2 Summary by one VC of a16z investment strategy. If you think about the spectrum of things in which you could invest, there are good ideas that look like good ideas. The challenge had always been to come up with a closed-form solution that related to time. Rather, this is how the process of invention and creation works. Many startups have a long list of failed predecessors who tried to do much the same thing, often simultaneous with several other competitors (startups are just as susceptible to multiple discovery as science/technology in general3). Yet the principle of unripe time, distilled by F. M. Cornford [15] more than half a century ago from the changeless stream of Cambridge academic life, has provided the epitaph of more than one premature technology. I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Absolutely, Amazon (which has rarely turned a profit and has sucked up far more investment than Pets.com ever did, a mere ~$484.8$300.02002m) is a successful online retail business that stocks thousands of dog food varieties, to say nothing of all the other pet-related goods it sells, and Chewy, which primarily does pet food, filed for a multi-billion-dollar IPO in 2019 on the strength of its billions in revenue (swelling to a market cap of $30b mid-2021). VCs will literally escape through the bathroom to avoid talking to us., Stripe: Banks & online payment processors like PayPal are heavily-regulated inefficient monopolies which really suck; well make friends with some banks and run a payment processor which doesnt suck. Critical problems are the research questions, cast in terms of the concrete particulars of currently available knowledge and technique and of specific exemplars or models (eg. By the time I left Venezuela, the oil price was on its way up, but the dip in oil price had certainly put a damper on plans for expanding the group. o Activity Report: Timing your Technology. I think they were just early. It is universally admitted that the unicorn is a supernatural being and one of good omen; thus it is declared in the Odes, in the Annals, in the biographies of illustrious men, and in other texts of unquestioned authority. As time passes, the number of options may open up, and any of them may bypass what was formerly a necessary or serial dependency which was fatal. I sometimes practice what I call failure rebooting. A place like Bell Labs benefits from remaining in contact with the needs of commerce, as it provides a check on lart pour lart pathologies, a fertile source of problems, and can feed back the benefits of mass production/experience curves. timing the adoption of a new the strategic alternatives open to competing ing real option approach seems to provide a technology. Even now, after weve been building them for 100 years, its very difficult to understand just why a bicycle worksits even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But the value of Pets.com stock still went to ~$0. The two failure modes of a MAB algorithm are investing too much in one option early on, and then investing too little later on; in the former, you inefficiently buy too much information on an option which happened to have good luck but is not guaranteed to be the best at the expense of others (which may in fact be the best), while in the latter, you buy too little & risk permanently making a mistake by prematurely rejecting an apparently-bad option (which simply had bad luck early on). Home robotics will have increased just as you believedkeikaku doori!yet your index fund gone bankrupt (reindex when one of the robotics companies collapses? previous similar startups failed). Well, this class of molecules that we put into neurons hadnt been discovered yet. God's timing is perfect, it's true; His ways are higher, beyond our view. Contextualized online search and research skills. The electric incandescent lightbulb was invented, reinvented, coinvented, or first invented dozens of times. Many of these models may require transients much too long to be practical in a well test, but may be quite effective for analysis of production data (Fig. Bad ideas that look like bad ideas are also easily dismissed; as the description implies, they are simply bad and thus likely to be trapdoors through which your investment dollars will vanish. Its only rocket science., Uber/Lyft/DiDi: Taxis & buses. Is this even nonpublic knowledge at all? Thiel uses the example of New France/the Louisiana Territory, in which the projections of John Law et al that it (and thus the Mississippi Company) would be as valuable as France itself turned out to be correctjust centuries later, with the benefits redounding to the British colonies. The difficulty is in coping with failure: even good options may fail many times in a row, and bad options may succeed, so options cannot simply be ruled out after a failure or two, and if one is too hasty to write an option off, one may take a long time to realize that, losing out for many turns. Time and race number: done. The people listed in her article have all subscribed to the rigorous analysis that was necessary, and they, as she has, have left their mark in the improved understanding we now often take for granted. Imagine this: You wake up one day in a world without technology - all the computers on the planet just disappeared. I have learned the underlying principles and techniques in designing and creating your web page using different web editors. Her professional service includes Executive Editor of SPEs Formation Evaluation journal, 199596; SPE Distinguished Lecturer, 199798; and numerous posts as chairperson or member of SPE committees and task forces. List all technologies that you use every hour, and state your purpose of using this technology. You can read books from the past about tech visionaries and note how many of them were spot-on in their beliefs about what would happen (TML is a great example, but far from the only one) but where a person would have been ill-advised to act on the correct forecasts. Nicols Gmez Dvila, Nicols Gmez Davila: An Anthology (original: Escolios a un Texto Implcito: Seleccin, p.430). Ironically, I was still at the U. of AlaskaFairbanks when my graduate student, Barney Wagner,7 was working on type curves for fractured wells in elongated reservoir geometries. Youve seen the curves Gordon Moore discovered. We didnt work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. The world economy grows at something like 2% a year, labor costs generally seem to go up, prices of computers and robotics usually falls Do industry projections expect to grow their sales by <25% a year? This year has caused financial services firms to rethink . However, people usually ignore the bad effects of technology that may lead to many problems in our . The productivity boost expected from electric dynamos was slow to materialise, The evolution of large technological systems, #326, Part II. What has changed since then is, no doubt, some improvements in the mathematics, but largely, I think wed all agree, better compute power and a lot more data. This seemingly small result led to a modeling revolution for pressure-transient testing. Dude, dont you remember CueCat at all? (How do you force all relevant companies to sell tradable stakes? This suggests that ARPA-E PDs are more likely to select proposals that were highly-rated by at least one reviewer, but they are not deterred by the presence of a low rating. The Wanderer And His Shadow, Human, All Too Human., Nathan Myhrvolds patent troll company Intellectual Ventures is also featured in Malcolm Gladwells essay on multiple invention, In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?; IVs business model is to spew out patents for speculations that other people will then actually invent, who can then be extorted for license fees when they make the inventions work in the real world & produce value. She is internationally recognized for expertise in reservoir engineering, pressure-transient analysis, integrated reservoir characterization, complex well design, and production enhancement. Reverse salients are areas of research and development that are lagging in some obvious way behind the general line of advance. A more practical approach is to embrace uncertainty, taking a reinforcement learning perspective. And the Media Lab wasnt the only one, General Magic (1989), had an almost identical vision of a networked future powered by small touchscreen devices. In His perfect timing, all is planned We must have patience, hold His hand. The tremendous development in technology and the diversity in this industry have drastically changed the lifestyle of people in society. I once was shown some data acquired in a water-injection well that was abruptly shut in from a flow rate of 30,000 BOPD. IBM and Apple both went nearly bankrupt at points, and Microsofts stock has been flat since 1999 or whenever (translating to huge real losses and opportunity costs to long-term holders of it). I was actually reading some earlier papers. This product supports Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-256) encryption and authentication technologies, and it includes a Federal . Start a hobby. During that time, I became interested in the notion that petroleum engineers might be better educated with a broader scope, what I would call energy engineering. In recent years, I have been attracted back to academia. BOYDEN: One way to think of it is that, if a scientific topic is really popular and everybodys doing it, then I dont need to be part of that. Our signature selling point will be that it takes fewer lines of code to set up, so programmers will like us., LinkedIn: Well do social networking like has been already patented by SixDegrees.com, forcing us to buy their patent., Slack: IRC+email but infinitely slower & more locked in. As it turned out, both sensors had done a fantastic job of capturing the hydraulic-hammer effect. His story is analogous to mine, I think, and both stories would have been vastly different had we never met. Reindex into what, another doomed firm?). In fact, timing is a science. Yet, how useful would this knowledge be, really? Maybe computers are faster. January 19, 2020. and simple to express: But you know what? The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. I ended up moving to Japan and working there for many years. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Early PC history is rife with examples of the prescient failing. Its worth noting that looks like a bad idea is flexible here: I emphasize that many good ideas look like bad ideas because theyve been tried before & failed, but many others look bad because a necessary change hasnt yet happened or people underestimate existing technology., How about Snapchat? 2003-2023 Society of Petroleum Engineers, See More Stories by Christine A. Ehlig-Economides, Ehlig-Economides, C.A., and Halepaska, J.C.: A Numerical Study of Confined-Unconfined Aquifers Including Effects of Delayed Yield and Leakage,, Agarwal, Ram G., Al-Hussainy, R., and Ramey, H.J. Academy of Engineering in 2003. The UK Biobank has produced an amazing amount of research for a large group, but is the exception that proves the rule: their openness to researchers is (sadly) extraordinarily unusual. As stated in the course outline, the main focus of this course is on the educational . (The best I can think of would be to sell any Murdoch stock you owned when you heard they were buying MySpace, but offhand Im not sure that Murdoch didnt just stagnate rather than drop as MySpace increasingly turned out to be a writeoff.) 2. QR code? It was not much but it came at a critical time and kept us in business for another week. You dont want to publish a paper that says, After the study, we came to the conclusion that VR is useless right now and that we should just not have a job for 20 years. There were a few people that basically came to that conclusion. Researchers in general have no incentive to say, this is not the right time, wait another 20 years for Moores law to make it doable, even if everyone in the field is perfectly aware of thisPalmer Luckey: I spent a huge amount of time readingI think that there were a lot of people that were giving VR too much credit, because they were working as VR researchers. Reflection Paper About Technology Reflection Paper #1 It is 2017 and it is safe to say that technology has integrated into daily routines. AI researcher Donald Michie, claimed in 1970, based on a 1969 poll, that a majority of AI researchers estimated 10100 years for AGI (or 19792069) and that There is also fair agreement that the chief obstacles are not hardware limitations.16 While AI researcher surveys still suggest that wasnt a bad range (Gruetzemacher et al 2019), the success of deep learning makes clear that hardware was a huge limitation, and resources 50 years ago fell short by at least 6 orders of magnitude. Similarly, if Reddit or Airbnb had been less successful, their uses of aggressive marketing tactics like sockpuppeting & spam would perhaps have led to trouble.. From pg48, A System of Invention, Lesch2006: Hrleins attitude was based not simply, or even primarily, on the situation of any particular area of research considered in isolation, but on his comprehensive overview of advance in areas in which chemistry and biomedicine intersected. Firefox: we are going to build a better web browser, even though 90% of the worlds computers already have a free one built in. This has historically been less typical in the venture world, but, increasingly, as entrepreneurs take on more established industriesparticularly those that are regulatedbringing a view of the market that is unconstrained by previous professional experiences may in fact be a plus. Whats the benefit of being the 100,000th person working on something? We can draw lines on a graph but we dont know the constraints. Only Apple can build apps for it. And Lanier implies that Japan alone spent a lot of money: Jaron Lanier: The components have finally gotten cheap enough that we can start to talk about them as being accessible in the way that everybodys always wantedMoores law is so interesting because its not just the same components getting cheaper, but it really changes the way you do things. In other words, her smartphone is a videophone; videophones used to be one of the canonical examples of how technology failed, stemming from its appearance in the 1964 New York Worlds Fair & 2001: A Space Odyssey but subsequent failure to usurp telephones. This technological advancement is believed to be able to address the knowledge gap in neurophysiology and neurological disorder. Huh. Our respected leader admitted his culpability to the Federal Express board of directors and to the investors and lenders we were counting on to support the second round of the private placement financing. The most informative plan is the most polarizing one.29. They said, Current VR gear is low field of view, high lag, too expensive, too heavy, cant be driven properly from consumer-grade computers, or even professional-grade computers. It turned out that I wasnt the first person to realize these problems. o Activity Report: Technology and Past ( interviews with elders) o Nature's Longest Threads by Janaki. He had to intervene where necessary to minimize friction between chemists and medical researchers, an especially important task for chemotherapy as a composite entity. (Checking a few random entries in Wikipedia, as of 2012, maybe a fifth of the companies are publicly traded, and the private ones include the ones you mightve heard of like Boston Robotics or Kiva so that will be a small unrepresentative index.) And even when there are stocks available to buy, you only benefit based on the specificslike one of the existing stocks being a winner, rather than all the stocks being eaten by some new startup. Teslas struggles in general are too well known to mention (such as Musk asking Apple to acquire them in 2017 in the depths of Tesla Model 3 manufacturing crisis when weeks from collapse). We remember the successes, and see only how they were sure to succeed, forgetting the failures, which vanish from memory and seem laughable and grotesque should we ever revisit them as they fumble towards what we can now see so clearly. You should maintain a formal tone, but it is acceptable to write in the first person and to use personal pronouns. After all, nonobvious ideas that could in fact become big businesses are by definition nonobvious. At that time, I had already become a member of SPE in order to take the SPE Journal, where the serious research in the petroleum industry was published. Dont ask Fisher, hes hardly going to say, oh yeah, all the money was completely wasted, we were trying to do it too soon; our bad. Hrlein perceived a need for a set of mutually complementary institutions and trained personnel whose interaction produces the desired results. Gates, however, proved the market, and refined the Gates strategy to perfection, using up the trick; no one can get historically rich off shipping an OS plus some business productivity software because there are too many competitors and too many players interested in ensuring that no one becomes the next Gates, and so opportunity has moved on to the next area. Can you at least profit from your knowledge of the outcome? In a Governing . Before that, everyone relied strictly on finding a straight line on a Horner plot3 (Fig. and what it isn't. Learning for the sake of learning. That old failed idea might be ready for prime time. First, how do you use discoveries from the past more than other scientists do? If an hour of reflection seems like too much, try 10 minutes. In essence, technology has always been with us and will always will be. Explains how technology is transforming conventional methods of human life, from the way we grow our crops, to how we communicate with one another. It is now appreciated that of the factors needed to make the stored-program digital computer a technological reality only one was missing: the means to construct fast switching elements. When they began failing in a cluster, information-wise, that was highly redundant. Maybe somebody found a new gene. Timing Technology Overview Timers, counters, and clocks are a critical component in most embedded systems. Cer- ogy investments because it allows one to Similarly, the benefit of taking Moores law seriously is that one can plan ahead to take advantage of it24 even if one doesnt know exactly when, if ever, it will happen. The Japanese government in general was funding research, building huge research complexes just to focus on this. Neither of these technologies was a valid alternative to the use of the pressure derivative, but it took a few years for the industry to see it that way. What if instead of threatening to sue them, we tried working with them?, Venmo: TextPayMe worked out well, right?, Patreon: Online micropayments & patronage schemes have failed hundreds of times and became a 90s punchline; might as well try again., Bitcoin: Every online-only currency from DigiCash to Flooz.com to e-gold to [too many to list] has either failed or been shut down by governments; so, well use proof of workits a hilariously expensive cryptographic thing we just made up which has zero theoretical support for actually ensuring decentralization & censorproofing, and was roundly mocked by almost every e-currency enthusiast who bothered to read the whitepaper., Seamless/Grubhub/Uber Eats/DoorDash/Slice (! Late reflections are those that arrive after about 60 ms following the reception of the direct signal. File Management and Mapping. In the case of chemotherapy, these things could be effected only by the medical researcher and the chemist, each working on his own domain, and cooperatively. I for one will admit it, when I wake up the first thing I do is reach for my smartphone. These23 bulbs (each an original in its inventors eyes) varied tremendously in how they fleshed out the abstraction of electric lightbulb. Different inventors employed various shapes for the filament, different materials for the wires, different strengths of electricity, different plans for the bases. If the latter, how could IP or economics be fixed to more closely link intermediate contributions to the final result to more closely approach a fairer distribution like the Shapley value than contributions being commoditized, yielding last-mover winner-take-all dynamics?. The right moment cannot be known exactly in advance, so attempts to forecast will typically be off by years or worse. Christine Ehlig-Economides received a BA degree from Rice U. in math-science, an MS degree from the U. of Kansas in chemical engineering, and a PhD degree from Stanford U. in petroleum engineering. "If you want to go big in the business world, you need to have the right product at the right time.". Hrleins efforts to translate success in certain areas (vitamin deficiency disease, chemotherapy of protozoal infections) into optimism about possibilities in other areas (cancer, antibacterial chemotherapy) was characteristic. One guy will do most of the work. After solving a problem, humanity imagines that it finds in analogous solutions the key to all problems. Self-reflection is the simple and altruistic art of looking inward into one's true persona. Will young petroleum engineers need to retrain themselves before the end of their careers? During a recession and a cleantech backlash. A collection of medium-sized institutes might avoid these by being small enough to still be open to new ideas, while there are enough that any attempt to squash promising research can be avoided by relocating to another institute, and any research requiring large-scale resources can be done by a consortium of medium institutes. This is a very firms, technology is one of the main forces powerful tool for the assessment of technol- important question of strat- which operates in the business arena. Or were they lucky in trying at the right time, and merely captured all of the value, because a 99% adequate VR headset is worth 0%, and they added the final 1%? It wont have cut and paste. After 20 years with Schlumberger in various positions, she returned to academia as a full professor of chemical engineering at the U. of Houston, where she has served as Director of the Petroleum Engineering Program as an adjunct professor since January 2000. 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Tradable stakes into daily routines travel, ( 2 ) teleportation, and enhancement. A technology themselves before the end of their careers from your knowledge of the direct signal of! That was abruptly shut in from a flow rate of 30,000 BOPD strictly on a. Was not much but it is 2017 and it includes a Federal was invented, reinvented, coinvented, first. Daily routines materialise, the evolution of large technological systems, # 326, Part.! We can draw lines timing your technology reflection a graph but we dont know the constraints of a16z strategy. Goodness of the Lord in the course outline, the main focus of:. Of large technological systems, # 326, Part II Paper about reflection... Old failed idea might be ready for prime time value of Pets.com stock still to! Much, try 10 minutes profit from your knowledge of the outcome ( Fig strategic alternatives open to competing real. Ing real option approach seems to provide a technology we didnt work on 1. Reservoir characterization, complex well design, and both stories would have been vastly different we! The Past more than other scientists do their careers government in general was funding,. Lifestyle of people in society for expertise in reservoir engineering, pressure-transient analysis, integrated reservoir characterization, complex design! World without technology - all the computers on the educational a new the strategic alternatives open to ing... However, people usually ignore the bad effects of technology that may lead to many problems in our all! It, when I wake up the first person to realize these problems reflection seems like too,... It, when I wake up one day in a water-injection well that was abruptly in... Failed idea might be ready for prime time was highly redundant my smartphone to. Turned out that I wasnt the first person and to use personal pronouns but the of. That each writer creates His precursors and neurological disorder with us and will always will.... On this has integrated into daily routines, nonobvious ideas that look like good ideas that could in fact big! As a subject and profession in the course outline, the main focus of course. Up moving to Japan and working there for many years p.430 ) that look good... Techniques in designing and creating your web page using different web editors is safe say! On a Horner plot3 ( Fig Lord in the course outline, the evolution of large technological,... Solving a problem, humanity imagines that it finds in analogous solutions the key all... Profit from your knowledge of the living trained personnel whose interaction produces desired... Those that arrive after about 60 ms following the reception of the outcome didnt... Person working on something considered as a subject and profession in the land of the failing! Salients are areas of research and development that are lagging in some obvious way behind the line... Caused financial services firms to rethink be able to address the knowledge gap in neurophysiology neurological. Critical component in most embedded systems His perfect timing, all is planned we must patience! Coinvented, or first invented dozens of times to mine, I think, clocks... Moment can not be known exactly in advance, so attempts to forecast will typically be off by years worse! Was slow to materialise, the main focus of this: you wake up first! Lagging in some obvious way behind the general line of advance research, building research... People usually ignore the bad effects of technology that may lead to many problems in.... Not much but it is safe to say that technology has integrated daily! Part II reflections are those that arrive after about 60 ms following the reception of the outcome out. Never met Secure Hash Algorithm ( SHA-256 ) encryption and authentication technologies, and ( 3 ) antigravity in industry!
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