Alvin Toffler's keynote was fantastic at yesterday's session of RSTechEd in Orlando. It's been 38 years since the publication of "Future Shock" and he still has a remarkable stage presence. Except for two guys behind me who found each other more informative than a thinker of world renown, the audience was captivated. Many people I talked with since were still fascinated by his ideas.
To get all his ideas, you'll have to read his books. The main point he was stressing was that we are at the beginning of The Third Wave (title of a later book) of human economic organization. The first wave began when a human noticed that food-bearing plants seemed to grow on the same spots and decided to try planting them herself. Agriculture was the basis of wealth for thousands of years thereafter. Somewhere between 1650 and 1700 men figured out how to adapt developing technologies to make things in an organized manner--and the industrial revolution was born. The source of wealth became manufacturing (although agriculture was still important, it was not the leading source of wealth and employment). The third wave is wealth based on knowledge. The implications of this are tremendous. Knowledge knows no boundaries--therefore look for the decline of boundaries, and in fact boundaries of all kinds are already blurring. And all of us in the information and knowledge "industry" are part of the creation of this new wave.
Rockwell had an invitation-only forum dubbed Manufacturing 2.0. There were several top speakers, not to mention about an hour of a q&a with Toffler. The topics were wide ranging, but I picked up tons of ideas to help me set the editorial direction of Automation World next year. Needless to say, information--how to gather it, how to move it and how to present it--was a primary topic. We were also challenged to include metrics for green, or sustainability, initiatives in our dashboards.
I'm about to hit 3.5 hours of executive interviews. I have more to blog from here--plus a whole bunch of things from my news scans. More tonight when I get back to the hotel.
11:47:02 AM 
|
|
