Low hanging fruit

I think people will look back on these times and think “how did anyone with some brains and ambition not become rich?” I don’t know if Ray Kurzweil is right about an exponentially increasing “paradigm shift rate” – a fact which, if true, means exponentially more opportunities to jump into an industry or technology and make your billions. But quite regardless of that, there are a set of well known sectors that seem well-trodden by the tech world but are so far from seeing their potential. Just because there are TechCrunch articles about them twice a day doesn’t mean there isn’t money to be made. It’s almost the conventional wisdom that “if you hear about something in the news, it’s too late to make money on it”. Bullshit. There are an infinitude of markets, niche applications, unexpected confluences of technologies and consumer needs, weird permutations of existing technology that represent local maxima in concept-space that are waiting to be found. They’re everywhere, but something about how we are raised, or the diffuse and unfounded pessimism surrounding progress, or the narrative fallacy, or the brain chemistry of the typical adult human keep us from seeing all the options.

I want to totally eliminate this mental block. I want to ability to think about things from a birds-eye perspective, both in space and time, and appreciate the intertwingled nature of progress, technology, and human problems. I want to be able to retreat from my myopic, here-and-now stream of consciousness whenever I want and zoom out into a memory/imagination palace where I can mentally throw together and evaluate some fraction of the boundless combinations of human and technological components I’m aware of.

Back on Earth, I think there is a lot of money to be made in AR, VR/3D media (the iron is hottest right now imho), drones, blockchain technology (for databases/contract management systems/facilitators of group knowledge work…see Ethereum), CRISPR (look it up), 3D printing (I’ll be satisfied when we’ve got Stephenson-esque matter compilers), home medical monitoring (enabled by microfluidics and sequencing tech, useful for metabolomic analysis, microbiome calibration, early detection, etc), implantable medical tech (see microCHIPS), the commoditization of nanotechnological products (no killer app yet besides VLSI), hydroponic agriculture (LED costs are coming down rapidly, the economics are right), and of course personal computers…that war is far from over.

I can put together a fairly compelling narrative for why each of these is in its infancy, with plenty of room left at the bottom, middle, and top. Less certain (and further down the road): nuclear fusion (watch out for ITER), injectable devices, a “silver bullet” for the local positioning problem (IR/Lidar? RTK GPS? SONAR? Radar (Soli/Leap Motion)? CV?), and a Bret Victor-style, smart-dusty “dynamic medium”.