TR Editors' blog

Hackers Are the Future

If you want to spot the next big trend, keep an eye on the F.

Erica Naone 09/15/2008

  • 3 Comments

"Hackers are a great predictor of the future," Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media, said last week at Ignite 4 in Boston. By this, O'Reilly means those who enjoy experimenting with, or "hacking," software and hardware, rather than computer criminals. "I was at the Tech Crunch 50 on Tuesday," O'Reilly said, "and I thought, 'Startups aren't where it's at.'" Instead, he said, the most important projects are being developed by people who are working on new technologies for the sheer enjoyment of it.

O'Reilly gave a keynote at the Hooley House in downtown Boston; his address was sandwiched between two sets of five-minute talks on subjects ranging from simulating natural life to providing computing power for terabytes of data produced by major telescopes. He backed up his statement by pointing to a few examples: programmers who remixed data from different websites well before Web companies started offering similar applications and services, and the community wireless networks created long before Wi-Fi was a common feature in coffee shops and homes.

As for current activities that might make the mainstream in the future, O'Reilly's money is on hardware hacking and collective intelligence. He pointed to projects like the Quake Catcher Network, which uses standard laptop sensors to detect earthquakes. "This is a very different future in which all of these applications are being driven by sensors," O'Reilly said. "We are moving out of the world in which people typing on keyboards will drive collective intelligence applications."

The talk finished with a call to apply such technologies to the more serious problems facing the world, such as those presented by climate change. To emphasize his point, he quoted Rainer Maria Rilke's "The Man Watching," which concludes, "Winning does not tempt that man. / This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, / by constantly greater beings."

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phoenix

172 Comments

  • 1240 Days Ago
  • 09/16/2008

faute de mieux

If society, and life itself for that matter, always move toward that far unseen shore of discovery, then it is the process of extrapolation, that immeasurably small dance of creation, which propels it ever forward to the bigger breakthroughs. We now live, thankfully, in a world where innovative ideas, regardless of their origin, are rewarded instead of being suppressed as they were in the past. Here's a good illustration of what I'm talking about.
Medieval notions quite often laid waste brilliant discoveries that were stated in haste,
But the world is round one cried while in a heretics fire he fried,
For his theories were just not in good taste.

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bullsoft

1 Comment

  • 900 Days Ago
  • 08/22/2009

Hackers Are the Future

Hackers are the future!!!
Very rightly said Erica...
Hacking can be used in both way either for good or evil...
That why there is a term of ethical hacking that makes you enabled desgined such a secure system to prevent unauthorizaed access from eveyone like spammers, terrorism and any other eviles.

so if we wants to have a better system we must used hacking in a ethical manner. because presently we do almost 90% of our activity on computer system so it must be secure..and for that we must have the methdology that helps us to make it that way..hence for "Hackers Are the Future".

Todd Miller
Tech Lead
RecoveryBull Software

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Xenev

1 Comment

  • 122 Days Ago
  • 10/09/2011

Re: Hackers Are the Future

Depends whom you call "hackers".
I agree that people who are interested in technology by itself and hacking to understand things better are doing the progress, but from another side when hackers just want to do a damage it's definitely not good!

Denis Xenev, Manager at Data Recovery

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