Comment by Suncho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Suncho | Hacker News Reader

I like the philosophy of going out into the future and bringing it back into the present. I feel like a lot of startups are making an error in failing to do this.

For example, in the not-to-distant future, we won't need parking spaces. You'll just hail the self-driving car (or similar) using your phone. People won't own their own cars.

So if your startup is designed to help people get parking spaces, how much potential is it really going to have? Probably not much.

Similarly, the internet is transforming education. Information is everywhere. A startup focused on helping kids get into college feels a little shortsighted to me. It might provide a useful service to some people today in the context of present challenges, but there's no way it's going to turn into a unicorn.

Anything related to helping people find jobs is also probably a non-starter. Do you imagine a future in which we need everyone to contribute to the extent that it's worth paying them what today we would consider a "fair salary" for their labor? I certainly don't.

Take the salary part out of the job and maybe you have something. What about a platform for helping people find interesting ways to spend their time?

Take the college part out of education and all kinds of possibilities open up. For that matter, take the job training part out too. I've become pretty disgusted as Udacity, Coursera, and edX have gradually shifted toward teaching people "career skills." There are still some good MOOCs out there, but you have to wade through all the "learn these skills to make more money in your career" crap.

What about a platform to foster pure intellectual curiosity? That's what I was hoping these MOOCs would be.

> like the philosophy of going out into the future and bringing it back into the present. I feel like a lot of startups are making an error in failing to do this. > For example, in the not-to-distant future, we won't need parking spaces. You'll just hail the self-driving car (or similar) using your phone. People won't own their own cars.

You are right about the philosophy. But a thought regarding your specific example: even if self-driving tech were to be available tomorrow, it will take many years for all the cars (the "fleet") to be self-driving. There are about 2B cars on the road, and every year about 100M new ones are made. It would take 20 years to replace the fleet. So the "parking problem" isn't made immediately redundant with the invention of self-driving tech. There is still room (and in my opinion) worthwhile for a startup to solve the parking problem (however they attempt to solve it). Just saying that I wouldn't discourage anyone from attempting this :)

That's a good point. I agree with you that, in the short term, there's going to be use for solutions to the parking problem. But how big can it really get?

It's not just self-driving tech. It's the ride-hailing paradigm in general, which the self-driving tech makes incredibly cheap. As soon as it becomes more cost effective to use ride hailing services than to own your own car, those 2 billion cars will all leave the road basically overnight.

We're not going to have to wait for the old cars to die.

That assumes if we had a perfect self driving car now that the replacement rate would be constant.

If you factor driver salary and depreciation on existing vehicles against cost of self driving car I'd expect a boom in self driving.

Most drivers of small vans earn more than their vehicle costs a year after all.

Dr. Kay might also observe that this is an instance of problem solving, which he associates with incrementalism (since the context is already understood), while inventing the future is about problem finding, which requires creating a new context.

> For example, in the not-to-distant future, we won't need parking spaces. You'll just hail the self-driving car (or similar) using your phone. People won't own their own cars.

Why won't people want to own cars? What if people want to drive for the fun of it, or do not care to use self-driving cars? what of motorbikes or even regular bicycles?

In the future people could lounge at the pool all day and have everything done for them by robots.

> Why won't people want to own cars? What if people want to drive for the fun of it, or do not care to use self-driving cars?

Some people will undoubtedly want to pay extra to drive their own car for fun. I imagine that having a driver's license will be like having a pilot's license today.

> what of motorbikes or even regular bicycles?

A bicycle is a lot cheaper than a car, so I imagine that more people will be riding their own bikes than driving their own cars.

> In the future people could lounge at the pool all day and have everything done for them by robots.

Yup. Except for the stuff they want to do themselves.

I think you're "right directionally" (i.e. solve for global optima, not local ones), but you must absolutely consider timing. It's fairly easy to dismiss ideas because they're not going to be the "end game" for humanity, but overlook many viable business opportunities that will be temporary on our way there, but still very profitable.

Moore's law can predict the future, but just predicting the future is probably better as you point out. If only you were right in the same way Moore's law is right.

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