poly: Emerging Technology (was: Rapture of the Future)

"Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> writes:

> I think it is rather valuable to making money, actually, to see the
> direction things are going in long term. That crazy silly "internet"
> thing was something that myself and my buddies working with it for
> decades could see was going to go somewhere -- even in 1987 or '88 I
> was mumbling to friends about stuff that has not yet happened but
> which seems inevitable like the destruction of the current media
> distribution system and the companies associated with it and their
> replacement with something, er, better. There is often money to be
> made by being a firm that sees where the future is and tries to get
> there first -- see @Home, for example.

A spin off-thread: what technologies do we see now that are like the
internet in the 80's?

The obvious one is biotechnology. In the late 80's and early 90's it
was all the rage to invest in it, but then nothing much seemed to
happen and the real yuppie era ended. But now it is accelerating, and
it seems like it is snowballing in capability. People seem quite happy
to invest in it again, so it might be a "late" growth technology to
invest in. Are there others, much earlier?

One area I think will get BIG very soon is knowledge management
software of various kinds. We now have information, and we are getting
better at information management (still far to go there, but we are
advancing). The logical step is software to manage quality information
(as opposed to piles of home pages, web essays of dubious scholarship
and files that look like good stuff but are just wrong or junk); we
are seeing precursors, but as far as I know nothing solid yet. (Sasha,
here is your cue to jump in and tell us what really is out there :-)
Rating software, bibliometric analysis, quality databases, search
agents able to search for concepts or relationships instead of
words... there is a huge field here, and both dollars and intelligence
amplification to be had.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y