From interview in India Times by Akhil George:
During the 1990s, it was chic to read Future Shock. Nowadays though, there’s a far more reli- able way of trying to comprehend the future. Computational thinking. CT is a problem solving process that uses decomposition (breaking complex problems into smaller chunks), pattern recognition (seeing connections between different problems), abstraction (sorting out relevant details from irrelevant ones), and algorithmic design (creating simple steps to solve a problem). It’s a way of thinking that is crucial for computer programming, but can be used in other fields too.
Akhil George
Maeda says companies are at different stages of ‘going digital’ and applies the famous Kardashev scale to the digital transformation status ofacompany.
Akhil George
Kardashev 1 was the period during the 1990s when the internet was created and companies started to take advantage of email and information. Kardashev 2 occurred in the early 2000s when e-businesses took off. Kardashev 3 is where most companies are now, where they sell products online, use the net to try to get customers their own way and use social media to boost their profile. Kardashev 4 is where the big tech companies are at, they are already working at light speed. They never had to go through the first 2 Kardashev stages and they made the third stage possible. They have data at their core, they have the best soft- ware engineers in the world and eat up all the startups. Kardashev 5 is the singularity. It’s like the computer tech in the Matrix and Skynet (from The Terminator movies). “Everybody at Kardashev 4 is afraid of Kardashev 5, whereas companies in Kardashev 1, 2 & 3 aren’t even aware of the 5th stage. That is an imbalance that must be addressed,” says Maeda.
