At GMIC today, I stumbled across a rather interesting thought. At a panel on ‘Connected Cars’, the speakers threw around the idea that software companies will rule the car industry of tomorrow. As a matter of fact, cars that are being developed today already run on hundreds of thousand lines of code. Creating that kind of code is no pass-time hobby – we’re talking serious software here. To make the point, let me quote one of the panelists: “Tesla is a software company that makes cars.”
Tomorrow will be all about code. This idea has been accepted as a fact by many people already. Certainly, this is why Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and other luminaries are pushing for more coding education. But what strikes me as new, is the concept that innovation and creation will shift more and more into an abstract, algorithmic space. Resources on the planet are starting to tighten up. We might soon be facing the stringent need to innovate in a non-material, non-physical context. We’re talking about robots taking over. The purest definition of a robot is ‘sensor-actuator pairing’. For any given sensor-actuator pairing you can create an infinite number of software variants. So to be just a tad provocative, pro-argumentative, I’d like to say that it all boils down to the code.
Next generation’s thought leaders will be software experts. The ones who manipulate the forces of the universe in N-dimensional space. The ones who recognize algorithmic creativity. The ones who know how to exploit numerical beauty. The ones who summarize Big Data at a glance. The ones who have two homes, the physical, the virtual.