How Long is the Future?

Canon EOS 5D Mark II

ƒ/1.4

50 mm

1/80

4000

Eric Schmidt’s opening comments at our LP dinner:

The politician’s answer is a few years at best.

We are looking for simple answers. The problems of healthcare, terrorism and climate change can be solved if we take a longer time frame and focus on truth.
Innovation is the solution.

Repeat these two statements after me:
“In God We Trust”
“All others should bring data.”

Andy Grove likes to say that technology moves 3x faster than normal people, and the government moves 3x slower than normal people. So there’s a 9x delta.

There are now 2.8 million emails sent per second and 42 hours of YouTube video uploaded every minute. Last year’s data creation is much larger than the past 5000 years combined. Most of it is user generated content – where I am and what am I doing.

Sergey and Larry are some of the smartest people I know. When you meet brilliant people who are changing the world, ally yourself with them even if they look like a child.

Automatic translation of all of the world’s knowledge will be a singular accomplishment.

There is a global conflict of enormous proportions between the physical and virtual worlds. Each causes the other to get better. It’s getting harder to be evil over time; you get caught.

8 responses to “How Long is the Future?”

scleroplex

Nov 18, 2011 at 9:25 pm

looks like a school play 🙂

the last part is patently not true, about evil people getting caught.

Reply
solerena

Nov 18, 2011 at 9:36 pm

ok:) see the point in the two statements and is ready to ally with the ones who are brilliant and look like a child… a question is how?:D
interesting about the conflict between physical and virtual as a vehicle of progress and about governments short-term focus…

Reply
Sunnyvaledave

Nov 19, 2011 at 12:08 am

the lawrence rule is "everyone will disagree with anything i try to say"

Reply
-fCh-

Nov 19, 2011 at 1:29 am

scleroplex: hear, hear!

"There is a global conflict of enormous proportions between the physical and virtual worlds."
This gives me pause for thought. It’ll be a while.

"Each causes the other to get better. It’s getting harder to be evil over time; you get caught."
As my (virtual, yet) friend Bahrani cautions, this may be a bit on the optimistic side. If true, how long until 1984?

Reply
jurvetson

Nov 19, 2011 at 4:59 pm

On the evil point, and in general here, it is interesting to see the Google zeitgeist applied to the world at large.

While individuals have not changed much, learning at the cultural level has reduced violence dramatically over time (see Pinker’s recent essay on EDGE.org)

Reply
-fCh-

Nov 19, 2011 at 9:52 pm

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson] …aha! However, is it Google zeitgeist, or Google as one of the expressions of our zeitgeist? I would like to think of Google, so far, in terms of the latter. The Apple people may disagree though.

Pinker’s book, while advancing a courageous hypothesis, which is salutary in and of itself in today’s social sciences, may soon turn out to be a bit like Fukuyama’s in the early ’90s.

Reply
scleroplex

Nov 19, 2011 at 10:19 pm

yes.
it is a stretch from ‘educated people in general are less violent’ to ‘it is getting harder to be evil as you get caught more "in these times"’. there is zero evidence to support the extrapolation.

it is a classic example of feel-goody ‘truthiness’ !

Reply
solerena

Nov 24, 2011 at 6:42 pm

Thanks for the future: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/solerena/6392056321/in/photostream">www.flickr.com/photos/solerena/6392056321/]
Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Reply

How Long is the Future?

8 responses to “How Long is the Future?”

Leave a Reply to -fCh- Cancel reply