I know most of the news about San Francisco is about homeless people, drugs and crime. But there are other things going on there as well, and I have a friend, Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang), who has lived just outside the city all his life and remains very bullish on Silicon Valley because it is still the site of most technological innovation. Right now he’s all in on AI and what it represents for humanity.
He posted on X last Sunday about what he thinks is coming to both the Valley and later to normie’s lives.(Normies are normal people in tech-talk.) Because he is a venture capitalist with a firm that invests in AI startups, he has an obvious point of view, but let me remind you what he listed as indicators of change.
Truthfully I care less about Jeremiah’s VC status than about the road he has taken to get there: he has been a long-time industry analyst and has been in touch with every trend. See his blog: webstrategist.com . Likely he is correct.
You don’t need to adopt or even believe everything at this moment, but if you are a parent or a manager, you might want to be thinking about this in terms of what to watch for or advise your children or teams to do with respect to education and training. Especially higher education. Tomorrow’s good careers may not be in the same industries as today’s.
And we have to be educating for tomorrow, so this is what his post would have us notice.
The most valuable companies are now tech companies. (See any stock chart).
Full self-driving cars have become normal in San Francisco, as they have where I live (Phoenix). Waymo, the self-driving taxi service I have used many times to avoid driving at night, is now rolling out in Los Angeles and Austin.
Related to this is the emergence of electric vehicles of all kinds, especially “cyber trucks.” Many cities will be working to adapt their roadway infrastructure to these cars.
Drones, droids, and bots have become accessible and affordable. Some are fighting our wars for us right now, which will preserve human lives even though humans themselves don’t seem to be able to get along much better than they did in the Renaissance.
And then there is the equivalent of this year’s metaverse, which is Apple’s release of its VisionPro, a first-generation stab at spatial computing. No, I didn’t buy one, because it costs $3500 and my tech advisors told me it will go through a couple of very fast iterations that will make it faster and cheaper, and that I will want the third version. Version 3 is supposed to be eyeglasses format. I hope so. I do want to try it, but I don’t want to trade in my car for it.
If eyeglasses aren’t good enough, Elon Musk is moving right along with Neurolink, an implantable device that will make me able to control my computer with my brain paving the way to creating cyborgs. Physical robots and androids are already more agile than the average human.
Artificial intelligence, which is already doing my research for me, has other capabilities that include seeing, speaking, thinking, and cognitively outperforming many human tasks.
And Jeremiah is right, AGI is likely to emerge in the coming decade, which could be humanity's last invention, as AI may invent everything else.
From these observations, he draws the conclusion that these are exciting times, hopeful times, and scary times.
How do YOU feel? I’m curious what most of my friends, especially those who are not close followers of technology, think. I can remember writing a post like this in 1996 (yes, this missive has been going on for that long) predicting to my friends that they needed to learn to use email. Somebody wrote me back that they’d be dead before email caught on. Wonder who that was?
Absolutely agree. Thank you for your always concise presentations.