Last week I gave a talk at SXSW 2013 in Austin about some of the things I’m thinking about these days—including quite a few that I’ve never talked publicly about before. Here’s a video, and a slightly edited transcript:

Well, this is a pretty exciting time for me. Because it turns out that a whole bunch of things that I’ve been working on for more than 30 years are all finally converging, in a very nice way. And what I’d like to do here today is tell you a bit about that, and about some things I’ve figured out recently—and about what it all means for our future.

This is going to be a bit of a wild talk in some ways. It’s going to go from pretty intellectual stuff about basic science and so on, to some really practical technology developments, with a few sneak peeks at things I’ve never shown before.

Let’s start from some science. And you know, a lot of what I’ll say today connects back to what I thought at first was a small discovery that I made about 30 years ago. Let me tell you the story.

I started out at a pretty young age as a physicist. Diligently doing physics pretty much the way it had been done for 300 years. Starting from this-or-that equation, and then doing the math to figure out predictions from it. That worked pretty well in some cases. But there were too many cases where it just didn’t work. So I got to wondering whether there might be some alternative; a different approach. Continue reading