December 2020
This post is mostly a brain dump for myself to keep me accountable, and here is why.
Over the years, I have witnessed brand new technologies or products to be invented, become mainstream and change lives of millions of people.
Even though I participated in most of those things one way and another, I started to feel that I didn’t take enough risks that was parallel to what I believed in.
To be honest, I have taken risks; I have started projects that turned in to companies, moved to a foreign country etc. However For some reason, I’m noticing a disconnect between the risks I took and the future I believed in.
This is why I want to materialize what I believe in via this posts, so that next decade of my life, I can keep myself accountable. I plan to do this every 5 to 10 years.
Some of the things I will list in this post could be too broad however I believe that there is actually a logical reason behind it.
I think the changes that affect our lives happen in multiple phases and they built upon each other and progress.
For example, working from home can be the first wave of change and It eventually leads people to leave big cities and move in to bigger houses, which leads to a education system going online.
In this post, I will usually mention the first phase. Second phase can be really hard to guess or rather variable depending on many other factors.
This first/second wave concept can also be called technology vs the application.
Back in Its earlier days, It could be somewhat easier to guess that the internet would change our lives.
However trying to figure out what might be the reason that people use internet could be a harder question to answer and depends on many variables.
For example, while e-mail is the natural progression from sending physical mails; 20-years later the application that uses internet could be a real-time video conferencing technology.
Usually, the application is what makes the biggest impact on our lives, however one should be open to different applications since believing in one application of the technology might result on missing other opportunities within the technology.
First time I put oclus on, I couldn’t stop thinking about what might be possible, and how much better it could get.
It is even more exciting when the technology works and you can find 20 other things that can be improved.
These headsets are chunky, some of them require cables, they are much slower compared to mobile computers, and they are doing a terrible job doing mixed reality.
However, even with it’s current form It’s an incredible experience, which is why I believe virtual reality to become better and better every year.
Eventually, I believe that these are going to replace our personal computers, phones and tablets.
As someone spending most of my time looking at monitors, I would love to go for a walk outside while still checking out things I want to check out without taking my phone out.
Even with current virtual desktop applications on VR headsets, you can get multiple monitors and a working physical keyboard, It can easily replace home office setups.
Combining all this with the remote work phase we will go through, will make this technology grow exponentially.
Some times It is hard to tell why a specific innovation would replace the current way of doing things, in those situations I try to imaging the very far future.
In case of crypto currency, I imagine a future in which we have colonized other planets.
How would you transfer wealth between different governments/corporations/individuals between different planets?
Do you think we would try to ship tons of gold or cash? My answer is no.
When It comes near-future It could be harder to argue for life chaining innovations, however think about 100 years from now.
I have a single measure of adoption for virtual or crypto currencies, whenever someone asks me about the adoption I mention this.
Adoption will grow until every major bank has a crypto currency wallet that you can hold your digital assets.
Until this happens, or the banks we know as usual dies (they would rather adopt a new technology then die) crypto currency space will grow and gain more users.
With the current environment we live in in 2020, It is already pretty hard to argue against the remote work already.
I believe that we went through different stages of work. These could be simplified as:
Unfortunately, not every part of the country or not every country can move to the later stages, depending on their current progress some might end up being stuck, so this one will have very different timeline for each country.
While in California, working from home is already the new normal for the most tech companies, talking to my friends and family in Istanbul (which relies mostly on manufacturing and service industry), remote work is still very foreign.
I believe that remote work now enables world population to freely work for any company, which will change many things.
It will be harder for local companies to hire good people, since employees will be able to work for an international company that can afford a much higher pay.
On the other hand, the money that is earned will stay and will circulate the local economies when that remote worker orders food or pays for rent.
Overall, remote work offers better opportunity for everyone regardless of their location.
On the other hand, I think immigration will be less of a discussion especially in the U.S. politics and many other countries, which wasn’t the case for last 10-20 years.
The remote work itself is already happening, but the main question is the second wave of this change.
Remote education or distance learning is inevitable result of this as well. If they will never go to an office, why would students ever go to classrooms anyways.
With our current education system, social education is part of learning which both happens in a school, but with distance learning I believe that social life of students and their learning will happen separately.