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I went to a Texas Ventures event last night on the UT campus to hear Jonas Lamis, founder of SciVestor, speak on the future of technology.  I will not transcribe the entire lecture here but hopefully I can give you enough that you will be encouraged to go talk to him about his thoughts. He started the event by using The Legend of the Ambalappuzha Paal Payasam to illustrate Moore’s Law which states that the power of transistor technology will double every two years. He expanded that to say that perhaps it applied to all technology, all technology will grow at an exponential rate. 

I got the impression that  Jonas expected this kind of growth to continue almost indefinitely. While I would like that to be true, I have my doubts. Most things eventually exhibit diminishing returns. In fact, Moore himself does not think that this kind of growth can continue indefinitely. From what I know, we are at the electron level already in transistors and are attempting to use spin angle get a few more states out of each electron. There are also rumors that graphite will extend Moore’s predictions, but I fear that here also, Lord Krishna will go away disappointed. 

However, Moore’s law was not the primary theme of the talk. The inevitability of singularity seemed to be the thesis. This is a point I agree with. My computer will soon be “smarter” than me. That will bring with it many advances. Here are a few that Jonas cited:

• The internet will switch from finding to doing. Google will not just find what you want but also process it and produce the result you expected. This goes hand in hand with…
• The semantic web will contextualize and enhance all experience and computer interaction. With the advent of the semantic web..
• Advertising will die. I look forward to this and to…
• Robot cars which will be able to drive us from place to place. Cars already have some automation built in. When automated driving becomes safer than human driving, insurance companies will demand it. Then you can ride while your car drives and you can pop your…
• Designer drugs that will be made to fit your genetics. 

I have not posted in a while because I have been offline while moving into our new house. We used to live in the westlake area. That area only gets internet from Time Warner. When I first moved in, I thought, “How is this possible?” I am living near every dellionaire in Austin and I only get served by Time Warner, the most hated of all internet providers!? However, I swallowed my pride and had them come set up our internet.

The service was seemingly good while I lived in that house, probably because I had low expectations. However, it is quitting TimeWarner that is the horrific part. They make getting in very easy and getting out very hard. I now have to take my router to Breaker and Mopac during the working day to get them to stop billing me for bits they are not transferring to a house I do not live in. Until then, I am paying $45/month instead of the original $30 because of the bait-and-switch billing programs.

Needless to say, I was excited about getting new service in my new house in Terrytown. That was until I started calling folks like Grande, AT&T, and Comcast only to find that none of them serve my area. In the end, I went with EarthLink, which is just another name for TimeWarner. Screwed again. When the Time Warner guy showed up to hook my “EarthLink” modem up. I asked him to take in the TimeWarner modem back for me, but obviously, that would have been too similar to customer service to be an option.

All this to say that, in my opinion, everything that is good about the internet is bad about internet service providers. But how can this be? How can a city like Austin continue to thrive as a tech mecca if we do not even have decent internet services? I am in pain. Why is someone not stepping up to make money off of my pain? I am certain this is happening on a national level. Someone needs to innovate us out of this.