weeknotes (1)

tldr: Ubiquitous gaze awareness, and the diminishing value of technical depth

If you could look at a light, and snap your fingers to turn it on, people would cry witchcraft.

a huge missing link in human-computer interaction right now is high-fidelity gaze awareness (and put it everywhere).

A friend sent me a link to a (pretty old) 60 GHz radar chip this week, and it reminded me of a Google project called Soli from 2016. Micro-gesture detection using radar, in both near-field and far-field forms didn’t find much applications back then.

But shrink the sensor into an unified SoC, with an integrated MCU, and make the package ridiculously cheap. And then chip everything - the lightbulbs, the power outlets, the TV, the doors. The Vision Pro showed everyone the power of eye tracking, and measured pupil dilation for intent signalling, and I would think that physical environments that are intimately aware of human intent would feel like an extension of our bodies.

(isn’t the reason our hands feel like a part of us, that they know what we want them to do.)

Technical mastery won’t matter like it used to

In 10 years, technical skill won’t be the moat, it’ll be about knowing what to build and getting people to care. The real advantage will come from social capital and strategic technical insight, the ability to see what matters and make others believe in it.

This massively favours people who can command attention (influence is by nature power-law distributed). But somewhat conversely, more people than ever will have the ability to build great things. As intelligence is commodified, social capital won’t be necessary to hire the best and brightest people to bring social capital and access to intelligence are tied together, but that’s not going to last. The future belongs to hyper-niche innovation from anonymous builders—people who don’t need status, permission, or a seat at the table to make an impact.

~ as an aside, a tweet from @keshavchan about the importance of storytelling.