I was driving by a “WAYMO” car the other day (Google’s spinout autonomous vehicle), and I was trying to explain to my wife that Cruise Automation has rolled out driverless cars in San Francisco successfully. WAYMO still has a driver in the drivers seat just in case something goes wrong.

Yesterday I showed ChatGPT to my 8 year old to see if she would interact with it in any specific way immediately.

This morning I woke up at 5am PST in order to witness the SpaceX Starship launch which will be the most powerful rocket launch in history, unfortunately it was scrubbed at the last minute. It is still incredibly impressive that they got to 5 minutes before the launch.

Deep Technology is ubiquitous. The advancements of the last 20 years all seem to be hitting the world at the same time, and it’s amazing how casually we can talk about these things that 30 years ago might have been insane to even imagine.

My children are going to wake up in a world where there is an assumed conversation with machines, and space travel will be a part of every day life. For some reason this makes me think about something there’s no name for other than “Relativity.”

To digress for a moment - I’m a fairly competent tennis player, and have practiced an insane amount of time to be capable of hitting a hard serve. At my peak, I was capable of hitting a 125mph serve accurately. People who play tennis or watch tennis will know that’s pretty hard. People outside of tennis, will know that’s pretty fast for any sport in general, but if younger kids (or my kids) watch me serve a ball that goes 125mph, they will not be impressed in the least because they have limited reference points on what that means. They can’t relate that to being impressive or not impressive. It’s just how the world works. It’s also possible that my kids just can’t fathom their Dad doing something impressive.

The normalization of technology seems to work similarly - Where the novelty of an autonomous car to me is like magic, or a rocket taking off repeatedly is like wizardry, to this next generation it will be normal. It’s just how the world works.

It’s interesting to think about what difficult projects were built each generation that the next generation took for granted yet also appreciate their existence: Roads, Computers, Airplanes.

I’m excited for what is to come, and what amazing things will be normalized in the coming decades!

*Originally published on Adam’s Substack - https://www.adamdraper.vc/

Deep Tech Relativity.