We seem to be in an interesting time where everyone is casting around looking for the next "big" idea, regardless of whether it works, and as a result the only way to do useful "small" ideas that work is to fund them yourself or get ordinary, non-import people to help fund them (i.e. crowdfunding or ICOs). All the attention is on flying cars, self-driving cars, killer robots, alternative currencies, artificial intelligence, 600 mph vacuum transportation, and missions to Mars.
The last time I can think of when the tech landscape looked like this was the early 90s, when everybody was hung up on artificial intelligence, pocket computing, handwriting recognition, voice recognition, WebTV, 3D graphics, and virtual reality. We ended up getting many of those, 15 years later, but the real huge story of the decade was the WWW, which was really unimpressive when it first came out (I remember comparing it unfavorably to Gopher in 1993; Gopher at least was semi-organized).
The WWW overshadowed everything else because the problem it was solving - which many people didn't know they had - was more universal than the problems solved by any other technologies that had just entered the market, and its solution was just barely viable enough to solve that problem. Meanwhile, the tech for many of the other much hotter problems of the time was 15-20 years out; they couldn't actually be solved by the processing power available in 1992. I wonder if there's a similar overlooked-but-universal problem that someone in a garage is working on now, that'll spark a new wave similar to the dot-com boom.
The last decade has produced very few significant technological jumps in my opinion. Electric vehicles have been around for over a century and the iterations on devices has been largely targeted toward better cameras so people can take selfies to post on the ubiquitous social networks.
The mRNA technology is interesting but unproven as we are seeing with the relative ineffectiveness of the Covid vaccines.
Software technology has been largely focused on new iterations of web frameworks and languages that target the young developers du jour who think that 5 year old frameworks are old school.
Mainly, small iterations of the same stuff is what has been dominating the technology space the last decade. My guess is that we are poised for some interesting new technologies, since it has been a largely ho-hum period for the last decade.
If only the efforts could be focused more toward actually making our lives better instead of focusing only on scraping our lives and diverting our eyes for the benefit of mega tech corporations and their wannabe startups.
20 years ago. 8/10/2001. There were no smart phones. 9/11 hadn't happened, so no endless wars in the ME or patriot act stuff. No social networks (friendster? maybe? Lipstick and Cigarettes?) Ray tracing a 640x480 scene with a few thousand polygons and some reflections on a home computer took half a day or so.
We've gotten a bit better at generating renewable energy, and a lot better at energy storage, data storage, processing power, but those are just annual, incremental changes. Whereas post-WWII there was tons of amazing tech from the war that entered civilian life (passenger jets, general purpose computers, nuclear energy and medicine, space exploration), all the new breakthrough tech in the "war on terror" period of the last 20 years has been from the realm of surveillance and population control. There's a lot of promising new tech out there, but very little I've seen since 2001 that's genuinely new. I guess CRISPR would be the biggest and most promising actual breakthrough (and I'd put mRNA vaccines in that category). But in some ways it's clear we reached our creative peak when we landed on the moon. Most new ideas now are just rehashes of old ideas, serving as vehicles to raise investment and sell garbage faster and more efficiently, retreaded to be a little faster and more efficient as if that alone was enough to "disrupt" something.
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?
I was just thinking the other day that we're in (or are at least entering) a slightly sad era as far as tech is concerned. Not too long ago (it feels, anyway) there was this explosion of possibilities when smartphones arrived on the scene. People were doing genuinely impressive and innovative things at a fair clip.
That's kind of dried up now. The latest iterations of smartphones are just minor progressions on previous models. Supposed new frontiers (AR/VR, self driving cars) have largely disappointed. The problems (the real problems) we face today like climate change, growing income inequality, stagnating public transit, aren't really solvable by most of us in tech. In fact, in retrospect I wonder how many problems we were really solving anyway (is Uber just a giant VC investment bubble? Will we look back on it as a distraction from improving public transit?)
...so yeah, I dunno. Feels like we're in a fallow year or few. It's not that problems aren't solvable, it's that they will take wide scale activism and a great deal of human work. A new API or tool isn't going to cut it.
Based of this thread it looks like people were a lot more hopeful about the future 10 years ago than they are today. Back then smart phones were new, the AI winter looked like it was over, Google had just started testing self driving cars etc.
But today, Google is still working on the same self driving cars, we are still using smart phones as our main handheld device, and while the AI breakthroughs gave us chatbots and face recognition it hasn't made much progress since.
So to me it seems like the exciting years are over as the last decade was probably the least exciting technology wise for a very long time. I'd say we'll need a huge fundamental breakthrough for the next decade to not become even less exciting.
Actually, any technology designed to be useful after 10, 20 years is pretty impressive in our times. Which is pretty scary, if you ask me.
I've meant for quite some time to write an article about the fragility of human technological innovation.
Here are some examples that I can think of:
- I think I read about this case in a computer magazine: when the personal computers just started to be available they scanned and recorded in the digital form some ancient holy book so that it will be better preserved in digital form from then on. The year was 1982 maybe, the computer platform was not the one that would become mainstream and the recording media was some kind of digital laserdisc I think. The irony is, some 20 years later they had a really big trouble finding the computer to read the data back. (this is from my memory, can't find the source)
- Web platform once considered cutting edge (Macromedia/Adobe Shockwave), cannot run on modern operating systems (Linux) 15 years later. No replacement or emulation solution in sight; users depending on it are left in the cold.
- Geocities was shut down on short notice, with no exit strategy for its users 10 years after being bought for $3.5 billion
- Belt-clippable, battery-operated mp3 players like iRiver T10 (an achievement of its own, if you ask me) are nowhere to be found 5 years after they appeared (appeared ~2003, obsolete in 2008)
In my eyes this kind of feels like another sign that things have stagnated in tech (on the fundamental innovations front, not the 'people are doing things' front). There was a massive explosion of thing happening a decade ago but today not so much, even to the point that you can get away with using years old tools without really much disadvantage.
I assume most stuff you mentioned fizzled out because there wasn't a viable business model (small number of adopters, high cost manufacturing, etc) and patents. Just look at 3d printers - been around since the 80s but the advances in computer size and being common coupled with expired patents makes it viable today.
Could just be where we are in the technology cycle. Using Carlota Perez terminology, in 2010 we were in the midst of Synergy for web technology and Frenzy for mobile. Now both web & mobile are nearing Maturity and whatever the next big technology cycle is still in Irruption.
If you looked at PCs from 1993-2003 you would've had a similar view. PCs from 1983-1993 underwent dramatic progress: you went from 16-color TV outputs, 64K of RAM, 8-bit CPUs, floppies, command-line interfaces, and BASIC to 24-bit color, 3D computer graphics, GUIs, 16MB of RAM, 200+ MB hard disks, 32-bit CPUs, IDEs, desktop publishing, CD-ROMs, modems and Internet access, even speech recognition and text-to-speech on some Apple machines. From 1993-2003, you had incremental progress: Microsoft won, Windows 3.1 became Win95 and then eventually Win2k, CPUs got faster, RAM and disks expanded, broadband happened, but what we used the computer for didn't change much, except for the advent of the Internet. The Internet itself was supposed to revolutionize computing, but the dot-com bust happened in 2001 and in 2003 it was still pretty much a toy. And other much-hyped developments like WebTV, VR, voice recognition, and AI had fallen flat.
There are plenty of toys that are still in Irruption now. Cryptocurrency was supposed to change the world; the bubble burst in 2018, but maybe we'll see it come back in 2020 with DeFi the way the Internet did in 2005 with social media. Drones are literal toys right now. So is VR & AR. There's been a lot of progress in computing for kids with things like Scratch, RoBlox, or Minecraft.
Strange, because for me, the stark contrast between the 90s and 2000s is unmistakeable. After the dot bomb and 9/11, the political climate in America went dark and that's also something that's never recovered.
America decided to double down on neoliberalism with the war on terror, so we've had endless bizarre legislation like the DMCA and PATRIOT act coinciding with our exploitation of developing countries and fear of the other. But we've only had a handful of the really important innovations like blue LEDs, lithium iron phosphate batteries, and enough Moore's Law to miniaturize computers into smart phones. We needed moonshots for stuff like cheap solar panels and mRNA vaccines a long time ago. We needed pure research that we didn't have. Yes we have these things today, but to me, having to wait around seemingly forever for them when we had the technology for this stuff in the 1980s, that looks like 20-40 years of unnecessary suffering.
For example, academia warned about the dangers of GMO foods and unpredictable side effects like autoimmune disease. Nobody ever listens or cares. Nobody cared when they warned about global warming or leaded gasoline either. But I am hopeful that this prolonged period of anti-intellectualism is finally ending and maybe the people standing in the way of progress are finally retiring. I've largely given up on real innovation from the tech world, so I've got my attention fixed on solarpunk now.
Yes, but between 1995 and 2005 was a decade when everyone seemed to think that "tomorow we'll wake up, in a different, better, world". And they had inventions to back up that feeling. I don't know anyone who feels that way now, and I don't seem the inventions to back up such a feeling if it were to be felt. And the beleif at the time, was, that we would see growth in inventiveness as tech improved, it would enable more tech.
I cut my teeth on this kind of thing 25 years ago...it's the stuff that makes the world go around, but gets shuffled off to the back corners of the tech world. Way more interesting and nuanced than it gets credit. So many problems that were solved decades ago that have been forgotten as the world perpetually reinvents the wheel.
One problem about technology development is scaling too early.
The transistor, integrated circuit, surface mounted component robotic pick and place machine, laser and fiber optics. In the software world, countless of ideas. Open source too. Whole generations of software developers. All those were needed for the information age, not just throwing money to scale up Sage or Sabre or VAX or anything.
I agree to a certain extent. I don't expect to see any mind-blowing innovations on the Internet until bandwidth constraints dissipate, but that definitely doesn't mean it's dead.
Think about the automobile. Fundamentally, it hasn't changed since the Model T. However, there have been many incremental improvements that have made a significant impact on our lives (A/C, seat belts, power-steering/brakes, GPS, auto-parking).
In about 20 years, the technology they're working on right now at Stanford for the DARPA Challenge will be commercialized and cars will drive themselves. That will be mind-blowing.
Hopefully we'll see something game-changing on the net sooner rather than later.
So much of the discussion seems to be along the lines of “yeah it’s broken now, but it’s just the start, it’ll get better”
I can list so many things that were hyped up the same way 10 years ago that still aren’t revolutionising the world today.
Maybe it will get super good really fast. Or maybe it’s the next self driving trucks or 3D tv where solving the last of the problems is much harder than the first 90%.
This may be why it seems like it's harder to find new ideas now. It was relatively easy during the waves of "do X on a computer", "do X on the Web", and "do X on a phone", but now we're waiting on the next transformative idea that will allow everything old to be reinvented again.
The last time I can think of when the tech landscape looked like this was the early 90s, when everybody was hung up on artificial intelligence, pocket computing, handwriting recognition, voice recognition, WebTV, 3D graphics, and virtual reality. We ended up getting many of those, 15 years later, but the real huge story of the decade was the WWW, which was really unimpressive when it first came out (I remember comparing it unfavorably to Gopher in 1993; Gopher at least was semi-organized).
The WWW overshadowed everything else because the problem it was solving - which many people didn't know they had - was more universal than the problems solved by any other technologies that had just entered the market, and its solution was just barely viable enough to solve that problem. Meanwhile, the tech for many of the other much hotter problems of the time was 15-20 years out; they couldn't actually be solved by the processing power available in 1992. I wonder if there's a similar overlooked-but-universal problem that someone in a garage is working on now, that'll spark a new wave similar to the dot-com boom.
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