Unless you are an airplane nerd, you would be hard pressed to distinguish the 787 from its grandfather.
And in fact, this revolutionary new plane flies slower than the 707.
The basic configuration of an airliner has not changed in sixty years. You have a long tube, swept wings with multiple engines mounted underneath, and a top speed of around 900 kph.
So what happened to the future?
.. The Russians got in on it too, with a plane derisively called the Concordeski. This proved too loud and unreliable for passenger service, so it ended up being a transport jet. It carried fruits and vegetables from Central Asia at twice the speed of sound.
..Because the technologies we had were good enough. It turned out that very few people needed to cross an ocean in three hours instead of six hours. On my way to this conference, I flew from Switzerland to San Francisco. It took eleven hours and cost me around a thousand dollars. It was a long flight and kind of uncomfortable and boring. But I crossed the planet in half a day!
Being able to get anywhere in the world in a day is really good enough.
.. So despite appearances, despite the feeling that things are accelerating and changing faster than ever, I want to make the shocking prediction that the Internet of 2060 is going to look recognizably the same as the Internet today.
.. Intel could probably build a 20 GHz processor, just like Boeing can make a Mach 3 airliner. But they won’t. There’s a corrollary to Moore’s law, that every time you double the number of transistors, your production costs go up. Every two years, Intel has to build a completely new factory and production line for this stuff. And the industry is turning away from super high performance, because most people don’t need it.
.. So the world of the near future is one of power constrained devices in a bandwidth-constrained environment. It’s very different from the recent past, where hardware performance went up like clockwork, with more storage and faster CPUs every year.
..But all this exponential growth has given us terrible habits. One of them is to discount the present.
When things are doubling, the only sane place to be is at the cutting edge. By definition, exponential growth means the thing that comes next will be equal in importance to everything that came before. So if you’re not working on the next big thing, you’re nothing.
This leads to a contempt for the past. Too much of what was created in the last fifty years is gone because no one took care to preserve it.
.. Since I run a bookmarking site for a living, I’ve done a little research on link rot myself. Bookmarks are different from regular URLs, because presumably anything you’ve bookmarked was once worth keeping. What I’ve learned is, about 5% of this disappears every year, at a pretty steady rate. A customer of mine just posted how 90% of what he saved in 1997 is gone. This is unfortunately typical.
.. It’s 2014, and consider one hot blogging site, Medium. On a late-model computer it takes me ten seconds for a Medium page (which is literally a formatted text file) to load and render. This experience was faster in the sixties.
The web is full of these abuses, extravagant animations and so on, forever a step ahead of the hardware, waiting for it to catch up.
.. The cult of growth has led us to a sterile, centralized web. And having burned through all the easy ideas within our industry, we’re convinced that it’s our manifest destiny to start disrupting everyone else.
Vision 1: CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS.
This is the correct vision... Vision 2: FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE
This is the prevailing vision in Silicon Valley.
The world is just one big hot mess, an accident of history. Nothing is done as efficiently or cleverly as it could be if it were designed from scratch by California programmers. The world is a crufty legacy system crying out to be optimized.
.. Marc Andreessen has this arresting quote, that ‘software is eating the world.’ He is happy about it. The idea is that industry after industry is going to fall at the hands of programmers who automate and rationalize it.
We started with music and publishing. Then retailing. Now we’re apparently doing taxis. We’re going to move a succession of industries into the cloud, and figure out how to do them better. Whether we have the right to do this, or whether it’s a good idea, are academic questions that will be rendered moot by the unstoppable forces of Progress. It’s a kind of software Manifest Destiny.
.. Consider how fundamentally undemocratic this vision of the Web is. Because the Web started as a technical achievement, technical people are the ones who get to call the shots. We decide how to change the world, and the rest of you have to adapt.
There is something quite colonial, too, about collecting data from users and repackaging it to sell back to them. I think of it as the White Nerd’s Burden.Vision 3: BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN CONSTRUCTION
This is the insane vision. I’m a little embarrassed to talk about it, because it’s so stupid. But circumstances compel me.
.. Here’s Ray Kurzweil, a man who honestly and sincerely believes he is never going to die. He works at Google. Presumably he stays at Google because he feels it advances his agenda.
Google works on some loopy stuff in between plastering the Internet with ads.
.. If you think your job is to FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE, then the web is just the very beginning. There’s a lot of work left to do. Really you’re going to need sensors in every house, and it will help if everyone looks through special goggles, and if every refrigerator can talk to the Internet and confess its contents.
.. And if you think that the purpose of the Internet is to BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN INVENTION, then your goal is total and complete revolution. Everything must go.
The future needs to get here as fast as possible, because your biological clock is ticking!The first group wants to CONNECT THE WORLD.
The second group wants to EAT THE WORLD.
And the third group wants to END THE WORLD.
These visions are not compatible.
.. We see businesses that don’t produce anything and run at an astonishing loss valued in the billions of dollars.
We see a whole ecosystem of startups and businesses that seem to exist only to serve one other, or the needs of very busy and very rich tech workers in a tiny sliver of our world.
.. We live in a world now where not millions but billions of people work in rice fields, textile factories, where children grow up in appalling poverty. Of those billions, how many are the greatest minds of our time? How many deserve better than they get? What if instead of dreaming about changing the world with tomorrow’s technology, we used today’s technology and let the world change us? Why do we need to obsess on artificial intelligence, when we’re wasting so much natural intelligence?
Unicorns Hunt for Talent Among Silicon Valley’s Giants
Amid a general scramble for talent, Google, the Internet search company, has undergone specific raids from unicorns for engineers who specialize in crucial technologies like mapping.
In particular, Uber — the largest unicorn, with a valuation of more than $50 billion — has plundered Google’s mapping unit over the last 12 months, aiming to bolster its own map research. Airbnb, the popular short-term rental start-up, has gone on a more general hiring spree, poaching more than 100 workers.
.. Uber has systematically hired Google’s experts in mapping technology, a crucial component of Uber’s plans to reduce its reliance on outside companies for mapping. In June, Uber hired Brian McClendon, a Google vice president for engineering who now leads Uber’s driverless car and robotics research center. Uber has also raided Google’s Geo unit, according to people close to the company, hiring at least a dozen mapping specialists over the last year.
Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace
Of all of his management notions, perhaps the most distinctive is his belief that harmony is often overvalued in the workplace — that it can stifle honest critique and encourage polite praise for flawed ideas. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to “disagree and commit” (No. 13) — to rip into colleagues’ ideas, with feedback that can be blunt to the point of painful, before lining up behind a decision.
“We always want to arrive at the right answer,” said Tony Galbato, vice president for human resources, in an email statement. “It would certainly be much easier and socially cohesive to just compromise and not debate, but that may lead to the wrong decision.”
.. In Amazon warehouses, employees are monitored by sophisticated electronic systems to ensure they are packing enough boxes every hour. (Amazon came under fire in 2011 when workers in an eastern Pennsylvania warehouse toiled in more than 100-degree heat with ambulances waiting outside, taking away laborers as they fell. After an investigation by the local newspaper, the company installed air-conditioning.)
.. “Data creates a lot of clarity around decision-making,” said Sean Boyle, who runs the finance division of Amazon Web Services and was permitted by the company to speak. “Data is incredibly liberating.”
.. However, many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue. In some cases, the criticism was copied directly into their performance reviews — a move that Amy Michaels, the former Kindle manager, said that colleagues called “the full paste.”
.. To get new team members, one veteran said, sometimes “you drown someone in the deep end of the pool,” then take his or her subordinates.
.. Preparing is like getting ready for a court case, many supervisors say: To avoid losing good members of their teams — which could spell doom — they must come armed with paper trails to defend the wrongfully accused and incriminate members of competing groups. Or they adopt a strategy of choosing sacrificial lambs to protect more essential players. “You learn how to diplomatically throw people under the bus,” said a marketer who spent six years in the retail division. “It’s a horrible feeling.”
.. A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. “What kind of company do we want to be?” the executive recalled asking her bosses.
.. Amazon retains new workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two years.
.. A 2013 survey by PayScale, a salary analysis firm, put the median employee tenure at one year, among the briefest in the Fortune 500.
.. “Amazon is driven by data,” said Ms. Pearce, who now runs her own Seattle software company, which is well stocked with ex-Amazonians. “It will only change if the data says it must — when the entire way of hiring and working and firing stops making economic sense.”
The Frenzy About High-Tech Talent
A 2014 study by the National Science Board found that of 19.5 million holders of degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, only 5.4 million were working in those fields, and a good question is what they do instead. The Center for Economic Policy and Research, tracing graduates from 2010 through 2014, discovered that 28 percent of engineers and 38 percent of computer scientists were either unemployed or holding jobs that did not need their training.2