inevitability

Technology is changing more than ever. Ray kurzweil has codified this in his theory of singularity. In short, information doubling in size over time. Computational power is doubling. Costs and time to get things done are halving in size at the same rate of the doubling.

Moore's Law is a similar codification of the same thing. Put simply, in three years everything is four times more powerful and four times cheaper. This is applying to more than just hardware. Network affects, distribution, customer acquisitions, marketing messages, memes, and more also follow same pattern. A single video on YouTube can find 100M people having viewed it in a week. Facebook has memes which get 200M likes in a week. Soon, this will be overnight and it will be everyone on earth who would like this type of video. It will near instantaneous traveling f news.

As our tools mature, software will approximate the speed of ideas. A person will conceive an idea and have it live that evening. They will post it and all that like or care about it will have decided to use it or not overnight. Market caps of companies and their size will be known in mere moments, not years it takes today.

Venture capital companies are looking at these trends and at still seeing decisions on investments being a 7 year cycle. We'll see this compress rapidly as well. Twice the amount of money available in half the time generating twice the ROI as today.

This is all a simple plot of history and current trend. Any nay sayer just lacks the insight on how to get to this state themselves. They are self selecting out of the makers of the future.

The real question for the futurists is how to predict the future when it is not linear. To do this, we have to plot linear lines to get to points where the power / cost graphs facilitate the idea in imagination. Put differently, find any solution that works today. Determine how much it costs to build, plot it against the curve and when the power and costs make it feasible given your solution you can reliably predict that such a solution will exists.

You now know the "what" and the "when". What you do not know is the "who" or the "how."

This concept I'm calling "innovation inevitability." Anything you could imagine which would be valuable will be created when it is cost effective to so or some point near then.

Innovation inevitability and this model should be very useful for VCs, innovators, and business folks to know whether or not it is time to build or time to create IP and to sit and wait for a cheaper , better starting point. It's coming. It's on its way. It's inevitable.