A PS 4 feels somewhat better than a PS3 which was release 10 years ago. Cellphones seem stuck on the black rectangle design. Cars are getting ever so slightly better cruise control every year vs. becoming self-driving.
We almost have a cure for AIDS except not quite.
Or is that just me?
My dad's electric RAV4 made with Tesla components. That thing is so quiet and smooth and can accelerate like crazy.
My quadcoptor with HD camera is pretty awesome, and unlike anything available before.
Uber feels vastly superior to me than taxis or even renting a car in some cases.
This one might be weird, but I play a lot of games, and I feel like Heroes of the Storm which came out last year is vastly better than any other game I've ever played in my life. Maybe that's just me? :)
Reading HN and Reddit is a vastly superior experience to reading newspapers and magazines.
I feel very excited to be alive with all the innovation going on.
> When was the last time you used a product and said “this is vastly better?”
Mid 2011 when I put a high dollar SSD in my laptop for the first time.
The internet is 45 years old. Companies started laying huge fiber optic networks in the 70's.
Can I:
1 - Take a picture and post it somewhere
2 - Surf the internet and use apps for consuming content
3 - Take some video and upload it to youtube
4 - use it to text message friends and family
5 - make and receive phone calls
These 5 basic functions are available on EVERY smartphone manufactured today. The differences? Minute. My LG G2 vs. the LG G3? The LG G3 has a Mildly better screen, 1 more GB of RAM and few other minor improvements.
You're absolutely correct progress is slowing down in tech. The biggest move forwards I thought was when Microsoft completely redesigned the interface of their Windows phones. It was totally original and I thought much better than how Android copied Apple's design.
Other than that? Not sure there have really been HUGE tech advancements in the smartphone arena. Same goes for PC's and Cars. Unless you're a HUGE hardware guy, I don't see big improvements or revolutions in these areas of tech.
Innovation is a diffuse thing, though, and I often find that when I perceive innovation as stalled, the truth is that innovation is simply happening in places I don't care about.
A few weeks back, a Youtube video [1] was shared here that asked if computers are still getting faster. The video argues that they are. I don't dispute that. However, I think it's widely acknowledged that the pace of real-world performance increases—especially in CPUs—has been slow of late. The largest performance boon in the past 5 years has been the widespread use of SSDs as main storage.
I just built a powerhouse workstation for my office that replaced a 2008-era first-generation i7. While this new workstation has gobs of cores, each individual core is only modestly faster than the individual cores from 2008. To me, computing speed is one of my paramount technology desires. The ideal is for all of my computing interactions to occur in 0 milliseconds. I want all my computing devices, and especially my workstation—the device I spend 8 hours at each day—to provide the pinnacle of performance. So it is acutely disappointing to me that the computing horsepower I have available to me is broadening but not becoming faster. Innovation is happening in the low-power space, not the workstation space. Obviously, there are incremental advances, and service to enthusiasts, but I think any honest observer would realize that the market is smaller so the drive to invest R&D in high-power processor performance is diminished.
I feel the same way concerning the enormous amount of R&D investment going into centralized cloud platforms versus decentralized private/federated networks. I contend that had private networks seen as much raw brainpower invested in the past 10 years, managing a secure private network would have been made easier for laypeople, and ultimately we would have retained greater privacy and self-ownership of data. I also feel that computing devices working together over a secure private network in a peer-to-peer model would be vastly preferable to using a vendor-provided centralized cloud to provide device interop. I would prefer my phone and workstation work together directly, on the same private network, rather than using a cloud server as an intermediary.
But as I said at the beginning, it's a matter of opinion and perspective. Broadly speaking—across the whole universe of technology—innovation is happening. But often I find it's happening in areas of little appeal to me.
I don't see the upcoming generation as being dazzled by accumulation and owning stuff. Nor do I see them wanting to ride on the hands of leisure. I see a culture of rejection of the codependence of infrastructure.
When looking at 2040 you have to look at teenagers right now and understand what kind of society they'll be building.
And personally I don't see one with a bunch of robotic assistants.
Sure they have lots of screentime but that's for communication far more than labor reduction. These teens aren't tabulating Excel columns for hours on end. We are amidst a revolution of distributive communication that's being manifested by a revitalization of community.
The barriers to engagement will eventually be expunged, not fortified.
There's no surprise. Everything just goes up at the previous exponential. No big hit, no saturation. Nothing ever changes.
Ok, there's another commentary, in that something that boring is almost certainly wrong on several counts.
Gardening for food, no. Craftsmanship, yes.
From a previous thread...
Everyone thinks about food in terms of economic costs. Few people consider the time that's involved. Yes, food is already cheap, but it isn't free because of the time humans spend involved in its production. That time must be remunerated, otherwise we'd call it slavery.
Imagine removing humans from the food equation, altogether. Production (vertical farms), harvesting (automation), distribution (electric vehicles), clean energy inputs (geothermal, solar, fusion), and maintenance (growing crops that can be used to manufacture replacement parts [e.g., organic polymers and carbon-based electronics] combined with modular, 3D-printed robotics) needs to be addressed. Difficult, but not insurmountable.
Once food is actually free (not merely inexpensive), how will it affect the economy? A large part of our economy is based on trading work for food (also known as indentured servitude). Such trades probably predate agriculture.
Hunger, humanity’s everlasting, unrelenting stressor is timeless and impelling. Hunger calls us all to consume, to feed corporate machines. Machines that were forged in the flames of the Industrial Revolution, when rich men hammered out schemes for our future. Their plans, perhaps unwittingly, followed the template of slave-driven civilisations wrought throughout the ages. Caste societies wherewithin the wealthy commanded the masses through control of food and knowledge.
The printing press and, on a larger scale, the Internet, have liberated our minds. In his plan for food control genocide, Henry Kissinger wrote, "Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents."
Wholly automated, indoor farming has the potential to liberate how we spend our time by removing another way to control the masses. In much the same way that lowering the cost to disseminate information liberated humanity from traditional slavery.
In that same 1974 plan, Henry Kissinger proposed rationing food in developing nations to restrict population growth. Starve people today to prevent people from starving tomorrow. How brilliant. Decades later, researchers learned that empowering women to make educated decisions about their own wombs reduces birth rates. Imagine that. Kissinger was wrong about the best way to curb birthrates, but right about how to shackle a population.
With the pressures of work, family life, and other societal impacts, time is the most precious of commodities. What if we didn't have to work for food, but, instead, could invest our time devoted to our passions?
Yes, there are people who have the opportunity to love their work, but I assure you, when compared with the global population, they are an insignificant minority. And yes, there are people who will loaf about in ways that contribute little to the advancement of humanity, but shouldn't that, too, be a right--if not, who are we to say how people should spend their time?
What's ironic about this idea is that the outcome of a work-free society is a consequence of free-market capitalism. Capitalism is the driving force behind maximum efficiency at minimal cost. Once food is free, capitalism implodes. And maybe that's a good thing.
Recently I've taken up urban harvesting. There's a loquat tree at a local gas station. Out by the river there's an orange and lemon tree. Near my office there's an avocado tree.
We have mostly ornamental horticulture in urban environments. I'm suggesting it will tend to be more functional overtime as resources are strapped and people turn to more fresh, natural, and regional foods.
The other aspect is that it's good for the psyche: urban harvesting is meditative and calming. There's been a large rise in community gardens and a number of schools have set aside plots of land for it.
In a way, you need to categorize it with physical recreation. Put it in the same group as say, jogging, yoga, martial arts, pickup soccer.
Every trajectory in rich-people's food culture is going exactly this way. When I introduce the idea to my peers in the 100k+ income group, something clicks and now they are mapping out where the trees are and some have started planting their own.
I routinely engage with teenagers (through aikido) and when I've told them about this, the reaction has been almost universal: "Oh you just started doing that? Do you know about the pomegranate tree over yonder, or the kumquat tree near this fence?"
Those are the people that will be running the world in 2050.
And what about the low-income people who have succumbed to food deserts after the corporate supermarkets exited the market? Recently, in south LA, cooperative farming initiatives have been popping up. There's one I saw in Lynwood and two in South Gate. I've heard about a budding one in Compton. This is the communities response to the corporate exit.
The change will and has always come from the people - not their possessions.
For innovations you can look towards organizations like http://dignityvillage.org/ ... Literally, a legally recognized homeless community.
If you are expecting to find future cultural innovation coming from elite organizations, you're looking in the wrong place.
The disenfranchised through radical organization is where that occurs.
As it happens it deradicalizes. Things such as not smoking, abstaining from red meat, not attending religious services weekly or not getting married were once radical positions. But as the cultural barriers imposed by radical animosity fell, personal reservations against these habits fell with them and they gave rise to cultural change.
That's why you can't simply elongate the status quo by 20 years in a linear trajectory and get "The Future!"
The internet may be a few decades old but we're just getting started using it, and portable computing using the Internet has accelerated rapidly in the last decade along with virtual assistants, AI, bioinformatics, autonomous cars, robotics, drones etc etc. Lots of things are changing very rapidly right now.