New Technologies Are A Pain - And That's The Best Time To Work On Them
Entering on the ground floor is rarely glamorous. Worse, the reality is without exception, messier than imagined.
We hire developers to build software for blockchain applications, BCI, or AGI. Full of hopes and dreams, they conjure an image of the puppy-dogs-and-rainbows web of tomorrow. Then the demotivation arrives when reality presents itself. The tools, libraries, and solutions are new or nonexistent. The applications are impractical and in some sense, almost silly.1
New technologies are always impractical
The initial use of almost every nascent technology is frustrating, impractical, and inferior to the preceding alternative. The first automobile probably broke down constantly, became mired in small amounts of mud, and was far less reliable than the horse it ultimately replaced. The first flight lasted twelve seconds, and basically any mechanism of covering a few hundred yards of beach would have been cheaper, faster, and safer.
How’d those technologies fare?
Wouldn’t you have wanted to participate in the heady, aspirational moments of their development?
The internet follows the same pattern
Web2, or however we wish to label the current version of the internet, not so long ago, was also “silly.” There were chat rooms of truly dubious quality, annoying dial-up sounds from AOL, family complaints about occupied phone lines, and minimal practical benefit for users. But the road ahead was forged by the type of folks who aspired to build something new without IDEs, frameworks, and other scaffolds. And now, you can watch TikTok videos and send emoticons while seated in the Uber you hailed with the same lump of material.
Web3 is also emerging from its nascent impracticality. NFTs, previously the tool-of-art for selling expensive GIFs to demonstrate social standing, are now becoming tools for ownership of the right to buy GPUs.2 Suddenly, a serial number can be defined, an NFT3 assigns ownership, and the risk of computation scalpers vanishes into cyberspace. Now it’s no longer silly.
Tomorrow will exceed our dreams
And ten years hence, we will be reminiscing, laughing about when the blockchain was used to sell simian GIFs. Scientists have argued that since the enlightenment, humanity has begun an exponential growth curve in terms of knowledge and capacity.4 Stated more elegantly, today, we are only 1% of the way to where we will be. And then, when we arrive, we will still be 1% of the way to wherever we will be next.
We are pursuing human agency increasing brain computer interface (BCI) technology. We won an international machine learning competition on the subject. At the moment, as remarkable as it is that a paralyzed human being can move a robotic limb with their thoughts (neuroprosthetics), we are in this field’s earliest moments.
Hardware can measure only hundreds of our 80 billion neurons and their thousands of connections. The models we calibrate are useful in the moment, then require lengthy, tedious recalibrations on the following day.5 A model calibrated for one task (e.g. moving the robotic arm) cannot help translate thoughts to text or any other cognitive activity. A model calibrated for one brain is minimally-applicable to another.6
But if you believe that we are 1% of the way to wherever we’re going, you must believe that all of these problems will be solved. And one day, sooner than we suspect, we’ll be looking at early-stage BCI the way we appreciate the researchers grappling with barely-formed applications of antibiotics or even the bulky, impractical, minimally-functional devices7 that were precursors to modern miracles.
Tomorrow will exceed our dreams
Excitement emerges from taking the long view, and looking a decade (or more) out. The future will be richer. Those who involve themselves with the current struggle are the ones who will understand the choices made and the rationales lost to history.8 The people willing to engage when the applications are still “silly” are the ones who will ultimately be most knowledgeable. They will receive the greatest satisfaction because they will know the journey that led to where we are today - from the time when we were only 1% of the way there.
Looking back one decade from any moment in our lifetimes leads to a certain amazement. “Look what we didn’t know! Look how much harder it was!”
We are 1% of the way towards the BCI OS that will ultimately be built. And then BCI OS v1.0 will offer 1% of the functionality and agency-increasing potential of BCI OS v50.0.
We are still 1% of the way towards understanding how to build agency-increasing products, and long-term-thinking, agency-increasing companies. The modern enterprise struggles to evolve, and becomes sclerotic with short-term thinking, micromanagement, and consultant-driven OKRs and metrics. We’re 1% of the way towards an escape from Price’s Law, where more than a chosen few without an organization can add tremendous value.
We’re 1% of the way there on blockchain.
We’re 1% of the way there on BCI.
We’re 1% of the way there on increasing agency across industry.
So we try, test, fail, improve, and repeat. There are plenty of intellectual and vocational avenues available to those who want to add their efforts to a well-traveled problem space. There is easy money to be made.
Still, wouldn’t you rather invest your time and energy in problems where we’re only 1% of where we will be? Wouldn’t you prefer to slog through the challenges of your daily work with the optimism that comes from building a brighter future? One day, when those challenges are the fondest of memories, won’t you be more satisfied in what you’ve accomplished?
1 Selling images of apes, kittens, and other mammals (even if NFTs do sell for exorbitant sums) and/or financial transactions that would be 100x simpler by logging into your standard-issue bank account.
2 Graphics Processing Units. More specifically, the discrete elements of computing power in the cloud that some massive cloud provider (e.g. Amazon, Microsoft) provides to perform computations on demand for a fee. The downside is that no one can really own one, as they aren’t physical items for sale.
3 A “Non-Fungible Token,” which ensures that its holder is and will remain the sole owner of the digital asset with which it is associated.
4 The Beginning of Infinity and other such books.
5 Your femur is roughly the same tomorrow as it is today, barring some rather grotesque mishap. The patterns of neural data your brain produces are far more dynamic with respect to time.
6 Imagine if every medical device needed to be created specifically for each intended user and remade every day and could only perform one narrowly-defined task.
7 E.g. the first iron-lung, the first pacemaker.