At the cusp of the next wave

I have been traveling a bit in the past few months, and for all the pain, there is one big advantage about 24 hour long cross-continental travel between US and India. You end up getting a lot of time to disconnect and think about what’s going on around you. And one thing that has been top of mind lately is that we are due for another wave of technology to shake things up around us. We had the Personal computing wave, and then came the Internet era which morphed into the mobile age. What’s next?

Revolutions typically do not happen overnight. There are small bits and pieces of changes that keep cropping up all over that one day magically coalesce into something that is much larger than we can imagine. To that end, I feel like we are watching the beginning of a big budget Hollywood thriller. There is a sense of impending big bang, and all you see for the first half an hour or so is small signs and clues that seem disconnected from each other. Things that by themselves are somewhat significant but when put together fundamentally alter the plot. The spoon did bend, the steak was indeed yummy, there is no such thing as deja-vu. Shit, we are in a Matrix.

There is no spoon

Here is a smattering of those signs…

• AlphaGo (Google’s Deepmind AI program) just defeated one of the top ranked players’ of a game of GO (to make the next move in this game while calculating the next four moves requires ~300 billion calculations). Its impossible for a computer to brute force its way to winning. If you want to be blown away, please do yourselves a favor and read this excellent WaitbutWhy article on AI. My friend, Rick Klau wrote an excellent post on this recently
• Cars are becoming more and more autonomous. I cannot go for a drive around Mountain View these days without running into a self-driven Google car (no pun intended). I have a running bet that my toddler will never have a full fledged driving license (he will have an operating one to sit in a self-driven car)
• Boston Dynamics keeps producing scary robots that not only run, walk and pick things like humans, but also recover when kicked and pushed around like few machines you have ever seen. Watch this. I worry that kicking these guys is not a good idea
• Then there is Virtual reality. I came home one day super-stressed from work, put on my Samsung VR gear and went to a Canadian wilderness where I hiked for about 10 mins. I could literally feel the crisp air, the mist rising up the trees and the slightly soggy ground beneath my feet. I was in my study in Bangalore
• More and more devices are connected all the time, and there is significant data infrastructure in place to store, analyze and provide real time insights that can then feed into any system you build on top of it. Fundamentally, almost all examples given above work on this. This is getting sophisticated by the day. We are completely surrounded by some sort of a device mesh that is churning up a data net around us. Soon, almost every thing we do will be informed by this continuous stream of ambient data
• Someone just printed an entire house from a 3D printer. Another company is printing cars. You can print cakes, combs, food, lawn mowers, life size castles all from a 3D printer. This is going to completely upend the manufacturing sector to the point where I should be able to select, design, customize and print whatever I need in my life (more or less)

I will stop now. I could go on and on. But these are just some examples of things that are going on as we speak, in parallel, at the same time, today.

How will all these things intermesh together? Advanced Robotics, AI, Nanotech, 3D printing, VR/AR, the innovation storm we are in the midst of is limitless. I saw this graph in a different context at WaitButWhy, but feel it accurately represents how I feel these days.

If human progress was a nice linear graph (which it sort of has been so far), then it would look like this:

But what if we were on the cusp of absolute and comprehensive craziness. What if we were actually here?

As Tom Urban put in his blog, that’s a pretty intense place to be in.

So to go back to the question I asked at the outset. We had a PC, then the Internet showed up, and now are in the midst of a mobile revolution. What is the next wave?

What wave? There is a Tsunami coming.