Unlearning 101

Unlearning & the Rise of the Supercomputer

Marshall McCluhan once famously said, “First, we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” As a professional futurist, I have been trying to explain how some of our tools are getting exponentially more powerful. In turn, these tools are accelerating the advances that will soon shape our future and, by virtue of their findings, necessitate unlearning. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of supercomputers. 

According to this ComputerWorld article, supercomputers with 100 million cores and capable of one quintillion calculations per second—or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 for those of you counting at home—will arrive around 2018. This growing processing power is important because it will help innovative researchers, scientists and entrepreneurs design next-generation materials, drugs, bio-fuels, batteries and much, much more. 

 One area merits special attention and that is in the area of how supercomputers are yielding new insights about the brain. As scientists learn more about how the brain really operates, I am convinced that we will need to unlearn much of what we now think we "know" about the brain. 

To better understand supercomputers amazing power, I invite you to watch this two-minute video I put together last year. Although be forewarned, one quadrillion is already rather quaint:

BMW Unlearns

The German automaker BMW, in introducing its "Light Visionary Model" prototype automobile -- which it dubs GINA (Geometry and Functions in "N" Adaption), writes this: "The key to affecting the development of tomorrow's mobility lies in our readiness to challenge what is established and in the ability to present new options." In short, BMW is unlearning.

I encourage you to watch the short video below. If you notice how doors and hoods no longer open so rigidly -- they gently fold and zip open instead -- or how the lights do open but they "blink" open (much like human eyes) instead, I think you'll agree that the benefits of unlearning could give BMW a very distinct competitive advantage in the near future. I particularly like Chris Bangle's quote at the end of the video: "Context over dogma." Words to live by!

 

The German automaker BMW, in introducing its "Light Visionary Model" prototype automobile -- which it dubs GINA (Geometry and Functions in "N" Adaption), writes this: "The key to affecting the development of tomorrow's mobility lies in our readiness to challenge what is established and in the ability to present new options." In short, BMW is unlearning.

I encourage you to watch the short video below. If you notice how doors and hoods no longer open so rigidly -- they gently fold and zip open instead -- or how the lights do open but they "blink" open (much like human eyes) instead, I think you'll agree that the benefits of unlearning could give BMW a very distinct competitive advantage in the near future. I particularly like Chris Bangle's quote at the end of the video: "Context over dogma." Words to live by!

To Unlearn: Put on a New Hat

I have recounted before how scientific and technical knowledge is doubling every seven years and have pointed out that if this trend continues everything known today will represent just 1 percent of the sum total of world knowledge in 2050. Consider then how a significantly better understanding of the human brain might influence not just science but economics. For instance, we know that, contrary to most economic theory, many people do not always act rationally when it comes to making spending and investing decisions. What will a better understanding of the brain portend for decision-making in this regard?

The answer is likely to be quite a lot. Take the following example. If given a choice between winning $150 or losing $100 on a coin flip (that is, where the odds of heads or tails are equal), many people refuse the deal because they fear the prospect of losing $100 more than they appreciate the benefit of gaining $150. This is the case even though the game is strongly tilted in their favor. The chances are that you will win $75 ($150 x .5) versus losing $50 ($100 x .5)—and this means that if you played the game ten times, on average, you would win $250. Still, most people are reluctant to even accept the bet over ten attempts. What is at work here is something called loss aversion, and it demonstrates that, contrary to rational economic theory, people can and still do make bad decisions—frequently.

A second example involves gift receipts. When people are asked if they would prefer to be given a $15 gift receipt to Amazon.com today or receive a $20 gift receipt in two weeks, a surprising number select the first choice in spite of the long-term economic advantages of the second option. What scientists have discovered is that in both this instance and the coin-flipping example there is disproportionate amount of activity in the limbic area of the brain. Neuroeconomics suggests that such information might be useful in determining how to help people make better long-term decisions such as preparing for retirement.

What else might change as a result of an enhanced understanding of the human brain? For one thing, marketing will. After the 2007 Super Bowl, in which advertisers plunked down a healthy $2.6 million for a thirty-second spot, researchers at UCLA showed that Coca-Cola’s commercials scored the best at connecting with peoples’ emotions and leaving them with a positive feeling. It obtained this information by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to watch how people’s brains responded to  ads.

If neuromarketing is the next wave, it might, among other things, require marketing executives for beer companies to unlearn the notion that scantily clad women, talking frogs, "trendy" vodka or funny shots of a young man getting hit in the groin are neither the best or only way to sell their product.

Medicine is another field ripe for an information explosion. In many instances doctors are today treating some diseases on the basis of limited information. As the connections between the brain and other parts of the body, including the human heart, become better understood, new methods of treatment are sure to arise. Similarly the relationship of whether a disease is the result of genetic or environmental factors, at the present, is also only vaguely appreciated. As new findings come to light, many of these relationship will be better understood. This will require medical professionals to unlearn old ways of practicing their profession and relearn new ones.

A perfect example is the case of Barry Marshall. In the early 1980s he was a practicing physician in Australia with virtually no research experience. Still, he became convinced that ulcers were caused not by stress and spicy food but by a bacteria called Helicobacter pylori. When he presented his theory before a conference of experts in Brussels in 1983 he was practically laughed off the podium. To make a long story short, in 1994 the National Institute of Health concluded that most ulcers were caused by the bacteria, and in 2005 Marshall and his colleague Robin Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. (A staggering number of ulcer sufferers are still unaware that antibiotics can cure them, but that’s another problem.)

To bring it back to a slightly more practical level, we know some lessons on unlearning are already out there. Anyone who has read Michael Lewis’s superb book Money Ball knows that Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, had been able to keep his team consistently competitive -- until this year -- by unlearning the baseball business.

Instead of relying on the subjective opinions of crusty old baseball scouts who have spent their lives around the game and claim they can spot the next “phenom” from a mile away, Beane replaced many of them with Ivy League graduates who can crunch players’ statistics on their laptop computers using sophisticated statistical models and complex algorithms. In so doing he has been able to make George Steinbrenner, who thinks nothings of spending $180 million annually in an attempt to get back to the World Series, look foolish for the past eight years. (Personally, I'm hoping the Yankees will lose again this fall.)

It is with some irony then that another good quote on unlearning comes from Satchel Paige, who once said, “It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you. It’s what you know that just ain’t so.” A lot of baseball minds think they know what makes a great hitter or a great pitcher. Unfortunately the continued failure of certain managers and teams strongly suggests that Mr. Paige was right. A lot of what they think they know “just ain’t so.”

Lest one thinks that there aren’t many opportunities to unlearn things, let us quickly look at a second example. In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki points out that David Romer, an economist at Berkeley,  used statistical probabilities to determine whether NFL coaches would have been better off going for a touchdown on fourth and goal or kicking a field goal. What he discovered is nothing short of startling. In 1,100 different situations where he determined the coach would have been better off going for it, the coaches opted to kick it 992 times. Eighty-eight percent of the time they made the wrong choice!

Why would NFL coaches make the wrong decision almost nine out of ten times? A big part of the answer is loss aversion. They are afraid of losing three points. The purpose of the game, however, is to win, and by unlearning some old things and relearning new things NFL coaches can jump the curve. Exponential executives can do the same thing by adopting different ways of thinking about old problems.

For more sports-related unlearning, check out these old articles:

Unlearn the Running Rules

Practice Your Unlearning Game

 

Unlearning Statistics

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics." Mark Twain

This past Friday Bjorn Lomborg had a thoughtful editorial entitled Technology Can Fight Global Warming. As a professional technologist and futurist, I couldn’t agree more and I have written about this idea frequently. Nevertheless, I find Lomborg’s use of statistics highly unprofessional. To wit, as the basis for his argument, he claims that a high CO2 tax “will reduce world GDP a staggering 12.9% in 2100--the equivalent of $40 trillion a year.”

It is amazing to me that the editors of the Wall Street Journal allow such drivel to be published. No one—and I mean no one—can predict what the future will be like in 91 years. (To understand why see my recent article The Future is Unpredictable). It is even more ridiculous that Lomborg pinpoints the figure at 12.9%. I mean, really, if you are going to guess what impact a future tax is going to have on the economy why not have a little intellectual humility and give yourself some leeway by suggesting the economy will drop by a more rounded figure such as 13%.

There is a famous quote by Andrew Lang that bears repeating here: "An unsophisticated forecaster uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.”

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A Future of Black Swans

The World is Changing: Unlearn!

Take a look at the pictures to the right. What's wrong with them? The answer would seem pretty obvious: they are upside down.

But that is wrong. They are only "wrong" from your perspective. From outer space there is no up or down, so the globe can just as correctly be viewed from one perspective as the other. And, regarding the map, had the first explorers been from Chile -- as opposed to Europe -- the first map of the world might have placed South America on the top and North America on the bottom. If so, we might view today's more common map as the one that is "wrong."

Yesterday, I posted a link to this video, which does an excellent job of explaining how fast the world of social media is changing. To understand the speed and pace let me highlight a couple of findings. It took 38 years before 50 million people had a radio. Television reached that milestone in 13 years, and the Internet only 4 years. I don't know the exact figure for Twitter but it is certainly less than four years.

I also liked the twist on the famous quote about Las Vegas. What happens in Vegas no longer "stays there," it also stays on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Digg -- forever.

The world is changing faster than many of would like -- and more than most of us care to admit. To survive, I remain convinced one of the more critical life skills you can possess is an ability to unlearn because the way you might view the world is likely not the only way to see the world.

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The Future Requires Unlearning

Take Course In Unlearning

Learning to Unlearn

The Time to Unlearn is Now!

This is the latest iteration of famous "Shift Happens" video with a focus on social media. If nothing else, it should serve as a reminder of to all of us why we must constantly unlearn. Enjoy!

Unlearning Prediction

"Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.” Lao Tzu

This famous quote was uttered over 2500 years ago and may strike some people as odd that, as a professional futurist, I have chosen to highlight it.

My rationale is two-fold. First, as I have said many times before, the chief responsibility of a futurist is not to “predict” the future but rather outline a range of future possibilities. Second, and more important, I have highlighted the quote because it is true.

If you have not already read Nassim Taleb's outstanding book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, do so as soon as possible. On Page 177 of the book, Taleb has an illustration of the scattering effect which artfully explains why predicting the future—especially for longer time frames—is virtually impossible.

Because I can’t reprint the figure here, I am left with Taleb’s analogy for understanding the scattering effect: the prediction of a billiard ball.

Assuming one has knowledge of the location of every ball and the speed and accuracy of the cue ball, it is relatively easy to predict the movement of the ball after the first shot. A person might even expect that, due to the growing computational power of computers, the second, third and fourth degree movements can be estimated with great accuracy. The problem, however, grows increasingly complex with each subsequent movement and after the ninth movement the gravitational pull of a person standing at the next pool table exerts enough of an effect to alter the trajectory of the ball. And after 56 movements even the smallest particle on the outer edge of the universe will effect the trajectory!

The bottom line is this: There are simply too many factors to consider when contemplating the future 20, 30, 50 or 100 years out. (Even a small effect today can have outsized implications 50 years hence). The situation, of course, becomes even more complicated because of Taleb’s main thesis which is that “Black Swans”—described as “high impact, low probability” events—tend to shape the future more than “expected” trends.

Therefore, whether a future “Black Swan” takes the shape of a pandemic, an asteroid, an E-bomb, a rogue terrorist attack, a North Korean or Iranian nuclear attack, an unexpected breakthrough in quantum computing or synthetic biology, or, more likely, some “unknown unknown;” the future will be difficult too predict because we don’t have—and won’t ever have—enough knowledge about the future.

Unlearning Information

Unlearning information. It's sounds paradoxical, right? After all, who in their right mind, would want less information? Well, you might if you want to succeed in the future.

Consider this quote which I came across in Jonah Lerner's informative new book, "How We Decide":

"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

It is counter-intuitive but often having access to too much information can lead people to make worse decisions.

For example, in a classic study, one group of MIT graduate students were given access to a steady stream of financial information -- CNBC, Barron's, The Wall Street Journal, etc -- while a second group was only given information on the changing price of a stock.

Given this disparity which group do you think did a better job in selecting stocks? Most people would assume the first group. After all isn't this why people read the Wall Street Journal and watch the analysts on CNBC? Well, you would be wrong. The second group -- the group with less information -- performed better.

Various versions of this experiment have been conducted with other groups, including college counselors who were asked to predict the future success of different students. One group was provided high school transcripts, SAT/ACT test scores, application essays and were even allowed personal interviews with the students. The second group was only given access to transcripts and SAT scores.

Again, the group with less information performed better. One big reason why this occurs is because when people are inundated with too much information they tend to think of all information as being equal. In the process, they lose track of what information is really important. More problematic is the idea that with more information people become increasingly confident of bad decisions!

The bottom line is not just as Jonah Lerner says that "Knowledge has diminishing returns," but rather as Nassim Taleb wrote in the Black Swan that "Additional knowledge of the minutiae of daily business can be useless, even toxic."

So there you go. De-toxify your system. Unlearn. Put down the newspapers and blogs; stop watching TV news programs; and quit following everyone on Twitter -- you'll make better decisions because of it.

Unlearn By Dispelling Old and New Ignorance

In his famous speech at Rice University where he declared that it was America’s intention to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, President Kennedy said “the greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds,” adding that “the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.”

 

Kennedy went on to offer a historical perspective for the magnitude of change society had experienced over the short course of human history. He asked his audience to condense the 50,000 years of man’s recorded history into the span of fifty years. Under this scenario, Kennedy noted that not much happened for the first forty years. Ten years ago, man emerged from his cave, and only five years ago did he learned to write. Christianity appeared two years ago, the printing press this year, and just two months ago the steam engine appeared. Last month electric lights, telephones, automobiles, and airplanes became available, and only last week did we develop penicillin, television, and nuclear weapons. To reach “the stars before midnight tonight,” Kennedy then poignantly added that Americans would have to “dispel old [and] new ignorance.”

 

Since achieving Kennedy’s goal in 1969, progress has continued exponentially. (Ironically, perhaps, with the exception of space exploration which, as Monday's 40th aniversary of the moon landing reminds us, has not made much progress.) Taking his historical analogy a little further, however, in the last proverbial "day" computers, biotechnology, the Internet, and the sequencing of the human genome have all appeared on the scene.

 

What Kennedy's analogy reminds us it that will need to continue to “dispel old ignorance” -- or continuously unlearn if you will -- only on a faster scale.

Take a Course in Unlearning

At the end of yesterday's post on learning to unlearning, I posed the following question: How does one learn a new gestalt? To begin a person must start by unlearning some things. But what things do we unlearn? For our purposes, a good place to start might be to imagine what a course on unlearning what might look like.

 

One place to start is to imagine where the course would take place. Initially it will be—and already is—online. In 2007 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it was putting all of its courses online for free—for anyone in the world to access.

 

And let’s remember, the online, virtual classroom of the future is only going to get better. The Internet of the future will be streaming incredible amounts of data-rich information anywhere in the world, students will be capable of wirelessly downloading the latest information from flexible electronic books that display both the written word and video files, and new software programs will be capable of translating text from Mandarin Chinese, French, or Farsi into English—and vice versa. (See "The Future of Reading.")

 

Another place a course on unlearning might gravitate toward is 3-D virtual-reality environments such as Linden Labs’ Second Life—a site where anyone can create a personal avatar of himself, meet other virtual avatars, and engage in online training sessions. As of this writing IBM, Dell, Intel, Circuit City, and Sears have all created a virtual presence in Second Life.

 

Interestingly, one of the initial motives of this move was not to create a stronger presence on the Internet (although that is certainly a factor), it was to achieve cost savings on employee education.

 

What is more interesting from the perspective of unlearning is how Second Life and other virtual-reality sites can be exploited to provide people with different perspectives. In a virtual environment, people can take on any appearance they want. While some people will undoubtedly use it for escapist fantasies, it could also be a powerful tool to help people unlearn certain habits. Imagine, for example, customer service representatives or managers being required to act as customers in one of their own online stores. The experience could provide a unique and refreshing perspective. (And, as I recently wrote, we could all benefit on occasion from unlearning everything from our perspective of color to that person across the street.)

 

Longer term, the classroom of unlearning will likely become even more immersive. Perhaps Second Life will morph into Third Life. Among the technologies this environment are likely to incorporate will be enhanced visual, auditory, voice and speech recognition, and haptic technologies. Doctors and service technicians could use these tools to practice operations and repairs in silico before being allowed to ply their trade in the real world.

 

These tools will also be a boon for learning, unlearning, and relearning. People are often classified into one of three broad categories of learning: visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. Visual people learn by seeing or reading something, auditory learners by hearing it, and kinesthetic learners learn by doing it with their hands and muscles. (It is not quite this simple. Many people use a combination of different techniques for different things, but in general, most people tend to favor one of the three methods over the other two.)

 

A course on unlearning could exploit these natural tendencies and help people absorb new ways of doing things. For instance, instead of just reading about how a new drug works on a cancer patient, doctors could watch how it interacts with and disables a cancer cell. Other businesses could use such immersive technology to gain a deeper appreciation of what an elderly person experiences and create products that better address their needs. (See "Unlearning Your Age.")

 

Many courses on unlearning won’t have a teacher. They will rather be open source in nature, and the content will not be provided by a single “expert” but rather it will be continually added to and improved upon by a vast collection of people. To this end, a relatively new wiki called Curriki has recently been created. Its goal is to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational material to anyone who needs it—anywhere in the world.

 

But far from being a shoddy collection of disjointed or inferior ideas, the result of these wikis will be vastly superior to anything a single expert could pull together. In the case of business wikis, they will contain advice and insights from employees, suppliers, and customers.

 

Among the adjustments this will require is that managers will need to unlearn their own reliance on experts. People will need to unlearn the idea that money and quality are synonymous. In the future, many of the best products will be the creation of open-source methods and wikis.

 

Another thing people will have to unlearn is that there isn’t always an answer. This is because so many fields are constantly evolving. An admission of one’s own ignorance may well be the first step most people will need to take upon entering the unlearning classroom of the future. Exponential executives may even have to go a step farther and accept that ignorance will be the largest element in their future educational needs.