Recessions can be the tool of ‘creative destruction’, if governments get out of the way and do not prevent the next wave of entrepreneurial experimentation by ‘softening’ the impact of the recession and distorting the efficient allocation of capital. Gordon Brown, take note: companies and governments have to fail. George Gilder, always an enthusiastic prophet, writes of the coming possibilities in Forbes. He identifies four areas that the financial wizardry of venture capitalism can nurture: ‘cloud computing’, graphics processing, nanotech engineering and energy saving construction materials. Gilder is useful for identifying waves of start-ups and linking them to wider technological change.
A great line is where Moore’s law is referenced as insufficient for our needs:
This vast expansion of the scale of computing across the network, however, renders Moore’s Law doublings inadequate to meet the need for speed. A key answer is the movement of optical technologies to chips themselves by such companies as Luxtera, a venture startup in Carlsbad, Calif., technologies based on Caltech advances that link fiber directly to chips. Azul Systems of Mountain View is pioneering a combination of Java-based parallel processing with virtualization software to produce multitrillion-bit-per-second performance in data centers.
A contentious but thrilling point if we wished to measure the proximity of a singularity event. As a useful summary of tech developments, Gilder is hard to beat. Nanotech filters allow pure water to be sucked up from a fetid puddle and new construction materials allow towers to be lighter and stronger and more radical. Hopeflly we can welcome new radical architecture: wierd, wonderfu to live in and wandering off the set of last century’s sci-fi cityscapes.
*One has to look elsewhere for exciting biotech, Gilder’s blind spot here.
The Rapture of the Nerds is not going to save us. The future is already here, it’s just not widely distributed yet.
Wake me up when the robots take over.
hehe… but in truth that is exactly what is going to save us.
Indeed. We have statism everywhere. That is not the future, although I suspect it will continued to get worse before it gets better.
Nano-bots in my bloodstream hopefully.
I’ve only just started reading Atlas Shrugged (I know, I know, my excuse is that it was bloody hard to find at a price I was willing to pay, that and I got an amazon voucher and couldn’t think of anything esle to spend it on) but its beginning to seem more like prophecy than fiction what with the current economic downturn and the demands from statist for more and more laws and regulation. I hope it turns out alright, in both the real world and the book (don’t tell me, you wouldn’t want to spoil the ending now would you?)
I’m in agreement with you Perry, the rapture of the nerds will be our salvation and the geeks shall inhert the Earth and all that lies beyond.
Cloud computing is a real interesting thing. It makes computers more efficient and powerful. The drawback is the centralization of the data and more demand on servers.
“The Rapture of the Nerds” is a great phrase.
I say SQOTD.
Imagine if…
Ugg, you’re gonna bring what into the cave?
Isaac, stop tinkering with those equations and get back on the farm!
Geordie, get down pit hewing coal man! A moving tea-kettle! What are you thinking of man?
Nikola, you know DC current is the way forward. Give it up please?
Orv and Will, you’ve got a great business with bicycles here. Why throw it all away on trying something impossible?
Albert, the patent office is a steady job you know?
So, Alan, you did maths during the war! Were you a conshy or something?
Bill, you dropped out of Harvard to set-up a company called? What “Microsoft”?
Imagine if all this sage advice had been taken. We’d still be thinking banging rocks together was pretty neat. Oh, and at 35, I’d be a bloody toothless tribal elder.
You’re right about Gilder’s blind spot on biotech, or bio anything. I once held George Gilder in very high regard and then he wrote an article for American Spectator in which he railed against biological evolution and revealed his embrace of that flapdoodle know as “intelligent design,” which is just creationism under a different name.
I guess as long as the subject is miles away from biology he is still pretty smart and worthwhile to read. But it is a shock when someone thought to be astute starts spouting nonsense on any subject.
Come to think of it – biotech I can claim to have some authority to comment on, seeings as I have a degree in Biological Sciences. Big promises are being made but what really has happened back here in the real world? A great deal less than the commentators here seem to imagine, I can assure you of that.
When I quote, `The future is already here, it’s just not widely distributed yet.’ I mean that very thing: if it isn’t in advanced prototype stage and nearing mass production (or large scale industrial implementation) it isn’t going to happen much this side of 10-20 years from now and – this is the important point – without the engineering hurdles fully understood nothing that people claim to have demonstrated in the laboratory can be taken as a sure thing or, in actual fact, anything much more than an interesting possibility for the future, for some definition of future.
The classic, and most egregious, example of this is nuclear fusion. If a workable fusion power plant really is only ten years away then what are you all whingeing about?
John,
If you say so. But in that case, why? Besides it being harder than it looks, that is?
Is it too difficult? Or impossible? Or not economic? Or is it the safety and ethics and crusty protesters that are holding things up? And if there’s a 20 year pipeline, then what’s been moving through it for the past 20 years that’s due to pop out? Nothing? Has every single thing they’ve tried, failed?
Pa Annoyed: I presume you’re talking about biotech (since I can’t imagine anyone seriously believes that nuclear fusion power plant is going to be running in ten years time). I don’t have God-like knowledge of all biotech – obviously – but some I have looked at more closely and, in the final analysis, just not found it interesting. I got my Biological Sciences degree over 20 years ago and nothing I see today is dazzling me with unexpected insights or results. Nor has, for instance, the basic economics of farming been changed. The price of oil has a lot more influence on agricultural production than modern biotech and I can’t see that changing any time before the Rapture.
In fact I’m often frustrated that things clearly aren’t moving at the sort of pace I was expecting when I got my degree and had the callow enthusiasm of youth. And, yes, it is harder than it looks – more often that not, the more we know the more questions it raises because the more we realize we don’t know.
But fine… prove me wrong. I’d love to be proved wrong. Meantime, scientists looking for government grants and/or venture capital are going to talk a good game, and visionaries will talk visionary talk… but the proof of the pudding is in the eating.