#1 Stop thinking you can predict the future. This is one of the biggest myths perpetuated by investors, media, and the entire “futurist” industry; no one is much better than random at knowing what businesses and products will succeed in the long run. Our approach: Try audacious things and figure out as quickly as you can when you’re wrong.
It’s possible to predict general territories where new opportunities are more likely to lie; for example, we think machine learning has the opportunity to unlock moonshot-sized opportunities in areas like agriculture, drug discovery, and the development of new materials. But you actually have to jump in and start trying things in order to get the details of that “Ah-ha!” breakthrough right. Sometimes you learn some harsh lessons; that’s the point. Sometimes it takes dozens of iterations; one team at X right now is working on improving how people hear, and they explored 35 different ideas before they found the one we’re going to pour fuel on.
#2 Take a long term view — it changes everything. We’ve deliberately chosen to work on hard problems whose answers are 5–10 years over the horizon. This gives us space to explore and experiment and learn more deeply. Taking the long view also enables us to think through the implications not just the applications of what we’re building, and ensure we’re taking into account the needs of many different people affected by any new technology. For example, we decided to tackle the longer, harder path of creating fully self-driving cars instead of launching a partially autonomous “freeway assistant” feature, because we wanted to help people who couldn’t drive at all and make roads as safe as possible. By thinking long term, we can optimize individual projects and our portfolio for as much positive impact as possible, even if we can’t know exactly which bets will work out in a big way.
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/39ymnF5
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