Introducing Distant Field Labs
We needed a place to share our insights and make some big ideas public, so today we’re introducing not only why we are here but The Observatory - A place to open some of our work.
Vanessa Piper, Principal Explorer
Mark Piper, Principal Explorer
24 April, 2024
It is no stretch to say that humankind is experiencing the greatest evolution of technology since the industrial revolution. Software, hardware, material sciences and the general understanding of our place in the universe are accelerating at a pace matched only by our imaginations.
Never before have we seen such ambition and relentlessness in development of new technologies. Nor have we seen such ambition in the adoption of these technologies.
Arthur C. Clarke stated in his third law that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and at the lab we hold this law to be true.
Executives, decision makers, investors, teachers, developers and public servants are among the exhaustive list of humans having to make sense of what often appears as magic.
As much as we would like it, we can’t reasonably expect every decision maker to stay ahead of the curve or keep pace with the evolution of technology. It is moving too quickly.
Our goal is to prepare organisations to make decisions relating to the new stuff, so they can stay focused on what they do at their core and staying true to their business.
Distant Field Labs provides intelligence on emerging technologies, taking the struggle out of making informed decisions on rapidly evolving topics.
We call this Decision Intelligence.
Introducing The Observatory
At the lab, we spend a lot of time contemplating, researching and writing about emerging technologies to support important decisions.
As an example, we have spent the last three months down various Artificial Intelligence rabbit holes looking to understand answers to some of the big questions - What is Artificial Intelligence? What’s up with Generative AI? How much is it really being adopted? By whom? Why?
It's easy to get a negative slant on rapidly advancing technology when rummaging through the hype and the fear on offer.
History is littered with lessons learned from early technology adoption and costly mistakes made before course correcting into realising value from change. Recent historical examples include the advent of mobile applications or the migration of legacy computing environments to public cloud architectures.
As we undertake our work, we focus on determining possible solutions to the problems being identified. We want positive ideas to tackle the emerging issues.
The Observatory is our place to share these ideas with the world for consideration. Never will we claim we are right, or that our word is lore or if it will 100% mitigate a problem. But we want to try.
We believe that good ideas, good solutions, come from exploration and evolution of thinking around tough problems. It is only after revision that a solution takes shape and hope emerges.
These are not marketing posts. There are no products or services being peddled here. No vendors are sponsoring these posts.
We simply want to share these ideas with the world and see if they help you, and your teams in wrapping your minds around the often mind-bending technology as we evolve together.
Today, we’re proud to launch the observatory with The Productivity Paradox in which Vanessa explores the very real risk of human over-reliance on Large Language Models and Generative AI.
