In order to know where to put efforts, time and money one has to understand which areas of technology, science and culture are experiencing break-through and which are stagnating.
In a booming sector/country/company everything is helping to reach a success. Even if you are a mediocre specialist you probably gain a good portion of experience and the career can go higher.
During a crisis you easlity get unlucky even if you are high-profile expert. Your environment possibly only thinks about survival or cutting costs and your expertise is not valued.
I think definitely hit the right spot by getting expertise in software and computers.
I was pretty close to the peak hype waves of 3D cinema, machine learning, self-driving cars, although maybe not in ideal position, and I didn’t squeese 100% of those opportunities.
I definitely missed opportunities to work on social networks, smartphones, web, e-commerce. Mostly because the areas weren’t so interesting for me.
What is next big thing? Here I’ll try to write down my thoughts about the future. I hope I should be not much worse in predicting the future than many other “experts” on the internet.
Also writing down some ideas helps me to unload them from my head. Otherwize they are just buzzing there and that bothers me.
Technology
Computers
Development of personal computers has slowed down a lot. CPU frequency doesn’t grow anymore. Amount of RAM and disk space almost stopped. We reached certain limits here. The main development happens on power efficiency and parallel computing.
Those two aspects are really interconnected. In order to put more computing power into one device they have to be more efficient, allow for normal battery life and don’t get on fire.
Development of the batteries cannot keep up with the growing compute. I think batteries have more physical limitations than putting more compute in a limited small box. It’s another reason why better batteries don’t solve the problem of power efficiency.
We went from state/business operated shared computers to personal wearable computer devices. The devices also are interconnected in a global network. Therefore we are talking here about mixed shared-personal usage type.
Withing that ecosystem there are some technologies that are still in the shared mode.
Search engines
The market is dominated by a couple of big world-scale players. The main one is google of course.
I suppose there should be a change in that. Personal computers became pretty powerful. And they can handle
Information about google search infrastructure: https://www.quora.com/How-much-computing-power-does-Google-require-to-do-a-search
Transportation / Self-driving cars
Microchips
Smartphones
Drones
Medicine
Transport
Remote work
Science
Economy
Globalization
Culture
Movies
Netflix Simplification