[LooseWire Blog] The Future of Work Rethought + A Battery-less Future?
Dear Subscriber, hope you're well. This week I wrote about The Future of Work and explored about A Battery-less Future. The pieces are below.
As ever, thoughts, comments, ideas and brickbats welcome on the above, or anything else on your mind tech-related, but not required -- and unsub details at the bottom (you're on this infrequent list because we've talked in the past, we're friends or both, but I won't be offended if it's one email newsletter too much.)
Jeremy
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PS: I've been a guest on Maverick Dreamers and Thinkers with Chloe Cho and discussed the Internet of Things (IOT), A Far-Fetched Future or a Present-Day Reality? Listen to the podcast here.
The Future of Work Rethought
I recently did two things I hadn’t done before. One was to cancel my membership at a co-working space. The other was to meet, face to face, my virtual assistant of seven years. I belatedly realised the two events were connected: the freelance world, once a parallel universe hidden from view, is fast switching places with the real one, and governments, companies and families should take note.
It’s tempting nowadays to think that technology is redefining work, and not in a good way. AI and robotics are stealing away work from top to bottom, from lawyers to assembly lines. Gig platforms like Uber and Deliveroo are slicing up jobs into ever smaller chunks, making robots of us before the jobs are actually handed over to robots. And technology outsources what can be outsourced.
But I realise this is just one side of things. Who are all these people to whom this work is outsourced? By 2020, the number of self-employed in the U.S. will triple, to 42 million people. Freelancers are the fastest growing labour group in the European Union. Behind these statistics is a story, not just of harried drivers and deliver guys, but of knowledge workers who have chosen their own lifestyle, who have defied the disintermediation of the so-called platform economy. They offer a counter-narrative to the usual technology story of innovative disruption.
Take co-working spaces. On the one hand such spaces have proliferated. I recall looking for a co-working in Singapore space back in 2009 and finding only one, on the campus of one of the universities, and when I turned up one morning there to find the curtains closed, bodies all over the floor and a distinct odour of unwashed students. Now, every other floor in the tower blocks of the business district are co-working spaces, though the business looks nothing like it was originally imagined to be. Just don’t expect to find many freelancers there.
Co-working sounded like a freelancer’s dream — a place for those working alone and from home to find space to work, to mix, to find work, to find comradeship. It may have started out like that, but you won’t find many freelancers in a co-working space nowadays. Respondents to a survey of 99designs freelancers, for example, showed only 4 percent of them used a co-working space.
I asked Patrick Llewelyn, CEO of 99designs, why this was. One reason, he said, was that most of the designers on his platform are primary care givers, looking after either their kids or a family member, and so tend to keep less formal hours. As co-working spaces have become substitute offices, they keep office hours which don’t suit most freelancers, most of whom want to get away from the 9-5 grind.
I also realised there was little that was appealing. I abandoned mine when I realised I didn’t enjoy going there. I had returned to working for myself a year or so ago and long admired co-working spaces as a vibrant, tasteful, colourful alternative to the dour, dusty and downbeat newsroom I worked in. But I realised that co-working spaces were too self-conscious, too brimming with hipness to be genuinely convivial. And expensive.
So freelancers choose their own path, and it doesn’t fall easily into any fancy new disruptive model.
And then there’s the other thing: my virtual assistant. She’s real, but based in a Philippines town far from the madding crowd. I had always imagined that one day I’d make the pilgrimage there to meet her, since when she started working for me, she didn’t have a passport. But by now she, husband and two kids in tow, was the peripatetic one, carving time for me in her hectic tour of Singapore.
This is the other thing that struck me about what Patrick told me. When I asked about how his freelancers find social fulfilment if they’re working from home, he said that’s the point. By staying home, often looking after family, they’re able to retain those physical connections that those working in an office tend to lose. And being able to support themselves gives them a sense of contribution as well as a creative outlet, which in turns give them confidence.
When Patrick recently went to Novi Sad, the second largest city in Serbia and one of 99designs’ biggest markets, he attended a meet-up of freelancers who clearly knew each other and felt a kinship and warmth you’d be hard pressed to find in a co-working space. Amarit Charoenphan, cofounder of Thailand’s first and largest co-working space Hubba, told me that in the rush to grab market share and protect themselves from competition, many co-working players had lost the human touch, of fostering a community among their members. He sees the future in algorithms, co-working 3.0, where spaces draw on technology to address the emotional benefits of being together.
Freelancers might argue they already have that, using apps to connect to friends and colleagues, while staying or moving to the places they love. My virtual assistant continues to work from her seaside home, bouncing her two-year-old daughter on her knee on conference calls with her main client, a friend of mine based in Texas. She worries about brownouts and the occasional typhoon, but with internet connectivity improving, she’s rarely offline for long.
She’s part of a massive, gradual shift in knowledge work, from the big city to the smaller towns and villages. This shows up in the data: Less than a quarter of the 99designs freelancers live in urban hubs of more than a million people — just as many live in towns or villages of less than 20,000. This is true more or less across the board: In the U.S. and Indonesia the number falls to be low 14% who live in a metropolis. Data from Upwork, a general freelancing site, shows that for a lot of specialised work even those based in remote towns in the developing world can command decent USD rates.
For sure, freelancing isn’t for everyone, and it’s not always easy to get your first client. And platforms that break down basic tasks like delivery and driving will always be a race to the bottom. But for those with skills, or those motivated to acquire them, the freelance economy has grown in the past decade to be a vast continent in the landscape of the future of work, mostly unnoticed by governments and immune to Silicon Valley’s eviscerations. Which reminds me; I have to go, my virtual assistant is reminding me we’re due a virtual brainstorming session.
A Battery-less Future?
At what point can we ditch batteries, the last encumbrance to our wireless nirvana?
The biggest single block on a wireless, connected future where everything everywhere is attached to chips and sensors which relay, receive and act on instructions from afar is power. And that means either that the device is connected to the electricity grid (which probably means you don’t need it to be wirelessly connected) or it has a battery in it. Which will need charging or replacing.
Long-range low-power technologies like low-powered wide-area networks (LPWANs think LoRa, NB-IOT and SigFox) have gone some way to solving this problem — instead of a power-hungry 4G modem you have a simple chip that sends only the most necessary data and runs off a battery that can run for years — but that doesn’t solve the problem of more complex or power-hungry devices that need to communicate more frequently and more loquaciously. These endpoints will need someone to service them. Internet of Things, Interrupted.
But what if the devices could find their own energy? What if they could “scavenge the energy they need to operate from whatever naturally occurring electrons were in their environment, regardless of that environment”, in the words of Chris Rust, founder and general partner of VC investor Clear Ventures?
Energy harvesting, as it’s called, is not new. Solar power is in effect harvesting the sun’s rays and turning it into energy via photovoltaic cells; wind or wave turbines do something similar (called electrodynamics). But scavenging ambient energy in the immediate environment into electrical power will yield only a few watts at most — enough to augment batteries or, possibly, to replace them. (Still enough to power your solar calculator indoors, and solar power is highly efficient at conversion.)
Energy harvesting can be done an in a number of ways:
- kinetic energy — vibrations, stress, tension or movement using piezoelectric materials, for example. Imagine the vibration on aircraft wings being converted to energy, or the reverberation of heartbeats to power a pacemaker. (Some examples of vibration energy harvesting can be found here from ReVibe Energy of Gothenburg.)
- Other examples of vibration-based energy harvesters are triboelectric charging — when certain materials are separated one becomes electrically charged (think the static electricity from running a comb through one’s hair) or the more traditional electromagnetic vibration, where relative motion between magnet and coil induces current into the coil. (Think turning a door knob or hitting a switch.)
- Then there’s temperature — where differences across a thermoelectric crystal cause a voltage, or the temperature of a pyroelectric crystal changes, generating a charge. The new PowerWatch, for example, uses both thermoelectric — the heat emitted from your wrist — and solar charging. The device uses chips from Matrix Industries.)
- Then there’s radio frequency (RF) radiation, emitted from routers and cell towers, or from RF chargers, that transmit electromagnatic waves in a specific area. So while this might be scavenging in the sense that it is capturing wasted or existing radiation, it could be deliberate — say, via pointing an RF source at your remote device and switching it on.
So some of this is happening. A RFID (radio-frequency identification) or NFC (near field communication) sticker (think price tags) or chip (think contactless cards, or has no battery in it, instead harvesting the power from the device connecting to it through a technique called backscatter, which transmits data by reflecting modulated wireless signals off a tag and back to the reader.
In the labs of academia the vision is that the body becomes a patchwork of, well, patches, where the energy is derived from the body itself to power unobtrusive sensors which monitor our health: solar-powered heart sensors no bigger or less flexible than a Band-Aid, or sensors that draw their power from the natural conductive properties of skin, storing their energy in stretchable capacitors made of carbon nanotube forests (so called because the material grows like trees 30 micrometers tall, their canopies tangled on wafers.)
But for now, the movement is in industry, and buildings. Companies like EnOcean sells self-powered switches and sensors for maintenance-free lighting which draw their power either, in the case of switches, from the kinetic movement of being pressed or in the case of sensors, from light (indoor and outdoor) or temperature differences to detect occupancy, say.
The changes will really kick in when devices can generate enough energy to be able to transmit over significant distances wirelessly. That means WiFi, which requires a decent-sized battery, rather than, say, Bluetooth, which has too short a range to be any use beyond your headset, mouse or keyboard. That, however, may not be true for much longer. The latest version of Bluetooth, version 5, expands its range by four times, making it comparable to WiFi. And companies like Atmosic Technologies believe they can extend a Bluetooth device’s battery life by between 5 times, to, well, forever.
Atmosic Technologies, just announced as winner of shortlisted for the Global Semiconductor Association’s startup of the year, says that “with the advent of Bluetooth 5, combined with ultra-low-power functionality, power consumption is low enough to be supported by harvested RF, light, or heat energy, while still able to provide the range and coverage equivalent to Wi-Fi.” In short, it makes “the concepts of “forever-battery” and “battery-free” IoT realistic. IoT devices can work for the lifetime of the devices on the batteries they come with, or without batteries at all.”
Atmosic says its a fully integrated single chip with RF energy harvesting (for size see the image at the top of this post) can provide small form factor battery-free operation up to a distance of several meters from the RF source. This could be a game changer, because it would mean not only that all your Bluetooth devices would not require charging, but that they could communicate over longer distances. It would also mean a lot more devices could communicate with each other without you having to worry about whether they need charging. But Atmosic acknowledges that “this is the first step in the journey,” which sounds as if we’re still some ways off the battery-free IoT revolution.
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