Ask HN: Who is building something that will change the world?
Who are the Apple's of this generation? What is a young Wozniak or Jobs doing in the 21st century? Where can you find them?
I'm building VR for public safety, (fire & EMS). I'm convinced we can train doctors in 1/3 of the time, maybe even less. (And I'm just a paramedic) I've been a lifelong gamer and in the fire service for over a decade. It wasn't until I tried Google cardboard using a hack I found on Reddit to play Counter-Strike, about 5 years ago, that I realized this could work. (My player character had been killed and fell down and laid in the position of a gunshot wound I had run and looked eerily similar, it was one of those "hmm, that's interesting" moments.
Prehospital emergency medicine, to me, is one of the most challenging skills to learn because it is so difficult to simulate the chaos of a patient as well as addressing so many multifaceted, high level concepts in such a short period of time. You don't have time, really, to look s* up.
But I've paid very close attention to my mind over my career, to the 'before and after' of a call that increased my experience level.
Long story short, I've spent a lot of time delving into this concept, of what experience actually is and how would you replicate the process by which a person becomes experienced.
Most of the time conceptual information is abstracted which adds significantly to the time to learn something. For example, learning how to read a 12-lead EKG, can actually be taught in much less time when the information is presented in the correct format. (Step by step 3D model animated properly)
Instead, traditional learning models abstract information in walls of text and this means that only people who are more intelligent (or more determined) are able to parse out the reality from this abstraction. Even then, time to comprehension and mastery is much longer than is necessary.
Comprehension is not a conscious act. Neither is recognition. You must build a pattern of sensory information overlaid with and assimilated cognitive weight.
-orange and white and black on a large, striped animal means Tiger! And is dangerous, RUN"
It's been a long time because I haven't had any money to really pursue this, and I can't afford to quit my day job. So I've had to learn the Unreal Engine and I do not come from a technical background. But at some point I realized I'd have to build this before I got any real traction.
I'm close now.
I've no qualms about the levels of complexity for this endeavor. I remember sketching out my first algorithm for a "simple" heart attack and kept running out of paper and nearly had an aneurysm.
(I don't mean connecting people, I am thoroughly unimpressed with that directive)
In this space you have the onset of design systems/languages. Information design and interface design. Education reform and restructuring. Programming education reform.
Look at Bret Victor and other researchers through CDG, VPRI, Dynamicland. Rune Madsen and other artist developers at NYU. John Maeda formerly at the MIT Media Lab with Design by Numbers and Casey Reas and Ben Fry with Processing and Lauren McCarthy with p5js. Mike Bostock with d3. Chris Granger with Eve.
Ink and Switch is a research lab with a number of interesting developers involved working on the future of power user design workflows.
If you want to find the interesting people you have to follow connections around. Start with the one most interesting to you and go backwards through their work, lookup every group they worked with and their members. Look at GitHub stars and find small blogs to follow, read their history and the one strange project they did which can lead you to the maintainer of some other interesting project. Build a picture, learn the space.
Xerox parc is responsible for the GUI plus a ridiculous number of other personal computing workflow essentials. There is no place with the breadth of Xerox parc today, but there are labs with incredible focus. University of Washington IDX. Stanford's HCI lab. CMU, UCSB, MIT. Transportation labs and BOOM at Berkeley. Delft, Aarhus, University of Paris Sud.
The next big thing will be giving power to users through protocols, not platforms. Through live environments and powerful conversation tools rather than consumption tools.
Excuse the mobile formatting, thanks for the question.
I don't sit in traffic for two hours anymore so I have more time with my family and less time burning fossil fuels.
My wife also works from home so I don't feel the loneliness aspect of it as much as others do. Having the dog around helps with that too. I also recently discovered Out Of Office[0], which promotes "work clubs" for remote workers to get together during the day and work together, so I'm looking forward to checking that out.
> don't feel the loneliness aspect
Working from home was the norm until the industrial revolution. Our cities and way of life will need time to adapt.
https://www.flexjobs.com/employer-blog/new-study-finds-remot...
Personally, if I'm working as part of a team, I'm much happier and substantially more productive if I'm working in the same physical space as the rest of the team.
But I also know people who are exactly the opposite of me on that count.
I had a truly transformative experience, too. I can't think of another experience, with technology or without, that has made me be so deeply impacted. VR is incredible.
As mentioned in my other comment below, for disabled people VR is a huge huge deal. Until now it hasn’t really been good enough to truly give you that feeling of “experiencing” something, but playing with the current generation is awe inspiringly good and you can actually get lost in it and feel like you’re there.
I’m really excited for the future of VR for people who are stuck at home or in hospital with disabilities.
I can't wait for hardware to catch up in terms of performance and price.
I actually want to learn vr dev and transition from my netsec gig into doing something cool with VR that helps people. Got a long way to go though.
People working with VR don't state this enough - your users are BLIND when you put them in VR. No one likes being blind. This feeling is inherent when you can't see your hands and try to interact. Combine this hardware barrier with the lack of deep content, you are going to have to make a product with some serious depth, something that people can't get anywhere else, before you get buy-in on a consumer level. The biggest problem is that VR is difficult to appreciate until you try it.
I think Facebook is onto something with their face scanning and if you haven't tried Big Screen Beta, which let's you watch movies together, it's pretty awesome.
Industrial applications though, are being done right now. There are some concepts that are so much easier to display or skills to train in VR that simply can't be done anywhere else.
I sortof agree, with two caveats. I think VR has potential to greatly impact gaming, and I think VR has the potential to greatly impact a few niche areas, like helping the disabled and specialty industrial uses.
Outside of those, I'm really not seeing it, though.
For the type of games I play it's a step change in enjoyability.
Racing and space sims basically
VR has immeasurable amounts of potential for disabled people alone, not just with racing sims but with giving is the ability to “get out” more and experience new things.
I was playing the other day driving around le man in a thunderstorm and when I took the headset off and it was beautiful sunshine outside I was sorta surprised.
I've found using a good set of headphones really helps, the Rift S is a cracking bit of kit but the built in speakers are weak as hell (but they put a 3.5mm on the side so who cares, headphones are great).
Of course we want to make money, but we also feel this may (1) enhance humanity's ability to confidently feed rising urban populations, all else being the same (2) reduce food waste (3) reduce single use plastic packaging (4) reduce needless road mileage for millions of grocery trips (5) provide an adaptable distribution channel for seasonal and organic produce that typically doesn't get the mass-distribution of generic mass-produce seen in supermarkets due to non-homogeneity, reduced or non-guaranteed availability.
We could fail at half of these and still be happy. Optimism is part of the game!
What you are describing is a "transition" to post-scarcity, as everything becomes automated and jobs are eliminated.
And for marketing, you don't call them robots. Call them appliances. Automated Appliances maybe. Robots go berserk and Skynet over the world; appliances just cook your food :)
... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
We call them 'service locations'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPSYzLZ7xKU
Irrigation without building canals, water generation at the point of use... If this is as good as they hope, this is the solution to the most fundamental of our political problems.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/crystalline-nets-har...
Construction technologies are outdated
Facility management and Real Estate technologies too
Also, there are some hot topics like Digital Twin(s) and Smart Cities which everyone has her/his own understanding about them
So, we've chosen the Facility Management industry, with $1.5 trillion annually TAM globally and are planning for the first step have one million users in our B2B contract which will cause we become a unicorn with $3 billion value just with one contract
It would seem that to change the world, you first need to be in a position of "being outside the world" - not literally but from a perspective point of view. Those who are immersed in the status-quo or are imitating some personal hero, are unlikely to ever come up with something truly radical and new.
That's why I think evolution in these areas should be the the change that will transform our world in big way. Transportation as in (Boring/SpaceX/Tesla), tool as in (Boston Dynamic) and communication as in (VR/AR).
But like I said this is more of an evolution than revolution. There might be something new that I cannot comprehend and that will radically change the world. (AI?)
The best that anybody can say is that what they're working on has a chance of changing the world, and even that is pretty shaky. The world has been changed by things that even their creators didn't think were that impactful at the time.
There are, and always have been, things that are incredibly capital-intensive, of course, but economics change and things that once required multiple millions of dollars are now affordable by normal people. This was true in the past as well -- those couple of guys working in a garage couldn't have done it a decade or two earlier when the costs of such electronics were stratospheric.
Things that are costly now, such as quantum computing, will very likely follow the exact same trajectory.
I think that people are ruining good stuff. They abuse openess and post shit on fb, youtube, twitter, etc. And it's all happening because a lot of ppl has internet. I mean bad ppl and retards post shit, for bigger reach. When not many ppl has inet there was no point of shit posting.
So I expect more websites will allow ppl to post after some barriers. Not the best days to surf internet.
I think we are actually at a very interesting time in history. World changing things like robotics, AI, space exploration have made huge advances recently, and there are still many industries that haven’t even invested in/been disrupted by software.
https://patentlyo.com/patent/2011/01/tracing-the-quote-every...
Cancer?
Airbnb? Facebook? YC classes?
It seems more and more like "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."
1. A lot of them are changing the world in small ways and some in big ways. And, some are just getting started and it is going to take another 10 years to see their impact. We like big narratives of x changed the world but I think it is more likely change by a thousand cuts.
2. Ads get a lot of attention but I'd say that is also hugely important to change the world. Adwords is amazing in that it is has democratized advertising significantly. Now small businesses can go buy ads without any contracts huge spend or so on. I know for me 10+ years ago it was a game-changer for getting one of my first businesses off the ground.
I can't really come up with other examples, though (although my gut tells me that's due to poor memory). I don't think Airbnb or RC classes qualify.
I think AirBNB does big time, huge amount of income for a lot of low to medium income earners. Enough to build wealth, put a kid through college, or pay the morgage. And, on the flip side it has enabled millions of people to travel and exp other cultures/places in a new and more intimate way. I've personally live out of AirBNBs in other countries for multiple years.
I think this bar to world changing is way too high, little changes can make big impacts over long periods. Especially on cultural values.
> I think this bar to world changing is way too high, little changes can make big impacts over long periods. Especially on cultural values.
I agree entirely with this.