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>You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now.

>You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And then they would sigh, “Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!” It's a bit easy to imagine once something's already survived it. A device with a hundred sensors probably survived hundreds or thousands of failed released or unreleased iterations. Every other mature field has probably gone through this same sentiment (and maybe still going through it, and perhaps will always go through it). If only astronomers today could imagine what new, novel techniques are just lying right in front of them with all of this computing power and automated manufacturing ability. Imagine how much further ahead astronomers would be in 2044 if they had discovered thingamajig back in 2014 instead of 2040! I think the greybeards of 2044 would be a bit biased. But this feels like we'd be backpedaling on choosing the right tool for the right job. Slapping AI onto something and watching it fail is great for our knowledge, but not our wallets. This is when business leaders create friction with development. This is where you get "Just make it work" commands which gets the snowball of technical debt rolling. The value gained is "This solution sucked in reality! Or maybe we just sucked delivering it! Don't do what we did unless you have a good reason!", but that's not what we're really after, is it? We could sit around and brute force a bunch of combinations of ideas and markets, I guess. And finally, if it was true back in 1985 with domain names, and it's true today with AI and the cloud, why wouldn't it be true for 2044 with VR contact lenses and holodecks? It seems like the future will be like then and now in this regard. So.. there will always be a wide open frontier somewhere? Do we really say anything substantial by saying "Today's an open frontier for internet ideas!" I think there's a lot less low-hanging fruit than this article might have us believe.

bittercynic 12y ago
The amount of low-hanging fruit available is at least partially dependent on how tall you are.
- linker3000 12y ago
  ...and the number of patents/patent trolls waiting in the wings.
unoti 12y ago
There most definitely is low hanging fruit. If you had the benefit of perfect hindsight from 20 or 30 years in the future, almost certainly there are things you could create today and be wildly successful with. However, none of us have the benefit of perfect hindsight from the future. We have to actually figure out what to do for ourselves, the hard way. And once your development skills get to a certain point, figuring out what to do is much harder than figuring out how to do it, generally. And so that makes that low hanging fruit not all that easy to get to after all, which is your point I guess! But still, the article gives a useful angle to think of these things from, I think.
unchocked 12y ago
I think his point is that, as the technological sphere expands, there is continually more opportunity than there ever has been before. In that light, your best point seems to be that most of us looking to capitalize on that opportunity will fail, as have most innovators before.

bittercynic 12y ago

The amount of low-hanging fruit available is at least partially dependent on how tall you are.

linker3000 12y ago
...and the number of patents/patent trolls waiting in the wings.

unoti 12y ago

There most definitely is low hanging fruit. If you had the benefit of perfect hindsight from 20 or 30 years in the future, almost certainly there are things you could create today and be wildly successful with. However, none of us have the benefit of perfect hindsight from the future. We have to actually figure out what to do for ourselves, the hard way. And once your development skills get to a certain point, figuring out what to do is much harder than figuring out how to do it, generally. And so that makes that low hanging fruit not all that easy to get to after all, which is your point I guess! But still, the article gives a useful angle to think of these things from, I think.

unchocked 12y ago

I think his point is that, as the technological sphere expands, there is continually more opportunity than there ever has been before. In that light, your best point seems to be that most of us looking to capitalize on that opportunity will fail, as have most innovators before.