Listening to the Future: Revisiting “The Thinking Factory”

Listening to the Future: Revisiting “The Thinking Factory”

Cover image via DALLE-2 from Microsoft Copilot on Edge.

I was sitting in a ballroom of the famed Queen Mary ocean liner, docked and aging in Long Beach, California. A filtered light streamed through the curtained windows behind me. At the front of the room was a large square screen. Round tables with sumptuous coverings filled the room. From above they might have resembled the film cliche of shooting people walking through the streets with umbrellas from above, where all you see are umbrellas. The chairs were filled with information technology people patiently awaiting a lecture from one of information technology’s early luminaries, James Martin.

Martin had been writing books on and about computers since 1965. In 1981 he introduced Information Engineering, one of the early enterprise methodologies for software development. In 1987 he was still talking about information engineering. I was attending a teleconference from his home in Burmuda, where he would eventually own a private island. Information Engineering was not only a popular software development methodology but also a lucrative one.

I was there to be indoctrinated in Information Engineering through Deltak Training (acquired by John Wiley and Sons). I don’t remember if I paid or not. Likely not, as at this time, I was already three years into my dual career as a technology writer and full-time employee. I often leveraged my technology writing to attend conferences and other events. My employer paid the expenses, I attended the events for free.

Information Engineering focuses on techniques for systems analysis, database analysis and database design to support the development of complex operational systems. Although some systems, like Manufacturing Resouce Planning (MRP) and various forms of accounting and human resources systems, existed, most didn’t talk to each other. More importantly, they were generic systems that mimicked books about their subject rather than the real-world needs of a business.

IT people, usually called Data Processing people back in the 1980s, needed to integrate various software systems and fill in the operational gaps. Any activity unique to a company required custom software. Most of us spent our budget and brainpower on customizing these systems to better fit our employer’s business models.

Large companies like IBM and HP wrote software and often applied Information Engineering to their systems, yielding documentation and code that could be understood by the data processing people charged with implementing those systems.

Enough about Information Engineering. This post is about what I did that day, in the spring of the expert system thaw, to invent and idea I hope still finds fruition in the wireless networked, IoT and ai-enabled world in which we live. This is a note about listening to the future.

I had already read Martin’s Information Engineering book. I was looking to him now for inspiration. And I received my inspiration at this conference.

As I often do when attending conferences (though not when speaking at them), I find a zone between listening and creating. I let the concepts modify my brain as I explore new concepts that arrive from the melding of the existing and the new.

On that morning I spent a couple of hours sketching out the ideas for what I called Cognitive Information Managment, a riff on the emerging concept of Computer Integrated Manufacturing. I realized as Martin talked about Information Engineering, he was also dropping hints at the value of artificial intelligence, which I was just starting to explore.

In March of 1988 I published an article in Manufacturing Systems Magazine, titled The Thinking Factory Is Not Too Far Away. I was, of course, wrong in my prediction. It was mostly a dating problem, not a conceptual one. The ideas in The Thinking Factory remain generally valid, although the surrounding technology and terminology do not match the semantics of my article. I wrote about expert systems and edge computing. I wrote about systems that were able to “intercept, sense, anticipate and act.” I wrote about intelligent agents. I wrote about systems capable of processing data, regular data as well as visual and auditory data. I wrote about systems that had senses.

A version of this thinking also appeared in the North-Holland academic proceedings from the Second International Conference on Expert Systems and the Leading Edge in Production Planning and Control, held May 3-5, 1988, in Charleston, South Carolina. I served as a co-chair for that conference. I went a little further and called that academic article, “The Feeling Factory.”

I was starting to learn how to listen to the future. I was weaving together concepts and seeing if they would stick. I had a forum and an audience.

The way I thought about the future then was dangerous. It was linear and extrapolative. It was technology-focused, in a vacuum separated by the social and economic factors that could bring it to furuition. It did not account for environmental impacts, nor did it consider politics or policy. 

I have learned since that morning on the Queen Mary, that predicting the future requires luck, and yes, it can be profitable if accurate, but accuracy proves rare. The interaction of the factors that influence the future require dilligent focus and deep attention. The meaningful exploration of the future is not a frivolous act.  One does not just spin up story and find, ten years hence, that the future matches with that story.

Bill Gates, and perhaps others, famously said “that the only way to predict the future is to invent it.” I don’t believe that. I think a few people with a vision influence the future, but they do not invent it. Lucky ones get something right occasionally. Really lucky ones more than once. Eventually, other influences overwhelm even the most seemingly prescient ideas. Some ideas prove stubbornly resistant to being born.

We all need to learn to predict the future. We all need to navigate it. While some animals can think a little bit ahead, humans are uniquely capable of exploring the multivariant possibilities that make up the future as it unfolds. We much grapple with uncertainty. Most of use do not have the means to strong arm an idea into a market, and build a company around it, and then spin off derivatives to keep the pipeline of invention going.

Most of use can’t invent the future, but all of us will live in it. Each of us needs to invest our personal time to let our minds synthesize options that will be important to our journey. To see the canvas wholly, with the variables in play and explore how the interact. We need to find contingencies for probably outcomes that may not fit our choices, and be prepared to leverage opportunities when factors align.

While I may have been naive in my thinking on the Queen Mary that morning in 1987, the one thing I did right was allow ideas to wash over me and change me. Had it not been for that morning, I might no longer be relevant to the AI conversation as it reemerges in the 21st century. That morning unleashed my brain to possibilities that even those who are reinventing AI have yet to realize. Perhaps they need to spend some time synthesizing ideas on an old cruise ship as a thoughtful guru offers insights that transform peripheral ideas into a lifelong passion for learning.

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