New Frontier » Technology

Welcome to the New Frontier

Nate — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:00:47 +0000

In 1960, in the midst of the space race, an ideological war, and the war in Vietnam, Kennedy declared in his inaugural address, “We stand on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of unfulfilled hopes and dreams, a frontier of unknown opportunities and beliefs in peril. Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.”

We stand in a similar place today. We’re slowly emerging from the greatest financial crisis in generations. We have a political system polarized by ideology. Though often forgotten, we’re fighting two wars. We’re in a race to find technology to solve the staggering energy and environmental problems we’ve created. We’re struggling to provide basic needs to over a billion people, and the number is growing. It seems that a collision between our infinite appetites and our finite planet is inevitable.

In finance, they call it gamma; in physics, it’s acceleration, the second derivative, the rate of change of speed. We live in a world with a wicked second derivative. Technology relentlessly marches forward, producing larger amounts of data faster and faster. Governed by Moore’s Law, the density of transistors continues to double as the costs drop in half; breakthroughs in genetics are happening even faster, and someday quantum computing may be faster still. In this world, time continues to compress—news travels faster, and markets react in step. Change accelerates, time is compressed, and our problems grow in scope and complexity.

We are connected as never before. We have tools that we’ve never had. We are the richest we’ve ever been. We define the way we live, the way we spend our time, what and how much we consume. We have the ability to create solutions, to leverage science, to transcend. We live in a truly transformative time, one in which our choices will affect the carrying capacity of the planet and thus the quality of life for future generations. We get to choose, to define the future (it does need us).

But we’ll face limits—not just peak oil but peak Earth. We’ll need to rethink our infrastructure—our water, agriculture, and energy systems. In this world, we’ll apply information technology to biology. We already talk about networks and viruses and just recently booted life. In the years to come, we’ll program our own biology as well as the planet’s. We’ll think of the plants, rivers, and land as hardware. We’ll optimize the carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles like they were supply chains. We’ll realize waste is just another input and thus build cradle-to-cradle business models.

In this world, technology will be ubiquitous. The virtual world and physical world will converge for both us as users and the environments we interact with. We’ll build tools to mine, visualize, and comprehend this big data set. Our cities, buildings, and organizations will produce, listen, and react to this data in real time. Transparency will increase, and we’ll have access to information like never before. Pushed by their people, governments will put data online, creating a more informed and engaged citizenry. We’ll be more urbanized as more people continue to move to cities, and yet our networks will not be defined by geography. Where you live—indeed, even the nation you live in—will matter less.

Driven by an old infrastructure and pressing debts, we’ll see innovation shift from the developed world to the developing world. Because the developing world gets to start fresh, we’ll see a connected, innovative, and entrepreneurial base of the pyramid that banks on their phone and checks market prices from fields in Africa. In the developed world, we’ll need to solve our infrastructure problems while our budgets shrink, and as a consequence, the developed world will contract as the developing one grows. We’ll see a battle between inflation and deflation. Driven by resource constraints and demand from emerging markets, commodities will face upward pressures. Meanwhile, the developed world will experiment with monetary policy in an attempt to combat deflationary pressures caused by ballooning debts and a lack of growth.

We’ll have to rethink saving and retiring and investing. Traditional financial boundaries will be shattered. We’ll see a great convergence between investing and philanthropy. We’re realizing that our private sector metrics don’t capture the true cost of our actions. These externalities are being accounted for more and more—as in the price of carbon, for example. Research continues to show that companies who manage to these metrics perform better. We’ll redefine how we measure value, creating new economic indicators to measure previously unquantifiable things like happiness. We’ll price things like water, soil, and biodiversity. We’ll apply markets and economics to our own psychology and thus find ways to transcend our evolutionary wiring.

We will simultaneously speed up some things (the consumption of information) and slow down others (the consumption of physical goods). We will maximize what matters (knowledge) and minimize what doesn’t (stuff). To do this, we’ll need all the tools we have and more. We’ll need to embrace science and engineering, apply behavioral economics and design thinking, and cultivate empathy. We’ll need a generation of hungry and foolish idealists who work on problems that matter. We’ll need a connected world like never before; we’ll need patient capital; and we’ll need lots of cheap, sustainable energy.

It will be unpredictable, complex, and always accelerating—welcome to the New Frontier.

The Acceleration of Addictiveness

Nate — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 01:30:40 +0000

The most striking thing to me in Paul Graham’s latest essay is that the programmer, computer language architect, and partner of one of the leading software incubators, Y-Combinator, doesn’t have an iPhone because it’s too addicting. More and more, we are going to have to be deliberate about our time and, more important, about the information streams we are constantly wired to.

These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.

It took a while though—on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we’ll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. [3] Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations—we’ll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything new.

In fact, even that won’t be enough. We’ll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That’s what bit me. I’ve avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it. [4]

Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We’re all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That’s why I don’t have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world. [5] My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.

Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn’t it? It always will when you’re trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. Maybe I can’t plead Occam’s razor; maybe I’m simply eccentric. But if I’m right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We’ll increasingly be defined by what we say no to.

Adoption Curves

Nate — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:26:55 +0000

Adoption Curves, originally uploaded by Nathan Laurell.

Great chart showing adoption curves for various technologies throughout history. Notice the slope of the adoption curves. In the early 1900s, there was a slow adoption over a period of decades. Then in the 1960s the curves start getting steeper. By 1990, we go from basically no cell phones to full adoption in less than 15 years. This shows how the rate of change is accelerating.

Kurzweil : The Law of Accelerating Returns (2001)

Nate — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:00:00 +0000

The Law of Accelerating Returns by Ray Kurzweil. Be warned it’s long but well worth the read in it’s entirety. The application to economics is a bit of a stretch but outside of that a brilliant look at where we’ve been and where we’re going (it was written early 2001 after all).

An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity — technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.

Now back to the future: it’s widely misunderstood. Our forebears expected the future to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much like their past. Although exponential trends did exist a thousand years ago, they were at that very early stage where an exponential trend is so flat that it looks like no trend at all. So their lack of expectations was largely fulfilled. Today, in accordance with the common wisdom, everyone expects continuous technological progress and the social repercussions that follow. But the future will be far more surprising than most observers realize: few have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.

Joy: The Future Doesn’t Need Us (2000)

Nate — Tue, 04 May 2010 15:00:37 +0000

Bill Joy on why the future doesn’t need us. Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns addresses many of these points.

From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things.

…

Best Sentence I Read Today…

Nate — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:00:17 +0000

From Paul Kedrosky at edge.org:

“First, the Internet is, for me, a kind of internal cognition combustion engine, something that vastly accelerates my ability to travel vast landscapes.”

More Here

Thoughts from Paul Graham on startups

Nate — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:43:24 +0000

A couple excerpts from Paul Graham essays on startups:

What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can’t save bad people.

Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.

Almost everyone who worked for us was an animal at what they did. The woman in charge of sales was so tenacious that I used to feel sorry for potential customers on the phone with her. You could sense them squirming on the hook, but you knew there would be no rest for them till they’d signed up.

For programmers we had three additional tests. Was the person genuinely smart? If so, could they actually get things done? And finally, since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities, could we stand to have them around?

When nerds are unbearable it’s usually because they’re trying too hard to seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like “I don’t know,” “Maybe you’re right,” and “I don’t understand x well enough.”

No one dared put on attitude around Robert, because he was obviously smarter than they were and yet had zero attitude himself.

Ideally you want between two and four founders. It would be hard to start with just one. One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear.

Business people are bad at deciding what to do with technology, because they don’t know what the options are, or which kinds of problems are hard and which are easy.

And what I discovered was that business was no great mystery. It’s not something like physics or medicine that requires extensive study. You just try to get people to pay you for stuff.

What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.

When I was trying to think of the things every startup needed to do, I almost included a fourth: get a version 1 out as soon as you can.

Full List of Essays

Hacker’s and Painters

O’Reilly: Work on Stuff that Matters (2009)

Nate — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:31:57 +0000

Tim O’Reilly on working on Stuff that Matters:

Some of you may end up working at highflying companies. Some of you may succeed, and some of you may fail. I want to remind you that financial success is not the only goal or the only measure of success. It’s easy to get caught up in the heady buzz of making money. You should regard money as fuel for what you really want to do, not as a goal in and of itself. Money is like gas in the car — you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road — but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations!

Whatever you do, think about what you really value. If you’re an entrepreneur, the time you spend thinking about your values will help you build a better company. If you’re going to work for someone else, the time you spend understanding your values will help you find the right kind of company or institution to work for, and when you find it, to do a better job.

Don’t be afraid to think big. Business author Jim Collins says that great companies have “big hairy audacious goals.” Google’s motto, “access to all the world’s information” is an example of such a goal. I like to think that my own company’s mission, “changing the world by sharing the knowledge of innovators,” is also such a goal.

Don’t be afraid to fail. There’s a wonderful poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that talks about the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with an angel, being defeated, but coming away stronger from the fight. It ends with an exhortation that goes something like this: “What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things.”