thinks of areas that can benefit from "AI assist" and pick a domain you think you can add the most value and go all in on mastering the intersection
What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
21–30 of 68 posts
Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#22If everyone is saying AI/LLM then that ship already sailed.
Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#23AI for sure. I’d steer clear of prompt engineering though - it’s hot right now, but I expect it’ll be a flash in the pan. Whichever areas you pick will almost certainly be disrupted by AI, so stay on top of it. Generative AI seems like a safe place to invest in.
Biotech is heating up. Sure it’s not pure CS, but there’s plenty of crossover. Doing computer vision on the glossy insides of a person is a serious CS challenge for example. Its disruptions are slow but possibly larger than other areas. Intuitive’s surgery robots are everywhere you look now for example.
Augmented reality. Apple’s Vision Pro is a big validation of this direction. We haven’t figured out what the killer apps here are yet and I expect we’ll see a similar gold rush and set of disruptions like smartphones as folks figure it out.
Self driving cars. These were way over promised but we’re getting past the hype. I’d expect to see robust (probably geofenced) Level 4 systems by the end of the decade.
Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#24Construction technology. Design software for horizontal construction is astonishingly bad. The PDF is still the "product" in am era where GPS and automated machine guidance are the norm. We're decades overdue on rethinking project delivery from first principles in the context of modern practices and The inefficiency costs billions. A single bill or FHWA policy memo on open data standards for digital project delivery…
All that could very well be true. The important question is: Is there anyone who is prepared to spend money to fix any of this?
Put another way: It doesn’t matter if you have a product which would help people and save them money, if people, for whatever reason, aren’t inclined to buy your product.
Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#25• Spacial Computing
This is definitely an emerging field that is trying to develop market share. Unclear if the tech is really there in the long haul for comfortable spacial computing though. What you're seeing now is literally akin to something like the Apple I being released. We have a LONG road to go but there's very little doubt that the end goal is something powerful.
• AI
Duh? It's useful now, and likely will only get better. No question here that sharpening your AI skills is a safe bet.
• Synthetics
Lots of work going on quietly around synthetic engineering, BCIs, etc. If you're interested in the human body interface then this is a field that has some interesting problems but, like spacial computing, probably won't come to fruition for many decades.
• Security
Always useful and always changing. A no brainer if you're looking to skill up in a specific computer science niche.
Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#26Manufacturing MRP. Every other manufacturing company has their own way of doing things and none of the MRP solutions on the market are flexible enough to work for these companies.
Googling MRP it is material requirements planning? Can you give some examples of existing big players and their shortcomings.
Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#27Military spending is probably going to be given a hefty boost as tensions ramp up with China and Russia. Dronetech will probably be a large chunk of that.
I’ll throw in anti-drone tech too. Countermeasures are where the money is!
Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#28Construction technology. Design software for horizontal construction is astonishingly bad. The PDF is still the "product" in am era where GPS and automated machine guidance are the norm. We're decades overdue on rethinking project delivery from first principles in the context of modern practices and The inefficiency costs billions. A single bill or FHWA policy memo on open data standards for digital project delivery…
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Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#29My son (15) has expressed interest in studying materials science. While he's still years away from a firm decision, it doesn't seem like a bad path to me.
Re: What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?
#30Broadly speaking, my bet is on three to four major ones:
* AI
* Cryptocurrency
* Solar
* Biotech/Bioinformatics
Doing some back of the envelope calculations you can get a rough guess that we'll have "human level AI" by 2030 or so. The current trend of AI producing spectacular results will, in my opinion, not cease but continue to pick up pace.
Back of the envelope estimates can show cryptocurrency holding, conservatively, 20% of the worlds wealth by 2030. I suspect the growth of cryptocurrency won't be independent of other technologies. Cryptocurrency gets a lot of flack here and other places but I'll remind people, yet again, that many of the critiques against cryptocurrency are eerily similar to critiques of the internet, email, the world wide web and social networks in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Back of the envelope estimates can show solar producing over half of the worlds energy needs by 2040. In addition to solar panels, there's battery technology, microgrids, etc. so this is really about what technologies are rolled out to satisfy the 2.5% yearly energy usage growth rate. I don't see any other technology that has "Moore's law"-like behavior in terms of the energy harvested vs. the energy invested than solar and battery technology.
Biotech and bioinformatics will have profound consequences for health, longevity and a host of other issues but I don't have a good sense for what the major innovations are that need to happen before this becomes widely adopted. I suspect AI will help with bio-engineering crops, drugs, food and help with general medicine but I don't quite know what that looks like. We silently hit a roughly $100 whole genome sequencing [0], so it's progressing, I just don't know what rough goals to predict or what to look out for.
All of the above are relying on a sort of "generalized Moore's law" in that the reason the innovation and adoption is so quick is because cost is dropping exponentially.
I created a small post about it with some simple justifications for where the timelines come from [1].