End of Silicon Valley as We Know it?

Just Saw Tim O'Reilly's column from March.   Provocative thoughts.  Good read.   Been a person who dove into the valley in the 90s, working with the Institute for the Future and others. See my IFTF tags for the time.   Also with Stanford in the area of AI.   With big companies there, like IBM, HP, Cisco, MSFT and Intel.  Later we had representatives stationed there.  And with the half dozen AI startups there at the time. They had very impressive buildings.  Even invested in a few of them.  It has changed a lot,  and will again.  Will change, may morph to something very different, but the power of innovation will survive. 

The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It?   Radar / Radar Column  

Four ways the party may be coming to an end

By Tim O’Reilly, March 11, 2021

Learn faster. Dig deeper. See farther.

High-profile entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, venture capitalists like Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, and big companies like Oracle and HP Enterprise are all leaving California. During COVID-19, Zoom-enabled tech workers have discovered the benefits of remote work from cheaper, less congested communities elsewhere. Is this the end of Silicon Valley as we know it? Perhaps. But other challenges to Silicon Valley’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora.

Understanding four trends that may shape the future of Silicon Valley is also a road map to some of the biggest technology-enabled opportunities of the next decades:

Consumer internet entrepreneurs lack many of the skills needed for the life sciences revolution.

Internet regulation is upon us.

Climate response is capital intensive, and inherently local.

The end of the betting economy.

Inventing the future

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” Alan Kay once said. 2020 proved him both right and wrong. The coronavirus pandemic, or something worse, had long been predicted, but it still caught the world unprepared, a better future not yet invented. Climate change too has been on the radar, not just for decades but for over a century, since Arrhenius’s 1896 paper on the greenhouse effect. And it has long been known that inequality and caste are corrosive to social stability and predict the fate of nations. Yet again and again the crisis finds us unprepared when it comes.

In each case, though, the long-predicted future is still not foreordained. It is up to us whether we are steamrollered by events beyond our control or whether we have the collective power to invent a better future. Awakening may have come later than we might have wished, but crises like the pandemic and climate change can still be massive drivers of innovation. If entrepreneurs, investors, and governments step up to solve the hard problems that we face today, the future remains bright. But one thing is certain: the inventions we most urgently need will take us in a very different direction than the consumer internet and social media revolution that is coming to an unsightly end.

The coronavirus is a case in point. The explosion of biomedical invention that it has accelerated may well have impacts that extend well beyond the pandemic itself. mRNA vaccines have given us a promising path to COVID immunity, developed in record time. Moderna’s vaccine was created within only two days after Chinese scientist Yong-Zhen Zhang released the genetic sequence of the virus! And mRNA vaccines are also easily tweaked, raising the possibility of even quicker response to mutations, and even the creation of a framework for rapid development of many more vaccines. We are starting to see the payoff of radically new approaches to biomedical innovation, and in particular, the way that machine learning is turbocharging research. During 2020, more than 21,000 biomedical research papers made reference to AI and machine learning. .... '