A Scripted World
The world built the internet. Now the internet will build the world.
The human species as we know it has existed on earth for 200,000 years. Throughout this time, human interactions were exclusively in person or through writing, either images like hieroglyphics or a scripted language. That didn’t change for several thousands of years until the arrival of the telegraph (1842) and the telephone (1876), enabling communication to span large distances effectively. A century later in the early 1980s, the internet began to form and merge into the fabric of everything we do.
The internet is a soft model for how the world will function. All your activity on the web is stored in a database somewhere across the globe. Google tracks all your searches, Facebook profiles your reactions on newsfeed posts, and Amazon records your tastes. All this data is analyzed to increase user utility, optimize the product to your habits, and up your usage.
Applying this product building philosophy to the “real world” will bring the speed and efficiency of online to offline. Developers have a debugging console that shows where in the code a program or app crashed. In a similar fashion, fire hydrants equipped with sensors will be able to detect any issues and automatically alert the city to repair it. Same thing with pipes, bridges, and cable lines. Just like how apps analyze our behavior, the sensor data will be used to overhaul these systems. This approach will push our surroundings to a completely new level.
Pipes at a Google datacenter
We are currently in a period similar to the internet’s formative years from the 90's, but this time there are several technologies set to become central to our lives: Drones, AI, AR/VR, and blockchain. Each one individually has enormous impact, but the overlap between them will diminish any remaining distinctions between our online and offline experience. Everything will be connected.
The combined impact of AI + drones alone will transform what our environments look like. The sky will be filled by drones delivering packages, advertising, policing, carrying out rescue missions, and much more. Going back to the example above regarding fire hydrants — an alert will automatically dispatch a repair drone. With sensors placed in all these devices, they will be communicating with one another just like how our browsers do with servers. The machines themselves will actively search for problems to solve and send the tools needed to do the heavy lifting. Initially this can be fixing potholes and cable lines but soon after, natural disaster recovery. Entire communities can be rebuilt quickly with these technologies in place. And this is how internet programs will start building the world.
The main question here is not will these things happen, but how long will they take to implement? Uber launched in SF in 2010 and is now located in over 450 cities, completing 1B+ rides this year alone.
Companies are already out there that will make one or more of these new technologies mainstream, with Amazon & 7-Eleven delivering packages with drones and Uber testing self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh and SF. With startups launching more frequently and product adoption rates increasing (people are more likely than ever before to buy new tech), the main obstacles are maintaining security and working with government regulators. If companies like Uber and Airbnb are any indication, better technology has a way of forcing itself to the top, offsetting any established opponents with deep pockets. We’ll start to see these enormous shifts by and before 2020.
Further reading:
1. A writeup stressing how essential it is to build a public street inventory (a digital map of all devices) in order to make cities more efficient.
The importance of coding the curb by Willa Ng of Sidewalk Labs: www.medium.com/sidewalk-talk/the-importance-of-coding-the-curb-bc5d2e106283
2. I only mentioned blockchain, but basically it’s a shared record of all transactions. Can’t be easily hacked because a copy of each transaction exists in multiple locations. Highly recommend watching this video to get a basic understanding if you haven’t heard of it — it’s going to be huge in the coming years.
Understanding the Blockchain in Two Minutes by IFTF:
3. In-depth, 3-part discussion about how successful startups take advantage of new technologies by building in the right place, right time, right idea. What causes us to move from the current solution to a new one?
Paradigm Shift Machine by Alex Danco of Social Capital: medium.com/@alexdanco/paradigm-shift-machine-part-1-technology-increases-access-to-what-is-scarce-1ed5cbc82537