a future where amazon and others sell the recommendations as a service but the actuals goods are free.
While it may be a long while before every adult is sharing art or innovations on a global scale, we can already see the abundance of good stuff piling up. Netflix has more great movies a click away — after I filter out the dross — than I can watch in my lifetime. What do I watch next? Spotify and other music streaming services will have more fantastic, I-am-in-heaven music available everywhere all the time than I can ever listen to. What do I listen to next? Google will have every book ever published only 125ms away, and collaborative filtering, friends recommendations and a better Amazon engine, will narrow down those stacks to the best 10K books for me. So what do I read next?
I believe that answering this question is what outfits like Amazon will be selling in the future. For the price of a subscription you will subscribe to Amazon and have access to all the books in the world at a set price. (An individual book you want to read will be as if it was free, because it won’t cost you extra.) The same will be true of movies (Netflix), or music (iTunes or Spotify or Rhapsody.) You won’t be purchasing individual works.
Japan now faces simultaneous threats to its infrastructure, its economy and its society. We have to ask seriously if Japan, as a nation, has the reserves of will necessary to weather this crisis.
a great example what our imminent mylifebits future enables.
MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language — so he wired up his house with video cameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son’s life, then parsed 90K hours of home video to watch “gaaaa” slowly turn into “water.” Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.
faster progress than moore’s law. and here’s a bit more background:
The technology that enables reading DNA is changing very quickly. I’ve chronicled how price and productivity are each improving in a previous post; here I want to try to get at how the diversity of companies and technologies is contributing to that improvement.
2015 world capacity of dna sequencing means it would take > 4000 years to sequence all living humans. we still have a long way to go.
With the ongoing unrest in Egypt, there has been speculation that the military, which is now in charge, might be tempted to launch a military adventure in order to unite the country behind them and position those advocating a pluralistic society as unpatriotic in a time of crisis. Most of the worry has been about a potential conflict with Israel, but with the rapidly deteriorating situation in Libya, what if Egypt’s present rulers decided to roll the tanks West instead of East? This move would be taken “in order to secure the oil fields” and “in solidarity with our Arab brethren, who deserve protection from the tyrannical regime that has exploited them for so long”.
if egypt wanted to take over libya, it wouldn’t be too hard.
As Tyler tells the story, there is a progressive expansionary impulse to government, for which technological change creates opportunities, so government expands until those opportunities are fully exploited. Tyrone says his brother has the story backwards. Why, asks Tyrone, does government not only expand in absolute terms as a response to technological change, but also in relative terms? After all, as Tyler points out, private enterprise also has a natural expansionary impulse. With technological change, Tyler writes, “Everything was growing larger.” Yet, to the degree that we can measure it, government has grown dramatically in its share of the overall economy. Why does government win? Tyrone says government is a reluctant adopter of new technology (“Have you been to a government office?”), but that government outgrows the private sector despite this, because the concentration of economic power that attends technological changes demands countervailing state action if any semblance of broad-based affluence and democratic government is to be sustained. Tyrone (who is much more arrogant and less pleasant than his brother) proclaims this to be his “iron silicon law”: In (non-terminal) democratic societies, technological change must always and everywhere be accompanied by the growth of institutions that engender economic transfers from the relatively few who remain attached to older productive enterprises to the many who require purchasing power not only to live as they did before, but also to employ one another in novel or more marginal activities that were not pursued before. Inevitably those institutions develop in state or quasi-state sectors (which include the state-guaranteed financial sector and labor unions whose “collective bargaining” rights are enforced by the power of the state). Tyrone tells me that the only thing the post-Reagan “small government” schtick has accomplished is to push this process underground, so that covert transfers have been engineered by a “private” financial sector in ways that are inefficient, nontransparent, and often fraudulent according to traditional laws and norms. Some of these weak institutions upon which we relied to conduct transfers broke in 2008, so now we’re really feeling the pain. We’ll continue to feel the pain until we restore the ability of the financial system to hide widespread transfers, or until we employ some other sort of institution to provide a sustainable dispersion of purchasing power.
Argues that the state grows because technology disrupts widespread affluence and the state is stepping in to “preserve democracy”. 2012-12-10: See also: cookie cutter “innovators”. 2013-03-03: I like this hypothesis. I have yet to meet a MBA where that fly-by-night degree didn’t count against the person. MBAs are often seen as a miracle cure for ailing careers, or picking the wrong major in college, but really all they signal is that you don’t understand opportunity cost.
The business mentality that focuses on short terms profits is what is preventing the rollout of radical technology. The fault is regulation and regulators. If a company was truly innovating, then that company would outpace the regulators. If a company is moving so slow that they have not escaped the regulatory paradigm then they have not achieved a true moonshot technology. Masses of people with MBAs are managing companies for the last several decades. They focus on milking the profit of existing technology. They can milk a cow but they cannot generate a truly new cow.
Americans have stopped taking risks, are too comfortable, and rely too heavily on incremental improvements of existing goods & ideas, which has resulted in a stagnation of our culture and economy.
2019-04-12: We might start to emerge from stagnation
We are now starting to get a hint of the future transformative technologies that you guessed were on their way in “The Great Stagnation”. You had not speculated on what they might be, but there are faint hints on what is likely to happen. I believe this article is one leg: extremely fast air travel. The second leg is the Hyperloop and similar: extremely fast ground travel. The third leg is synthetic biology. The fourth leg is quantum computing, which is finally starting to show that it might work. And the fifth, and final leg, is fusion energy, which looks eerily like it will actually come to fruition this time. Put those 5 together and you have the makings of a new economy, with a huge burst of growth to come for many decades. These are just faint hints, of course, but they’re starting to get increasingly clear.
2020-12-14: Perhaps Covid helps with ending stagnation
If the Great Stagnation is ending (we will see), it seems as if the COVID-forced remote work revolution has to have played some sort of role.
Speaking from personal experience as a white collar Exec, the productivity gains for our highest value workers has been immense. The typical time-sucks and distractions of in-office work have been eliminated, as have their personal time investments like physically visiting the grocery store or running errands. Mental focus on productive efforts is near constant.
Perhaps most importantly, work travel is not happening. Valuable collaborations with colleagues, customers, regulators or other partner companies aren’t delayed by the vagaries of the various groups’ availability to meet in person, navigating being in different cities, flights, hotels, etc. Collaboration happens as soon as you have the idea to meet via Zoom. And a lot more collaboration happens as a result. It may be lower productivity collaboration than meeting in person around a whiteboard (maybe), but the sheer quantity of it means on net there’s perhaps been a boom in cross-pollination of ideas.
Software is eating the world. But progress in software technology itself largely stalled around 1996.
2 possible causes come to mind: we’re in exploit, rather than explore mode (there’s an overhang of areas where we haven’t even applied our current software technologies, as the pandemic has demonstrated: Japanese companies still fax, checks are being mailed out, etc). And we have too much software, and don’t know how to replace / refactor it (think of all the systems still running on COBOL / Excel)
The problem for banks, though, is that while their COBOL may be stable, their customers’ expectations aren’t. As you probably realize, the landscape of the financial industry is shifting quickly. Transactions are increasingly happening on Venmo-style apps that let people ping money to friends; services like Coinbase let people buy cryptocurrency; there are new lending apps like Tala and Upstart. People now expect ever-easier ways to manage their money via software. This is where banks, which should have inherited advantage in moving money around, have it harder. It’s difficult for them to roll out buzzy new features quickly, because they have to deal with their Jurassic “technology stacks”. Those old COBOL-fueled backends store data in disparate chunks — “they have a lot of silos”. And it’s dangerous, of course, to tinker much with the old code: “You’ve got resource pain, technical pain, operational pain, risk pain.” But a startup can do whatever it wants. There are no old systems. They’re in what programmers lovingly call a “green field” situation. Instead of buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of mainframe computers to store and process their data, they just rent space on a “cloud” system, like Amazon’s. They can write code in new languages, so they can hire nearly any eager young computer science student. And they don’t even need to build everything themselves: When Showoff is crafting a new fintech app, it might use an existing service to handle a tricky task — like using Stripe to process payments — rather than trying to create that software themselves.
Notch’s luck was that he came across the idea of doing a first-person fortress building game. His alignment was that the game that he wanted to make was culturally connected to his tribe. While the game may appear ugly, and its purchase process etc seem naive to many a gaming professional, all of those decisions that Notch made along the road to releasing his game were from the point of view of a particular perspective of what games are, what matters and what were the things that he could trust the tribe to figure out for themselves.
New York is quite an average city, marginally richer than its size might predict, not very inventive and quite safe (267th in violent crime). too many banksters, in other words.
Larger cities are disproportionately the centers of innovation, wealth and crime. We use these general urban laws to develop new urban metrics that disentangle dynamics at different scales and provide true measures of local urban performance. New rankings of cities and a novel and simpler perspective on urban systems emerge. We find that local urban dynamics display long-term memory, so cities under or outperforming their size expectation maintain such (dis)advantage for decades. Spatiotemporal correlation analyses reveal a novel functional taxonomy of US metropolitan areas that is generally not organized geographically but based instead on common local economic models, innovation strategies and patterns of crime.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 