Tim O’Reilly - WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us

THIS MORNING, I SPOKE OUT LOUD TO A $150 DEVICE IN MY kitchen, told it to check if my flight was on time, and asked it to call a Lyft to take me to the airport. A car showed up a few minutes later, and my smartphone buzzed to let me know it had arrived. And in a few years, that car might very well be driving itself. Someone seeing this for the first time would have every excuse to say, WTF?

At times, WTF? is an expression of astonishment. But many people reading the news about technologies like artificial intelligence and self-driving cars and drones feel a profound sense of unease and even dismay. They worry about whether their children will have jobs, or whether the robots will have taken them all. They are also saying WTF? but in a very different tone of voice. It is an expletive.

Astonishment: phones that give advice about the best restaurant nearby or the fastest route to work today; artificial intelligences that write news stories or advise doctors; 3-D printers that make replacement partsfor humans; gene editing that can cure disease or bring extinct species back to life; new forms of corporate organization that marshal thousands of on-demand workers so that consumers can summon services at the push of a button in an app.

Dismay: the fear that robots and AIs will take away jobs, reward their owners richly, and leave formerly middle-class workers part of a new underclass; tens of millions of jobs here in the United States that dont pay people enough to live on; little-understood financial products and profit-seeking algorithms that can take down the entire world economy and drive millions of people from their homes; a surveillance society that tracks our every move and stores it in corporate and government databases.

Everything is amazing, everything is horrible, and its all moving too fast. We are heading pell-mell toward a world shaped by technology in ways that we dont understand and have many reasons to fear.

WTF? Google AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program, beat the worlds best human Go player, an event that was widely predicted to be at least twenty years in the futureuntil it happened in 2016. If AlphaGo can happen twenty years early, what else might hit us even sooner than we expect? For starters: An AI running on a $35 Raspberry Pi computer beat a top US Air Force fighter pilot trainer in combat simulation. The worlds largest hedge fund has announced that it wants an AI to make three-fourths of management decisions, including hiring and firing. Oxford University researchers estimate that up to 47% of human tasks, including many components of white-collar jobs, may be done by machines within as little as twenty years.

WTF? Uber has put taxi drivers out of work by replacing them with ordinary people offering rides in their own cars, creating millions of part-time jobs worldwide. Yet Uber is intent on eventually replacing those on-demand drivers with completely automated vehicles.

WTF? Without owning a single room, Airbnb has more rooms on offer than some of the largest hotel groups in the world. Airbnb has under 3,000 employees, while Hilton has 152,000. New forms of corporate organization are outcompeting businesses based on best practices that weve followed for the lifetimes of most business leaders.

WTF? Social media algorithms may have affected the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election.

WTF? While new technologies are making some people very rich, incomes have stagnated for ordinary people, and for the first time, children in developed countries are on track to earn less than their parents.

What do AI, self-driving cars, on-demand services, and income inequality have in common? They are telling us, loud and clear, that were in for massive changes in work, business, and the economy.

But just because we can see that the future is going to be very different doesnt mean that we know exactly how its going to unfold, or when. Perhaps WTF? really stands for Whats the Future? Where is technology taking us? Is it going to fill us with astonishment or dismay? And most important, what is our role in deciding that future? How do we make choices today that will result in a world we want to live in?

Ive spent my career as a technology evangelist, book publisher, conference producer, and investor wrestling with questions like these. My company, OReilly Media, works to identify important innovations, and by spreading knowledge about them, to amplify their impact and speed their adoption. And weve tried to sound a warning when a failure to understand how technology is changing the rules for business or society is leading us down the wrong path. In the process, weve watched numerous technology booms and busts, and seen companies go from seemingly unstoppable to irrelevant, while early-stage technologies that no one took seriously went on to change the world.

If all you read are the headlines, you might have the mistaken idea that how highly investors value a company is the key to understanding which technologies really matter. We hear constantly that Uber is worth $68 billion, more than General Motors or Ford; Airbnb is worth $30 billion, more than Hilton Hotels and almost as much as Marriott. Those huge numbers can make the companies seem inevitable, with their success already achieved. But it is only when a business becomes profitably self-sustaining, rather than subsidized by investors, that we can be sure that it is here to stay. After all, after eight years Uber is still losing $2 billion every year in its race to get to worldwide scale. Thats an amount that dwarfs the losses of companies like Amazon (which lost $2.9 billion over its first five years before showing its first profits in 2001). Is Uber losing money like Amazon, which went on to become a hugely successful company that transformed retailing, publishing, and enterprise computing, or like a dot-com company that was destined to fail? Is the enthusiasm of its investors a sign of a fundamental restructuring of the nature of work, or a sign of an investment mania like the one leading up to the dot-com bust in 2001? How do we tell the difference?

Startups with a valuation of more than a billion dollars understandably get a lot of attention, even more so now that they have a name, unicorn, the term du jour in Silicon Valley. Fortune magazine started keeping a list of companies with that exalted status. Silicon Valley news site TechCrunch has a constantly updated Unicorn Leaderboard.

But even when these companies succeed, they may not be the surest guide to the future. At OReilly Media, we learned to tune in to very different signals by watching the innovators who first brought us the Internet and the open source software that made it possible. They did what they did out of love and curiosity, not a desire to make a fortune. We saw that radically new industries dont start when creative entrepreneurs meet venture capitalists. They start with people who are infatuated with seemingly impossible futures.

Those who change the world are people who are chasing a very different kind of unicorn, far more important than the Silicon Valley billion-dollar valuation (though some of them will achieve that too). It is the breakthrough, once remarkable, that becomes so ubiquitous that eventually it is taken for granted.

Tom Stoppard wrote eloquently about a unicorn of this sort in his play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead:

A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear.... My God, says a second man, I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn. At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience.