Jobs of the Future, Harnessing Earth Observation, & Gaming Tech Advances
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What is the opening hook that frames the episode’s discussion of rapid tech change?
How do companies take the magic that happened when we all got up at 5 AM and watched SpaceX catch a massive multi-story rocket with chopsticks? Yeah.
Terabytes and terabytes come down from orbit every single day. Soon to be probably petabytes.
We're talking about job creation for a whole class of folks that don't necessarily need a degree to participate.
All the technology exists today to have that experience in an amazing intuitive way, and yet it doesn't exist.
What is the next generation water treatment engineer look like? It's someone that knows their way around the robot.
In a matter of days, we'll say goodbye to 2024 and start 2025. It's hard to believe. It's been 25 years since Y2K, 21 years since Facebook was founded, and even nearly 10 years since OpenAI was brought to life. So if it feels like things are moving quickly, you're not alone. That's why every year we ask our partners who are meeting every day with the people building our future what they think is in store for the following year. Last year we predicted
A new age of maritime exploration, programming medicine's final frontier. AI first schemes that never end
democratizing miracle drugs. And on deck this year, we'll be exploring.
Infrastructure independence and hypercenters.
Super staffing for healthcare. Regulation will become code. And throughout this four-part series, you'll hear from all over A16Z, including American dynamism, healthcare, fintech, games, and more. However, if you'd like to see the full list of fifty big ideas, head on over to a16nc.com slash big ideas. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16c.com slash disclosures.
Today we focus on the increasingly interesting intersection of hardware and software.
Up first? We're seeing a renaissance in technical disciplines that cross the hardware-software chasm. The robots are coming. Someone will have to build, train, and service them. That was Aaron Price Wright, a general partner on the American Dynamism team. And here's Aaron's big idea. In the 2000s and 2010s, if you weren't coding, it seemed like you'd get left behind. The number of computer science majors exploded while degree programs like mechanical engineering and electrical engineering shrunk on a relative basis. Now we're beginning to see a crucial shift amid the push to reshore manufacturing, the mass retirement of skilled workers across unsexy industries like water treatment, commercial HVAC, and oil and gas, and the rise of autonomy across defense, enterprise, and consumer applications.
People are building physical things again. It's really exciting to see. And that's gonna require this full stack skill set of people who can cross the hardware software chasm. So I think we've really seen over the last two decades a mass migration of engineers to the software and computer industry. And what I think we're gonna see is huge demand for engineers in areas like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, controls engineering. are gonna be in really high demand over the coming year as industries from defense to industrials Manufacturing, even things like HVAC and water treatment are looking for people that are really ready to wrestle with and bring AI software into these really complex hardware contexts.
Over the last few decades, we have seen a lot of people migrate to software, and now maybe we're seeing a shift. Can you speak to the macro trends that are really underpinning that?
I think the last 20 to 25 years has really been the software is eating the world, not to steal our own tagline, but it's really true. Most of the growth in the economy came from the software industry. So, with first the rise of software as a service, and then more recently, the kind of explosion of AI, the skill sets that have really been in demand have been software focused.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the opening hook that frames the episode’s discussion of rapid tech change?
0:00–11:58
2
How are robots and full‑stack engineers driving a new industrial renaissance?
11:58–15:15
3
Why is there a growing demand for engineers who can bridge hardware and software?
15:15–26:58
4
What education and training models are needed to create the next generation of full‑stack engineers?
26:58–41:52
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The a16z Show
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