What recent technological trends do you personally find exciting?

Real-time technology is a huge interest area of mine, especially in terms of analyzing giant datasets. I’m especially interested in areas like agriculture, weather and macroeconomics, where we are getting far better at finding ways to identify interesting and important data before it comes out to bite us. For the longest time, this has been a highly marginalized area. Part of the problem was our inability to extract signal from noise in big, messy, real-time datasets in order to describe what was happening in the economic world. But we’re finally seeing a confluence of computing power, data availability, algorithmic improvements, and visualization techniques that are allowing us to do some pretty useful and important things.

What technologies do you think are overhyped?
Social media. I think we overestimate its importance while underestimating some of the schismatic effects it has on us by allowing people to create their own little self-reinforcing communities. These communities aren’t particularly functional from a societal standpoint of allowing us to have common interests or some shared set of beliefs. Strangely, for all these wonderful things social media can do, it can also be greatly limiting. With social media, it’s easy to never see anything other than the things that reinforce your perspective. It’s easier than ever to live inside of an echo chamber of unified people who do things the same way you do, and you’d never know that there’s anything else out there. I think treating social media as if it were some sort of unallied force for societal cohesion is just kidding ourselves, as I think it’s actually leading to much more dysfunctional places than the utopians out there might believe. Frankly I find most of it very disappointing.

{ Paul Kedrosky interviewed by Josh Wolfe | Forbes/Wolfe Weekly Insider Newsletter, May 14, 2010 }

ideas, technology | May 14th, 2010