Dr. James Canton

Dr. Canton's Demonstration Video

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Collaboration

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Dr. James Canton Forecasts the Future

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Dr. James Canton Forecasts the Future

Executive Technology 2001

Michael Hickins
By Adam Lincoln

James Canton, president of the Institute for Global Futures in San Francisco, is convinced that in the next five to eight years, “retail will be transformed by the technologies of the Internet, voice recognition, sensory feedback and, perhaps most dramatically, personalized electronic merchandising.”
Executive Technology asked Canton to talk about his vision of the direction of retailing in the near future, the steps retailers will have to take to capture the imagination of consumers and the kinds of investment in infrastructure that will be required to make this vision take shape.
EXECUTIVE TECHNOLOGY: What do retailers have to do to capture greater consumer mind-share?
JAMES CANTON: Retailers have to get smarter about how they leverage their physical presence online. Some people are going to understand that there's an opportunity to have more intimate relationship with customers.
ET: Retailers often talk about offering consumers more ways of interacting with them, but is this something consumers really want?
JC: We have to figure out how to make it easier for consumers to use technology. Right now, it doesn't work very well: it's not reliable or easy to use. Over the next few years, technology needs to be designed to future out intuitively what people need and adapt to us - not require us to adapt to it. And it will do that. We're going to see the emergence of natural language processing, the further integration of telephone and computer, more intuitive interfaces, surrogate helpers that intuitively process our request and more precise search engines.
ET: Do you see anything on the horizon that is addressing this?
JC: The new Playstation 2. Though they look like game machines, they may end up being the paradigm for setting the bar. It's a message to technology vendors: if you do not adapt and make your systems easier and more functional, you will be eclipsed by the next generation. Playstation 2 can do everything your PC does. It isn't intended to run business applications, but its operating system is more sophisticated than integrated than anything already on our desktops. This is the future.
ET: That's assuming consumers will continue to use technology as a shopping tool, doesn't it?
JC: The synergy between on- and off-line retailers is very, very critical. As the Internet becomes integrated in the next generation of TV and embedded in automobiles and appliances, retailers will have an entirely new channel to not just promote, market and push people into their physical stores, but to interact in real time, personalize, understand customer priorities, use new gateways to drive people to the on-line experience.
ET: How will on- and off-line technologies interact together to form a seamless experience?
JC: People want to interact with others, for reasons that are more prevalent than before. With our aging population, longer lifetimes, the Internet and the growth of entrepreneurship, over 30% of the work force will be telecommuting.
Without any workplace to go to, going out to the mall will be even more important to people.
So retailers have to get smarter about how to leverage their physical presence in the online environment. Personalized electronic merchandising is an opportunity to understand and have a more intimate relationship with customers. Email messages personalized with video and audio will generate a 50% to 70% return on investment, versus traditional 1% to 3% return you get from direct mail marketing. Retailers can do profiles on 5 million people in a data warehouse, segmenting by demographics and interest, and use the Internet to send customized communications with offers of discounted merchandise. And it's a thousand times cheaper than direct mail, and it's targeted so it's more efficient.
ET: What technologies will retailers use to interact with them?
JC: Consumers will have wireless smart cards and automated intelligent agents loaded with whatever personal information they choose to disclose, including digital cash signatures, authority to buy within certain thresholds, with that agent acting as their mediator. Consumers won't have to put up with an impersonal experience with a retailer. The won't have to input their information over and over again with every new retailer.
ET: So the idea is to let shoppers enjoy the intrinsic pleasure of shopping without the inconvenience of the transaction process?
JC: Right. The intelligent agent helps find, bid for, transact and deliver the product. All those levels of functionality will be integrated into the process.
ET: Will consumers perceive this as exciting?
JC: “telepresence,” the next evolution of virtual reality, will become a very critical technology for on-line retailers. Consumers will be given a full sensory experience in cyberspace that will come to rival walking through a physical mall. It's like the sensory force feedback joysticks that exist today - it's a new way of digitizing information. The next generation of the Internet will be thousands of times faster than today. It's going to be a very exciting time for retailers and will drive traffic into their stores if they learn to adapt to this technology.
ET: Won't this kind of technology be available to a very select demographic?
JC: On the contrary, it will be available to everyone. The massification of knowledge that has completely changed culture, as we know it is still a fairly new phenomenon. The printing press was invented only 500 years ago. That was the beginning. Now the next big wave in telecommunications - the deployment of fiver and wireless spectrums - will offer very high bandwidth on demand and at a low price point or free.
ET: Do you think retail will remain localized or will the Internet make retail become more global?
JC: We'll no longer be separated from other peoples throughout the world by language or physical distance or national borders. The major marketplace will be a global marketplace linking over 200 countries in a very vibrant, robust, virtual electronic bazaar.
ET: What is the linchpin of this vision?
JC: Investments by governments and business to help build the back-end IT architecture that will make for an electronic learning environment, and environment that will link TV, computers, cell phones and mobile devices so they will become a platform for education and merchandising, and most especially for collaboration and communicating.

MARIAH MAKES IT EASY

James Canton describes the seamless shopping experience of the future:

Let's say I'm about to fly to San Francisco on business. Before getting on the plane, I log in to my intelligent agent, Mariah, which has already read my e-mail and tells me I'm being offered a 15% discount on a video game machine, which it knows I might have some interest. Mariah has already done a price comparison and this is the one for me. I ask for the closet location based on my travel itinerary. Mariah finds one in San Francisco and even confirms that they have available inventory. I confirm my interest and Mariah has the store hold it and even makes an appointment with a saleswoman at the same chain I know in Dallas and with whom I prefer to deal. She will be available virtually from her Dallas location and give me more information and advice in real time.
In my wallet, I'm carrying a smart card provided by a wireless service company that has stored my personal information and preferences, so as I walk into the store in San Francisco, the retailer who participates in the same wireless service knows what kind of products I like. As I walk into the store, the smart card activates a local area network and lights up displays next to products as I'm passing the shelves.
Furthermore, because I'm a frequent shopper at this retailer, the smart card gets me discounts based on my past purchase history.
To actually make a purchase, I simply flash my card at the shelf display - I don't pick up the products - and I verbally confirm to Mariah that I'm going to buy it.
As I'm getting a presentation from the virtual saleswoman in the Dallas store, Mariah has negotiated an extra bonus pack and an extra carrying case because she has detected better offers elsewhere.
The retailer asks to update my profile, and I give them access to Mariah, who also updates my personal profile on an ongoing basis.
All these purchases are facilitated by other portals, and everyone gets a piece of the action. The wireless provider gets a piece, the retailer gets a piece, folks who are part of the collaborative merchandising Web and the product manufacturer all get a piece, and they all get to share information.

Competing In the Future

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Fast Forward to Robo Health

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Fast forward to Robo Health

Chris Zdeb, Journal Staff Writer

Edmonton Journal

June 24, 2002

Are you ready for a world where organ cloning is routine?

Where CyberDoc computers diagnose your aches and pains? Where surgically implanted devices similar to a pacemaker remedy the symptoms of epilepsy, Parkinson's tremors, chronic pain, incontinence and sleep apnea? Where, shades of Star Trek and Star Wars, doctors interact with life-size transparent holographs as if they were real patients? This is health care in the future and not that far away either, says American technology futurist James Canton, whose San Francisco think tank advises health care and pharmaceutical clients and governments, including provincial decision-makers on this side of the border. His book Technofutures details how leading-edge technology will transform business in the 21st century.

• As early as 2003, in the States anyway, a few years later here, people will begin carrying a "smart card," a personal health history on a tiny chip detailing the drugs they've taken, medicines they're allergic to, diseases or conditions they've suffered. Hooked to the Net, the card will alert people to new research on a mutant genetic trait they've inherited, he says.

• The focus on preventive medicine and fitness will grow more intense, driven in part by people spending more time searching for health and medical information to prevent illness and support their good health. Internet 2, a faster, video-rich, more essential Internet that will be wireless and a lot more personalized will help them do this, he says. What we now call telemedicine, supplementing care to people in remote and rural areas, will be simply medicine tomorrow, he says.
• Home care will become more efficient as remote patient monitoring over the Net becomes available. Chronically ill patients will be equipped with "nurse-bots" for 24-hour duty which will be able to take vital signs and transmit them using hand-held video conferencing devices to a central data base. A medical college in the States is already running trials with such monitors he says.
• Like personal fitness trainers, people will soon have a personal health agent who will remind them to take their medicine if they're diabetic, tell them which restaurants to eat at that would support their health or help shape their healthy living with nutrition counseling or by getting them a second or third opinion about a particular medical problem, Canton says. Getting more people to take more responsibility for their own health will not only make health care more efficient, it will also make it more cost effective, he says.

The Extreme Future

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Brave Cool World

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Brave Cool World

Dr. James Canton Predicts the Future of Technology

Report on Business Magazine
Michael Smith
December 1999

Report on Business Magazine: You talk about knowledge-based digital technology. What do you mean by that?
James Canton: Knowledge-based digital technology is all of the stuff that is currently being talked about in terms of E-business. It's data warehouses that provide relevant customer information, it's how we develop products and services and how we collaborate with our co-workers; it's how we communicate between supplier, customer and ourselves; it's the way we display information in virtual environments. It's also the very thinking about markets - virtual private markets that can emerge given this new blended reality, this merging of physical and virtual reality. People don't realize just how fast these new complex technologies are emerging unseen. Much of how we will do business in this digital knowledge economy is going to be wireless, real time and everywhere.
Take a small thing today that's an indication of where we're going tomorrow: the distribution of music, the MP3 model. The major record companies - these are billion-dollar companies - have been brought to their knees by, if you will, a customer-led revolution that's a perfect example of the emerging digital economy. Major music stars - David Bowie, etc. - are now distributing for free songs that you can download over the Internet. Today we're distributing music and software; tomorrow we're going to be distributing entire catalogues, entire products, and entire services over this distributed environment.
And by the way, less than 1.6% of the world is on the Internet; three-quarters of the world hasn't even made its first phone call. So this is the Middle Ages.
I've seen this wave head toward the beach over the past 25 years, but I'll tell you, the emergence of the Internet and the implications for business will change every industry. The most business-critical asset a company can have is this digital knowledge.
ROB Magazine: You also talk about the networked planet - what you refer to as the “social neuro-web of our collective unconscious”
JC: In my new book, Technofutures, I have about 50 scenarios about our lives in the future. One of them is something called the “megaverse.” I'm forecasting that not even 15 to 20 years from today, we will have computers that surpass human intelligence. But well before that will be the emergence of the “megaverse” - the Internet will develop its own belief systems, its own behavior, and its own kind of synthetic intelligence.
I think we're talking about parallel evolution. The evolution of human beings will be influenced at a very deep level by technology - the development of synthetic intelligence, which will live in a virtual universe called the Internet. The convergence of human beings and this networked intelligence will occur in less than a decade.
Right now, we're in the Middle Ages in terms of proliferation of communication technologies. We're in the Middle Ages when it comes to understanding health, medicine, ourselves. All of this - over the next three to five years and certainly the next eight to 15 years - is going to be transformed.
ROB Magazine: How?
JC: Four specific power tools: The first is computers. Computers will be embedded in everything and everyone - smaller, super intelligent computers. We've got about 200 million computer chips today in computers. We've go seven billion other computer chips that most people are unaware of, in car doors, in refrigerators, in books for inventory control. What happens when all of those seven billion get wirelessly connected? And they will.
The second power tool is networks. Internet bandwidth will be the key competitive weapon that will transform business and will be a key advantage for education and health care. It will be the key driver for telemedicine, for virtual education, for communications. Just as computer power is doubling every nine months, corporate bandwidth is doubling every six months. Now, this is North America, but as satellite telecommunications come on line . . . wireless Internet access will drive culture, education, commerce, you name it. You'll hand somebody a cell phone and it'll be attached to a satellite. Three-quarters of all the cell phones sold over the next 15 months will have Webcasting capabilities.
The third power tool is bioscience, which will extend life and unravel disease. But more importantly, this whole question of human evolution will be reinvented. We will have the tools to choose sex, extend life, clone organs, transform and unravel the DNA code. What we're going to look like, how long we're going to live and the quality of our existence are going to be transformed.
The fourth power tool is nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter at the atomic level. This is the most awesome of all and obviously could not exist without computers, bandwidth and bioscience.
ROB Magazine: I hate to use the phrase “Brave New World”
JC: But it really is. You can actually say that now with some certainty because of the emergence of these power tools. You couldn't say that before.
Few people are really prepared for it. It used to be that every 500 years you'd have one or two technological break-throughs - steel, or the factory or even the radio or TV. Think about the printing press. Knowledge was controlled by a wealthy elite. Monks had a monopoly on hand-designing books, which only the wealthy could afford. Knowledge was not distributed. All of a sudden, you could now print books for pennies. Knowledge could be distributed, you had a need for schools, and you had a need for people to be able to read.
In the past 50 years there have been more technological innovations by a factor of 1,000-plus than in the previous 10,000. I'm predicting, as a futurist, that this is going to accelerate dramatically because of these four power tools.
ROB Magazine: Aren't you failing to take into account human resistance to technology, as well as technical obstacles? After all, we've been waiting for artificial intelligence for 20 years now, and all we have is a really good chess-playing machine.
JC: It's getting harder to deny the emergence of this future. Let's take artificial intelligence. Today, if you were to ask the average person about artificial intelligence, they would say, “Gee, I can't give you any applications.” Few people realize that artificial intelligence is embedded in many objects. For instance, the camcorder, which uses fuzzy logic to bring the subject into focus, is a form of artificial intelligence. The sensory based technology that tells the refrigerator that the door is open. . . is a kind of artificial intelligence. My point is that AI has become embedded in many different kinds of products and applications. The telephone system, the TV - Those systems are mediated and constructed using different forms of artificial intelligence. Am I expecting a synthetic human to show up tomorrow? No. And I don't see that for quite a long time. But I will say that virtual personalities are already appearing on the Web . . . and we're working with companies that are building intelligent-agent interfaces. And here's the point: They don't have to be as smart as us. All they have to do is be believable and have a purpose.
ROB Magazine: What kind of world will all of this create?
JC: The good, the bad and the ugly.
The good side is new economic opportunities, widespread education, widespread availability of knowledge, whether it's health care, extending life, whatever.
The bad news is there's going to be privacy invasion, identity theft, data thieves that pull digital dollars out of your bank account. More importantly, we're going to be uncomfortable with - rightfully so, and I'm warning people now to pay attention - the control that we give, the power that we yield to computer intelligence. Computers are going to do a better job of some things, but are they going to be caring? What are the implications for living in a democratic society when you have computers influencing human lives?
The ugly side of technology is that it will break down and we'll be at risk. We already have millions of dollars disappear from the financial system that get hacked away and nobody really wants to talk about it. There are perils around us, but they will become more pronounced. You can't have this utopia of a global, connected universe, where there's all this bounty, without some risks, without some obstacles, without some bumps along the way. The question is, can we stomach the bioengineered way to Nirvana? The answer may be “yes” and it may be “no” - but it's all going to happen in our lifetime.