WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

by Tim O'Reilly

Dave Hickey, an art critic and MacArthur “genius” grant winner, describes how Harley Earl of General Motors, the first-ever head of design for a major American company, turned the post–World War II automobile into “an art market.” Hickey defines that as a market in which products are sold on the basis of what they mean, not just what they do.

I’m fascinated by a comment that Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, made to me over dinner one night: “If you want to understand the future, just look at what rich people do today.”

“Boot and Shoe Service is one of three restaurants created by a man named Charlie Hallowell. They are part of why people now say Oakland is a great place to live. We need more Charlie Hallowells more than we need another Mark Zuckerberg.” After all, a great platform like Facebook is a rare thing, not easily duplicated. You can count the people who succeed like Zuck did on your fingers; not so the tens of thousands of Charlie Hallowells who characterize a truly rich and diverse economy.

Creativity can be the focus of an intense competition for status, so that “he who has built for use till use is supplied must begin to build for vanity,” but it can also be the key to a future human economy that would let all enjoy the fruits of leisure that are brought to us by machine productivity while also encouraging entirely new kinds of creative work and social consumption.

This is the possibility that Keynes foresaw when he wrote: “The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.”

One of the moments that stuck with me was a remark from political scientist and author Robert Putnam, who said, “All of the great advances in our society have come when we have made investments in other people’s children.”

I remember once reading an account of the crossing of the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska that used a curious fact as part of its analysis of the possible date. It couldn’t have happened before the invention of sewing, the authors noted, which made possible the piecing together of close-fitting garments that allowed humans to live in cold climes.

The path from physical maps through GPS and Google Maps to self-driving cars illustrates what I call “the arc of knowledge.” Knowledge sharing goes from the spoken to the written word, to mass production, to electronic dissemination, to embedding knowledge into tools, services, and devices.

BIG IDEA!

When Henry Maudslay built the first screw-cutting lathe in 1800, creating a machine that could reproduce exactly the same pattern every time—something impossible for even the most skilled human craftsman equipped only with hand tools—he made possible a world of mass production.

Thomas Reardon, the creator of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser, retired from Microsoft to pursue a PhD in neuroscience and in 2016 cofounded a company called Cognescent to produce the first consumer brain-machine interface.

LEARNING: THE MASTER AUGMENTATION One key to understanding the future is to realize that as prior knowledge is embedded into tools, a different kind of knowledge is required to use it, and yet another to take it further. Learning is an essential next step with each leap forward in augmentation.

All of our bestselling books were created by finding people who were at the edges of innovation and either getting them to write down what they knew, or pairing experts with writers who could extract their knowledge. This led us to document the cutting edge of Linux; the Internet; new programming languages like Java, Perl, Python, and JavaScript; the best practices of the world’s leading programmers; and more recently, big data, DevOps, and AI. When, in 2000, our ad on the cover of Publishers Weekly baldly stated, “The Internet Was Built on O’Reilly Books,” everyone accepted it as the simple truth.

Stuart Firestein, in his book Ignorance, makes the case that science is not the collection of what we know. It is the practice of investigating what we don’t know. Ignorance, not knowledge, drives science.

Before she could learn how to make an exquisite dessert by watching a YouTube video, my stepdaughter had to know how to use an iPad. She had to know how to search on YouTube. She had to know that a world of content was there for the taking. At O’Reilly, we call this structural literacy.

A lot of companies complain that they can’t hire enough people with the skills they need. This is lazy thinking. Graham Weston, the cofounder and chairman of managed hosting and cloud computing company Rackspace, based in San Antonio, Texas, proudly showed me Open Cloud Academy, the vocational school his company founded to create the workforce he needs to hire. He told me that Rackspace hires about half of the graduates; the rest go to work in other Internet businesses.

I spend a lot of time urging Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to forget about disruption, and instead to work on stuff that matters. What do I mean by that? There are a number of litmus tests that I’ve learned by watching innovators in science and in open source software and the Internet, and that I try to pass on to young entrepreneurs. Here’s what I like to tell them. 1. WORK ON SOMETHING THAT MATTERS TO YOU MORE THAN MONEY.

Money is like gas in the car—you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road—but a successful business or a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations.

Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off for you having tried.

2. CREATE MORE VALUE THAN YOU CAPTURE.

3. TAKE THE LONG VIEW.

Walter Reuther, the pioneer UAW organizer, told the story of a conversation with a Ford executive who was showing Reuther his new factory robots. “How are you going to collect union dues from all these machines?” he asked. Reuther said he replied, “You know, that is not what’s bothering me. I’m troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles to them.” The question of who will have the money to buy tomorrow’s products in an increasingly automated world should be central to every entrepreneur’s thinking.

4. ASPIRE TO BE BETTER TOMORROW THAN YOU ARE TODAY.

Trends that are accelerating are especially worth taking note of. One mistake many entrepreneurs and investors make is to look at the size of something, decide that it’s “big” or inevitable, and go all in on it. But of course, it’s often much more useful to recognize something when it’s small, and growing fast.

Climate change provides us with a modern version of Pascal’s Wager (the argument of the seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician for acting as though you believe in God even if you don’t). If catastrophic global warming turns out not to happen, the steps we’d take to address it are still worthwhile. Given that there’s even a reasonable risk of disruptive climate change, any sensible person should decide to act. It’s insurance. The risk of your house burning down is small, yet you carry homeowner’s insurance; you don’t expect to total your car, but you know that the risk is there, and again, most people carry insurance; you don’t expect catastrophic illness to strike you down, but again, you invest in insurance.

There is enormous opportunity in transforming our energy economy. My son-in-law, energy researcher and inventor Saul Griffith, has drawn a massive Sankey diagram—a map of all the energy sources and uses in the US economy to a resolution better than 1%. Standing next to the map, he explains to a visitor that any pathway on this map that is as big as his little finger (about 1% of energy flow) represents a $30–100 billion annual opportunity.

In the employee Q&A at a March 2017 all-hands meeting at Amazon, where Jeff continues to remind his employees that “it’s still Day 1,” someone asked him, “What does Day 2 look like?” Jeff gave a passionate response, which he recounted in his annual shareholder letter a few weeks later: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.” That is a dire prognosis for a company or a society, yet it is what we face if we accept the status quo or the WTF? of dismay. Jeff continued with four tips for staving off Day 2: “customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.”

Unlike most people who have large social media followings, though, Brandon didn’t try to cash in via advertising. He has created two bestselling books from his photos and stories, and is a frequent speaker to businesses and at college commencements. But he reserves the direct power of his social media following to raise money for causes inspired by the people whose stories he tells.

This is my faith in humanity: that we can rise to great challenges. Moral choice, not intelligence or creativity, is our greatest asset. Things may get much worse before they get better. But we can choose instead to lift each other up, to build an economy where people matter, not just profit. We can dream big dreams and solve big problems. Instead of using technology to replace people, we can use it to augment them so they can do things that were previously impossible.

As Michael Lewis once said, “You never know what book you wrote till you find out what book people read.”