Winter Reflections [2]
The Crystal Ball
There are essentially two prominent questions in our field:
- When and how will the future arrive?
- How does one get in on it?
In September 2017, Steven LaValle gave a guest lecture at Aalto on the “state of the art in VR”. I asked these two questions, to both LaValle gave equivocal answers: “Nobody knows.” and “Aren’t the big companies hiring?”
The Golden Question
The story was brought up during McGookin’s lecture on prototyping: Jeff Hawkins walked around holding a block of wood, pretending it was a handheld computer. Who would have imagined, that 15 or 20 years later, the whole world would have entirely changed. People would pull out a mobile device at the bus station, on their own sofas, in lecture halls, and have their attention glued to it for hours on end? Wouldn’t it be a crazy vision back then?
And think about the age of “mobile”, billions and billions worth of industry had been created, in such a relatively short time span. What has enabled the arrival of this new reality? Is it the technological problems to be solved: multi-touch for mobile, or making it less dizzy or more light-weight for VR? Is it the ecosystem, the App Store and the developer community? Is it the critical mass of consumer readiness, finally after many years to embrace the new tech?
When will the future arrive and how? What is still missing and how will these puzzle pieces be solved? There had been massive tidal waves— greater than all of us — and there will be more greater ones still, when the world changes and the landscape of businesses shifts at a tectonic level.
Bill Gross showed the single most important factor for startup success is timing— this is the thesis of a “historical materialistic” point of view — the larger economic trends, rather than heroic personal journeys and legendary ideas, explain the business success stories. Now the tidal shifts just happen a lot faster. Where’s Kodak (once $30B)? Where’s Nokia Mobile (once $150B)? New realities are arriving, and rising tides float unseen new fleets.
“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”
Many say Kurzweil has been more successful at predicting the future because he focuses on the longer, deeper trends as opposed to fads of the time — and the bigger trends are more consistent, even inevitable. Often I feel the trends this time are a lot bigger — “this time it’s different” — the future will change in fundamental ways, e.g. how autonomous vehicles will create seismic shifts in the economic landscape.
The “Big Giants Riddle”
Large corporations like Google and Amazon have the capital to exploit (in the neutral sense) talent pool, market access, public policies — what Marx prophetically suggested is now plainly a global reality. How many KickStarter projects that you never heard of were just like Amazon Echo? Whereas larger companies have the capital to plan strategically to capture the timing of trends, how do startups in Finland compete? Can new companies even get into the same stadium or playing field (rather than playing at the KickStarter level)? That’s the riddle.
The Silver Question
It’s hard to predict the future. I still remember hearing some financial news commentary (ca. 2010) about how AMZN’s P/E ratio is too high to justify even a price of $100… Whereas for people who joined AMZN that early, it would have been a “life changing” journey.
Who knows what will float all boats in 8–10 years? To which area of work should one dedicate the next decade of life? How does one ride the tides? How does one get on a future big ship, the right ship?
There was one slide in LaValle’s lecture with a picture of a large number of VR headsets (way more than pictured above). The main point was that the market has exploded, there are so many companies now, investing heavily into an area that is now emerging from the trough of the “hype curve”. The trend is happening.
Then here and there you see all the news about big companies investing heavily in new media, Apple, Facebook, “assembling a secret team” of “tech veterans” and “legends”, doubling down on VR etc. — or just the long running approach of Microsoft Research, snatching smart people into a research park… it makes you wonder, how does one become “snatchable”.
Also in LaValle’s lecture slides, there was a picture of him “in an Oulu apartment, fiddling with a robotic arm”. Were the last two years of his career (with Oculus and exit of being acquired by Facebook) the defining part of his success? Many like to argue about the ambiguity of the meaning of success. But without those two years, he was just play with a robotic arm in an Oulu apartment, even though that level of obscurity was already hard to achieve, just think about how competitive academic tenures are these days…
At Slush you see so many people under one roof running with incredible haste towards nowhere. Outside of that, you see some designers create their own agencies and become wildly successful, while others toil to get an internship. What is the secret of those who throughout history have “made it”?
The big trends are happening. How do we get in on it?
