OK, I am only going to write about this one time, and then I am going to let it go. I start every presentation I give on social technologies with the same slide, and each time I review it, the audience nods their heads as if to say, “now I get it…” This slide is a simple vocabulary lesson to try and bring some coherence and sense to the jumble of terms people are now using in the social space. It seems that each new day brings some new variation on an activity with the word social pasted in front of it. This is much like the late 90’s when people put the letter “e” in front of just about everything in order to try and signify that it was Web enabled.

Here is my take on what we should all be doing… The umbrella term needs to be Social Technologies. This is a general enough term that it covers the various branches of the discipline. To use the term social networking or social media as the umbrella is a misnomer because these are simply branches that I will discuss in a minute. Since Social Technologies (or technology) is a little long, we could shorten it in most cases to Social Tech. With this as an general term, let’s look at what falls underneath it and why…

Social Networking is clearly the right name for the branch of this field that speaks to any application or platform that is used to connect people through live, or delayed written communication. This includes eCommunities, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc. Any service that seeks to connect people one to one, many to many, or one to many for the purposes of communication or community falls within this branch.

Social Media is the branch that refers to any application or platform that uses a form a media to allow people to share information one to many. Media in this case means video, documents, presentations, or pictures. Or said another way, YouTube, Scribd, SlideShare, and Flickr. The word media is a specific term that refers to a specific method for leveraging social communications or information sharing and the key thought here is that it is done through a media file.

Social Relevancy is the branch that speaks to online reputation, or online credentials. This includes all of the concepts and applications that help build, monitor and measure what your visibility is on the Internet. This includes all of the social networking and social media sites. Whether we are talking about an organization, a person, or a product, all are starting to have online reputations, and a measurable amount of social relevancy.

There is now a fourth branch I will call the catch all branch. This is for any activity that now has the word “social” pasted in front of it to denote the fact the social tools are now being used to improve performance. For example, Social CRM, and Social Recruiting. I suspect we will see many more examples of nomenclature like this over the next five years, then we will drop putting social in front of terms when everything has a social tech element within it.

If people cannot discern the difference between these terms, they will never be able to actually be good at using them. Vocabulary can be powerful in that way. So please help me get the popular press, and the various commenters to start using this paradigm. It makes much more sense to delineate these terms into branches that make sense, and to use an umbrella term that is intuitive. By the way, it starts with you using these terms correctly… My next stop is Webster’s Dictionary. I intend to put the full court press on for them to define things this way!!!

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Scott Klososky is one of the first successful Internet entrepreneurs and is a highly sought-after technology and future trends speaker.  You can read this article and others on Scott's blog Technology Story.

For some reason I have had these visions popping into my head of the things in life that technology has pretty much erased from the face of the Earth.  If you are under 25 years old, this post may not mean much to you.  For the rest of us, this will be a bit nostalgic. The point is not simply to stroll back through the memories of our past, because the real goal here is to help us look forward into the future. By taking a look at the dynamics of days gone by, we may be able to apply the flow of what has happened forward to predict the future, and maybe even make a guess as to whether we will like what we see…

I remembered carbon paper this morning.  I am not sure why, but the distinct memory of the days when we actually stacked up sheets of clean paper, with sheets of carbon impregnated wisps and then hit the keys extra hard to make sure that our words actually were copied onto all pages.  Of course this also made me think of white out, and the big step forward when we got NCR paper, which had that magical ability to copy words through without the actual carbon paper being in between.

I have often recalled those cute little pink “While You Were Out” tablets that my admin used to fill out with the 50 or so calls I would get a day on the telephone.  That was back in the day when I received that kind of volume of calls.  Today a busy phone day might be 5 to 8 calls, and they come on my cell phone, which has a system that recognizes most callers by checking the number against my contact list.  That means the caller is greeted by name, their message is taken, converted to text and sent to my email and texted to me.  No admin involved at this point.

I remember going to library and using the Dewey Decimal System to look up a book so I could find the piece of information I was searching for in that large institution of knowledge.  I remember having to be quiet, having to check out the books, which meant having a library card, and being forced to have a deadline for the return of their property.  Oh, and I remember the fines.

Of course I remember vinyl records, 8 tracks, cassettes, and CD’s.  That means I remember having to clean the needle on the record player, and buying a new one every once in a while.  I remember my kid brother scratching the needle across my favorite Elton John record, and I remember chasing him around the house after it started skipping – never to be repaired.  And I recall the tape players eating the tape on occasion.  I also remember sitting by the radio with my cassette recorder ready to go so I could tape a song I liked that I just could not get on a piece of media, then being the only one of my friends with the recording – even though it started 10 words into the song.

OK, let’s go to bullet points from here!

• When my news came from TV and paper
• When I lost touch with friends and co-workers never to be found again
• When I had to memorize addresses, birthdays and phone numbers
• When I could be by myself and no one could find me and make me work
• When my kids communicated with the person in the room, and not ten people on their mobile device
• When my Rolodex was the most important contact tool I had
• And finally, when I read books that were made with real paper, and I carried one at a time.

The truth is, life has changed a lot and I am not just talking about the tools we use.  The pace is changing – It moves much faster.  The input has changed; it is now a fire hose of information, not just bits and pieces.  The ways we communicate and get entertained are completely different now.  The ways we have meals, and what we think is appropriate has changed.  So how does all this looking back, help us look forward?

The strange thing about we humans is that we most often get what we want.  That is to say that when we seek advancement, we always seem to find a way to make it happen.  We believe in a world of possibilities and for this reason it is safe to say that the tools we use today will continue to evolve to help us get what we want.  That concept is always hard for most people to wrap their heads around because they can only see what is right in front of them and they believe we are SOOOO advanced that we simply could not invent yet another way to improve things.  This of course is not true…

Here is a list of what we seek by the way:

More convenience – Life in general and work specifically should be simpler to handle.

More connection – We like to connect with others that think like us, are related to us, or have some other connection to us.  At times we just want to connect with famous people because it makes us feel important.

Easier communications – The simplest form of connection is simply being able to “talk” to others.  We crave easier, faster, and simpler ways to get in touch with whomever we want, whenever we want.

Better entertainment – Need I say more?  We like to be entertained.

More productivity – Our bosses demand it, and we have found that our pocket book gets enhanced when we can get more work done in a 24-hour period.  Anything that helps us get more work done faster is a winner for most of us.

With this list as a touchstone, and given the changes we have already seen from the past, what can we look for in the future?  And maybe the bigger question is will our lives be better when we get it?  Is everything we want actually good for us?

The answers to these questions could take up five more posts, but let me make a few observations…. There are lots of things that are still broken with how we communicate, connect, and get work done.  Without even thinking hard, think about how inefficient the keyboard and mouse are as interface devices.  It takes me way longer to document these thoughts than just to think them.  I need them to get stored in digital as fast as I can think of them.  When I want to send them to my friends, I have to just pick one method, or work really hard to guess what each of you would prefer.  Wouldn’t it be great if I could just tell my computer the people I want to receive this and my system would reconcile with your systems the best way to get the information to you!

Productivity is still in the dark ages for the most part.  We do not have automatic system to update those around us when we complete a task, or even what the status might be.  We still must do lots of tasks by hand, and do the same things over and over.  We still gather information through long painful meetings and discussions… You get the idea.

The point I want to drive home is that we are making an escalating amount of progress in applying technology to improve our lives.  We are not done.  Because we have a driving need to improve on the ways I mentioned, we are only halfway there if that.  So the change from carbon paper to Microsoft Word is only a partial improvement.  Get ready for much more to come.  And when you have some free time, think about the really big question concerning whether we will ultimately be happy when we get there.

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Scott Klososky is one of the first successful Internet entrepreneurs and is a highly sought-after technology and future trends speaker.  You can read this article and others on Scott's blog Technology Story.

Powerful, passionate and creative, Scott Klososky is one of the first successful Internet entrepreneurs and is a highly sought-after speaker.  He shares stories from his experience of building successful dot.com companies in good and hard times and shares personal stories of achieving success when facing adversity.

Understanding where technology has been, where it is headed, and how it will effect you are imperative in these times, as always. Scott Klososky takes you on a journey into the future of the 'Net.

 

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Scott Klososky has started and been part of building numerous successful organizations, including two that were sold for over $200 million in aggregate. His experience of building these operations from the ground up as the CEO is now being applied as he speaks to organizations of many different sizes on the topics of Social Media, Social Networking and Social Relevance, The Changing Sales Model,  The Technology Integration of Man, and A Technology Infused Leader.

How will you use technology to your advantage?

One of the more important concepts I speak about these days is the idea that the Internet, and a gaggle of social technologies, has created an amazing ability to build rivers of information into our brains. Most people are still getting their hands around why, or how, social tools can be used to improve relationships with potential customers, or provide improved customer services. In short, they are heeding the siren call of the press who is incessantly saying things like, "it is all about the relationships." Actually, it is not all about relationships. Using social tools to communicate certainly does help us improve client or customer relationships, and even to close sales, but this benefit really needs to be put in context of being just one of the critical benefits of Social Tech.

The other powerful use for Social Tech tools is the ability to now assemble a broad, dense, and powerful flow of filtered information that is uniquely assembled for each of us. Never before in history could a person construct such a flow of real time information for free. Never before in history could this flow of information be so broad and deep. Sure, twenty years ago, you could have twelve subscriptions to magazines and read two books at a time - then spend the rest of the day watching the news on TV. But, you would only be scratching the surface of information that today can be pushed to you through RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc. Even if you want to debate with me on the volume of information in this comparison, you cannot debate that we have an awesome ability to reach into very specialized data and to filter it down to the things that are critical in much better ways today.

The best example I can give you of this philosophy is myself - or maybe that is just the easiest for me! I have carefully crafted a stream of information, and have carefully chosen how I want it delivered. I have specific things sent to my iPhone, others sent to specific applications on my laptop. I download specific books and periodicals to my Kindle, and finally still read a few magazines and newspapers on paper. In each case, I have made the decision about what I read, and where I read it very consciously. I still read a few things on paper because it fills a void for me when I simply cannot use electronics. Those two times being when I am taking off and landing in the planes, or when I am home waiting on my family for something and do not want to access my laptop or phone for fear of being distracted by work. I have specific V-logs, and Twitter sent to my phone so I can access these things when not using my laptop. Then I have various feeds sent to my email, or other applications depending on the sources. I follow many thought leaders in my industry, some of my competitors, my clients, and a few inspirational innovation sources just to keep my thinking fresh. I follow a few associations newsletter for industries I care about, and constantly correspond with people that care about the same thing I do so we can share valuable thoughts. In short, I have carefully crafted my river of information so that I maximize powerful content, and minimize the time needed to access it.

Why is this concept so important? For a few reasons... One is that it makes me smarter. Noticeably and dramatically smarter and that translates into making me enjoy my career more, and getting paid more for the knowledge I now own. Another is that we are all getting buried under information - as in information overload. So learning to filter and direct this flood is important because a flood can drown you, or you can learn to harness the waves and do something useful with it. Finally, this is the knowledge economy after all, and that should tell you that there is a lot of knowledge flying around, and that learning to harness your share will ultimately make the difference between achieving your goals, or losing.

By the way, add up the ability to build these rivers of information for each employee in an organization, and you now have a huge differentiators in the market. So if you have an HR department that is looking for something meaningful to do, consider having them spend 2010 teaching people how to build these rivers of information.

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Scott Klososky is one of the first successful Internet entrepreneurs and is a highly sought-after technology and future trends speaker.  You can read this article and others on Scott's blog Technology Story.

Being a creative person, I am always on the look out for a way of mixing words that might be a new way to describe something that is not well described today. As I speak to audiences about business intelligence and how it will move us to artificial intelligence engines that run our organizations, I have been struggling to replace the AI moniker. Artificial intelligence was never a good descriptor of a software application that would appear to be able to think. The reality is AI is just a sophisticated set of rules that simulate how a human might process a set of variables. The human brain is an amazing computer - even in a low IQ person. The speed at which it can discern a flying object that is coming toward me as safe, or deadly is amazing. However, the brain is really just a wet-ware computer when it comes to solving business problems.

For this reason, I propose we rename intelligent software with a name like "augmented intelligence." This would let it fit nicely with the hot field of augmented reality and better describes what we are really doing in my opinion. For example, a calculator is just augmented intelligence because humans programmed it and stored all the math calculations in it. It is not an artificially thinking device. It is just a device that augments our ability to do math. It is the same with any so called expert system, it is in reality just an application that augments our intelligence by allowing us to test a series of variables through the piece of code.

As the Web moves to a more semantic Web format, it arguably can become good enough to be called an augmented intelligence because I will be able to ask it a plain language question and get an answer. If you have not checked on the WolframAlpha website, you might take a look. This is a knowledge engine as oppose to a search engine and you will quickly see the difference. It is clear that we are moving in this direction in the construction of the Web and all the tools that are being assembled upon it.

And no, it will not become sentient. It will not become the Matrix and suddenly develop an awareness of self and want to "live." It will just become more and more able to augment our intelligence by gathering the knowledge of millions of people and storing it in a configuration that allows anyone to access the accumulated wisdom. We will learn how to write self learning systems that will study the results of decisions the system made and will self audit rules and change what needs to be changed in order to meet quality guidelines we build in. Ergo, the applications will be able to get "smarter" on their own. What this will do is unleash a new era for humanity like we have never seen. It will give us the ability to stand on the shoulders of those that have gone before us in whole new ways. In fact, it will allow us to stand on the shoulders of software systems that will have spent years improving through repetition and observation.

In the past, we had to accumulate knowledge in books so that it could be passed down to the next generations. This sped up knowledge acquisition because at least it was all on 600 pages in one place and we did not have to redo the experiments. Now imagine a world where accumulated knowledge and wisdom is built into an application so that I do not need to even understand the underlying rules. For example, I could ask the calculator a word problem and it would do the math without me ever understanding how the math worked or even how it would have been structured to answer the word problem. I recently had an argument at an event when I said this and a teacher did not agree because she thought one had to understand the underlying "math" in order to be creative and move on. I just do not agree. I suspect the coming generations will live in a world where a piece of software augments their intelligence and they really have no idea how that software got built or what the rules are inside it.

So in order for this to become a meme, I will need all of you to start using the phrase "augmented intelligence" to describe smart systems so I can get credit for this!

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Scott Klososky is one of the first successful Internet entrepreneurs and is a highly sought-after technology and future trends speaker.  You can read this article and others on Scott's blog Technology Story.

We are now reaching an interesting point in the growth of the Web. For the first time, you can run a search on a company or product and you will likely find more information about what other people say about them than what they say about themselves. Time was, we searched for the Internet site of an organization if we wanted to know about them. What we got was lots of marketing hype. Today, we might get a few pages from their Website, then some mentions in various blogs, a few Twitter comments, and links to videos from their latest event posted without their approval. With Web 2.0, the power has shifted to the people.

The United Destroys Guitars song on YouTube, which has been viewed over 5.5 million times in a few weeks, is a great example of this trend. When people want to know what the eWord of mouth is about you or your organization, all they need do is an addictomatic.com search to see what people are saying in the social sphere. Then they can run a socialmention.com search to see what your relevancy is on the Web. When you step back and think about it, we were able to live pretty anonymous lives ten years ago. Now we are torn between wishing we could be invisible from bad guys, but knowing we have to be visible in order to prosper in the business world. In the end, our reputations will be formed on-line whether we agree or not. People will talk about us, upload pictures and video of us, and generally post comments about us, and our performance in life. ORM is here to stay so we might as well figure out how to manage it.

Lots of people ask me when they hear about the concept of ORM, how they can get bad press off the Internet. As if there is some magic electronic Mr. Clean Eraser that can be wiped over the screen and a negative mention in a blog will simply vanish. I, of course, give them an answer they do not want to hear, which is to make sure it does not get on the Web in the first place. When people talk about social media being one of the most democratic devices known to man, I agree. In a democracy, there is freedom of speech. In a democracy, you can try and outvote the other side by working hard to gather people to your message. Will there be the occasional negative person that attacks you or your organization for no apparent reason? Sure there will be. These really are not the problem because they will be drowned out by the good in most cases. The problem comes when you do something to deserve the negative press. Like when you break a guys guitar, and then refuse to fix it. Or when you break up with your girlfriend through texting while on a date with the next girl. You will be flamed publicly, and you will deserve it.

ORM might be manageable in some ways, but it will not be controllable, and this is a great thing. In a world where one person can "talk" to 1.5 billion other people for free, it would be wise to treat people very well. Although that sounds simple, anyone that has had to call an AT&T help line could tell you, we still get shafted daily. Just as a person could be anonymous in years past, protected from public scrutiny by the lack of a technology to post and store feedback from the rest of humanity, organizations could also get away with horrible service. ORM will prove to be their undoing because it will be impossible to "manage" what you cannot stop from hitting the websphere. Social media will now cause people and organizations to reap what they sow - at the speed of light.

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Powerful, passionate and creative, Scott Klososky is one of the first successful Internet entrepreneurs and is a highly sought-after technology and future trends speaker.  You can read this article and others on Scott's blog Technology Story. 

Social networking has become part of our lives and more recently Twitter has vaulted to the top of the list of what's hot in technology today. Twitter is in the news; in fact many TV and radio personalities are using Twitter to connect with their audience. Does micro-blogging have a place in sales? Scott Klososky explains what Twitter is, why you need to understand the two sides of Twitter, and what it takes to turn Twitter into an effective communication tool in your business. If you don't know your tweet from your elbow this is a good listen.

Listen to Scott's interview with Salesopedia: Should Sales People Tweet?

Scott Klososky is a former CEO of three successful start-up companies, a best selling author, and a pioneer in the world of opportunity created by the evolving Internet. He was Founder and CEO of webcasts.com, an early producer of webcasted media ranging from corporate and government communications, to sporting events and entertainment. Today, Scott is a technology speaker, and he shares his unique perspectives on technology, business culture, and the future, with audiences and organizations all over the globe.

I cannot stop myself from writing this specific message for you to because I am becoming frustrated that organizations are moving so slowly on this subject. I have been asked to speak to quite a few audiences lately about social media and how it can be used by organizations to increase sales, or to drive success in some way. I am sure that the exploding use of tools like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn by individuals, and the unique fact that the underlying costs of these tools is zero, is driving more interest. As are all the stories now turning up in the press of wild successes and spectacularly stupid Web social moves. The fact is that social media is a hot topic and with good reason, millions of people are starting to use these tools as a regular part of their day and an organization can benefit from learning how to have a voice in the social sphere. So here is my soapbox subject for today...

I started telling people some months ago that organizations, large and small, needed to document a policy for how they would like employees to use, leverage, and participate in social media as it concerns the organization. When I first started saying this, I was shocked that some people did not understand why a company would try to dictate standards to team members on how they would use these tools. It seemed quite obvious to me that their employees were representing the company on the Web through the use of tools like Twitter and Facebook, and writing their thoughts in blogs. These communications represent their feelings and thoughts as employees of the organization - even if they were meant to be framed personally. So there exists huge potential for the miscommunication of a companies messages - or at least a misrepresentation of the voice the company might want to use.

In addition, the organization can really benefit from using social media tools as a sales, customers service, or communication device. So why not set standards, and goals for the progress the organization would want from leveraging these tools? There is a benefit from being proactive and beating your competition by getting your customers to be attached to your social medial connections first. So there is great opportunity in learning to leverage these tools, and great danger if you do not get them under some kind of control. So.....

Why not create a written policy and standards document that defines what your organization wants to achieve from social media? Why not set goals for the number of connection, mentions, and followers you would like to achieve each month? Why not dictate what the organizational voice needs to be, and who can represent it, and how? I promise you, in a few years, it will be very normal to see a written policy on how employees can handle Facebook profiles as it concerns the organization. You will see contests running to see who can get the most Twitter followers. Companies will compete for the most mentions in the social space and proudly declare that they are the most talked about.

Creating this kind of document is both an offense, and a good defense. Don't wait until five disasters drive you to write it. Get our in front of this trend and state clearly what you want from these tools so employees do not have to guess, or just simply make it up on their own.

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Scott Klososky is a technology and trends speaker.   You can read more of his blogs on social media and technology's impact on humanity in his blog Technology Story.  

I have delineated ten phases in "the technology integration of man" - four before this moment, and six to come.  Step back and think about the time we live in now as being in the middle of a 100 year continuum. We can go back 50 years and review how technology has blossomed for us, then look forward 50 years to what it will become. It is helpful to view our time in this way because it will make you conscious that we are on a fantastic journey of integrating technology into our lives, and early enough with it still that we do not really understand the impact. Not only is the fact we are becoming more dependent on technology interesting, but also what it is and will do to us as human beings.

In the beginning, we had basic calculating machines. These were mechanical and had no electrical parts. A person could press a series of buttons and then pull down a handle to get an answer to some mathematical question. These actually came to being around the turn of the century, and were the only devices that could be classified as information technology because they were the first devices that could create a piece of knowledge for us mechanically. (Well, that is if you set aside the abacus.) The only impact these had on our lives was to speed up the ability to do simple math. Yet, they also created a fork in the road because for the first time, we could assemble a machine that calculated something on our behalf so that our minds did not have to go through the process of calculating. The impact on our lives was minimal because these devices really helped with small tasks on a small scale. It is important to understand that this first phase lasted for decades, and was only replaced with the advent of mainframes.

The second phase is signified by the growth and development of mainframes. We now moved out of the realm of a mechanical device that could calculate to an electronic device. This was a huge change in the scale of calculation that could be done because now, for the first time, a machine was able to crunch numbers and data at a speed and level of accuracy that was not really possible by a team of humans. Sure, we could do the math, but it would take too long to get it done, and any weak link in the chain of humans would cause a major deficiency.

They were called "thinking machines" at times because to humans in that day, the machines actually offloaded the task of calculating on a huge scale and this made the machines appear to be able to think. Of course they only processed data that was fed to them in strict means of holes in punch cards or the like. The impact of mainframes was very different than the mechanical calculators before them. Mainframes were used in World War II with great impact. They invented secret codes, broke secret codes, processed huge amounts of military data, and allowed man to find answers inside of data that had been locked away heretofore. This time, technology became indispensable to man, and for the first time, proved itself to be able to change world events. Once again, this phase lasted for decades before the next phase came to be.

The next two stages will bring us up to the current times. The reason it is important to understand what is happening with humanity and the integration of technology into our lives is because we are finding this integration/dependence on tech is constantly altering our quality of life, how we work, and even the social strata of society. It is critical that we don't get "lost in the forest for the trees." I have given lots of thought as to these stages and what they will mean for us and the picture it creates is intriguing.

Phase three was the advent of personal computers. For the first time in history, we moved the power of a computer into the hands of the individual, and away from the IT department. A couple of interesting things to note are that this stage came approx. 40 years after the mainframe era, and that it put the power and creative field of software development into the hands of hobbyists. This meant that the time between stages was starting to shrink, and that there would now be millions of people that could apply their innovative ideas into code that could be sold on the market directly to users. In other words, the economy was augmented with a new product set that would allow Microsoft, Lotus, Adobe, and many others to become multi-billion dollar companies. For those of us that lived through this time, it was a fantastic adventure of getting more and more powerful computers annually, and participating in the burdening software market where the person next door might write an application and hand it to you on a 5 ¼ floppy for $10. This era exploded and grew at a substantial rate for about 15 years, which brought us the next stage.

Phase four was the power of the Internet, or the Web to be more specific. The Internet as a technology had been around for a while, but not until the World Wide Web was created by putting a graphical front end and hyper-linking into the mix, did it really take off as a tool the masses grabbed a hold of. Now for the first time, humanity had a collective way to post and store data that could be accessed by anyone else in the world. We now had an underlying communication infrastructure that was electronic and extremely low cost. The Web started with people creating a single page, then they added sub pages, then e-commerce, then an explosion of applications that helped us find things on the Web, communicate in a myriad of ways over this network, and collaborate. Again, an interesting dynamic was that this stage came in half the time as the previous stage, and our adoption rate of this new technology was incredible. For the first time in humanity, we are connected to one another in an unfiltered way where any one person can "talk" to more than a billion people for free. And we the people get to decide what is valuable by reading it and voting it up or down if we choose. Talk about a democracy!

So how have these four stages changed us? To list all of the ways would take many pages so in order to just think the big thoughts, let's just pull out a few basics. This integration of technology into our lives so far has dramatically improved our quality of life by bringing us information to our fingertips that we never had. It allows us to entertain ourselves, heal ourselves, and work in completely new ways that are more flexible than any time in the past. It has begun a huge change in the economy and who can do what work from where. The types of jobs people hold are moving quickly from manufacturing to knowledge based or technology development. Along with this list of positives, we have the negative. Kids who are addicted to technology and lose touch with reality for awhile. Unfiltered access to information for young people who are seeing and being exposed to things earlier than is wise, and the enabling of adults who struggle with a myriad of moral problems. Without our recognizing the transitions, we are all moving quickly through foundational changes in how society operates.

Step back for a just a second and think about the fact that from 1940 to the present time, we invented mainframes, then reduced that power to PC's, then created the Web to connect and leverage the collective thinking of anyone that has access. This was a mere 70 years, and the trend is toward faster adoption and creation of new stages. Although interesting in a historical way, the more interesting thing will be what the next 70 years will provide.

Now we are getting into the most interesting part of how we will become more, and more, integrated with technology. As we sit here today, we are somewhere between stage four and five on the Klososky vision of things and stage four was the Internet. We are still feeling the effects, and reaping the rewards of this major step forward. The intriguing thing for me with my futurist hat on is that it is pretty clear what the next stages will be, because we already have prototypes being built of the systems that define the next large leaps we will take with integration.

Phase five will be known as the era of intelligent software systems. We have been talking about artificial intelligence, expert systems, and knowledge based systems for years, and have been building the early versions in this class of tools. There really is no magic here, it is simply a matter of taking rules that humans use to make decisions and coding those rules into a platform that can ingest data, and apply the rules. We already have expert systems that help us make loan decisions at banks, medical decisions at hospitals, and do claim adjudication in insurance companies. Each year, we improve these systems by encoding more rules, with more variations, and create more trust that the computer can make decisions as well as a human given the same set of data. Like most big leaps forward, there is a slow run up before the major change. The Internet was like that as well in that we had it for years before the Web component was added to and it took off with the masses. Such will be the same pattern with all of the big stages that are coming. The technology will exist for years before it "suddenly" takes off and has major impacts on our lives.

So let's spin forward what intelligent software will begin to do for us, and to us. As expert systems become more and more sophisticated, they will begin to encompass more rules than any one human could handle. This will create situations where the expert system is literally smarter than a human - or at least can make decisions that will prove to be better on a more frequent basis. An example would be that a healthcare system will be able to diagnose more accurately than any one doctor. This is only surprise to you today if you do not understand how crude some of our diagnostic tools are, and how often doctors are just guessing. Or how about a car insurance rating system that can much more accurately judge what your payment should be by processing 100 factors about your life instead of the 5 or 6 that humans use today. As these systems get better and better, they will become more and more valuable and companies will covet the asset that will be their expert system. These pieces of artificial intelligence will one day be the most valuable asset on the balance sheet.

Then they will become self learning.  They will begin to monitor the results of their predictions and decisions and will self-modify their rules based on outcomes. This will quickly allow them to get more and more accurate, and be ever changing with new trends, data, or variables. Will they ever become conscious? No, this is not Matrix territory, these are just highly intelligent pieces of code that know one specific thing very well, and can learn from mistakes. And these will be embedded in devices all around us. We will come to depend on them. We will do what they say without thinking because they will have proven to be dependable. We will eat what they tell us to eat, and drive like they tell us to drive, and handle business decisions the way they tell us to. Except for those rare moments when we think we know better. This is already happening isn't it. I use a GPS to take the route it tells me and I almost never try my own turns. I go where it says to, when it says to. Turn now please...

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Scott Klososky speaks on technology trends, innovation, and leadership.  He's a former CEO of three technology startups, as well as a successful entrepreneur.

Scott Klososky is interviewed about the challenges and rewards of being an entrepeneur.  Once you have a great idea, how do you pursue it, when should you think about funding, and what does it take for someone to become a successful entrepeneur?  Also, how will entrepeneurship affect the economic future of this country?