Orange Institute #14

Our latest session in Silicon Valley and LA comes almost two years after our previous immersions in these locales. We knew a lot had changed, but what was stunning was how much more was new.  Moore’s Law is always the key to understand the pace of change in the Valley, but there is so much more driving an acceleration of change.  The mechanics of speed were exposed to us by multiple presenters: very specific changes in the way software is released (continuously), improved (in small incremental versions), and distributed (not just Cloud, but microservices spread across the Internet. This relationship between Speed, Size, and Time is impacting everything – including money.  Blockchain is one example of speed is being able to maintain a single true, crowd-verified distributed ledger keeping track of anything that has value, not just BitCoins, and doing it in minutes instead of days.

An important part of achieving Silicon Valley speeds is providing Autonomy to the talents who do the work.  Social is equal to Salary in establishing reputation, which is the basis for Authenticity.  We heard from executives engaging with software developers  that being in service to talent means providing them with the visibility and process to establish their authentic selves in public.

Even Evolution is being accelerated, and here’s where Moore’s Law really does apply to well-established mathematical models for AI and machine learning.  Multiple startups in the red-hot space of machine intelligence exposed to us how succeeding generations of intelligent agents lived and died by the accuracy of their predictions, transforming the biologic pace of evolution to the clock-speed of ultra-fast GPU processors.  Even DNA succumbs to this tempo.

New lenses are needed in the quickening world of digital media, with incumbent Hollywood studios caught blind-sided by the parallel universes of short-form online video, creating YouTube celebrities invisible to mainstream platforms.  These new platforms for new genres of Virtual Reality, e-sports, and 3D scans are coming on fast, creating wow effects wherever they go.

We saw all this and more, and remember, you saw it first at Orange Institute.

• Themes explored

What’s Next for the Valley?

CIO Talk, SF Giants

Digital Communities

Designing for Hyper-reality

Digital Worldview

Orange Fab Demo Day

New Models of Trust

Augmented Humanity

Living in the Stream

House of Lauréates

Hollywood and Tech

The Digital Audience