This video is an introduction to Ray Kurzweil’s newest project: The Singularity University.

In 2005 Kurzweil published his seminal work, The Singularity is Near.  For Kurzweil the Singularity is that point where we are able to transcend the limitations of our biology through our science.  I read this book slowly and in detail. I was left with dozens of pages of notes, and a jaw-dropping appreciation of his Vision.

Over the next couple of months, I will  be covering  his books, and his thought in depth.  For now suffice it to say that I believe he is one of the most extraordinary minds of this, or any century AND that his Vision of the Future is as important as it is stunning. 

Speaking of Kurzweil Bill Gates of Microsoft had this to say: “Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence. His intriguing new book envisions a future in which information technologies have advanced so far and fast that they enable humanity to transcend its biological limitations—transforming our lives in ways we can’t yet imagine.”

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Below are links to Kurzweil’s books “The Singularity” and to “Transcend.” They are Amazon links so I hope you buy a bunch of copies but even if you don’t, just go to the library and read both books both closely. They are important. “The Singularity” shows a vision of a very possible near future and “Transcend” can literally save your life if you are a Boomer with medical issues.
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Many believe that the Net Generation is the most selfish, self-absorbed and thoughtless generation ever.  Have the Boomers created a narcissistic generation of children that can’t function? Will their techie games like Facebook and Twitter ultimately dead-end like the pet rock?  Will having their lives and loves on the Net destroy their ability to function as adults?  Will they ever create anything of real value?

If the current avalanche of negative press can be believed, the Net Generation is hopeless.

Don Tapscott has a much different opinion.  He has been researching the effects of digital technology on individuals and society for over 15 years.  In his book Grown Up Digital, he finds this generation full of surprising talents and skills acquired from a deep association with the Internet, and an interestingly close relationship with their Boomer parents.  He also points out that they are the first ubiquitously connected generation. They often have friends around the world from an early age, and this provides them with truly unique learning experiences on both the technological and interpersonal levels.

Tapscott identifies 8 norms in this challenging generation. 

1. Freedom They prize freedom and choice for themselves and for others.  Indeed, their world is all about freedom of choice, and much of it is about the choice of creativity. 
2. Customization They want to customize things—everything—to make those things personal and original.  For them the question is, what will they personalize or change or create anew today.
3. Scrutiny They will scrutinize you and your organization.  Get ready.  The Net taught them the value of judicious choice and continuous judgment.  They do not turn off this scrutiny.  It is part of who they are and what they do in every moment.  They will forgive generously if you make a mistake and ‘fess up, but you will not pull the wool over their eyes.  If they suspect you are lying, they will Google your story into submission.  Moreover, they seem to find a way to do this without being pessimists; indeed as a group they are clearly optimists.
4. Integrity The near omniscient information and ubiquitous self-revelation of the Net has taught them that liars will be caught and that Integrity is critical. They have seen the scams and stupidity of the Net and have learned to insist upon Integrity in their work and relationships.
5. Collaboration Growing up on the Net with Boomer parents, the Net Gen are natural collaborators.  For them, being an individual and being connected and collaborating are all the same thing.  An infinite number of combinations both personal and factual are the norm, and to be expected. This means that for the very first time creativity is the Norm, not the exception. A hundred years from now this generation’s legacy is going to be very interesting.
6. Entertainment They want to engage and have fun at work and at school.  They use their ubiquitous connectivity in all parts of their life.  They pour themselves into life with a passion that is akin to the extreme sports that were born as they were.
7. Speed For the Net Gen, Speed is the Norm, and I will add my own corollary here: Slow is Wrong.  They are intent on LIVING, and they want that in capital letters. Get ready. The pace of their lives will increase as they rise through the ranks, and as their Generation comes to control more and more of the Gates of Life.
8. Innovation Daily innovation is part of their lives in a way that has never been seen before.  There have been those in every generation who were innovators, but this is a Global Generation of innovators closely connected to the collective information of our entire species.

So if this is the profile of the Net Gen, what shall we look for down the line? 

Here, like any good researcher, Tapscott leaves much open-ended, but it is clear that he is an optimistic advocate of this generation.  As a Boomer parent of two from the Net Gen and as an academic, he has been studying this unique generation for over 15 years. What is it that Don Tapscott sees?

Socially, he sees two fascinating effects.  First of all, this is the first Global Generation.  Spend a little time on the Net and you will see what he means.  The names you see there playing, writing and working are from every part of the globe.  Most of the Net Generation have friends they have never met. Oftentimes, close friends.   Secondly, this globally connected generation is very passionate about family.  We are seeing the rebirth of the extended family in a new and exciting format.

Professionally, Tapscott sees the Net Generation changing the nature of work.  They come to the work place with crucial tech skills and with these they are taken seriously early in their careers.  The Net Gen norms that Tapscott outlines will force a more flexible workplace.   What you can do and make happen will finally be more important than your degree, tenure or experience.  Moreover, look for change to be enacted at light speed.  The Net Gen is always on and in pursuit of change. You may be dismayed to find them playing at work, but look for the engaged Net Gen to be working when he is at play. For the Net Gen, seamless is good and life is well-lived at a blistering pace.

 What are my thoughts?  I am a Boomer who has hired and worked with a number of the Net Generation.  I think Tapscott is right, and more.  This generation is grounded in family and focused on the future.  I believe their skill at Net searching, collaborating and learning portends well for our world.  Contrary to popular opinion, I believe this is a generation that has learned how to learn. Further, this is a generation that does not acknowledge national or ethnic boundaries to knowledge or action.

We may not always like the way they go about it. They end run college busywork assignments.  They have no patience for the slow plodding approach.  They are better at tech out of the box than we will ever be. They expect to do meaningful work from their first day on the job. And truly, they do not fit in well with the traditional Sage on Stage model of college learning. As Davidson and Rees-Mogg predicted in the Sovereign Individual, I believe this generation will ultimately re-define the nation state, and strengthen the world. 

All in all, I find Tapscott’s presentation of the Net Gen in Grown Up Digital to be an inspiring account of what I am certain will be (with apologies to Tom Brokaw and his book) the greatest generation.

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Yup another commercial message. Below are links to two of Tapscotts great books. If you choose to click through from here and buy I will receive a tiny commission from Amazon.

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But Kelly’s work is different.  He talked about the development of Facebook while the founder was still in middle school.  He predicted the ascendancy of the Net and its storage locker the Cloud.  He predicted that the traditional rule driven production of the Industrial Age would give way to the constant but productive flux of the Information Age… he even predicted that the Information Age would give way to the Age of Relationships and Wikinomics.  He predicted that the computer would become a commodity and that it was the Network and its ultimate result, the Relationship, which was coming. 

Today, in the midst of vast economic flux, Mainframes have given way to Desktops, Desktops have given way to Laptops, and Laptops are giving way to iPhones and Netbooks. Now it is our connectivity to that vast web of Relationships that we call the Internet that matters most.  Whether we are using a GPS, or an iPhone or a Netbook, the most important information of our day to day life is on the Net and in the Cloud.

This ubiquitous repository of knowledge seems to be everywhere and nowhere.  Driven by the value of having the data and the information of our lives and work updated, synced and in real time, most of us have our calendars, our work and our research on the Net.  More and more we work from the Cloud and not from our desktops. The power of the Cloud extends from a Google calendar shared between spouses  to the data flow that an international executive needs to track the critical real time issues of his organization. 

This is today’s news, but Kelly told us about it first.  Eleven years ago.  In this brilliantly fast moving world, that’s like predicting the failure of TWA in 1900. Did we see a prophet? Did we listen?  Some certainly did.  Many of us did not.  What should we have heard 11 years ago? His rules were admittedly a bit cryptic for the uninitiated:

1. Embrace the Swarm
2. Increasing Returns
3. Plentitude not Scarcity
4. Follow the Free
5. Feed the Web First
6. Let Go at the Top
7. From Places to Spaces
8. No Harmony, All Flux
9. Relationship  Tech
10. Opportunities Before Efficiencies

Let’s tease out the meaning of Kelly’s Rules in the context of the present.

Embrace the Swarm is about the power of distributed knowledge.  The soccer Mom next door can spend an afternoon on the Net and know more about her son’s rare cancer than the family doctor. This enhances her son’s chance of survival and increases her power, while decreasing the doctor’s lock on the exclusiveness of his.  Knowledge, they have said for years, is power.  But it must be known and acted upon to matter.  With the spreading power of distributed knowledge comes new aggregations that can be tapped.  Formal and informal organizations are created, break apart and re-form on a daily basis.   The best of this organized knowledge and its power can be repackaged for action; and the soccer Mom (with husband, family, friends and other Relationship allies from across the Globe) can save her son’s life; adding his life and its value to the world.

Increasing returns.  Kelly wrote early in the history of the Net.  The number of connections could still be counted and more or less understood. Almost daily those of us watching were amazed at the breadth and depth of the knowledge and connections being created.  As a group we were just discovering the power of Greater Numbers.  Two people communicating through a node or a phone call is a conversation.  Twenty is a research consortium.   A few thousand and you have a revolution… and on the Net this can happen overnight. 

Plentitude, Not Scarcity.  Today the knowledge component of each product and service increases at a blistering pace, and whole new whole new areas of work and research are spun off on a near daily basis. Not only does knowledge itself increase, but as Ray Kurzweil argues in The Singularity, the acceleration of the production of knowledge of all sorts increases.  In this, knowledge is passionately unique.  It is not used up by sharing, it is increased dramatically.  The more we share it, the more we increase it, and nothing shares knowledge like the Relationships driven by the Net.

Follow the Free.  For Kelly, as the abundance of knowledge increases, we are driven in the service of its Freedom.  It has been said that on the Net knowledge wants to be free.  The more knowledge is shared and worked and re-worked, and the more creative minds that have access to it, the greater the value of that knowledge and the lower the cost of both atoms and knowledge.  Can anyone say Google and Wikipedia here?  And maybe Wolfram|Alpha (the scientific problem-solving engine of Stephen Wolfram). If you and I have one sandwich between us for lunch and we share it with each other, we each have half.  If we share it with 20 co-workers, we each have a smell and a few crumbs. However, turn that sandwich into knowledge—each co-worker adds an idea, and we now have the original knowledge bit and 20 new spin-offs, 20 new ideas… and those are then shared.  Our current economic crisis aside, the rules of Scarcity and Costliness have been repealed because of the Nature of Knowledge and the ubiquitous Relationships of the Net.

Feed the Web.  As the nodes of communication and relationships in a particular arena expand and entangle us, our loyalty is driven into the Web itself.  Thus, the Wiki becomes a massive force to be reckoned with.  Knowledge is aggregated and organized and learned and used amongst a group of peers.  In return they drive this value by returning to add their own knowledge to the process.  The speed and ubiquity of this driven knowledge becomes more important than the companies that people work for.  They feed the web and the web helps them feed the company.

Let Go at the Top.  Wrap a web of knowledge and relationship around the world, and where is the top? There is none.  With the acceleration of innovation and knowledge driven by the Web, the leader often becomes the follower.  The Servant Leader, as Stephen Covey calls him, facilitates the minds that drive the innovation that drives the company.  This Leader lets go of the legacy of the Industrial Age command-and-control model and puts himself in the roll of servant to the Mission of the Organization.  It is this vision and innovation that drives the choices of the modern organization.

From Places to Spaces.  Place has become unimportant and Space (the Space of connected communities on the Net) has become important.  We are at the point where many of our most important connections and relationships are nurtured on FaceBook and MySpace and LinkedIn.  Thanks to the Net, we are much better at the connections that drive warmth and relationship.  Ask anyone who has reconnected with old friends and former colleagues via the Net.  Spaces do not replace Places, but they can augment them dramatically. I have a friend who tells me of a spontaneous party of over 300 former high school friends who re-connected through Facebook, and brought their families and children together for an afternoon of fun just because they could.  Today, Spaces drive Places, and both drive the Relationships that make us better both personally and professionally.  When others were telling how the Net would de-personalize our world, Kelly was telling us it would bring us together.

No Harmony, all Flux.  Wasn’t it Heraclitus who said that all is flux and change?  Whatever his philosophic mistakes, he might well have been writing about the drive of a knowledge economy in this millennium.  When real human value comes from the Idea and not from the incremental improvements of productivity, we know that the Industrial Age has come and gone. Kelly re-iterates again and again, almost in repetitive redundancy, that if you can measure “productivity” as the economists do, by counting widgets per hour, the task is not important enough for humans to be doing.  In fact he takes this further; he says that most of the jobs that the unions are fighting for today will be considered inhumane in a few decades.  He champions our freedom from the assembly line and our explosion into creativity and innovation of all kinds.

Relationship Tech.  Oddly and surprisingly, all the hard technology and the computers and the Networks of Wires and Wireless connecting us at light speed have come down to this; the furthering of Relationships.  It maybe the resurgence of the interconnected and extended family that Don Tapscott talks about in Grown Up Digital, or it may be colleagues wrangling over esoteric knowledge on a private Wiki.  But it is the Relationship that has arisen as the clear winner in this world

Opportunities Before Efficiencies. Here Kelly returns to the roots of what it means to be human with a resounding “and I mean it.” For Kelly, to be human is to be creative; to dive into the opportunities of a life unbounded by the repetitions that are measured and called productive and efficient.  He is quite clear in this.  If a machine can do it, it should. This frees another creative mind to add to the benevolence of a growing race.

Can I sum up Kelly’s book? Yes, that is pretty simple.  If you didn’t read it and act on it 11 years ago, go back and read it and act on it today.  The very long term principles that he brought to light in this brilliant tour de force are as fresh today as they were then.  Buy it.  Read it.  Digest it.  Act on it.  Your life and your portfolio will thank you.

 Well, unpleasant and radical truths are still the truth,even if they are cast in an old fashioned and an oh-so-last-century manner. 

 The bottom line is that I think Dave Ramsey is on to something very real.   I started this book as a skeptic.  I have read economic theorists like Keynes and von Mises, Hayek and even Sowell’s  commentaries.  I have even read Howard Ruff and Robert Allen, not to mention more than a few economic textbooks.  Why read any book that seems so antiquarian, when my focus in on the thought and the theories that might illuminate the next hundred years?

I am not sure, but it seemed different somehow and I know that oftentimes answers are found in differences and not in sameness.  So I read it.  Closely.  I took nearly 10 pages of handwritten notes, and I ended up thinking that this book could be used as a model for re-vamping our financial system and the values of many of our people. 

The essence of Ramsey’s point is that easy borrowing can and statistically does destroy many people financially.  Many of us are seduced by credit cards and the very easy way that we can seem to have it all, and have it all now.  We can get a gold card.  We can borrow $50,000 across various credit lines, no matter what our real income.  A year ago we could get that low or no-doc mortgage.  All, we had to do is show a strong credit score and we could buy that quarter or half million dollar house without a penny down.

Thanks to the ability of the Federal Government to manipulate our currency the government could have it all too.  Add the budget debt to the off budget entitlements and how many Trillions (I never use that word without capitalizing it.) of dollars was our deficit before the current crisis?   If someone wants to figure that out for me, I would love to know but  I haven’t the time to research it at the moment.  Still, this number is a HUGE number and we are set to double it in the next few years.

 Ramsey says forget the complicated economics, money is simple. 

Money in minus money out  gives you a color.  If it is red you are racking up debt, and if it is black you are adding to your net worth.  Whether we are talking about a family or a company or a government, this is still true.  We can manipulate the game for a while and we can feel smart doing so, but it will snap back and it will cause a lot of pain. Maybe that is the simple but profound explanation for this recession.

Consider this on very personal basis.  If you had  no consumer debt, if your home was paid off, if you had 6 months worth of savings in the bank and if your job was very stable; just how worried would you about this financial crises?  In this context you could almost live on what a friend of mine calls paper route money. But, if you have $40,000 in credit card debt, two car payments and a $3,500 monthly house payment, you have some very serious trouble.  Any small set back can and will cause a financial crisis.  When that happens, the guy who lived frugally will likely be buying your home out of foreclosure for pennys on the dollar.

Anyway… go buy the book, do it now.  Read it.  I challenge you.  Read it aloud to your spouse.  Read it to the nearest Government representative you can nail down.   And get Ramsey’s core principle down cold. Challenge  yourself to earn it and then buy it.  Whatever that “it” happens to be in your case.

In a limited number of important instances they have chosen to stay focused  and driven until they get thru the Dip.  Tne Dip is that difficult spot where you have been working hard for a long time and it seems like you are getting nowhere.  Maybe you are applying to your 20th grad school or you struggling thru the 3rd year of your business.  Maybe you are at that point where no one believes in you, or what you are doing, or what you stand for… that spot is the dip.  The 100 billion dollar question is simple.  Is this the Dip before it all takes wings to fly or is this the inexorable sag that you can’t and shouldn’t try to prop up. 

I understand that feeling, both the situation and the decision are brutal.  I tried to prop a business like that up.  If I had read the Dip a couple of years earlier, (Ok, ok it was published in 2007 and I needed it in 20005 or 2006) things could have been a lot different.  My advice is read the Dip.  Spend some time figuring out which Dips you must push thru and which you must simply quit.  Quit those now.  Don’t wait.  The truly important should never be at the mercy of the unimportant.  Can’t decide which is which?  That is a tough one and a subject for another day.  Hint:  Stephen Covey said a lot about this, so did Jack Canfield.