

sustained attention, tasks that ten years ago almost every child

would have been able to do easily. When you put that together

with research suggesting that children are now less empathic

than they used to be, you get a startling picture. Because each

of these faculties – the ability to read faces, to sustain attention

and to empathise – as well as being essential to the human

world, is particularly reliant on the right hemisphere of the brain.

So their relative demise is precisely what you would expect if

my hypothesis is correct.”

Iain McGilchrist Divided Brain, Divided World

1.Narrative collapse the loss of linear stories and their replacement with both crass reality programming and highly intelligent post-narrative shows like The Simpsons. With no goals to justify journeys, we get the impatient impulsiveness of the Tea Party, as well as the unbearably patient presentism of the Occupy movement. The new path to sense-making is more like an open game than a story.

2. Digiphrenia how technology lets us be in more than one place – and self - at the same

time. Drone pilots suffer more burnout than real-world pilots, as they attempt to live in two worlds - home and battlefield - simultaneously. We

all become overwhelmed until we learn to distinguish between data flows (like Twitter) that can only be dipped into, and data storage (like books

and emails) that can be fully consumed.

3. Overwinding trying to squish huge timescales into much smaller ones, like attempting to experience the catharsis of a well-crafted, five-act play in the random flash of a reality show; packing a year’s worth of retail sales expectations into a single Black Friday event – which only results in a fatal stampede; or – like the Real Housewives - freezing one’s age with Botox only to lose the ability to make facial expressions in the moment.

4. Fractalnoia making sense of our world entirely in the present tense, by drawing

connections between things – sometimes inappropriately. The conspiracy theories of the web, the use of Big Data to predict the direction of entire

populations, and the frantic effort of government to function with no “grand narrative.” But also the emerging skill of “pattern recognition”.

5. Apocalypto the intolerance for presentism leads us to fantasize a grand finale. “Preppers” stock their underground shelters while the mainstream ponders a zombie apocalypse, all yearning for a simpler life devoid of pings, by any means necessary. Leading scientists – even outspoken atheists - prove they are not immune to the same apocalyptic religiosity in their depictions of “the singularity” and “emergence”, through which human evolution will surrender to that of pure information.

3. Choices

This Time Is Different

No wifi No broadband No signal… guaranteed!

healing the divided brain

re-connecting the generations

eWealth creation (for everyone)

get in touch: gerard.oneill@amarach.com

www.amarach.com