

Gates predicts software revolution  - bootload
http://mis-asia.com/news/articles/bill-gates-predicts-software-revolution

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mattmaroon
Whenever technologists start dreaming of the future, they end up
overestimating the pace of changes. They think too much in terms of what is
possible and too little of the many forces of the market and government that
hold them back.

I have little doubt that if we were building a brand new country from scratch
with a huge budget, we'd all have cars that drive themselves. But, because
some percentage of the population couldn't afford them in our current reality,
it's greatly complicated by the fact that not all cars would be self-driven.
So rather than having roads and central control designed to make computerized
cars safe, which we could probably already do, we have to design ones that can
drive down a 50 year old expressway full of human-driven cars.

That's how it works with most technologies. Legacy systems and things being
good enough the way they are prevent the sort of rapid progress technologists
always predict.

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ryanwaggoner
I think that's true to a certain extent, but I also tend to subscribe to Ray
Kurzweil's theory that futurists overestimate the pace of change in the short-
term and underestimate the pace of change in the long-term.

The reason for this is that the pace of change is not constant, but is
increasing exponentially, as new technologies enable more rapid iterations of
development and market adoption of even newer technologies, and so on.
However, this exponential trend is difficult to grasp from our perspective
today, so futurists tend to extrapolate out the current pace of change into
the future (along with a healthy dose of optimism), when in reality, change is
accelerating.

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mattmaroon
Define long term. Every time I see an article from the 40s describing today,
they've got us all in flying cars.

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marvin
"Flying cars" will never be created, the same way a road-running sailboat will
never be created. But we could probably build an aircraft today that would
serve most of the purposes a car does.

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mattmaroon
That was exactly my point. We could, but we won't and we probably won't in
another 50 years. Technology is held back by all sorts of stuff.

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kajecounterhack
It doesn't take Bill Gates to say things will move forward.

Companies will continue to find things people want, and people will continue
to buy things they want. The end. Move on, nothing to see here.

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Anon84
Isn't this roughly what he's been saying since his 1999 book?

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Hutzpah
yeah, the chokehold of the monopoly fades away... off course there is a surge
in innovation.

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rainface
Isn't it about time Gates restrains himself from publicizing predictions?

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extension
Bill Gates predicts sun will rise tomorrow

with an embedded touch screen

