Program Description

The Internet is a Brain:
Predicting the future of technology and business from the inside out

In his multimedia lecture, Stibel demonstrates how networks (professional, social and otherwise) have changed and what that implies for how people connect and form communities; What the Internet-and online business opportunities-will look like in the future; What the next stage of artificial intelligence will be and what opportunities it will present for businesses.

Addressing the forward-looking interactive aspects and potential predictive power of the Internet – which is evolving to mimic the brain’s own abilities – Stibel asserts that a more personalized Internet will emerge.  As Internet applications get to know the real “you,” the Internet will begin to tailor its opinions which will enable very personalized reviews and information, and it will be able to quickly match demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information.  And, as the Internet advances farther in this direction, the Internet will get better at interpreting subjective thoughts and opinions, and it will get better and better at making predictions and this will enable businesses to do a better job serving their customers.

Stibel also presents varied examples of how exceptional companies are using their understanding of the Internet’s brain-like powers to create competitive advantage – such as building more effective Web sites, predicting consumer behavior, leveraging social media, and creating a collective consciousness.

Even in such personal areas as healthcare, the Internet will be able to help medical companies like WebMD evolve to become a more interactive service, while significantly bringing down the cost of insurance.  The user’s experience will be more like being in a doctor’s office where the patient is being asked a series of symptomatic questions and offered medical advice.  People will have their own virtual doctors who will come to know them and their medical histories as well as their real doctors do.

Ultimately, Stibel predicts that the evolution of the Internet will fuel a new era of productivity where software advances will outpace the growth we previously saw in hardware; where intelligence will emerge not from brute force but from educated guesses — remember that the brain is a slow computer so we did not gain intelligence from sheer size or speed.  What makes us smart is that are brains are slow, and speculative in many respects.  When the Internet can no longer count on productivity gains from brute force or sheer peed, it will turn to other measures and that will surely come from mimicking the power of the brain.

Bio

Jeffrey M. Stibel is a brain scientist and entrepreneur who has helped build numerous public and private companies. He is currently President of Web.com, a public company that helps entrepreneurs launch and grow their businesses on the Web. He is also Chairman of BrainGate, a brain implant company that allows people to use their thoughts to control electrical devices. He serves on the boards of a number of private and public companies, as well as academic boards for Brown and Tufts University. Stibel studied for his PhD at Brown University, where he was the recipient of the Brain and Behavior Fellowship, and studied business at MIT’s Sloan School of Business.

Three years ago Leonard began to focus, as a reporter/blogger/columnist, on the topic of “globalization,” using a fairly broad definition — anything that interconnects humans living on this globe is included. He is neither for it or against it — he only endeavors to understand it, and, hopefully, help explain it.

Program Description

How the World Works: The interconnections between globalization, energy policy, economics, the environment, and politics…and everything else in between

In his lectures, Leonard discusses how in the course of exploring the issues of trade, capital flows, battles over intellectual property, and the challenges of getting the world together to work on global warming, he gradually found his beat revolving around three absurdly large and inextricably interrelated axes — economics, the environment, and energy.  And, as his work has converged on those topics, the U.S. housing bust precipitated the greatest economic crisis the world has witnessed in our lifetime.  Leonard addresses the depth and breadth of the global financial meltdown, and digs deeper into the root causes and underlying interconnections that, unless broken, will continue to harm our future prospects.

Moreover, Leonard illustrates how one cannot understand the U.S. housing bust without understanding China. One cannot can fight global warming without understanding how U.S. politics work. One can trace connections from 17th century India to 21st century Berkeley, CA.  Trade-offs exist everywhere, and understanding emerges from nuance.

Leonard’s lectures are about the sense of connection and interrelatedness that is essential to globalization. It’s not always a positive relationship — just ask the Midwestern auto industry workers whose pensions and wages are being slashed as a direct result of foreign competition. And it’s not always an obvious connection: the digital technology advances (computers, the Internet) that push globalization are responsible both for vast intellectual property violations and the rise of the open source software movement (Linux, Firefox). They are flip sides of the same basic transformation. A core element of globalization is that information travels everywhere, more cheaply and more quickly than ever before. We’ve only just begun to understand the implications of this.  Leonard not only helps distill the ramifications of these changes, but more importantly helps us glimpse the the possibilities that the future may hold.

Bio

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon.com who currently writes the hybrid blog/column “How the World Works” — a venue for exploring the interconnections between globalization, energy policy, economics, the environment, and politics. Prior to ‘How the World Works,’ he edited Salon’s Technology & Business department from 2000-2005. From 1996-2000 he was Salon’s lead technology reporter.

Leonard is the author of Bots: Origin of a New Species, published by HardWired in 1996, and described in a New York Times review as a “playful social history of the Internet.” His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Wired, Newsweek, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Sierra Magazine, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle and numerous other publications. Before becoming a journalist he studied Mandarin Chinese for ten years and lived and traveled extensively in East Asia.

His most recent career highlight came in early November 2008 when he was denounced by name on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Senator James Inhofe, R.-Oklahoma.

In his multimedia “Inviting Disaster” lecture program, Chiles helps organizations assess risk and avoid catastrophe by examining the repeating patterns of past disasters, and applying the lessons learned to not only to the operation of complex, high-energy systems, but also to the daily processes that keep any workplace running smoothly and safely.

Program Description

Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology –
Innovative Solutions for a Safe and Productive Workplace

To understand a fundamental pattern behind the huge variety of technological disasters, and the much greater number of close calls, consider how a piece of metal breaks over time. Under stress, cracks begin to grow out of tiny manufacturing flaws and damage during use; then at a critical point a crack spreads like a gunshot and the piece fails completely. As with metal, weak points appear in all systems. These weak points are human errors and machine malfunctions — or, “system fractures”. A good system is one in which people catch weak points early, before a string of them link up to a system fracture and catastrophe.

Chiles illustrates how the causes of disasters fall into repeating patterns, and nearly all technological disasters have been preceded by early warning signs, occurring days or weeks ahead — indications that serious flaws existed and were starting to link up.  The grid that supplies us with food, energy, transportation, and water is getting stretched tighter with economic troubles. That means we need to adopt new and better ways of catching system fractures early.

Using well-known historical examples, and proposing innovative solutions, Chiles not only demonstrates how noticing and acting on these precursors can help avert certain disaster, but he also provides organizations with the tools to improve their own internal processes and controls, enabling them to engender a forward-looking culture of efficiency and safety.

Companies and agencies that deal in high-energy, complex machines need to be aware that techno-disasters have a high and long-lasting cost. Aside from the obvious costs of deaths, damage, hikes in insurance costs, and months of business interruption, in some cases so much public mistrust follows that an entire segment of industry may be wiped out if the public comes to see it as both risky and optional.

Chiles brings the discussion current, highlighting the critical reality of our reliance upon technology, and reminding organizations of the fact that machine frontier contains complex and high-energy systems – some of which are subject to catastrophic, cascading failure – has not been lost on terrorists.  Their research shows strong interest in methods of technologically-boosted mass destruction. These are locations where large numbers of people would be at risk, where the system already holds energy that can be unleashed, and where a protracted crisis would attract intense media coverage over an extended time period.

Technological crises are inevitable in the course of all major projects. How well leaders handle unwanted crises is a very powerful determinant of whether a project ultimately succeeds or fails. Distilling lessons from those times of crisis, and having the lessons periodically refreshed, is critical. Even as computers take over routine operations that people do now, many important and unique tasks still will remain for people to carry out. This includes innovation, the exercise of judgment in the handling of problem reports, and above all, troubleshooting.

Bio

James R. Chiles, author of the acclaimed book Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology (HarperCollins), writes chiefly on technology and history.  He has published over fifty features and columns in magazines including Smithsonian, Aviation Week, Texas Monthly, Audubon, Harvard, Air & Space, and Popular Science.

Chiles was the featured commentator for the History Channel television series based on his book, Inviting Disaster. And, he has subsequently appeared on six other History Channel programs, including “Katrina: American Catastrophe,” “Engineering Disasters,” and “Megadisasters.” He has also appeared on National Geographic Channel’s “Seconds From Disaster” and on numerous TV and radio outlets, including NPR, CNBC and elsewhere.  His second nonfiction book, The God Machine: From Boomerangs to Black Hawks, The Story of the Helicopter (Random House), was named by Library Journal as one of the best science books of the year 2007, and Scientific American named it as a holiday book pick for 2007 as well.

Program Description

Making ‘Limbonade’: Turning Adversity into Triumph

In his empowering multimedia lecture, Jay translates becoming bionic, making Limbonade and realizing your true Inner-Superhero into universal, actionable tools for use in work and life.  As a career Ad agency executive (MasterCard: “Priceless”), Jay thought he knew about loss, rejection and the breakdown of the creative process.  All of these things were tied to the elusive concept of Inspiration.  He was cynical about what it meant to be “inspired” and to inspire others.  But, Jay learned the hard way that inspiration comes from the inside, out.

Jay takes audiences on his real-life epic journey of Destruction, Realization, Transformation,  Exuberance and Focus. From career Ad Man to Amputee to Superhero, Jay shares the trials, the realizations and the actions that got him off the tracks, on his feet, and up on an active volcano in the blink of life’s eye.

Sharing simple yet pivotal steps in overcoming any type of adversity, crisis, or loss, Jay can walk organizations through a variety of topics which are custom-tailored to suit the nature of the audience, and the audience’s goals; i.e. his message to college audiences will differ appreciably from his detailed consultative talks to business audiences.  In each case, Jay will demonstrate how his techniques not only revitalize the spirit of an organization, but can have a positive impact on the organization’s bottom line.

Jay focuses on helping organizations to understand the need for creating positive energy, and promoting a sustained sense of drive across an entire organization, while encouraging the balance of body, mind and spirit.  Jay candidly shares the arc of his story, from his near-fatal train accident through his bionic optimization, and draws vivid parallels between his own situation and that of any organization that isn’t functioning at the absolute optimal level.  Jay illustrates the benefits of breaking out of chronic habitual patterns, stasis and negativity, and points organizations toward a more focused, productive and more present incarnation.