It's an uphill battle for an individual to catch on to these advances. I try to focus on two strategies, one of which you've mentioned which is to just "be aware" by reading, following twitter feeds etc. awareness of whats out there is a starting block. once you become aware of something you need to evaluate its potential for success. Ex. read an article on Bitcoin in 2010, is Bitcoin something that will be valuable going forward? Institutions can manipulate value through repression, over-buying, over-selling etc. Individuals can increase their odds through a form of higher-level thinking. Ex. relating a product to human values and attempting to place it on a futuristic timeline. Now, for an actionable example...
3D body imaging - lots of focus and investment around 3D printing to create concrete objects, however I am more excited with the scanning portion and the virtual representation possibilities of this technology. See Google's Tango project, or PrimeSense out of Israel. Now imagine the possibilities of having a 3D representation of your body and potentially the world around you. you could easily:
Track your BMI and your physical features (athletics, vanity, health) Try on clothing virtually (fashion, performance) Use your own body for online gaming avatar Virtual dating The list goes on and on..
Why would the above be successful? Because it decreases the cost of being inaccurate. (time, money, morale)
Now think about the value of the data to corporations that would exist from having information on everyones body size and type, the value would then compound the more they use the product to purchase new clothes, products, etc.
$$$$$
But then the follow-on to this, supposing one thinks that 3d body imaging is going to be big -- which I think is not an unreasonable guess -- is, how does one buy financial exposure to this technology?
In early 2000, I registered my personal domain name weidai.com, along with a couple others, because I was worried that the small (sole-proprietor) ISP I was using would go out of business one day and break all the links on the web to the articles and software that I had published on my "home page" under its domain. Several years ago I started getting offers, asking me to sell the domain, and now they're coming in almost every day. A couple of days ago I saw the first six figure offer ($100,000).
In early 2009, someone named Satoshi Nakamoto emailed me personally with an announcement that he had published version 0.1 of Bitcoin. I didn't pay much attention at the time (I was more interested in Less Wrong than Cypherpunks at that point), but then in early 2011 I saw a LW article about Bitcoin, which prompted me to start mining it. I wrote at the time, "thanks to the discussion you started, I bought a Radeon 5870 and started mining myself, since it looks likely that I can at least break even on the cost of the card." That approximately $200 investment (plus maybe another $100 in electricity) is also worth around six figures today.
Clearly, technological advances can sometimes create gold rush-like situations (i.e., first-come-first-serve opportunities to make truly extraordinary returns with minimal effort or qualifications). And it's possible to stumble into them without even trying. Which makes me think, maybe we should be trying? I mean, if only I had been looking for possible gold rushes, I could have registered a hundred domain names optimized for potential future value, rather than the few that I happened to personally need. Or I could have started mining Bitcoins a couple of years earlier and be a thousand times richer.
I wish I was already an experienced gold rush spotter, so I could explain how best to do it, but as indicated above, I participated in the ones that I did more or less by luck. Perhaps the first step is just to keep one's eyes open, and to keep in mind that tech-related gold rushes do happen from time to time and they are not impossibly difficult to find. What other ideas do people have? Are there other past examples of tech gold rushes besides the two that I mentioned? What might be some promising fields to look for them in the future?