HACKER Q&A
📣 littlesamana

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?


  👤 Blakestr Accepted Answer ✓
I think I figured out how to transfer 'experience', functionally.

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.


👤 angleofrepose
I think the most interesting future work will be around communication. Communication encapsulates all the places I want tech to have a positive benefit in society and my life: education, thinking, invention, people.

(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.


👤 buboard
The companies who create things around remote work. If we can get > 30% of people working remotely, cities and countries will change. transportation will change, lifestyles will change, the environment will be happy for it.

👤 ralusek
VR. I thought it'd be cool but we weren't there yet. Tried an Oculus Quest over the weekend...amazing. I thought I had a good idea of what to expect, but the technology is miles ahead of where I thought we were.

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.


👤 thisisbig
I just found out about this last night: EnviroMission[1] is looking for funding to build solar updraft towers that could radically change the world’s reliance on fossil fuels. The design is very simple, and at scale could generate massive amounts of power. They’ve been having trouble getting off the ground, unfortunately, but the technology is so promising that it should not be ignored. More info in [2].

1: http://www.enviromission.com.au/IRM/content/default.aspx

2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower


👤 contingencies
We're creating a network of robotic service locations providing automated, always-available, meaningfully personalized food prepared on demand directly from fresh ingredients, which are automatically restocked by a transparent supply chain.

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!


👤 numtel
Metal-organic frameworks that can pull water out of the air passively hold promise to completely reshape our relationship to the land.

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...


👤 sova
We are developing Japanese Complete, a rapid fluency acquisition platform. Not "change the world" as in put more stuff in it, but "change the world" by allowing more humans to interact meaningfully in/through/about Japan/ese. Check it out! (https://japanesecomplete.com/overview)

👤 ReD_CoDE
I'm in the Digital Built Environment industry, so I strongly believe that it's one of the less developed industries and has a lot of potentials.

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


👤 CyberFonic
Brilliant people come from the most unexpected places. The one thing that stands out about Jobs/Gates/Wozniak et al. is that they came from unconventional (for the time) backgrounds with unique skills and talents.

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.


👤 ntnlabs
I think we can see from history that key ingredients for a push forward were language, axe (as a tool) and wheel.

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?)


👤 JohnFen
I honestly don't think it's possible to know in advance what will change the world and what will not with any real degree of confidence.

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.


👤 quickthrower2
I think the next Wozniak opportunities will require a lot more funding so will be controlled if you like by investors and corporates not two men in a garage. Nowadays you’d need a lotto win to afford the SV garage. For example quantum computing needs a lot of money. It’s not soldering chips anymore.

👤 barbarbar
Someone who can make it possible to store the energy from windmills. Now the windmills are taken out of the grid when producing more than what can be consumed. Which is a complete waste. If this energy could be stored for a while - then this switch of would not be needed.

👤 throwaway29434
Just curious, why are you asking. I think the most exciting industry are the old ones, there are some interesting projects out there, if you want just let me know specifically what sector

👤 faissaloo
There's a small community currently looking at the home fabrication of semiconductors that I'm loosely associated with.

👤 tyzerdak
Imo nowadays most interesting stuff is solved, so in nearby future won't be some great innovation. But in 10-20 years ai maybe will be capable to translate text like human.

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.


👤 bwb
Everywhere :), you are looking at the people a few rounds back who got lucky + worked hard + played some hands. Look at startups all around!

Airbnb? Facebook? YC classes?


👤 crb002
I'm building the equivalent of a Heroku for batch processing. Should save an obscene amount of developer setup time, and megawatts of power with more data locality.