Technlogy laws about people

Roy Amara was an American futurologist who stated: “People overestimate the effect of a certain technology in the short term, but they underestimate the effect of that technology in the long term”. An example. After the first seven years of the Human Genome Project, only 1 percent of human genes had been analyzed. The costs were sky-high and the project was budgeted for fifteen years. One percent of DNA analyzed after seven years would mean that it would take another seven centuries before all human DNA material had been analyzed. In short, wouldn't it be better to leave the Human Genome Project as it was? Another American futurologist, Ray Kurzweil, thought otherwise. He applied exponentiality and predicted that the Human Genome Project was already halfway. And indeed, after another seven years, the Project was finished and all human DNA material analyzed. The lesson: as humans, we are trained to predict linearly. 5 percent more turnover every year. With this traffic jam you will be in Amsterdam in 40 minutes. If I save 500 euros every month I can buy Y in X years. As humans, we are not trained to predict exponentials. Hence: the Law of Amara. July 18.

Computing power, storage capacity, bandwidth are examples of exponentiality in hardware. In addition, there is also exponentiality in humans: so-called 'network effects'. Robert Metcalfe is one of the inventors of the Ethernet protocol (that wider plug in your laptop if you want to access the internet wired). He is also known for his Law of Metcalfe: “The value of a network increases squarely with the number of connected members”. In itself, there is everything to be said for doing your private messaging with Threema (more privacy) or Viber (more compatible with a wider variety of phones), but because everyone has WhatsApp, you use the latter. That's why the word "apping" is commonplace and no one is talking about "threema-ing" or "viber-ing". The sooner you get to July 18, the more likely you are to scale up and the more you can leverage network effects.