For me the biggest example of all smoke with no fire has been the tablet. It surprises me how many people will argue with me about it. To me, it’s a classic example of consumers being persuaded that we need The New Thing. It’s midway between a phone and a laptop, and does neither thing well. But the hype, oh the hype. I taught in a school board that gave an IPad to every student. It went as you would expect.
My two cents: I don't give a fuck about AI but its less glamorous cousin language translate technology will change the world. Just the dumb old Google translate app is already good enough that you can communicate with anyone on earth. Yeah sometimes it mistranslates "street" into "horse" or whatever but then it's really funny when you try to suss mistranslations. There's also tech where you can attach a translator to your phone and it operates even without internet, but that's still too expensive.
This may be true (and I share your skepticism about a lot of this stuff, particularly VR) - but it also reminds me of discourse at the end of the 19th century:
- Philip Von Jolly, Planck's teacher, told him to not go into physics as "a highly developed, almost fully mature science which, now that the discovery of energy has crowned it, so to speak, will soon reach its final stability would have taken shape."
- The head of the US patent office wrote in 1902 "In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold."
Like I said, I'm skeptical about VR, AI, and so forth - but I'm more skeptical of promises of the end of history, or the end of technological growth. I think it's very tempting to look at something like space travel and say "a world where that happens is indistinguishable from a world where it doesn’t, for the average person." This isn't a new criticism of space travel; people have said this for the last 60 years. But communications satellites, GPS, etc. *have* been enormously significant inventions that have improved the lives of the average person, not just through direct use, but also through, e.g. allowing better automation of farm equipment which increases ag productivity.
I really love VR, but I can definitely see why other people don’t like it: there are few truly great games out there, and the wonkiness of wearing a headset and the need for enough space to use it make it a bit cumbersome to use regularly. Half Life: Alyx just isn’t enough to persuade the average gamer to buy in. Technology may be moving slower on truly life-changing applications and inventions, but so what? Living in the Big Boring is pretty damned interesting to me, and if it truly is the Forever Now, that makes me feel pretty good about things. Big change can mean big problems for small people, so maybe incremental change is the safe bet for the future.
This is a topic that a number of tech industry commentators, most notably including _Peter Thiel_ of all people, have been pushing on for a long time: revolutions in information technology, while nice, simply do not have the same level of impact as revolutions in the material world. Coal and steam power, the railroad, the assembly line -- these all had far more impact to everyday wealth and prosperity than the Internet ever will.
We're definitely seen a slowdown in innovation and change in the physical world. My understanding is people who study this see two big reasons for this:
1. We've simply run out of easy scientific advances and applications in the physical world; the low hanging fruit have all been plucked.
2. Changes to regulations, safetyism and a general aversion to changing the physical environment has made large scale improvements to the physical world much harder than previously.
My POV is that as a combination of 1 and 2, the _return on investment_ of innovation in physical devices is much lower than the ROI in software, and as a consequence our entire technology culture focuses exclusively on software. Everything else follows from that.
"I know I’m never going to convince most people that AI is not coming to rescue them from boredom and disappointment and let them live forever and bring back their beloved childhood dog Rusty and allow them to get kinky on the Holodeck. "
LOL. Well done.
I think homesteaders are going to be the new upper class by then end of this century. The global order started after WWII by the US and maintained by the US since then... the one that provided the world such marvelous advancement, peace and prosperity... the one that those same classroom kids and their older peers are demanding be expanded and destroyed at the same time... well it is coming to an end.
It is simply breathtaking the benefit and harm dichotomy of this common human tendency to always want more. My mother, God rest her soul, after being raised a poor country bumpkin that bought her clothing at Montgomery Wards and suffering a terrible first marriage with a man that could not keep a job, marries an enterprising second husband who provides an upper-class lifestyle for her. I remember her being so upset that her housekeeper was quitting (after all they had done for her) because she would have to do house work until she trained another. The poor housekeeping girl had to go back to Mexico to care for her sick mother. I remember being so disappointed in my mother at that point for becoming one of them. Thankfully it was only a temporary moment of her weakness... she was 95% above all the classism.
But everyone eventually has to rewrite the chapters of their life book to match their new reality. They eventually get pissed and resentful getting stuck in a chapter... they always want to turn the page. One problem is when their obsession to turn the page overwhelms their good judgement (they feel the need to do something different, and pick something bad). Another problem is that they forget the path they took to get where they are, and the lack of perspective makes them waste historical wisdom and thus repeat unnecessary mistakes.
I hire young people to work for me. I have been astounded that I have to teach them how to handle a cordless drill.... how to change a toilet paper role, and how to handle constructive criticism. Yes, they are witty, brilliant, educated and quick. They can communicate in binary semi-language and images with their peers in ways never seen before. But they are hugely ignorant in common sense and everyday life-skills. They are probably the least prepared generations for dealing with the coming collapse.
People will abandon themselves to tech. It will make every major decision for them, from when to change jobs to what to eat for dinner. There will be explicitly AI controlled cults where members pool their incomes and the machines divvy it up.
People will stop asking their phones for directions and instead start asking them for permission.
The literal tech won't have to progress much further than it already has. The main change will be how we think about it.
This is a reasonable argument about the current state of consumer tech—and your description of AI aligns broadly with what most actual AI engineers and researchers think (I touched on this a little yesterday in https://dansitu.substack.com/p/power-technology-and-love).
But most technology isn't consumer tech, it's boring stuff that makes other things work better. The "Green Revolution" was an accumulation of fairly boring incremental improvements to agriculture that happened over the course of the 20th Century. Together they produced an astonishing increase in yields, especially in the developing world, that has enabled literally billions of additional human lives.
The same dull incrementalism has borne multiple agricultural and industrial revolutions that have taken human beings from a tiny ecological niche to a space-faring species. And the pace of incremental improvement is increasing. Minor improvements in manufacturing yields, cost-reduction, and supply chain technologies really add up. At a fundamental level, technology IS incrementalism—and though things may seem flat from the perspective of a lifetime, we've been living on an ultra-steep gradient for the past few hundred years.
While I do think some amazing consumer tech is in the pipeline (https://dansitu.substack.com/p/furby-is-the-future-of-ai), consumer gadgets have always been pretty unimportant compared to our shunting around of matter and energy with ever-increasing skill.
"There is nothing at present that these systems can do that human being simply can’t."
Just to get this out of the way, even with the help of your big blue ox you can't fill hundreds of thousands of art commissions per minute. Just for the easiest and most obvious answer to this question.
As for the rest, there are things you probably want to read up on that are empowered by what spacex is doing and can have massive effects on life on earth.
1) starlink allowing people to access a network with no government controls, thus bypassing copyright laws or other content controls.
2) decreasing cost per pound to orbit will eventually allow economically viable asteroid mining. The amount of resources available in just the asteroid belt is so mind boggling that you can't even grasp how much you can't even grasp it. Imagine harvesting a rock and permanently crashing the price of gold. That's what is coming.
3) you can do some very dirty power generation in space and beam the power to earth. If you harvest the raw materials from asteroids it's even more viable. Pass certain breakpoints and it effectively becomes boundless energy so cheap it might as well be free. Making an expensive resource cheap upends everything (making bandwidth nearly free brought us the modern internet).
4) zero G research has been extremely limited. Space telescopes cost billions. Look at what jwst has done to cosmology. Now imagine access to space cheap enough that middle rich high schools can put a space telescope in orbit.
Stepping away from space, you mention CRISPR but don't seem to fully appreciate what we are looking at. With the increased access to cheap compute and now some AI assistants you'll be able to spend some money and mod your genes at home. This is going to be both amazing and horrific.
MRNA vaccines are a game changer too. With how easy they are to develop (the moderna vaccine they went with was ready in _days_, it just needed months of testing and approvals) and the confluence of AI and cheap biotech I guarantee you're going to see those upper crust crystal yoga mommies start bootleging their own vaccines, and other similar crazy stuff.
Probably one of the best use cases for AI will be curation. You can ask the AI to find cool shit you'll like. If it can't find anything, you can ask it to make something up. In a world with loneliness epidemics you'll have a computer bud who gets you and doesn't judge you and is always available. This also means you can practice social skills in a safe environment and be more comfortable when talking to real people.
And I'm just scratching the surface. What does small capacity public transit using driverless electric cars (powered by free infinite energy) do to the suburbs? Does that make them easier or harder to live in? Especially if the car can safely drive at 100mph in most weather? If you live as long as your affluence class, you'll know the answer before you die.
Read some old science fiction from the 50s-70s, before science fantasy started to take over. Niven, Brin, Pournelle, Heinlein. Check those out. That should kick start some ideas of what will be possible in just the next few years.
Tech could probably eliminate violent crime over the next few decades via better surveillance and forensics tech, but we’ll probably leave that set of innovations on the table
"I know I’m a pessimist but I genuinely can’t think of any actually plausible new capabilities that smartphones might have in three years that they don’t have now." I actually feel that this is wildly optimistic. Maybe once these shitty avenues for the expression of creativity have run out, people will explore deeper wells of creativity and value creation.
I don't see how this is solely an indictment of tech. What about humanity? If you want to blame something for our state of Forever Now, why not us?
The difference between the world of atoms and bits explains this responsibility. Technologies of atoms enter society as *forces* of energy and matter. Technologies of bits are are tools for *controlling* energy and matter. The constraint on atoms is the non-negotiable realities of our physical universe. The only constraint on bits is our imagination.
Other S-curves beyond the iPhone continue to cascade and compound: information, algorithms, and computation are all exponentially increasing in both power and accessibility. Yes, including AI. Whether these technologies of bits will lead to the revolutions we care about is up to us.
For me the biggest example of all smoke with no fire has been the tablet. It surprises me how many people will argue with me about it. To me, it’s a classic example of consumers being persuaded that we need The New Thing. It’s midway between a phone and a laptop, and does neither thing well. But the hype, oh the hype. I taught in a school board that gave an IPad to every student. It went as you would expect.
My two cents: I don't give a fuck about AI but its less glamorous cousin language translate technology will change the world. Just the dumb old Google translate app is already good enough that you can communicate with anyone on earth. Yeah sometimes it mistranslates "street" into "horse" or whatever but then it's really funny when you try to suss mistranslations. There's also tech where you can attach a translator to your phone and it operates even without internet, but that's still too expensive.
Wearables
What about fusion ignition? Seems like that could be a new societal game changer.
This may be true (and I share your skepticism about a lot of this stuff, particularly VR) - but it also reminds me of discourse at the end of the 19th century:
- Lord Kelvin on the "Utter Impracticability of Aeronautics" (https://zapatopi.net/kelvin/papers/interview_aeronautics_and_wireless.html).
- Philip Von Jolly, Planck's teacher, told him to not go into physics as "a highly developed, almost fully mature science which, now that the discovery of energy has crowned it, so to speak, will soon reach its final stability would have taken shape."
- The head of the US patent office wrote in 1902 "In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold."
Like I said, I'm skeptical about VR, AI, and so forth - but I'm more skeptical of promises of the end of history, or the end of technological growth. I think it's very tempting to look at something like space travel and say "a world where that happens is indistinguishable from a world where it doesn’t, for the average person." This isn't a new criticism of space travel; people have said this for the last 60 years. But communications satellites, GPS, etc. *have* been enormously significant inventions that have improved the lives of the average person, not just through direct use, but also through, e.g. allowing better automation of farm equipment which increases ag productivity.
Well thanks Freddie. Now I need to go put on Everbody Hurts, curl up in a corner with my cat, and have a good cry.
I really love VR, but I can definitely see why other people don’t like it: there are few truly great games out there, and the wonkiness of wearing a headset and the need for enough space to use it make it a bit cumbersome to use regularly. Half Life: Alyx just isn’t enough to persuade the average gamer to buy in. Technology may be moving slower on truly life-changing applications and inventions, but so what? Living in the Big Boring is pretty damned interesting to me, and if it truly is the Forever Now, that makes me feel pretty good about things. Big change can mean big problems for small people, so maybe incremental change is the safe bet for the future.
This is a topic that a number of tech industry commentators, most notably including _Peter Thiel_ of all people, have been pushing on for a long time: revolutions in information technology, while nice, simply do not have the same level of impact as revolutions in the material world. Coal and steam power, the railroad, the assembly line -- these all had far more impact to everyday wealth and prosperity than the Internet ever will.
We're definitely seen a slowdown in innovation and change in the physical world. My understanding is people who study this see two big reasons for this:
1. We've simply run out of easy scientific advances and applications in the physical world; the low hanging fruit have all been plucked.
2. Changes to regulations, safetyism and a general aversion to changing the physical environment has made large scale improvements to the physical world much harder than previously.
My POV is that as a combination of 1 and 2, the _return on investment_ of innovation in physical devices is much lower than the ROI in software, and as a consequence our entire technology culture focuses exclusively on software. Everything else follows from that.
"I know I’m never going to convince most people that AI is not coming to rescue them from boredom and disappointment and let them live forever and bring back their beloved childhood dog Rusty and allow them to get kinky on the Holodeck. "
LOL. Well done.
I think homesteaders are going to be the new upper class by then end of this century. The global order started after WWII by the US and maintained by the US since then... the one that provided the world such marvelous advancement, peace and prosperity... the one that those same classroom kids and their older peers are demanding be expanded and destroyed at the same time... well it is coming to an end.
It is simply breathtaking the benefit and harm dichotomy of this common human tendency to always want more. My mother, God rest her soul, after being raised a poor country bumpkin that bought her clothing at Montgomery Wards and suffering a terrible first marriage with a man that could not keep a job, marries an enterprising second husband who provides an upper-class lifestyle for her. I remember her being so upset that her housekeeper was quitting (after all they had done for her) because she would have to do house work until she trained another. The poor housekeeping girl had to go back to Mexico to care for her sick mother. I remember being so disappointed in my mother at that point for becoming one of them. Thankfully it was only a temporary moment of her weakness... she was 95% above all the classism.
But everyone eventually has to rewrite the chapters of their life book to match their new reality. They eventually get pissed and resentful getting stuck in a chapter... they always want to turn the page. One problem is when their obsession to turn the page overwhelms their good judgement (they feel the need to do something different, and pick something bad). Another problem is that they forget the path they took to get where they are, and the lack of perspective makes them waste historical wisdom and thus repeat unnecessary mistakes.
I hire young people to work for me. I have been astounded that I have to teach them how to handle a cordless drill.... how to change a toilet paper role, and how to handle constructive criticism. Yes, they are witty, brilliant, educated and quick. They can communicate in binary semi-language and images with their peers in ways never seen before. But they are hugely ignorant in common sense and everyday life-skills. They are probably the least prepared generations for dealing with the coming collapse.
Not my kids though... I made sure.
People will abandon themselves to tech. It will make every major decision for them, from when to change jobs to what to eat for dinner. There will be explicitly AI controlled cults where members pool their incomes and the machines divvy it up.
People will stop asking their phones for directions and instead start asking them for permission.
The literal tech won't have to progress much further than it already has. The main change will be how we think about it.
Not life changing...but I love my plant and bug identification apps
This is a reasonable argument about the current state of consumer tech—and your description of AI aligns broadly with what most actual AI engineers and researchers think (I touched on this a little yesterday in https://dansitu.substack.com/p/power-technology-and-love).
But most technology isn't consumer tech, it's boring stuff that makes other things work better. The "Green Revolution" was an accumulation of fairly boring incremental improvements to agriculture that happened over the course of the 20th Century. Together they produced an astonishing increase in yields, especially in the developing world, that has enabled literally billions of additional human lives.
The same dull incrementalism has borne multiple agricultural and industrial revolutions that have taken human beings from a tiny ecological niche to a space-faring species. And the pace of incremental improvement is increasing. Minor improvements in manufacturing yields, cost-reduction, and supply chain technologies really add up. At a fundamental level, technology IS incrementalism—and though things may seem flat from the perspective of a lifetime, we've been living on an ultra-steep gradient for the past few hundred years.
While I do think some amazing consumer tech is in the pipeline (https://dansitu.substack.com/p/furby-is-the-future-of-ai), consumer gadgets have always been pretty unimportant compared to our shunting around of matter and energy with ever-increasing skill.
"There is nothing at present that these systems can do that human being simply can’t."
Just to get this out of the way, even with the help of your big blue ox you can't fill hundreds of thousands of art commissions per minute. Just for the easiest and most obvious answer to this question.
As for the rest, there are things you probably want to read up on that are empowered by what spacex is doing and can have massive effects on life on earth.
1) starlink allowing people to access a network with no government controls, thus bypassing copyright laws or other content controls.
2) decreasing cost per pound to orbit will eventually allow economically viable asteroid mining. The amount of resources available in just the asteroid belt is so mind boggling that you can't even grasp how much you can't even grasp it. Imagine harvesting a rock and permanently crashing the price of gold. That's what is coming.
3) you can do some very dirty power generation in space and beam the power to earth. If you harvest the raw materials from asteroids it's even more viable. Pass certain breakpoints and it effectively becomes boundless energy so cheap it might as well be free. Making an expensive resource cheap upends everything (making bandwidth nearly free brought us the modern internet).
4) zero G research has been extremely limited. Space telescopes cost billions. Look at what jwst has done to cosmology. Now imagine access to space cheap enough that middle rich high schools can put a space telescope in orbit.
Stepping away from space, you mention CRISPR but don't seem to fully appreciate what we are looking at. With the increased access to cheap compute and now some AI assistants you'll be able to spend some money and mod your genes at home. This is going to be both amazing and horrific.
MRNA vaccines are a game changer too. With how easy they are to develop (the moderna vaccine they went with was ready in _days_, it just needed months of testing and approvals) and the confluence of AI and cheap biotech I guarantee you're going to see those upper crust crystal yoga mommies start bootleging their own vaccines, and other similar crazy stuff.
Probably one of the best use cases for AI will be curation. You can ask the AI to find cool shit you'll like. If it can't find anything, you can ask it to make something up. In a world with loneliness epidemics you'll have a computer bud who gets you and doesn't judge you and is always available. This also means you can practice social skills in a safe environment and be more comfortable when talking to real people.
And I'm just scratching the surface. What does small capacity public transit using driverless electric cars (powered by free infinite energy) do to the suburbs? Does that make them easier or harder to live in? Especially if the car can safely drive at 100mph in most weather? If you live as long as your affluence class, you'll know the answer before you die.
Read some old science fiction from the 50s-70s, before science fantasy started to take over. Niven, Brin, Pournelle, Heinlein. Check those out. That should kick start some ideas of what will be possible in just the next few years.
Tech could probably eliminate violent crime over the next few decades via better surveillance and forensics tech, but we’ll probably leave that set of innovations on the table
"I know I’m a pessimist but I genuinely can’t think of any actually plausible new capabilities that smartphones might have in three years that they don’t have now." I actually feel that this is wildly optimistic. Maybe once these shitty avenues for the expression of creativity have run out, people will explore deeper wells of creativity and value creation.
I don't see how this is solely an indictment of tech. What about humanity? If you want to blame something for our state of Forever Now, why not us?
The difference between the world of atoms and bits explains this responsibility. Technologies of atoms enter society as *forces* of energy and matter. Technologies of bits are are tools for *controlling* energy and matter. The constraint on atoms is the non-negotiable realities of our physical universe. The only constraint on bits is our imagination.
Other S-curves beyond the iPhone continue to cascade and compound: information, algorithms, and computation are all exponentially increasing in both power and accessibility. Yes, including AI. Whether these technologies of bits will lead to the revolutions we care about is up to us.