New Website - New Posting...

That was pretty "quasi-periodic", given that this is my second post in 8 months. No website, so new blog postings. I'll try for once a week...

Lot's of changes in the past 8 months. The last time I posted, I was sitting in the Starbucks in Arlington, MA. Today, I'm sitting in my office in the Engineering Systems Division (ESD) at MIT (E40-264, 617-324-6693). I'm part time here at ESD & will be helping to team teach the ESD Doctoral Seminar with my colleague Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld & also helping to team teach the new Sloan Undergraduate course with my friend/colleague Tom Kochan. This is exciting & I'll be posting on my opinions about things at MIT quite a lot here. Courses start this week & I'll be trying to balance my time between this work, my consulting work (see website) & writing the book I'm committed to, both contractually & emotionally (also see website).

Here's an MIT opinion... One of the programs I've gotten involved with is the Program on Emerging Technologies or PoET. This is a degree-granting program that is a collaboration between the School of Engineering & the School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences involving ESD, the Technology & Policy Program, the Center for International Studies, the Department of Political Science & the program in Science, Technology & Society. The program looks at the economic, security, environmental & socio-cultural implications of emerging technologies & assumes that our understanding of these implications does not & can not keep up with the actual development of technologies. It is exactly the kind of program I have been talking & writing about for years as being essential in the education of technologists - So why did I feel so out of place in the meetings? I literally felt uncomfortable as the kind of focus I've been emphasizing for years was played out. Emerging technologies is what I do, right...? Part of it was that I have been doing this in a corporate setting for the past 20+ years. Where emerging technology is dealt with at all in this context, it is looked at as a potential revenue source, an addition to the strategic product portfolio to be developed or acquired as the numbers indicate. The economic implications are narrowing analyzed with respect to the bottom line & the other implications are left as an exercise to the user. Part of it was that in my corporate setting, many of the people dealing with these topics were programmers or managers of programmers. These people are generally not focused on the larger socio-cultural aspects of their work. Sitting around the PoET table are political economists, historians of science & technology, technological theorists & academic technologists across the spectrum from network theory to bioengineering, as well as some very bright & accomplished students. A very different environment from the Emerging Technology Committee at EMC (my last corporate employer). Suffice to say, I am getting more comfortable with my PoET colleagues & am looking forward to learning & teaching in this program.

& speaking of emerging (or emerged) technologies & their implications, my next focus for the FutureSense Strategist is search. The next issues of the strategist is entitled "If Search is the Answer, What's the Question?" (with respect for Danny Bobrow at PARC for his original paper on Prolog, one of the two best papers I know of in AI languages). Search is driving quite a lot of research & development activity these days & creating a lot of value for companies such as Google (for instance), but what really are the longer-term implications & consequences of this effort. What can search actually do for us in our everyday efforts, both at work & "in real life" (for those of you that have them...). This next Strategist will focus on the larger picture of search & its place in our work & life processes - due at the end of September...

Enough for now... Look at the new website (www.hartzband.com) &:

remember - entropy requires no maintenance