The Real Future of Tech · Joseph Thacker

In 2016, my friend Daniel Miessler wrote a book called “The Real Internet of Things.” It’s a quick little read that he later put on his site as an essay. You can read it here:
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-real-internet-of-things.

He didn’t ask me to write this post, and has no idea I did so (until now, hi Daniel!).

It’s legitimately mind-blowing how many of his predictions came true, and how the rest are coming true right now. I have been a fan of Dan for awhile so maybe I’m biased, but I think this book/essay is massively underrated.

So yeah, naturally I think you should just go read it, but I wanted to highlight some insights from it here. I think it will convince some people who are still skeptical.

Note: Some of this might sound obvious to your post-LLM ears, but he wrote this six years before ChatGPT was released.

Good Calls

The craziest thing, to me, is that he basically predicted the whole “agent” revolution and in some ways, he predicted Cluely blowing up. He calls them digital assistants and Cluely is exactly the type of digital assistant that Daniel predicts we will all eventually have.

His biggest insight wasn’t any specific application though. It was the shift from humans learning technology (coding) to technology learning human interfaces. He predicted we’d stop adapting to technology and instead technology would adapt to us through natural language, gestures, and context. This is exactly what happened with ChatGPT. Instead of learning to code, many people simply query it in natural language and it does it.

He also predicted the growth of the gig economy. Sure, some smaller parts of the gig economy were around when Daniel wrote this, but his prediction of how it would occur was spot on. And in fact, it’s still moving that way. Most high performers I know sort of build their calendar by cherry picking gigs and projects that they want to do. While Uber might have been around, the full-blown gig economy wasn’t here yet.

Big Picture of The Future

Most of my followers and readers are probably similar to me in regards to being skeptical of most opinions they read online. Someone has to convince me to believe something. Daniel’s book resonates with so much of how I see the future playing out.

It’s been massively accurate at so much big picture stuff, and I think it’s VERY directionally correct for where the tech space is going. The post is an amazing inspiration for what to build if you’re looking for ideas.

For example, Daniel predicted that things would move:

• From centralized to peer-to-peer
• From forced to natural
• From obvious to invisible
• From manual to automatic
• From periodic to continuous
• From private to open
• From visual to multi-sensory
• From aggregated to curated
• From designed to evolved

And you could literally pick any of those concepts and apply them to an industry, and create a new product that would do well.

Bye

So yeah, you should read it. It’s free on his site here.

Peace!
– Joseph

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