ITx 2016 - Our Bodies are Data-Rich

August 2016

TechCommNZ board members Rob Grover and Peter Nock spent three days promoting TechCommNZ at the ITx mega conference in Wellington in July. Between intense sessions of explaining what we do to IT colleagues, and shamelessly bribing them with TechCommNZ jet planes, Rob managed to be blown away learning about precision medicine and exponential technological growth.

The ITx conference brought 12 tech-based industry bodies together and attracted more than 1200 people to the TSB arena in Wellington. Within this audience was a wide mix of professionals, from software developers, project managers, and technology startup entrepreneurs, all the way through to young students trying to get a foot in the door.

With 12 conferences combined, there was a comprehensive selection of topics to choose from, ranging from discussions about DevOps and Agile, to calls for more recognition of IT in secondary school education, to invitations for more New Zealand entrepreneurs to pitch their IT innovations to Silicon Valley investors.

There were two presentations that made a particular impact on me because they presented a very clear view of how technology will make an impact throughout many industries in the near future. The following is a brief synopsis outlining some of the key points.

Moving from evidence-based to precision medicine

Ian McCrae, founder of Orion Health is labeling the next evolutionary stage of health care as "Precision Medicine".

"We humans are data rich, we contain a total of 2 Tb of data", he stated. "12 of us is the equivalent to the 24 Tb contained on Wikipedia". Of all this data, doctors currently only have access to a small amount, most of which is incomplete.

McCrae is leading the way to bridging this gap by setting himself the goal of collecting the entire 2 Tb of his own data, and he is currently up to 40%. With more comprehensive data available to doctors, McCrae claims the biggest benefit will be that they can treat every patient as unique, rather than applying the same evidence-based approach to all patients.

The biggest hurdle going forward will be finding a way to cope with the "tsunami of new data". The solution he has for this is to store it in a cloud, and find a way to allow secure authorised access for both doctors and patients, "we need to put some intelligence and deep learning into the cloud to make sense of all this data". This large-scale storage and use of human data is referred to as “big data”.

Bracing ourselves for a future of exponential technological growth

Kaila Colbin, ambassador for Singularity University in Silicon Valley gave a presentation on exponentially accelerating technologies, and what they mean for humanity.

She explained exponential growth with Ray Kurzweil's price performance of computing model, which asks "how many million instructions per second can you buy for a thousand dollars?" Colbin stated that this number has been doubling for over 100 years. "Every time a technology maxes out, another one comes along to continue that doubling curve".

Various technologies with this doubling curve are now set to surpass the traditional linear curve that we are used to seeing, which means we are in for significant technological disruption in the near future. "Converging technologies with doubling curves (e.g., big data and artificial intelligence), are building on each other, which causes the pace of change to exponentially accelerate".

One of the biggest effects of this will be loss of jobs "the current projection is that between 47 and 81% of jobs as we currently understand them are under threat from technology within 20 years".

She was also quick to point out that historically, automation technology has often created more job opportunities than it has made obsolete, and she remained optimistic that these advancements will also create many new opportunities.

However all this pans out, the only thing that seems certain is that we are in for a few speed bumps as we adjust and integrate with these changes "we've never experienced this phenomenon of technological unemployment at this speed, and at this scale, so we don't really know what to expect".

Conclusion

It's always easy to dismiss bold technological predictions as outlandish science fiction fantasies, but the underlying theme that I noticed during this conference was a call to action across all sectors to take this change seriously and accept it as an opportunity to innovate, rather than a reason for concern.

Here are a few questions to get us thinking about what this means for technical communicators.

  • With cloud access to big data being predicted in the near future, what will this mean for technical communication, and how will it influence the way we communicate to users?
  • How can technical communicators embrace innovation to offer value in a world of rapid change?
  • What will technical communication look like 10 years from now?