Show notes
The Future Perfect: Rediscovering Utopia Technology ruined our utopia. When did humans have it better than the dawn of time? We were born with everything and nothing. The entire world was ours. Since everyone had nothing, everyone had everything. We had no property, no houses. We were free to roam and inhabit as we pleased. We only worried about survival — finding enough food and avoiding dangerous predators. We didn’t have to worry about 401(k)s or what car the neighbors just bought. There wasn’t a 1 percent or 99 percent. We didn’t have politics. We just had survival. Humanity at its purest. Then invention doomed us. It was innocent at first. Innovation made it easier to survive. Food and safety became essentially guaranteed, so we needed to find other things to define our lives. Then inventions became those things. Things not for survival, but for status. For having something someone else didn’t. For benefitting unequally based on that ownership. For handing down to the next generation so they didn’t start with nothing. Things became the new goal of survival and they defined our differences. People who had things treated people without them differently. We went to war with others who had things we wanted. Now most of us are born with nothing. We have to earn everything, buy everything. We’re trapped in a system that forces us to chase things that maintain our differences. We innovated ourselves out of utopia and into industry, and innovation is the only way to get our utopia back. What does the perfect future look like? The entire world will be ours again. Everyone will be born with everything. There will be no such thing as having nothing. The future will be a world of infinite fulfillment. This future will not be limited by time or place. We will be able to experience any place at any time. We will be able to re-experience the past and newly experience the future. We won’t need to own cars or fly on planes. Anything we want to experience will be available to us, on demand. This future will not have jobs or chores. The mundane and the complex alike will be automated by machines that perform these tasks with greater safety, efficiency, and effectiveness than humans. Everything we do will be for a personal purpose, based on our unique talents. Creativity will become the most important human industry. This future will not have keyboards, screens, or smartphones. Information and communication will be available to us everywhere, seamlessly. We will interact with computers naturally: with our voices, our actions, and our minds. Everything will be a keyboard. Everywhere will be a screen. This future will not have limitations. Physical realities of the human body and mind will disappear, creating new avenues through which we find purpose and meaning. This is the future of computing. This is The Future Perfect. “Trying to predict the future is a discouraging, hazardous occupation … If by some miracle a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd, so farfetched, that everybody would laugh him to scorn. This has proved to be true in the past and it will undoubtedly be true even more so of the century to come. The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. So, if what I say now seems to you to be very reasonable, then I’ll have failed completely. Only if what I tell you appears absolutely unbelievable have we any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen.” – Arthur C. Clarke (1960) The perils of predicting the future are obvious. A better place to start, as famously pointed out by Jeff Bezos, may to be ask, “What won’t change in the future?” We ask the question a little differently: What does it mean to be human? We believe there are five core human desires as it relates to technology. These persistent desires have been the basis for the largest technological breakthroughs over the past few centuries: Humanity’s desire for connection Humanity’s desire for uniqueness Humanity’s desire for information Humanity’s desire for purpose Humanity’s desire for pleasure Some combination of these five core human desires underpins the primary reasons for adoption of the following technologies: Written language – information and connection Printing press – information and pleasure Telephone – information and connection Radio – information and pleasure Television – information and pleasure PC – information, connection, purpose, and pleasure Internet – information, connection, pleasure, purpose, and uniqueness Smartphone – a ubiquitous extension of the Internet History shows that breakthrough technologies are coming at an accelerating pace. The most recent six of those technological breakthroughs all happened within the last 150 years. Only ~15 years separates the mainstream adoption of the PC and Internet with another ~15 to reach the smartphone. And the Internet was the first to enable all five of humanity’s persistent desires. It did so by amalgamating and modernizing many of the technologies before it. Blogs, social media, and ebooks are the modern implementation of written language (e.g., books, letters) and the printing press. Facebook, Skype, WhatsApp, etc. replace the telephone. Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music, and podcasts are the new radio. YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, etc. recreate television. The PC is a terminal through which one accesses the Internet, and the smartphone is a terminal you can take anywhere. We say this not to belittle the PC or smartphone, nor any of the other prior technologies, but to highlight the transformative power of the Internet and recognize its importance in relation to the next wave of breakthroughs. The next evolution of technology, the future of computing, must enable humans to communicate more effectively and consume information more efficiently. It must create more immersive entertainment and pleasure-based experiences. It must yield better tools to recognize our desires for uniqueness and self-expression, while also helping us find and achieve purpose. Perhaps most importantly, the future of computing must build off of the current foundational technologies. In other words, the future of computing will be a remix of what came before it. It must combine existing technologies with evolutionary innovations that create a new, better reality. The future of computing that creates The Future Perfect is a combination of four emerging technologies: virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and robotics. We believe these four elements will combine to create a new life paradigm for humanity, creating an evolution beyond anything any combination of technologies has done before — an era of human super-fulfillment. Perhaps we have a rosier view of the future than others, but we believe our optimism is justified. If we were pessimistic about the fate of humanity, there would be no point in investing in our future. Are there dangers to this new world? Certainly. But these dangers have applied to every technological development since fire. Yes, there is the possibility that our world ends up like a dystopian science fiction novel. For that reason, we are committed to focusing our capital and research efforts on pursing The Future Perfect while avoiding these potential negative outcomes. In the following sections, we will detail how this future of computing will guide us into an era of super-fulfillment — enabling us to bring about an absolutely fantastic future that will emerge over the next 50 years. Virtual Reality Virtual reality (VR) fundamentally changes how we experience the world. Some view virtual reality as a subset of augmented reality (AR) in that developers determine how much of “real reality” they incorporate into AR. In the case of VR, it’s none. While this argument is logical and valid, we feel that virtual reality has the potential to be so special, so transformative, that it deserves to be considered separately from AR. Many people expect AR to be a bigger overall theme than VR because AR can replace the smartphone and PC. We would agree that AR will be bigger over the next 10-15 years in terms of revenue, but advanced VR has the potential to transform nearly every industry over the next 50 years. Therefore, we believe VR is actually the bigger opportunity long term as it delivers limitless lifelike experiences, making it the centerpiece for connection, purpose, and pleasure. Before we get to future lifelike experiences made possible by advanced VR, let’s talk about the state of VR today and in the near future. Near Term: VR Content Hardware, software, and content are all critical for the future of VR, but content represents the biggest near-term opportunity (5-10 years) to show the power of VR through our current basic hardware. The most obvious implementations of VR content are in entertainment and communication. Many great companies already offer compelling products in gaming, cinema, live events, and sports. Gaming has so far lead the charge in showing the possibilities of virtual reality and will continue to do so. VR is the perfect technology for gaming because its purpose is to provide interactive and immersive environments. This allows developers to transport users to the worlds they create, putting gamers closer to the action in Call of Duty or Madden than ever before. Game developers pushing the envelope with the content experiences they deliver will inspire creators of other forms of media. Advanced VR gaming will require the democratization of many features that will allow VR experiences to improve not only in gaming, but across all content types. These features include haptic feedback, gesture-based input, the ability to move in the real world to control the virtual one, etc. Advanced VR gaming is already possible through theme-park type experiences, where users interact with a real-world environment specifically designed for VR while wearing a portable VR system. While early, we believe these experiences provide a window into what commonplace, home VR systems can become in the future. In cinema and entertainment content, VR will be a part of many transmedia strategies over the next few years. VR will provide immersive experiences as an extension of mainstream media products like an additional scene to a theatrical movie; however, VR will also enable completely new ways to tell stories. Filmmakers will no longer be limited by linear 2D storylines. The line between what we think of as movies and games will blur more than it already has. Cinematic VR experiences will enable exploration of the world created by the content creator, just like a game. There will be unique stories told all around you instead of just the main storyline. Imagine exploring the Star Wars universe without limitation: traveling to different planets, following bounty hunters, exploring the Death Star. You may be able to spend days or weeks or months in the same “movie,” taking in pieces you missed and finding new stories. One critical element for near-term consumer adoption of cinematic VR content is to create standardized experience frameworks. We need standard, non-linear story arcs for VR cinema as well as a set of common actions (i.e., pinch and expand on touchscreens) so that consumers have general expectations for how they can interact with cinematic VR content without instruction. This standardization should not limit the ability of creators to deliver unique stories, but should have the added benefit of making VR content more scalable to build because they won’t have to recreate the wheel every time. Just as Star Wars showed the world what was possible with special effects and Toy Story changed how we thought about animated movies, there will be breakthrough films that show the true power of VR as a storytelling medium by creating these frameworks. The first truly great VR movie will pave the way for it to be the standard medium for cinematic experiences. Live events are the last category that VR will transform near term. VR literally puts the viewer on the field or stage, giving fans access that was previously impossible. The notion of sports has already begun to change with the emergence of eSports, and the concept of “live” will shift as time fades in The Future Perfect. No matter what live events look like in the future, the idea of human performances, whether athletic, mental, musical, or otherwise will persist as an important entertainment medium; however, one thing that VR will have a hard time replicating for live events in the near term is the communal aspect. The dynamic of meeting new people with a common interest changes. There are no tailgates. The feeling of palpable excitement from others around you isn’t quite the same. All these elements represent challenges to communication platforms on VR. Social will be a key element to not only the live events space, but for VR in general. Near Term: VR and Social The tech industry has long awaited the “next” Facebook. We believe the question isn’t what will replace Facebook as the core place where humans connect with one another, but rather how will new technologies change the way we communicate in the first place? Mobile gave us Instagram and Snapchat, powered by pictures and videos from smartphone cameras. Mobile also gave us WhatsApp, replacing basic SMS with richer messages delivered through high-speed mobile data. This is not a question of chicken and egg — the new underlying technology, in this case mobile, came first to enable these great companies to form. One common element in these new communication platforms is the move away from text-based communication. Humanity has gone from hieroglyphics to written words, back to digital hieroglyphics in the form of videos and emojis. Facebook began as a platform to send old-school, written messages to one another, either on our “walls” or privately. Twitter was built to send SMS-inspired 140-character messages about what you were doing. Instagram emerged to broadcast mobile photos and videos of our perfect existences. Then, Snapchat for sharing our less perfect existences. Technology is exponentially increasing how we can communicate with one another. If an emoji says a few words and a picture says a thousand, an immersive, volumetric video says infinitely more. Social communication will evolve quickly on VR. Apple added a rudimentary photographic depth feature to the iPhone 7 Plus and there are a number of 360-degree GoPro-like cameras for consumer use, providing users with an early view into immersive communication. As has been the case with the past few core social platforms, younger users (age 20 or below) are likely to be the leading indicator of the winning platforms in VR communication. Near Term: Market Estimates The biggest near-term barrier to VR will be headset adoption. We believe there were about 10 million VR users at the end of 2016, the vast majority via Google Cardboard, and expect close to 100 million by the end of 2018. This would be an adoption rate roughly 2x as fast as the smartphone, which took four years to grow from ~10 million users to ~100 million. Such a fast rate of VR adoption is reasonable given that the majority of VR headsets in 2018 will be powered by smartphones (over 80% of the total). The existing prevalence of smartphones combined with low-cost VR headsets like Gear VR, Daydream, and Cardboard will enable this quicker adoption curve. We consider these smartphone-powered VR headsets “low immersion” in that they are capable of delivering basic gaming, theatrical, and live content, but aren’t capable of providing higher-end experiences that represent the truly compelling use case for VR. Computer-powered headsets like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive are “high immersion,” but currently require non-commonplace hardware —a PC with powerful graphics capabilities. Most low-immersion headsets cost less than $100 tod…
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