Technology

From early days through the modern Information Age, we adapted our work to the technologies of the time. With culture we learned to speak complex thoughts and collaborate over meaning. With argriculture, we spent our time planting and harvesting. With machines came the assembly line. And now we have our screens. We ensure our computers know what we’re doing in a way not quite as cool as we thought it would be. Still, it’s pretty cool. Can we do better?

What if our technology could remove more seems between our work and our outcomes? Could we turn away from our screens, face our problems and expect our computers to keep up?

Retrofuturism

In a world imagined at the dawn of our age, things were cool. It was clean, efficient, and safe. Everything we wanted we had. The world anticipated our needs and prepared it for us before we knew to ask. The Jetsons got the playfullness of this possibility right:

People could do what looks crazy dangerous safely. Life moved at a faster but satisfying pace. People in this dream are empowered.

My version of this is simpler, but we would collaborate more, we would do more, we would have systems that could figure out what work we need to do and do the parts it could. If Siri were the Siri of my dreams, it could look like this:

“Hey Siri, prepare me for this next meeting.”

“I’ve setup a summary of the agenda, take a look at the second item, the budget changes.”

“What’s interesting about those?”

“They are about 30% higher than predicted. The new building construction is overbudget and behind schedule.”

“Are our predictions based on the contractor’s numbers?”

“No, they are our own. We are about 55% above the contractor’s numbers.”

Do you see how cool that would be? A tool that can grasp context, compare reality to expectations, and use a voice interface effectively. I don’t think this is science fiction. I think our technology could be used to flip our attention away from our screens and towards our colleagues and collaborators.

Branch

I grew up in a computer lab. To be fair, it was actually a photo lab, but my dad automated it with computers. In the 70s. Executives from New York and Minnesota came to our little rented duplex to see what this guy was doing that their PhDs couldn’t. This gives me exactly one advantage: I’ve been imagining how things could be better for a long time.

This imagining means I’ve idealized what could be. It means my head is sometimes in the clouds. We moved from C and C++ to “4th Generation Languages,” and I started thinking about what the 10th generation could create. We dialed into university information boards and I imagined what a network would look like. I read about rule-based AI in the 80s and imagined what a true voice interface could do.

In the 90s, SAP and other ERPs were born. This was the age of SQL and relational databases and Enterprise Resource Planning is what happens when you give a SQL database steroids. In a lot of ways, this was a good thing–as long as you’re in the business of planning and stiffening how your business runs. Experience says it takes a team of consultants and 1-3 quarter projects to change large ERP deployments.

Ruby on Rails was built as the anti-ERP solution. In the age of agility and smart people tired of enterprises bossing them around, Ruby was designed with programmer happiness in mind. Rails was designed with programmer productivity in mind. Get data into a form and into a database quickly, with all the sexy tools of the age, and you’re a winner. Smart companies were started with Rails: Github, Shopify, AirBnB, BaseCamp, Twitter, and many more went far fast with this technology.

All of this progress means we spend less time to get more done–as long as we’re focused on our screens. This makes it easier to create a user experience, easier to build SaaS companies. I’ve done a lot of this. I’ve worked on hundreds of projects, some of them you’ve heard about. But what I’ve wanted is what I’ve seen done in a little photo lab in the 1970s: a chance to do well at things that matter, even if it looks differently than the experts think it should.

As Lewis Carroll reminds us, “It’s a poor thing sort of memory that only works in the past.” ¹ Memory and imagination work together, and this has started to drive ideas into running code. We call the project Branch, and it’s designed to address complexity, get the user focused away from the screen and towards collaborators. So far, it’s looking interesting. It means I track events, context, and work.

A Technological Design

Forget the voice part of this idea, and Branch is working on this kind of interaction right now. Events are an event log, either precisely defined or a prompt for something more formal to be worked out later. That means I can share what’s going on, what I think is relevant, and even if the system can’t handle that information yet, it has the information. I can push the system to catch up.

An event means something when it’s in context. What was I working on? Where am I? Do I have any rules or tools for this situation? What does the system need to know to take the next steps. Just like with events, if the context isn’t setup well, it’s OK. I’ll learn to gather only relevant information better over time.

Once something happens, and I have a guess about why it’s important, I can assign the system work to do. It might be a really clear shot: he’s telling me he’s weighed himself, I’m going to record that information and see if he’s on track with his expectations. If so, congratulate him. If not, encourage him. Maybe the system’s out of useful encouragement, so I can let it know that a good Douglas Adams quote would have been funny in that moment.

In reality, this starts with about 20 classes, a database, and little panache. I am not telling the system that I can do it all right now, or ever. I’m dancing with the mystery of my life, of hard problems, complexity that normally runs me over can at least be logged into my system. Zat Rana suggests this could be a good thing–adapting to mystery, working with things that bring me awe ².

A Mindshift

In order to get anywhere with what I’m doing, I turned away from the specialists, the people that told me how I should be doing things. I’ve read too many books and articles that tell me the future of AI is the same 20 algorithms. It’s not. I just don’t believe that those tools get me what I want without applying them fundamentally differently to my life.

What I’ve got to do is force a wedge into the toughest parts of my life and see if I can push some awareness and functionality into that gap. When the insurance company were being little shits, what do I wish I’d known? When I flubbed a meeting, what could I have done better? When I stress ate that bundt cake, was there anything else I could have done better?

A lot of the event-context-work loops are not worth championing. The problems are untractable or the effort is not worth the gains. But some of them are gold. Some of them, if handled well, could change the way I work, the direction I face when I deal with hard things.

And this isn’t just for me. Branch is a company as much as it is a technology. If I can solve some problems profitably with it, I can get these ideas, these tools, into people’s minds and hands. Maybe they build something like this, but better. Maybe they love what I do and use it directly. It’s a mindshift from, “I’ve got an app for that,” to, “what would Geoge Jettson do?”