I believe that the future doesn’t lie in some great beyond, but it is in the great now with mankind utilizing technology correctly just like heroes in the movies. But the technology that will allow us to unlock our inner potential will not be batarangs or cool suits of armor, but the tools of the Distributed Ledger, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and Quantum Computing, otherwise known as “DARQ Tech.” If we do this correctly, in some sense we can all unlock our own inner potential and in very real ways become superhuman. So in homage to this idea, and my general love of comics (or graphic novels for you purists), I’m going to start a series of interviews with friends of mine that have been fighting the good fight in the path to becoming a better version of themselves and bettering the world in the process, all by using technology properly.
Hopefully, this survey of interviews will give you a glimpse as to the things that are to come in the investment world because I can assure you that change is already here like Neal Stephenson has said, the future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed. With this in mind, let me preface this series of interviews with a few comments on my own personal journey in these DARQ Arts.
Distributed Ledger or Blockchain
When I entered Columbia in 1995, I joined a ragtag group of students from Computer Science, Engineering, and the Business School that was dubbed “The Internet Business Club.” The only common belief among the students was the possibility that the Internet could change the world. As weird as it seems, few realized its potential back then. I was there because of my interest in the transformational possibility of certain technologies like XML, but the interactions opened my eyes to so much more. I almost left grad school to start a tech company with some of my friends but it was the allure of transforming the finance industry with technology that kept me there and eventually led me to join the world’s largest investment manager, leading an effort to rebuild their entire code and model base. As excited as I was back then about the Internet, I became even more excited about a decade ago when my friend and partner Hal Tolley, one of the best cryptographers I know, began to talk about the possibilities of blockchain. I’ve waited during this decade for those changes to occur, becoming very disappointed at the outright scams perpetrated in the ICO Bubble of 2015-2017, but I still believe in the future of blockchain.
Artificial and Augmented Intelligence
Beyond what I’ve written previously on this topic, this is a much deeper topic than most realize. We are facing a transformative time period not so much because of new ideas since many of these ideas dubbed AI or ML (Machine Learning) are old, but the change will come from the power of technology and data driving the innovations and the way the underlying groups of technologies are being deployed together. Pedro Domingos refers to the underlying ML technologies as the “Five Tribes of ML” and we are starting to see them come together in surprising and beautiful ways. This is allowing for us to start to accomplish what world chess champion Garry Kasparov described as implementing a superior process of bringing groups of technologies together with groups of people, all built for and trained to work together. I’ve done a lot of work on this over the years, and over the next months, I will be sharing more on that.
Virtual Reality
This was one of the hardest things for me to grasp, until an old friend, a quirky Berkeley logic Ph.D. who hung with Woz in the day invited me to hang out in his basement. Having images of Pulp Fiction and the Cask of Amontillado flashing through my mind, he pushed on a bookcase that popped out, revealing a hidden room. Entering with a little trepidation, I soon found myself faced with what he called his “Holodeck.” Over the next hours as I sampled the various VR headsets and games, I traveled this world and others. Suffice it to say that Accounting will never be the same for me again. From that moment, I realized that the world will change, and it won’t take the full Oasis to do that. When the ULISSES Project was hosted at SCI, I found that many of the best and brightest there went to Nvidia, telling me when I asked that they were tasked with finding real business applications for VR. I assure you that it will emerge from the hobbyists’ dungeons at some point to become mainstream and when it does, it will change the world.
Quantum Computing
This is something that I’ve been excited about for years. This said, I can’t say that I or really pretty much anyone that I have talked to knows how this will work yet. There will be new hardware architectures, computer languages and ways to think about problems that have yet to be developed. However, the fundamental physics indicates that it will change the world, albeit in a spooky way. I find this fascinating and can’t wait for it to unfold.
So with this said, I will finish by saying that in these interviews I will go back to my own beginning, starting with my youngest friends who all happen to be doing interesting things now in these fields, and then I will move forward to new friends and new fields. So, with this said, let us depart off into the DARQness as new adventures await us there.