Where are the next big waves in tech and innovation?

https://memos.substack.com/p/where-are-the-next-big-waves

by catapultis • 4 years ago

22 8 4 years ago

memos.substack.com

necovek2• 4 years ago

This should be retitled "next big waves in profitability": the downturn period ("in the early-to-mid 1980s") they mention has brought us TeX in 1983 that revolutionised typesetting soon after, especially math typesetting; start of the free software movement and a programmable editor environment like Emacs; and countless others, though these spring to my mind right off the bat.

Notably, none of them led to VCs getting involved because these were published as free software.

But judge them as not innovative or revolutionary at your own peril.

breck2• 4 years ago

You're wrong. TeX had no impact and everyone nowadays in science makes PDFs first and then compiles to TeX only for legacy reasons. Similarly, the public domain WWW was a good idea but really just cloned AOL.com and I expect AOL to make a comeback soon. The public domain SQLite has had a good run but Oracle now has MySQL and so I expect them to start taking good market share. And I used to work at Microsoft and they had a non-public domain VCS called SourceDepo (sd) that will soon give git a real run for its money.

necovek2• 4 years ago

My apologies, you are completely right.

But I am not sure what VCS stands for? Venture Capitalist Sourcecode?

Ancalagon• 4 years ago

You're kidding yourself if you think software will account for less investment the next decade than it did during the last one. AI-generated artwork companies will automate entire sectors of the design industry. I suspect things like video advertisements, music, even whole movies and books will become AI generated over the next 20 or so years.

What's funny is a lot of people thought artists would be the last ones to become unemployed by the AI revolution but it actually looks more now like they might be some of the first.

With that in mind, perhaps most white-collar jobs that we thought were safe from automation won't be for long. Automated code-writing, and even requirements gathering also seems to be just around the corner, although I have more doubts about that (I'm biased though so who knows). These may eventually be reduced to prompt-input, no-code solutions useable by everybody.

Climate tech/strategies will obviously need to improve, unless we plan on living in a 500ppm CO2 world for a long time. So yes investment on the atoms front will increase, but I'm having a hard time seeing profitability in this space without whole sectors of the economy having their profits diverted by government in order to make this space profitable.

One single mineral-rich asteroid in orbit around Earth could be a huge boon to space tech and advancement. Serving both as a near earth launch and refueling platform, solar energy farm, and material provider to both earth and space-based industry. This seems a little farther out though. But with SpaceX advancements, all the pieces seem like they could fall into place very soon. We've already made contact with and diverted asteroids. All it would take would be some careful planning and moar boosters.

HellDunkel• 4 years ago

I doubt your predictions about AI generated art automating away entire sectors of „the design industry“. What industries are you thinking of in particular? Even extremely dull and uncreative things like wire removal or rotoscoping is still mostly done manually these days. 3d characters are carefully sculpted by hand, CAD models too- machine learning wont replace that anytime soon. UX design, layout, typeface design- these art very human centric fields, no AI on the horizon to do that. ML sure has potential filling in some gaps, adding a final touch of realism or rendering efficiency but its not much more than a powerful filter. Filters don’t kill artists.

throw8383833jj• 4 years ago

you can't assume that markets are always efficient. i'm sure there's plenty of industrys that won't use labor saving tech even if it could save them a lot of money. and since they don't need to compete, they won't loose market share to those companies that do.

govt for instance isn't going to start laying off employees for AI generated work, even if the AI gen work is better.

theGnuMe• 4 years ago

There's a lot more to come from the information age.. we will also see the digitalization of biology, chemistry etc... The future is exciting!

Where are the next big waves in tech and innovation?

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