“If you live in the future”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5801697

28 46 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

A recent post by Joseph Walla used a catchphrase of Garry Tan's "if you live in the future ..." the idea being you can identify a trend and then an opportunity

"If you live in the future, all cars will be electric, so build Tesla Motors"

What are your quotes about the future and its opportunities ?

lifeisstillgood7• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, a diagnosis of most symptoms will be done from a pinprick at home, so become a medical researcher not a GP

(Ok an example of what not to do - far too negative)

lowmagnet• 13 years ago

…so build the sensors

lifeisstillgood7• 13 years ago

Aha! Much better :-)

dataisfun• 13 years ago

Or build the secure data platform for all that data to be portable, which is what we're doing at Patients Know Best :)

derleth• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, you'll still need to have someone whose career may be on the line if they get a diagnosis far enough wrong, so some form of human oversight of the diagnosis process is still inevitable; therefore, make it possible to reliably transmit the confidential medical information needed to make diagnoses across networks a lot more securely than we can now.

reeses6• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, patients screw corporations!

lifeisstillgood7• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, 80% of all office jobs will be remote working - so build service office spaces and lots more coffee shops.

jethroalias97• 13 years ago

People always say that remote working will be the way of the future, but humans remain extremely social animals. So much of what we do is guided by genetics and it seems to be human nature that if you don't see someone's face on a regular basis it is very difficult to create an intimate or trusting relationship.

This seems to be one of the main pain points when it comes to outsourcing work abroad, people seem to work best and collaborate the most when they interact frequently in person. In Pixar Story, I recall Jobs saying he designed the headquarters specifically for unplanned collaboration. As much as the world changes, people remain the same.

reeses6• 13 years ago

Invest in 3d printers that extrude coffee!

Man, I am going to be SET!

lifeisstillgood7• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, laser guns will be able to shoot down jet fighters from miles away, so build trade agreements.

krapp3• 13 years ago

Or build the lasers.

ISL• 13 years ago

So invest in retroreflectors.

jtemplin• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, people will no longer trust the cloud with their plaintext, so build end-to-end encryption systems.

ChrisNorstrom• 13 years ago

If you live in the future:

You won't drive, autonomous cars will come to pick you up and drop you off, including round trips. That's why 14 out of 15 car dealerships went bust.

You won't use paper, all of your receipts, tax documents, contracts, and mail will be digital and sent to a i-mail address assigned to every US citizen. And you'll view all these documents on your "wall screen".

Power cords will found no where. Nearly every device will be powered by wireless electricity.

You won't have a tv, you'll have a "wall screen" a giant thin film like flexible plastic sheet covering one of your walls which will display a crisp high definition picture.

Touch was so last century. "Look and Think" technology is where it's at. Calibrated Brain wave readers and eye cameras in the corners of your room can see what elements on the screen you're looking at and can execute commands based on certain thoughts.

You'll have 1 super computing pc in your home to which you will connect all your devices and. It. Will. Be. Bad Ass. Because it'll be like a server for every device your family has it connected to. And contain pretty much all of your media, documents, and data which will be streamed out to external devices. Contrary to popular belief in the future everything is NOT in the cloud, because the cloud costs a corporation money to run and maintain. Back in the early 2000s era cloud services were popular before companies like Google and Microsoft realized they were losing money on services that didn't and couldn't generate a revenue and sunsetted them. Consumers have also lost trust in someone else keeping their data. Your super PC will be so cheap and software so easy and automated you'll have no reason not to set one up. Plus the technologically uneducated of the early 2000s have already died off, as have several generations of their semi computer literate offspring, leaving a society that is truly very very tech savvy.

You'll have an e-ID issued by the government which you can use to sign on securely to important websites that manage your taxes, benefits, payroll, etc... It will be created in 2021 after facebook (the former issuer of online IDs) suffers from a massive security breach caused by Chinese Hackers.

Taxes will also be easier, and are no longer done by person but automated. Employers will upload all payroll information to "intelli-Tax" automatically, point of sale, e-commerce, even wordpress(which expanded into a life managment software called ) shops will collect and report payments.

If you live in the future, you'll still hear people talk about how 2087 is the year of consumer linux, and you'll still roll your eyes and laugh. And linux still won't get it.

acavailhez• 13 years ago

and our children will marvel that error-prone human drove combustion engine vehicles going 30mph in the places we live.

nawitus• 13 years ago

>You'll have an e-ID issued by the government which you can use to sign on securely to important websites that manage your taxes, benefits, payroll,

Funny that you say that, it's pretty much reality in Finland. You can do taxes, apply for benefits etc. online. Not every single thing can be done online just yet, of course.

LowKarmaAccount• 13 years ago

>Calibrated Brain wave readers and eye cameras in the corners of your room can see what elements on the screen you're looking at and can execute commands based on certain thoughts.

Brain waves (produced by changes in electrical current in your brain) are weak to begin with, and decrease in power in proportion to the square of the distance (1/r^2). That's why anything that reads your brain waves needs a helmet to work.

ibudiallo2• 13 years ago

And privacy will be will called the P word, it will be offending to people when you keep things to your self.

reeses6• 13 years ago

Why? What do you have to hide?

Backs away suspiciously

lifeisstillgood7• 13 years ago

That's a very interesting concept

31reasons• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, you don't have to think, everything will be predicted for you.

reeses6• 13 years ago

Hey, leave the future perfect out of my perfect future.

thoughtcriminal• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, garbage is gold. Garbage will be used to build business empires. Garbage will be sold, sorted, repurposed and resold in ways unimaginable, so determine what future assets you are throwing out.

Puts the saying "find something no one else wants to do and make a career out of it" in a whole new light.

Bonus Prediction: William Gibson will write a novel about garbage.

michaelhoney• 13 years ago

Upvote for the bonus prediction.

krapp3• 13 years ago

Idoru was pretty much about garbage.

reeses6• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, your Amazoogle is composing new William Gibson novels on the topics of your choice.

If I live in the future, I enjoy reading William Gibson™ slashfic about the heroes of my favorite mimetic Hyuman Companions and orcas.

hugs• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, you know more work is and will be done by robots. However, there will be human jobs for designing and programming robots... So, start a robotics company!

Bjorkbat• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, you'll have access to relatively cheap VR headsets, so build an online classroom platform that delivers content through immersive VR classrooms, rather than embedded video.

extrafox• 13 years ago

If you live in the future everyone will be able to create movies and other shows, so content will be free but we will pay (or watch ads) for services to find the content we want to watch.

ibudiallo2• 13 years ago

And they may call it utoob

etkombros• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, people will still care about classical Chinese literature (because people still care about classical Chinese literature now and it's not like Confucius lived in this millennium). So study classical Chinese, if you think it's interesting.

contingencies3• 13 years ago

Agreed. I would actually bring that one level more abstract as follows:

If you live in the future, conventional information technology related skillsets will have become largely obsolete through automation resulting from advances in human computer interfaces (derived from computational linguistics and the merged fruits of ontology-oriented and iterative-generative-gist programming).

In its stead, a degree of social concern for the creation and consumption of human art and philosophy of all eras will become the primary occupation of many during their waking hours, to levels previously considered to be an impossible, utopian myth.

leephillips• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, medical science will have made lifespans so long that you won't do anything because there will never be a reason not to procrastinate.

lifeisstillgood7• 13 years ago

I will give you my reply tomorrow :-)

oceanstone• 13 years ago

If you live in the future:

Linux will be the leading gaming platform, so build a Linux optimized gaming engine.

scottmcleod• 13 years ago

If you live in the future collaboration and creativity are the norm.

LarryMade2• 13 years ago

When a crime or accident happens in the future the first responders will be (quad?) copter camera drones to record information, provide crowd control, and record the scene for possible wrongdoers at the scene or fleeing. Other drones may be used to deliver vital emergency medications/equipment from local hospitals to accident/disaster scenes.

So build drones that:

a) have proper sirens lights, etc

b) can fly to any street address and canvas the area visually and communicate with people on the scene

c)and be stored and launched from neighborhood automated deployment stations

reeses6• 13 years ago

Pfft, that's so, like, ten minutes from now.

contingencies3• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, large scale agricultural monocultures will be quaint tangents of history. All children will accept as self-evident that producing greater varieties of food in heterogeneous environments more closely resembling natural ecosystems, in a decentralized fashion with proximity to places of habitation (and therefore consumption) is not only simpler and cheaper, but also healthier due to reduced requirements for artificial components (fertilizers and pesticides), eliminates the majority of transportation and storage overheads, and largely resolves related concerns around pollution and reduced nutritive capacity.

lifeisstillgood7• 13 years ago

If you can get bbc iplayer look for a radio programme on vertical farming - a similar concept (mono-culture plants grown indoors in warehouses in cities in hydroponic environments).

Ok not Herero-environments but still similar

contingencies3• 13 years ago

I guess you meant https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01snbm2/Vertical_Farm...

By 2050 the population of the world is expected to grow to over 9 billion and proponents of "vertical farming" believe growing food in cities would use less land and resources than traditional outdoor methods, reduce transport costs and fossil-fuel emissions. As vertical farms start to spring up in Sweden, Vancouver and the Netherlands, Ella McSweeney investigates whether they could provide a cost-effective solution that will increase yields or if it is just another example of head in the clouds utopian thinking.

Sounds good but playback fails both on Firefox + Chrome under Linux. Torrent, someone?

cousin_it• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, most humans will be hopelessly outcompeted and economically redundant, due to technologies like intelligence amplification, mind uploading and artificial intelligence. So... I don't have any good suggestions, it looks like doom from any angle, maybe you should spend some time thinking about it? Or just enjoy life while you can?

krapp3• 13 years ago

If you live in the future... be born rich.

informatimago• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, the (robotic) economy will have moved where there is money to be made: in space, on the asteroids, and you'll be left on Earth to your own devices.

alenox• 13 years ago

If you live in the future, you and everyone you know is healthy and fit. This is due, in large part, to a food delivery system that uses your medical data to plan and deliver meals for you.

esayas• 13 years ago

have you guys read this: http://esayas.com/post/52052551164 - the future is already there in the universe. humans are just villagers to get it.

“If you live in the future”

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