Sunday Review: What Will Life in 2030 Look Like?

Here is a digest of the best links I found each week for anyone who might be interested.

Pandemic: the reality we live in

Contract tracking is critical in addition to the testing infrastructure to slow down the virus spread. However, there are many ethical and privacy concerns that can impact the government and each individual’s decision on adoption and usage. This then can affect the effectiveness of contact tracing. For example, if the install rate doesn’t meet the minimum threshold, which has happened in most of cases so far, it cannot be effective enough for tracking the virus among the population. Apps development, especially given all these requirements and urgency, is hard. Each country doesn’t have a second chance to redeploy a new solution. There are 80 apps in 50 countries that have been documented, and “many put user’s privacy at risk”. Here are demos of 15 apps on TechCrunch.

Apple and Google jointly announced their Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing effort. It tries to balance privacy with the usefulness for tracking exposure. There have been harsh criticisms against both companies strong stand for protecting user privacy. But, some of those arguments seem non-sense. See one argument against the Post’s negative report.

Regions and states need to agree with Apple and Google’s APIs and build their own apps to trace contact. Right now, 4 of 50 US states are participating.

Sadly, if the virus cases surge (too quickly), contact tracking won’t be that useful given the testing delay.

Disruptions: how it might be different

As the entire world seems being paused due to the pandemic, a lot of trends that were working slowly have been accelerated instead. More people are transitioning to e-commerce, remote working and online education, etc. Changes are happening to cities, corporations, colleges and churches.

“This means that when the coronavirus era finally ends, there will be a Rip Van Winkle feeling — a sense of having been asleep and waking to normality, except that we will have time-traveled and the normality will resemble the year 2030 as it might have been without the virus, rather than just a simple turn to 2021 or 2022.”

What will life in 2030 really look like?

One possibility is that solar price may be insanely cheap. Solar has plunged in price in the last ten years faster than anyone predicted. The price drop fits the observation of Wright’s Law, which predicts an exponential decline in the cost of technologies as a function of cumulative scale of production. And indeed, Wright’s Law has been found to apply to at least 60 other technologies.

We might have VEIL (Virtual Epiphantic Identity Lustre) to survive in a world full of facial recognition systems.

But, we are definitely going to have better games. Check out this demo of Unreal Engine 5.

Insights: raise the bar for ourselves

The observer effect has a long interview with Marc Andreessen, who invented Netscape and founded a16z. There are always so many interesting insights from Marc. They talked about his way of managing time, how he sets goals for himself, why and how to read so much, the things that keep him passionate, and the things to build referring to his call for actions.

Leadership: the ideas for better collaboration

The typical technical hiring process, as most of us are familiar with, is broken. We often go to the interview knowing many candidates are hacking the process by practicing common problems online, looking for leaked questions, using tactics to handle hard topics. At its best, it leads us to find the most prepared candidate instead of the best ones.

Popular behavior questions are also weak to identify the signals that show candidate’s competencies for the position to fill. There are a lot of new experiments in this area. Among them, I like written interview the most.

It gives candidate time to think for the best answer they have, while also evaluating how they communicate it. It’s an extension to current onsite interviews instead of a substitute. The extra time and space for the candidate to articulate their thinking gives them confidence and reduce the biases in favor of fast thinkers. Some company goes even further with both pre-interview shared questions and onsite writing samples. At the end, it may come down to the choice of questions (like the Peter Thiel one) to ask.

On one side, technical questions are much easier to standardized, hence the process can be scaled much easier with less variance. Good written questions are harder to come up with and become more challenging for new candidate to impress the hiring team. For now, the process seems fitting better for early stage companies before it gets more standardized.

Economy: the science hidden among fallacies

The Economy Is A Mess. So Why Isn’t The Stock Market? On one side, all economic indicators tank. It seems to many people, if not everyone, that we are heading into a recession. However, stock market rebounded faster than the economic. It’s unclear what the main reasons are. It can be caused by the growing gap of inequality, where we are seeing a rick man’s recovery. It’s also largely driven by the current monetary policies (MP-3 as referred by Ray Dalio) that are creating an uncertain environment for the market. Well, it confirms again that “the stock market is not the economy.” Based on the evidence from the 1918 Flu, we know that pandemics depress the economy, but public health interventions do not. It’s really sad to see we are not doing as much as it needs to stop the growth of infected cases.