It seems to me that programming has become one of the most, if not *the* most, accessible field of all time. Books and tutorials abound and it’s quite easy to obtain knowledge regarding the subject, and as a result starting meaningful companies in the field can be difficult. It feels like everyone is trying to innovate in the areas of ease (e.g web application development note: not decrying web app development in general but rather applications that are primarily composed of forms).
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have a different outlook on things though, to the extremity of prolonged to infinite lifespans, and space colonization. In light of their views on things, I think I’m really understanding for myself what it means for us (humans) as a population to mine the shallow soil. Everyone’s looking for gold in the easy-to-reach places, but the harder problems take far longer and far greater investment to solve. It’s not as easy as gluing together or building proprietary APIs to complete trivial or mundane tasks e.g data entry and retrieval.
The real gain (and with it, money) is in the hard fields; fields that change the way computers/we think or fields that change the way computers/we interact. It’s not easy to make a good social network, but technologically speaking it’s not anything game-changing. On the other hand, telecom companies make the big bucks because of the heavy investment in early infrastructure that few can ultimately compete with. Physical wire is being strung; it’s actually hard work. It’s why Google Maps has such a leg up on everyone except Microsoft. Hard investment and time.
Investors are looking to make that next *billion* dollar investment a la Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. But just because one of the three was a relatively (technologically speaking) uninspired creation, everyone seems to be digging the shallow, easy soil. We enjoy pursuing pipe dreams of easy riches and we’d like to think that applying what we already know is good enough without giving thought to discovering anything really new.
My personal projection for the technological industry: sound and sight. Computers are receiving input from humans and other computers in an unprecedented volume / frequency. Large industry pivots are going to be made however in terms of how we interact with our computers. The iPad/iTouch is a strong example of this: capacitive touch screens truly changed the paradigm of human-computer interaction. The Kinect is another: people are realizing just how far the fields of computer vision and speech processing have advanced.
Even given computationally challenging tasks (e.g speech to text), with the continuing advancement of hardware, soon these challenges will be stories of the past. Our computers will understand us and each other, and as more devices in our households begin to understand and become controlled by computers, we will experience a revolution in the way we live and in the way we interact.
I think that times call for bouts of both deep technological innovation as well as social innovation that applies the technology to our lives. Facebook is a good example of social innovation that leveraged existing web form technology to create a network of information concerning individuals. On the other hand, Microsoft’s Kinect a good example of deep technological innovation, creating a device that opens up a wide array of new possibilities. It however has not been fully exploited for households and everyday use and can benefit from a good bout of social innovation.
Investors in the valley need to start concentrating on companies that are making deep technological innovations that change the game. My personal bets? I’d put down my own money on QWiki for AI innovations and Palantir for data mining innovations if I had any.
gotta get that bro time in somewhere, right? Finished CS357 assignment. Today: 6 hours of class and house hunting, then CS421 MP1.
