timing your technology reflection

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. Before coming to Stanford, Ramey and two students at Texas A&M U., Ram Agarwal and Rafi Al-Hussainy, had developed type curves accounting for wellbore storage and skin that enabled well-test analysts to model the early-time transient response using type curves2 (Fig. Entrepreneurs, with their speculations and optimistic biases, serve as randomization devices to sample a strategy regardless of the conventional wisdom, which at that point may be no more than an information cascade; information cascades, however, can be broken by the existence of outliers who are either informed or act at random (misfits). We couldnt know for sure that such projections were wrong, and the amount of money being spent back then on AI was truly trivial (and the commercial spinoffs likely paid for it all anyway). This sounds a good deal like individuals pursuing standard careers & occasionally exploring unusual strategies like a startup; they will occasionally explore strategies which have performed badly (ie. Maybe some other discovery from left field has changed how we think about things. (DARPA indeed saw itself as much like a VC firm.). (Academics invent ideas about computers, which then go into mass production for business needs, which result in exponential decreases in costs, sparking countless academic applications of computers, yielding more applied results which can be commercialized, and so on in a virtuous circle.) By mid-July our funds were so meager that on Friday we were down to about $21,136.3$5,000.01973 in the checking account, while we needed $101,454.2$24,000.01973 for the jet fuel payment. Businesses wont be able to get enough of it; employees will love to hate it., English Wikipedia: Well compete with Microsoft Encarta, the Encyclopedia Britannica, H2G2, Everything2, Interpedia, The Distributed Encyclopedia Project (TDEP), TheInfo, & GNUs GNE by letting literally anyone edit some draft articles for Nupedia.9, Zoom: Skype has a literally 15-year headstart, but we can do so much better, and maybe something will make everyone suddenly want to video-conference after all this time avoiding it as much as possible?. Part of the explanation is survivorship bias causing hindsight bias. Early PC history is rife with examples of the prescient failing. Enough progress in one domain (particularly computing power), can sometimes make up for stasis in another domain. At Rice U.s Baker Inst., we find the Shell Center for Sustainability. It is not always as easy a task as it sounds. "If you want to go big in the business world, you need to have the right product at the right time.". ], Investing in Good Ideas That Look Like Bad Ideas, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western. 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. Large ones can run large long-term projects investigating something thoroughly, but then err by being full of inefficient bureaucracy and overcentralization, killing promising lines of research because a well-placed insider doesnt like it or they just dont want to, and can use their heft to withhold data or suppress results via peer review. His story is analogous to mine, I think, and both stories would have been vastly different had we never met. Clearly doomed to failure when they refused Facebooks $3.9$3.02013b buyout offer and Facebook launched a direct competitor; by February2020, they had failed their way to a marketcap of >$100b., Where there is, as Musk describes it, a graveyard of companies like Coda Automotive or Fisker Automotive. My best timing was meeting my husband of nearly 30 years, Michael Economides. A typical reflection paper is between 300 and 700 words long. It is surprising that some have never tried or attempted to keep off technology even for a day. In their book Edisons Electric Light: Biography of an Invention, Robert Friedel, Paul Israel, and Bernard Finn list 23 inventors of incandescent bulbs prior to Edison. Sensors, displays batteries! From Frock2006, Changing How the World Does Business: Fedexs Incredible Journey to Success, in 1973: On several occasions, we came within an inch of failure, because of dwindling financial resources, regulatory roadblocks, or unforeseen events like the Arab oil embargo. Indeed, its inherent in really transformative ideas that they look like bad ideasGoogle, Apple, Facebook and Amazon all did, sometimes several times over. Or look at computers: imagine an early adopter of an Apple computer saying everyone will use computers eventually! Yes, but not for another few decades, and in the long run, we are all dead. After all, nonobvious ideas that could in fact become big businesses are by definition nonobvious. (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.) Psalm 27:13-14 (a succinct yet powerful Bible verse about God's perfect timing for your life!) I knew immediately that Bourdet was really on to something. Reflections on Timing and Technology Christine Ehlig-Economides reflects on her career and how being in the right place at the right time has made all the difference. Lets start one. Again, the issue with adoption is that the timing is so damn hard. Remember, you dont know anything else about the tech landscape in the 2000s, like that Google will go way up from its IPO, you dont know about Apples revival under Jobsall you know is that a social network will exist and will grow hugely. Will young petroleum engineers need to retrain themselves before the end of their careers? This last fact is what is most significant. Origins of Innovation: Bakewell & Breeding, Build something people want is not enough, The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment, part 1: Biases16, Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves, Technological convergence in drug discovery and other endeavors, Quantifying the evolution of individual scientific impact, Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology, How DFS, poker, basketball, Starcraft and strong opinions, weakly held (SOWH) can help your startup, An Attempt at Explaining, Blaming, and Being Very Slightly Sympathetic Toward Enron, How Bubbles and Megaprojects Parallelize Innovation, Market Research, Wireframing, and Design, Spend twice as much effort every time you attempt to solve a problem, Why didnt electricity immediately change manufacturing? Survival alone is highly chancy, and founders can often see times where it came down to a dice roll.10 Like historical events in general (Risi et al 2019), the importance of an event or change is often known only in retrospect. In a Governing . And, incidentally, offering an example of why stock markets are fine with paying executives so much: a good executive can createor destroythe entire company. Any good idea can be made to sound like a bad idea & probably did sound like a bad idea then5, and Bessemer VCs anti-profile is a list of good ideas which Bessemer declined to invest in. If an hour of reflection seems like too much, try 10 minutes. Its important to be the last person to discover something. 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). Dropbox: we are going to build a file sharing and syncing solution when the market has a dozen of them that no one uses, supported by big companies like Microsoft. These areas shared a number of generic problems and solutions, for example, the need to isolate a substance (natural product, synthetic product, body substance) in chemically pure form, the need to synthesize the substance and to do so economically if it was to go on the market, and the need for pharmacological, chemotherapeutic, toxicological, and clinical testing of the substance. Translation, Katsuki Sekida, Two Zen Classics: The Gateless Gate and The Blue Cliff Records, 2005., Which as a side note is wrong; compiled predictions actually indicate that AI researcher forecasts, while varying anywhere from a decade to centuries, typically cluster around 20 years in the future regardless of researcher age. and err again A naive Thompson sampling would do badly in a long-term problem because at every step, it would change its mind and be unable to follow any plan consistently for long enough to see what happens; what is necessary is to do deep exploration, following a single plan long enough to see how it works, even if one thinks that plan is almost certainly wrong, one must Disagree and commit. The motivation to take something into the real world, which necessarily requires attacking the reverse salients, may be part of why corporate & academic research are both necessary; too little of either creates a bottleneck. Bible verses about God's perfect timing. Overall, the odds of success are low, and the rewards are not great for mostdespite the skewed distribution producing occasional eye-popping returns in a few cases, the risk-adjusted return of the technology sector or VC funds is not that much greater than the broader economy. Smartphones are an even bigger example of this. Its a weird perspective to take, but we can think of other technologies which may be like this. . Learning can occur in many forms and situations. 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. We do not know what a unicorn is like. One theme I notice in many systems is that they follow a multi-level optimization structure where slow blackbox methods give rise to more efficient Bayesian inference. Certainty is irrelevant, you still have problems making use of this knowledge. Fedex, early on, couldnt make payroll and the founder famously kept the planes flying only by gambling the last of their money in Las Vegas, among other near-death experiences & crimesjust one of many startups doing highly questionable things.12 Both SpaceX & Tesla have come within days (or hours) of bankruptcy, in 2008 and 2013; in the former case, Musk borrowed money from friends to pay his rent after 3 rocket failures in a row, and in the latter, Musk reportedly went as far as securing a pledge from Google to buy Tesla outright rather than let it go bankrupt (Vance2015). X27 ; s perfect timing for your life! are all dead causing hindsight bias computer everyone! About things domain ( particularly computing power ), can sometimes make up stasis. Unicorn is like Rice U.s Baker Inst., we find the Shell Center for.! 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