reflection-in-action. Or were they lucky in trying at the right time, and merely captured all of the value, because a 99% adequate VR headset is worth 0%, and they added the final 1%? Because of the winner-take-all dynamics, theres no way to solve the coordination problem of holding off on an approach until the prerequisites are in place: entrepreneurs and founders will be hurling themselves at an common goal like social networks or VR constantly, just on the off chance that maybe the prerequisites just became adequate and theyll be able to eat everyones lunch. The productivity boost expected from electric dynamos was slow to materialise, The evolution of large technological systems, #326, Part II. The aeroplane industry cannot now redeem Daedalus nor can the computer industry recover the money spent by the British Admiralty more than a hundred years ago in support of Charles Babbage and his calculating machine. This is true but I would say it reverses the order (N to N+1? But it was left to Eckert and Mauchly [16] several years later to rediscover and implement the conceptions of stored programs and conditional jumps, which had already been present in Babbages analytical engine [17]. I dont know what they can do to move faster but I suspect it has to do with placement (distribution) and with networks which both depend on (corrupt) entities.. A successful company rewrites history and its precursors14; history must be lived forward, progressing to an obscure destination, but we always recall it backwards as progressing towards the clarity of the present. You dont have to be bipolar to be an entrepreneur, but it might help. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. Likewise, the idea of production-log testing was to use a flowmeter to measure the downhole flow rate during pressure-buildup tests, thereby eliminating the need for pressure-derivative analysis because the wellbore storage would be corrected by the flow-rate measurement, and an equivalent to the Horner plot would suffice. And the Media Lab wasnt the only one, General Magic (1989), had an almost identical vision of a networked future powered by small touchscreen devices. Develop your point through body paragraph (s), and conclude your paper by exploring the meaning you derive from your reflection. rife with examples of the prescient failing. The organizational pattern that emerges more or less clearly from Hrleins lectures is closely associated with his view of the typical phases or cycles of development of research in chemotherapy or physiological chemistry. Maybe some other discovery from left field has changed how we think about things. 2. They use their discretion to surface proposals that have at least one champion, regardless of whether there are any detractorsThe results show that there is greater ex ante uncertainty in the ARPA-E research portfolio compared to proposals with the highest mean scores (Model1). Want to read all 2 pages? There were people playing around with controlling brain cells with light going back to the 1940s. So, it seems that rapid progress depends on crazy people. And then suddenly a catalyst took hold and the adoption skyrocketed. Its Moores law. Huh. You dont want to publish a paper that says, After the study, we came to the conclusion that VR is useless right now and that we should just not have a job for 20 years. There were a few people that basically came to that conclusion. Such an attitude is similar to the DARPA paradigm in fostering AI & computing, a rational process of connecting the dots between here and there intended to orchestrate the advancement of an entire suite of technologies, with responsibilities split between multiple project managers each given considerable autonomy for several years. She has also worked in industry for Schlumberger. In this edition, we are reminded that rigorous technical work is one of the pillars of our industry. (One wonders if a 20-year forecast might be driven by anthropics: in an exponentially-growing field, most researchers will be present in the final generation, and so a priori one could predict accurately that it will be 20 years to AI. and what it isn't. Learning for the sake of learning. . Every authentic solution brings in its wake a train of grotesque solutions. Timing, we believe, is an art. We couldnt know for sure that such projections were wrong, and the amount of money being spent back then on AI was truly trivial (and the commercial spinoffs likely paid for it all anyway). Its not enough to theorize about the possibility or prototype something in the lab if there is then no followup. After 20 years with Schlumberger in various positions, she returned to academia as a full professor of chemical engineering at the U. of Houston, where she has served as Director of the Petroleum Engineering Program as an adjunct professor since January 2000. Only Apple can build apps for it. She currently is participating in the SPE Long Range Planning Committee and cochairing a steering committee for a Middle East Colloquium in Petroleum Engineering Education. Yet the principle of unripe time, distilled by F. M. Cornford [15] more than half a century ago from the changeless stream of Cambridge academic life, has provided the epitaph of more than one premature technology. Something happened that made the world different. His story is analogous to mine, I think, and both stories would have been vastly different had we never met. Remember, you dont know anything else about the tech landscape in the 2000s, like that Google will go way up from its IPO, you dont know about Apples revival under Jobsall you know is that a social network will exist and will grow hugely. It sounds like Facebook! After 7 of my 20 years with Schlumberger, I left transient-test analysis for several other pursuits, and as before, my timing continued to be great. Even now, after weve been building them for 100 years, its very difficult to understand just why a bicycle worksits even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. Informatio: The new language of science ( Hans Christian von Baeyer) 14-15 Why would anyone think that the future of smartphones would be won by a has-been 1980s PC maker and an obscure search engine? Technological developments can be foreseen but the knowledge is largely useless because startups are inherently risky and require optimal timing. After10 hours of deliberation, he was acquitted. Indeed, its inherent in really transformative ideas that they look like bad ideasGoogle, Apple, Facebook and Amazon all did, sometimes several times over. Certainty is irrelevant, you still have problems making use of this knowledge. Progress will happen and can be foreseen long before, but the details and exact timing are too difficult to get right, and the benefits of R&D is in laying fallow until the ripe time and their exploitation in unpredictable ways. Thiel uses the example of New France/the Louisiana Territory, in which the projections of John Law et al that it (and thus the Mississippi Company) would be as valuable as France itself turned out to be correctjust centuries later, with the benefits redounding to the British colonies. Is this impossibly rare? Critical problems are the research questions, cast in terms of the concrete particulars of currently available knowledge and technique and of specific exemplars or models (eg. Youve invented taxis & buses. 35 years. Then after your special knowledge has become public knowledge, the robotics company goes public, and by EMH, their shares become a normal investment. Since people tend to systematically over-exploit, how is this implemented? I once was shown some data acquired in a water-injection well that was abruptly shut in from a flow rate of 30,000 BOPD. For if they were obviously good ideas, they would never produce venture returns. Even the women and children of the common people know that the unicorn is a favorable portent. However, those are precisely the startups that crazy people will have done years before when they looked like bad ideas, avoiding the waste of delay. 1. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be entreated not to hit the nail at all. Once the initial shock of the situation wore off, you'd start getting ready for work. I basically think all the ideas of the 90s that everybody had about how this stuff was going to work, I think they were all right, they were all correct. I sometimes practice what I call failure rebooting. Youve seen the curves Gordon Moore discovered. But say that the market is wrongly pessimistic. 2003-2023 Society of Petroleum Engineers, See More Stories by Christine A. Ehlig-Economides, Ehlig-Economides, C.A., and Halepaska, J.C.: A Numerical Study of Confined-Unconfined Aquifers Including Effects of Delayed Yield and Leakage,, Agarwal, Ram G., Al-Hussainy, R., and Ramey, H.J. The third big area of team investigation for VCs focuses on the founders leadership abilities. A firm's ability to maintain an advantage in market value depends on whether investors perceive that the rate of cash flow growth will be sustained. Its a universal rule. That was inconceivable before because it would have been just so expensive to do that calculation. (The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion). It's frustrating to desire somethinga solution, position, experience, relationship, or possessionbut sense the Lord saying "no" or "not now.". Someone could have built the Rift in mid-to-late 2007 for a few thousand dollars, and they could have built it in mid-2008 for about $673.5$500.02008. First of all, you'd wake up late because your smartphone alarm no longer exists. This last fact is what is most significant. Look after a pet. Even the major oil companies give lip service to the claim. A more practical approach is to embrace uncertainty, taking a reinforcement learning perspective. Psalm 27:13-14 (a succinct yet powerful Bible verse about God's perfect timing for your life!) In recent years, I have been attracted back to academia. Progress can happen and can be foreseen long before, but the details and exact timing due to bottlenecks are too difficult to get right. Gates, however, proved the market, and refined the Gates strategy to perfection, using up the trick; no one can get historically rich off shipping an OS plus some business productivity software because there are too many competitors and too many players interested in ensuring that no one becomes the next Gates, and so opportunity has moved on to the next area. Each one plans, invests & commits to push results as hard as possible through to commercial viability, and then pivots as necessary when the plan inevitably fails. Further, people in general appear to overexploit & underexplore, exacerbating the problemeven if the expected value of a startup (or experimentation, or R&D in general) is positive for individuals. All major success stories overshadow their long list of predecessors who did the same thing, but got unlucky. If convicted, he would have faced a prison term of up to five years. Head and introduced the BS and MS degree programs in petroleum engineering. What is different? I loved modeling flow through porous media, and I thought modeling three phases instead of just water would be even more interesting. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Suppose you somehow knew in 2000 that in 2010, the founder of the most successful social network will be worth at least $10b; this is a falsifiable belief at odds with all conventional wisdom and about a tech that blindsided everyone. In this regard, it is amusing to note the exponential growth of conferences like NIPS or ICML20102019.). # 326, Part II it might help a few people that basically came to that conclusion a reinforcement perspective. So expensive to do that calculation expensive to do that calculation be entreated not to hit timing your technology reflection at! 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