Sure, but that's not technological innovation, but mere gradual evolution. Things were moving a lot faster in the nineties and the oughts. I think most people who remember the advances in computing in the nineties feel that we're in a technological slump. We hoped that with more people going into computing things would speed up, but that hasn't happened. That's not necessarily anyone's fault, though. Maybe the low-hanging fruit had already been picked.
I can remember the early 90s. I think the feeling then was very similar.
We had a number of technologies that were cool, but didn't work right. Think WebTV, PDAs, speech recognition, OCR, virtual reality. We also had continual evolution in the price/performance of PCs. I remember all the IBM clones - seemingly a new vendor was popping up every couple months, and they all had dozens of models available. Even Apple was drowning in continuous, gradual improvements - this is when they numbered all of their products. Remember the Centris 660AV, Powerbook 520/c, or Power Macintosh 9500?
I think we're seeing the same effect now. Existing technologies are being gradually refined. The price of cloud computing is falling through the floor. Those industries where the building-blocks are open (notably web startups & mobile apps) face a deluge of small-time competitors. Those where it's closed (search, mobile OSes, hardware) face a number of small incremental improvements. And on the horizon you have a number of exciting technologies that are far away from commercialization (SpaceX, self-driving cars, Bitcoin, 3D printing, wearables, VR...still).
I bet that the next big thing is being worked on in someone's garage or living room right now, and it's probably nothing we've heard of. The WWW came out of nowhere in 1995. Except it didn't - it built on TCP/IP (1973), DNS (1983), the personal computer (1975), and graphical user interfaces (1984).
If you read Kuhn, he describes the history of science as long periods of gradual refinement of theories ("normal science"), punctuated by overthrows of the established scientific consensus ("paradigm shifts"). Tech is much the same. It's been a long time since we had a paradigm shift, but that doesn't mean that it'll never happen again. Rather, it may mean that there's fertile ground for one to happen now.
The one caution is that very often, paradigm shifts don't look like paradigm shifts to people inside the old order. They look like trivial toys, because they grow out of small experiments within the existing paradigm. Scientifically, it usually takes a whole generation for new paradigms to take root, because the old guard of existing scientists never considers them important - they have to die off before the new paradigm replaces the old. The same thing happened with webapps - old-school mainframe and desktop programmers considered them trivial toys - and it may be happening with mobile. So, something for all the folks on HN who say there's been no technological progress - has there actually been none, or are we just the dinosaurs who're out of touch with what kids these days are using?
Maybe technology is both exciting and disappointing. And maybe we are dinosaurs, but I can tell you this: my grandparents were really impressed with PCs, cellphones and the internet; Snapchat -- not so much :)
Even if you're 100% right, I think it's safe to say that there's certainly no more innovation today than a decade ago; or two, or five. This is what makes the new SV religion so fascinating.
Agreed, and I think a lot of early adopters ignore this. Creating the technology itself is a milestone, yes, but so is advancing it to the point where it's appealing to and digestible by the masses.
My mom recently created a WhatsApp chat for our family using her Android phone, and now I keep in touch with her a lot more easily and often than I would have otherwise. That would've been unimaginable to me a decade ago.
Unimaginable? You couldn't have set up an email account for her? I'm not saying more accessible communication is not good but the unimaginable part is a bit of stretch.
Yeah, it's hyperbole. I could've imagined it, but I wouldn't have predicted that she'd ever start using that kind of tech. For the record, she's been using email forever. There used to be a huge gap between "using email" and "chatting online".
Then maybe you should elaborate on that a bit because your post doesn't mention any of that. I'm also curious what emergent behavior you're talking about. When I look around I don't see any kind of qualitative difference in the kinds of things people do with technology. The tinkerers and hackers are still doing what they were doing from the time general purpose computers and networks became widely available and the rest of the population is still using them as convenient application platforms.
I did. I noticed it was a lot of high-class socialites using Uber to get around to their social events. Some golden nuggets from the article itself
> on weekends, preppily dressed crowds wait patiently for sandwiches from Eggslut.
> At the Mandrake, a bar he co-owns near Culver City, customers may be more likely to order a third cocktail when they know they can be whisked home safely; he certainly is.
> A night out in Los Angeles used to involve negotiating parking, beating traffic and picking a designated driver. Excursions from one end to the other — say, from the oceanfront city of Santa Monica to the trendy Silver Lake neighborhood on the eastern side — had to be planned and timed with military precision, lest they spiral into a three-hour commute. More often than not, they were simply avoided.
> On a recent night, she bounced from drinks at the Ace to dinner at a Roy Choi hot spot in nearby Koreatown then more drinks at a new bar in West Hollywood. “I can just, like, YOLO with Uber,” she said.
> Still, the fares can add up. Ms. Schoenhals, co-author of the satirical novel “White Girl Problems,” based on the popular Twitter account, subsidizes her Uber habit in digital-age fashion. The company offers credit to people who sign up new riders, so she gives out promotional codes to her 812,000 Twitter followers. “I just keep riding Uber for free,” she said gleefully.
None of that remotely qualifies as emergent behavior of any kind.
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