Discussion
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
I am Steve Jurvetson, one of the partners at DFJ and board member of some very fun companies (SpaceX, Tesla, Planet, D-Wave and Synthetic Genomics). I am especially interested in machine intelligence, software-defined hardware, and technology futures across ever-widening frontiers. Ask me anything; I like to learn.
Ben Tossell
@bentossell · Community Lead, Product Hunt
hey Steve
If you had to swap lives with a tech CEO for a week, who would it be and why?
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
@bentossell Very interesting. The key part of the question for me is the timeframe of a week. Rather than imagine that I could get anything done in a week that would stick after I’m gone, I approach the question from a learning perspective: where could I learn the most in a week from being on the inside, and presumably, being able to ask any question of the team.
So I’d say Google. I’d want to learn about how they are using deep learning in every single product. I’d have so many questions for the Android team and Google brain. And I’d want to see what they are doing with custom chips (TPU) and their 8x8 quantum computer in development.
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
@bentossell thanks and goodbye y'all. I gotta run to a dinner salon I am co-hosting on "Deep Learning at the Edge"
Ayrton De Craene
@ayrton · Code @ Product Hunt
What is the most surprising thing about being on Tesla’s board?
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
@ayrton Oh I'll have to think about this one a bit. As it is a public company. ;) First reaction is the breathtaking scope of change... A decade ago I would not have imagined how the opportunities would expand from what at the time sounded like a big vision: catalyzing the EV transition and getting us off oil. Now it is so much more
Chad Whitaker
@chadwhitaker · Design at Product Hunt
What does the future of technology look like? What trends are you focusing on and do you think wider consumers are missing anything now that will become more mainstream down the line?
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
@chadwhitaker So much here. First reaction: deep learning and iterative algorithms in general (directed evolution, generative design and all of the machine intelligence approaches) => many consumer product effects, such as a renaissance in voice interfaces (imagine an Amazon Alexa interface for under $1 on any consumer product, including non-internet connected & battery powered).
Second: be prepared for ubiquitous broadband rolling out by satellite. 2->6B people online faster than forecasters predict.
Ben Tossell
@bentossell · Community Lead, Product Hunt
What is one thing about the future you believe in but very few others agree with you on?
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
@bentossell That we are in the middle of a sea change in how much of engineering will be done. It will be more like parenting than programming. The locus of learning shifts from end products to the process of their creation. An ever-growing percentage of software will be grown and an ever-growing percentage of compute will run on infrastructure that resembles the brain (massively parallel, fine grained architectures with in-memory compute and a growing focus on the memory and interconnect elements)
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
@bentossell And on a derivative note, I also believe that the conversion of every business into an information business will have profound aggregate effect, such as an accelerating rich-poor gap that is not self-rectifying.
What if technology raises the bottom of the pyramid for all, and democratizes upward mobility, yet at the same time, transforms it from a pyramid to a conical spike — where an ever shrinking percentage of the population controls an even-growing percentage of an information-economy embedded with winner-take-all network effects and power laws?
In short, I ask if the ironic byproduct of erasing the digital divide is a further acceleration of the rich-poor gap?
What happens to peoples who opt out of the vector of progress, as the sea change of destiny becomes the drumbeat of decades, instead of centuries? What is the nature of work in the future? And how can our culture and the very fabric of society co-evolve with our technologies during the transition?
And it motivates me to address some basic human needs, like free healthcare forever: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ju...
David Joseph
@dvdrjo · Co-Founder, President. Regeneration.com
@dfjsteve @bentossell Free Healthcare is something that is very possible. The main question needs to be what perspective is that information being created from. Is it the conventional pharmaceutical approach. Or an Integrative approach that encompasses the best of modern medicine with ancient technology that is thousands of years old. Addressing the whole being is what has been lost from conventional care which sees the body as a machine. When it is a vastly more complex system composed of interconnected psychological, emotional, and physical bodies. Any thoughts on this perspective as our society shifts towards self-actualization as a result of our basic human needs being met?
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
@dvdrjo @bentossell The learning comes from the people, just like for Google today. So it can incorporate non-traditional medicine as well. Everything that works. Imagine it starts with a simple mobile text interface, and as the next three billion people come online in this decade, it could become enriched with imagery and diagnostic sensors in the smartphones. The proposition for the consumer is free, unbiased advice as long as they respond to the daily prompts for input on the remedies tried and the progression of symptoms through resolution. The recommendations would come from a special purpose AI (using machine learning and then deep learning) that benefits from what would become the largest data set of over-the-counter, prescription and non-traditional remedies. What actually works? What is the actual rate of adverse events over time? (This data set alone could provide enough revenue to cover the marginal cost of operation.) The vast majority of health care does not require surgery, especially in the developing world (think infectious diseases and nutrition), but when it is required, the system could help point people to the specialist they need. The service would be offered in all languages with voice/text conversion for the illiterate. Regional epidemiologic patterns and proactive warnings would naturally follow as it becomes a trusted, life-saving advisor. As it scales, it could become a powerful distribution channel for generic drugs, priced at a small fixed margin over manufacturing cost. Since the system is the trusted advisor, the brand of the drug would be anonymous and there is no sales or marketing expense to reach this large customer base.
David Joseph
@dvdrjo · Co-Founder, President. Regeneration.com
@dfjsteve @bentossell Steve & Ben would you be interested in speaking about the solution we have created at Regeneration.com ? davidjoseph@regeneration.com
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
@bentossell somewhat related: I think we'll build an artificial brain before we reverse engineer our own. Evolved complex systems are inherently inscrutable: https://www.technologyreview.com...
Kunal Bhatia
@kunalslab · Co-founder & Design Lead @SlidesUp
Hey Steve! As an avid learner, how do you learn? What do you like to learn about? Do you have a framework for picking a learning technique given the subject?
I'm inspired by @ellenchisa's article/talks about Learning in Product. Very curious to hear your take, especially as someone who looks at such a broad range of subjects. Thanks!
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
@kunalslab @ellenchisa awesome "process" question. I need to think about this and open to ideas. I have focused on conferences, and smart people and working with a team that has cognitive diversity, and most of all nurturing a child-like mind: http://jurvetson.blogspot.com/20... Use it or lose it. We have to get out of the mental ruts that career tracks and academic “disciplines” can foster. Physical exercise is repetitive; mental exercise is eclectic.
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
@kunalslab @ellenchisa More on the value of cognitive diversity... being more important than ability on certain teams — a lot of this was reinforced at a Management 2.0 brainstorming offsite http://www.flickr.com/photos/jur... where I wrote:
Four tenets jump to mind if we consider the Wisdom of Crowds as an emergent phenomenon, operating at a higher level of abstraction:
1) team (thinking style) diversity is more important than individual ability
2) disagreement is more important than consensus
3) and the voting policies and selection mechanisms that you put in place are more important than the coherence or even the comprehensibility about what you do.
4) The role of upper management is to tune the parameters of communication
I first started thinking about this in 2005 at the Santa Fe Institute: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jur... where Scott Page shared an interesting rejoinder:
"People in diverse groups are less happy. Their views are challenged, and they feel like the outcomes were manipulated. Based on their experiences, they will self-report that it was not better than when they were on a homogenous team."
More for the curious:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jur...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jur...
http://seedmagazine.com/content/...
Kunal Bhatia
@kunalslab · Co-founder & Design Lead @SlidesUp
@dfjsteve thanks for such detailed responses! Just finished reading your article about nurturing a child-like mind. Perhaps this is why I'm obsessed with Pixar movies and goofy outdoor workout communities! Also, totally jealous you got to have a play-date with David Kelley :)
What do you think of his new Design Impact program at Stanford, where students now pick themes in Energy and Healthcare? http://designimpact.stanford.edu/
Kunal Bhatia
@kunalslab · Co-founder & Design Lead @SlidesUp
@dfjsteve since you focus on learning at conferences, could I ask you a few questions about your past experiences? Working on something to help you learn and connect with people of diverse thinking styles at these events. More details on Twitter (https://twitter.com/KunalsLab/st...) and I'd be happy to email you to discuss further.
Alex Wellman
@alex_wellman
Hi, Steve! As an e-resident of Estonia, what do you think about the future of digital citizenship and identity?
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
@alex_wellman Go Estonia. Their Prime Minister told me: "Signing documents digitally saves us 2% of GDP annually."
Teemu Soilamo
@teemusoilamo
Steve,
Are you familiar with Mary Lou Jepsen's work on functional near-infrared imaging? She claims to have invented a ski hat sized device that exceeds fMRI in both temporal and spatial resolution and could eventually be manufactured at consumer electronics prices. Some now believe that incorporating deep neural networks to simultaneously predict brain states correlated with actions (say, writing or speaking) could lead to a whole new paradigm of AI development. In other words, we wouldn't need to understand HOW the brain does it, but WHAT it does and WHEN it does it with respect to the input datastream. The brain probably contains a panoply of implicit semantic meaning encoding that can help label and classify different kinds of input. By using that innate capability as a bootstrap, we can effectively bypass the "understanding" part. Any thoughts on this?
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
@teemusoilamo Just spent my birthday with her. She is an amazing polymath. First met her at the 2012 Google Solve for X retreat: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ju...
d a n n y
@searchresults
Would you – hypothetically – fly around the moon on, let's say, a SpaceX Dragon 2 capsule?
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
@searchresults For sure! But, unlike the Apollo era, in the commercial space era, it should become cheaper and safer over time. I have two specific missions in mind (and I don’t have much interest in suborbital flight or anything shy of these):
• spending a few days in a commercial space hotel in low Earth orbit and
• a lunar orbital mission, going much closer to the surface than Apollo X, but not landing.
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
@searchresults For both trips I am excited about the photography. For the lunar trip, there would not be as many creature comforts or space for weightless play, but the views are pretty breathtaking. Earthrise, the dark side of the moon, Earth and moon at various distances.
Since the moon has no atmosphere, it presents a unique orbital opportunity – we could fly incredibly close to the surface while staying in lunar orbit. Apollo X dropped to an orbit 47K feet off the surface – like a private jet altitude over Earth.
If the goal is tourism, you could go much lower, and with no landing, it could have a downward facing window optimized for the views. I would want to figure out the tradeoff of orbital altitude and surface speed — skimming a thousand feet over the highest crater (Zeppelin altitudes) would be amazing, but might be dizzying. But, since the moon has 1/6 the mass of Earth, the orbital speeds at any given altitude are about 1/6 as fast... so it could be slow and low, that is the tempo... =)
Why not land? The cost and complexity just explodes, as the Russians discovered in the space race. For a new tourist activity, so does the risk. And to what benefit? With the full Apollo stack with EV on the moon, yes, you could cover some distance, but not as much as you can see in orbit. Bouncing around on foot just does not grab me as an essential first person experience. And, moon gravity and Mars gravity is easily simulated on the parabolic planes if that’s the key attraction.
And all that weight and design constraint would likely tradeoff with the window-optimized design. I would rather spend more time in orbit, at various heights, than attempt a landing.
I do wonder about a spacewalk. These EVA activities are a much easier engineering challenge, and might not tradeoff with the earlier goals. Michael Collins marveled at his EVA in Earth orbit:
“This is the best view of the universe that a human has ever had. We are gliding across the world in total silence, with absolute smoothness; a motion of stately grace which makes me feel God-like as I stand erect in my sideways chariot, cruising the night sky.
I am in the cosmic arena, the place to gain a celestial perspective; it remains only to slow down long enough to capture it, even a teacup will do, will last a lifetime below."
Ben Tossell
@bentossell · Community Lead, Product Hunt
Being involved in all these incredible future-forward companies, what are you MOST interesting/excited in?
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Steve Jurvetson
@dfjsteve · Partner, DFJ
@bentossell Machine Intelligence. I first chose that as the "top tech trend" in 2013 (where we were asked to look forward 5 years to 2018). It was not a common theme for VCs back then. And it is just beginning. In a recent post, I tried to summarize my enthusiasm. I think the application of iterative algorithms (e.g., machine learning, directed evolution, generative design) to build complex systems is the most powerful advance in engineering since the Scientific Method. Machine learning allows us to build software solutions that exceed human understanding, and shows us how AI can innervate every industry. https://medium.com/@DFJvc/intell...