ETech 2009: 'You don't know the future, but you can rise to meet it,' says Tim O'Reilly

Day zero of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference – ETech – has just ended, and so far, so good, so quiet. The preamble to the main event consisted of a full slate of workshops and DIY hackathons, which proved fun for attendees. Among the workshops that went down particularly well: a build-your-own online maps tutorial from Stamen; MIT's stitch-and-bitch on wearable computing, and Rob Faludi's session on building wireless, social objects.

But there's no denying that the atmosphere so far has been quite low key - one regular attendee told me that he'd "never seen it this quiet before. Perhaps it's the result of the recession, the decision to move things from San Diego to San Jose, or simply because the programme isn't in full swing yet.

In any case, it can't particularly please Tim O'Reilly, the techno-publishing maven whose company puts on the event (and calls it their most important conference)… but tomorrow is another day.

Still, to welcome everyone into the fold, O'Reilly (who, for the uninitiated, he unleashed the phrase "web 2.0" on the world)
took the stage for a talk about why he thought ETech matters now.

He begins by reiterating his argument that technologists need to start doing things that have genuine benefits – not just creating mindless Facebook apps (or "throwing sheep" as he puts it).

"There's a certain way that the technology industry, particularly in its focus on consumer electronics, was missing something," he says. "It was focusing on consumption, on advertising, on selling people things that they don't really need."

"When I urged people in the technology world to think deeply about what matters. A lot of people thought I was saying to work on non-profits, or maybe social ventures. But I don't think we should relegate what's important to the world of non-profits. We need to reinvent our world so that we see working on stuff that matters as the heart of opportunity. The world's great challenges are also the world's great opportunities."

He goes through to list a few examples of what he means by that: Shai Agassi's Better Place, which doesn't just want people to build electric cars – he wants them to be able to use them wherever they go.

"He may not succeed, but that's OK. He's tackling something that's really great, and going at it really strategically."

Along the way he refers to 1366 Technologies – which wants to make solar energy cheaper than coal – and Makani Power, founded by his son-in-law Saul Griffith, which is working on high-altitude wind energy.

"One of the guys there, Jim McBride, worked on Wall Street as a quant, but came there because he said the math was harder," says O'Reilly. "I love those stories of people picking something to do, not because they're going to get rich but because it's hard."

He moves onto the story of Brewster Kahle, the curator of archive.org – the library of the web – and Carl Malamud, who has been running a campaign for the last decade to get public data online (sounds familiar).

"What seemed quixotic has now become part of the platform of the man who's become the next president of the United States. That man picks someone as his CIO somebody who's trying to pick out Carl's vision [meaning Vivek Kundra]"

"Don't be afraid to dream big," he says.

O'Reilly then points out that he's just spent the past couple of weeks in Washington, and wants to share some of that; to explain why they're running a new conference Government 2.0 in DC in the autumn.

"We have the idea of the government as this oppressive entity that we want to keep at a distant, but I was amazed by how committed those people in Washington are," he says. "There are also these amazing problems of this antiquated machine."

"We need to give all of our support to the people who have the courage to fight the battle and cut that Gordian knots that have built up over hundreds of years in Washington."

"I think we have about two years to really make a difference. If we don't make progress in that time, people will start to run against him on those issues because they didn't work."

He mentions that we should begin taking the long view; looking at multigenerational problems, and understanding

"You set things in motion, and then you go to meet up with them 20 or 30 years later. It helped me set up my company; setting things in motion for a future that I didn't quite understand yet. You don't know the future, but you can rise to meet it – even a very distant goal."

"We don't care about time," he adds. "Many of our problems have crept up on us because we're living the present in a way we should not be. We should be taking the long view of where we are and what we're doing."

O'Reilly goes on a little trip through the world of scenario planning: wondering whether our current models of the future are enough.

"What you're trying to develop are robust strategies that will help you through any of these scenarios. What are the things that will be good regardless?"

"I urge you to think: what are the extremes that can happen to the things I care about – and what are the things I can do? It's really a game of choose your own adventure. Find a place where you can make a difference – and make it count."

And here we come with the takeaway points:

1. Work on something that matters to you more than money.

Be prepared to do something great, flame out and then move on, he says, then uses the analogy of a road trip: you need to keep an eye on the gas tank (your finances), but we're not going on a tour of gas stations.

2. Think about how to create more value than you capture

There were people who knew that Ponzi-scheming Wall Street mogul Bernie Madoff was up to something, but they didn't voice their concerns because they wanted to capture the value anyway. This recession is due to the fact that the pressure of greed became systemic – a human pathology that went awry, an illness that we're all suffering from now.

3. Build a simple system – let it evolve.

The first IBM PC was open, people continued to build on it. The early world wide web – Tim Berners Lee defined a few simple rules, and people came and built on that. We're seeing that today on Twitter, for example.

4. Be friendly to those who extend you.

My whole career is taking what I've learned and saying look at this! I spend my time doing that in publishing, I spend my time doing that at conferences. Changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.

So. If you've made it to the bottom, well done. Tomorrow we're going to be blogging from some of the sessions: including former One Laptop Per Child guru Mary Lou Jepsen, Chumby Industries Bunnie Hwang and researchers from MIT, NYU and elsewhere.