Things about the internet that will remain true over the next 10 years

Jeff Bezos says that, while disruption is about looking for things that will not be true about the world and replacing them with things that will be, it’s helpful to anchor a business around things that will always be true. For example, Amazon customers will always want low prices, selection and fast delivery.

As technologists then, it’s helpful to think through the next 10 years and state what we think is true about the world that will continue to be true. This way even though the details of apps and technologies can be in flux, we can maintain a general true north that we are marching towards. Below is my attempt at a list:

1. The world will continue to shrink — It might be hard to imagine that we can do even more of this but on closer look it’s obvious that we have a long way to go. For example, even though there are a ton of languages spoken in the world, we have only managed to connect up buckets of people who speak the same language. To borrow an Andreessen-esque anthropomorphization, the world wants to be shrunk and it will be shrunk. This truth gives us a unified lens through which to look at disparate technologies like machine translation, Facebook, Oculus and Skype.
2. Moore’s law [unbundling the computer] — Non-digital things will continue to become digital. The computer can be thought of as a digital bundle of all our needs. Over time that bundle got improved and then progressively unbundled into cameras, phones, TVs, microwaves etc. From this view point, the story of Moore’s law is not one of faster processors but one of turning more and more objects in our surroundings into special purpose computers. We just happened to need faster computers in order to get there. There is already a buzz word about this truth which shall remain unnamed ☺
3. More & Different Data — We will continue to generate data at an accelerating rate. Furthermore, the new devices we get from #2 will allow us continue to collect new kinds of data that have previously been unavailable to us. This is not only about recording what we buy for Christmas. It is also about things like how we drive and how we learn. It’s about the genome and the map of neural connections in our brains. In the ultimate limit, every action taken and every bit of information present in the world will leave a digital footprint. Humans will always have new problems to solve and solving problems requires getting data and ultimately information. While problem domains might change, this need for data as a tool will go nowhere.
4. Intelligence — Algorithms will continue to get smarter. We already have modern marvels like Google Translate and speech recognition. Every year, these algorithms will see incremental improvements as well as applications in new domains. As usual, these small improvements will compound and in 10 years, today’s applications will seem incredibly archaic and unintelligent.
5. Natural Human Machine Interfaces — The way we interact with machines will continue to get better —from the very obvious UI improvements on mobile devices to the more futuristic interactions via things like voice, virtual and augmented realities and even brain waves. If UIs from 10 years ago look ugly to us now, what will they look like 10 years from now? We will continue to yearn for more natural interfaces to all tools we interact with and this won’t change anytime soon.
6. Industries moving online — Jeff Bezos says we know we are still in the early stages of the internet because people still talk about “internet companies” while no one talks about, say, “electricity companies” even though they did so in the early days. Electricity is now a utility that powers all industries. Just like water, it runs in the background and is so useful and ubiquitous that we actually do not think it’s special anymore. In Marc Andreessen’s words, “software is eating the world”. The story here will continue to be driven by a dance between breakthroughs in fundamental technology and the overriding push of Moore’s law. While breakthroughs in technology are less predictable, we can at least predict that there will continue to be breakthroughs ☺ In the past, the internet coupled with an existing payment infrastructure allowed ecommerce take off as one of the earliest applications. Increased bandwidth allowed the music industry move online and now is doing same for the movie industry. Cheaper computers, Digital cameras, Smartphones and low cost bandwidth all came together over time to allow increased consumer participation and thus allowed alot of our social lives to move online. Low hanging fruit in these areas has been picked off in some sense. However, this just raises the bar for the new technologies that will be needed to enable change within these industries. Specifically, there are still things we need to buy, say and share that we currently do not do online because the technology isn’t there. A recent example of technology enabling increased penetration of an existing “online industry” is Instacart. In this case mobile made it possible to move grocery delivery online. It’s not a new thing, it’s part of the general arc of moving industries and parts of industries online when and only when such a movement has been enabled by technology. There are also industries which are mostly just whitespace and have not really been touched by technology. The widely accepted belief is that in most cases this is due to regulation. The more likely truth is that progress is just as much about enabling technology as it is about regulation. In other words, there might be a 10 year version of Skype + Hololens + Oculus that makes H-1B visas obsolete. The lesson here is that to solve finance, education, government, law and healthcare we should lean into technical breakthroughs that route around regulation as much as we do into trying to fight regulation or lobby for new laws.
7. Bandwidth — There was a time when streaming or downloading music was really hard to do. Those days are long gone. However, video still feels hard to deal with. This is certainly the case with live video. To further the internet’s march into all aspects of our lives, it will continue to be true that we need to increase network bandwidth. A corollary is that we need to build applications that consume this bandwidth.
8. Inclusive internet access — Perhaps counterintuitive, but it seems to me that we are better off when we are all better off. To get to a point where the world is one global village with hyper efficient transactions, we’ll need to actually connect the whole world. The motive here is just as capitalistic as it is altruistic. A more subtle point is that internet minorities aren’t only people from countries with low penetration. The issue of inclusivity is just as much about women and blacks getting more products they can relate to as it is about students in Niger getting 24/7 connectivity. Access and inclusion is something people want and this will continue to be true for the next 10 years.
9. Leverage— This is about doing more with less and increasing the independence of individuals. We have made progress with democratizing the production of information. Tools like Wordpress, Medium and Twitter have given everyone a voice and social networks give new age writers content publishers incredible leverage. However, not everyone is a publisher and the principles of allowing people get more done with less and empowering individual independence hold fundamentally across all endeavors. We already see that in 2012, 5 engineers can create $1 billion in value

In my mind these things should be considered lenses through which to view a market-specific idea or solution. It is almost always the case that if we work within any of these umbrellas, we are working on something valuable. I’d love feedback on this list and thoughts about what should / shouldn’t be included.

I’m a hacker/physicist @ a startup in SF. Send me tweets /follow me @levandreessen