Next tech boom

Jurassic · Post by **Jurassic** » Sat Jun 23, 2018 10:37 am

What do you guys think will be the next tech boom?

The dotcom boom was a boom for making websites (up to 2001) and I suppose there has been a boom for apps like Uber, Whatsapp at the moment....

... What do you think will be the technology that creates a boom?

nikol · Post by **nikol** » Sun Jun 24, 2018 5:27 pm

Facilitation of P2P:

- marketplaces (Alibaba, Uber, Airbnb...)

- distributed register

AI.

Tradenator · Post by **Tradenator** » Mon Jun 25, 2018 9:57 pm

internet of things - it's game on right now

Jurassic · Post by **Jurassic** » Mon Jun 25, 2018 10:46 pm

IoT is an interesting one as I cant see any development in that space right now

AB12358 · Post by **AB12358** » Tue Jun 26, 2018 9:25 am

There's one just beginning in aerospace, in my opinion. The weight of (ie. FAA) regulation hasn't allowed disruption by small players, and the large players are just now starting to move toward things like 'beyond line of sight' drone flight, and collective UAS control.

The application of autonomous UAS to infrastructure inspection, agriculture, and mineral exploration will not directly have a huge impact (outside of those industries, of course). It will be a major factor going forward in the amount of hype and investment in the use of autonomous systems for such things as shipping, and eventually passengers.

There are not enough real world uses (aside from dodging falling bolivar) for proof of work supported public blockchains to cause a real boom.

In terms of P2P business models, I'm not sure. They profit by dodging regulation in what's become a fairly predictable way. How much longer can that last?

I started out in industrial automation and I still can't see widespread use cases for IoT beyond factory and warehouse kind of stuff. Certainly nothing in the home, unless you count surveillance. Having said that... there are a few open problems pertaining to routing that could seriously multiply the usefulness of IoT to various industries, but I'm not holding my breath for the solution of those.

Avenger · Post by **Avenger** » Tue Jun 26, 2018 10:50 am

I think the medical sector has a lot of potential growth. But im 19, what do i know ${L_SMILIES_SMILE}$

jslade · Post by **jslade** » Thu Jun 28, 2018 4:55 pm

I think this is an ill-posed question.

The things people are investing in, the things people make money on, and the technologies which make a boom possible are all different things.

Example: you could have invested in cutting edge search technology in the 90s by investing in DEC, which got hamstringed by spook contracts and was eventually bought out by a crappy laptop maker that no longer exists. Google made money on advertising (still pretty much all they make money on). I don't remember what idiots were investing in back then; probably semantic web nonsense.

If you asked me what to invest in which I expect will make money: clones of useful existing .com services for Latin America. Same process has already mostly unfolded in China.

Jurassic · Post by **Jurassic** » Fri Jun 29, 2018 2:59 pm

> I think this an ill-posed question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble#Legacy

"A friend of mine has a great line. He says 'Nothing important has ever been built without irrational exuberance'. Meaning that you need some of this mania to cause investors to open up their pocketbooks and finance the building of the railroads or the automobile or aerospace industry or whatever. And in this case, much of the capital invested was lost, but also much of it was invested in a very high throughput backbone for the Internet, and lots of software that works, and databases and server structure. All that stuff has allowed what we have today, which has changed all our lives... that's what all this speculative mania built".[42]

jslade · Post by **jslade** » Fri Jun 29, 2018 4:55 pm

If you want to know what the irrational exuberance is in, go look at Hacker News or Tech Crunch. Blockchain, self driving cars, IoT and "AI" are all still big, though I forecast AI winter soon, and self driving apocalypse. Gartner's hype curve can help you with the time series aspects of things.

That quote is horse shit, FWIIW. Most of what he describes was funded not by irrational exuberance, but by government central planning.

deeds · Post by **deeds** » Fri Jun 29, 2018 7:41 pm

@jslade, i may be wrong, but thinking about Tim Wu's writing, i think that both irrational exuberance and government central planning have played important roles in development, particularly in network-y industries.

Start private, public intervention, privatize....rinse, repeat.