Feb 15

Written by: Dick Morley
2/15/2009 

The road to the future is not a projection of the past.  As the book "The Black Swan" suggests, improbable events occur frequently.  It is unlikely that a specific event (earthquake - mud slide - drought - and on) will occur.  But, it is probable that some improbable event will occur often.  So projections of events based upon a naive analysis will be flawed.  Expect a decisive turn of events.  Good or bad. 

The trend in technology to believe in short term trend extrapolations is naive at best.  So what do we do?  HP looks at the top 1% of patents, determined by the reference frequency, to learn the trends.  Even if we didn't know what they are.  And seven of eight of these salient inventions are done by individuals or small organizations.   Only one in eight is initiated by large organizations. 

Let’s look at the social trends.  Engineers are in short supply.  CAD/CAM training is lengthy and ponderous.  We expand a problem to fit our concept of solution.  For an analogy, consider monster trucks. Those big earth moving machines serves a big need, but for some jobs, like the bringing cable the last mile to the home, they’re counter-productive. The invention of the backhoe and the Fordson tractor overwhelmed the market because they filled that need not served by big earth moving machines.  The Monster shovels never saw it coming. 

Movies vs TV, iPod vs music distribution, trucks vs rail, USPO vs Fed-Ex are but a few examples. Newer trends are Computer Games vs Movies, Vista vs OS X, and for our audience, Mainstream CAD vs Google SketchUp.  For those on the right side of the equation, we just want to solve a problem, not learn to use the tool.
 
We need to solicit revolutionary elements into our staid and rational engineering systems.