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grindr & SMS? Try: e-commerce and search engines. We are pretty good at getting used to technology, to the point that we forget we ever had to search anything

grindr & SMS? Try: e-commerce and search engines. We are pretty good at getting used to technology, to the point that we forget we ever had to search anything in books and encyclopedias, or call a travel agent to book hotel reservations halfway across the globe, or seek a distributor for a part we needed in the yellow pages. Now, is not that I don't agree that the march towards automation advances more slowly than predicted in a lot of areas, but we have definitely come up with systems that improve significantly how things are produced and distributed when compared to mid 20th century...

awinter-py 11y ago
e-commerce is cool but not because we've invented smarter rules for it. amazon isn't that different from sears 116 years ago; collab filtering is a difference, but that's a stat algo, not something humans design. They also use TLA+ for their distributed systems -- i.e. they're solving problems at the limit of unassisted human understanding. (TLA and CF are definitely solid examples of human augmentation; but that doesn't mean e-commerce is. the merchant is being augmented, not the customer). grindr as a proxy for any service that says 'match me with an arbitrary person with these characteristics at this place and time'. grindr was one of the early successful ones. stackoverflow careers (or monster.com, god help us) also belongs on this list. and SMS as an alternative to making plans and sticking to them; remember when you had to be on time and couldn't edit plans on the way?
- Kadin 11y ago
  Taken individually, all the improvements might seem merely like changes in degree -- Amazon is an improved Sears, Roebuck; Wikipedia is an online version of Britannica, etc. -- but in the aggregate it creates a difference in kind. By making things easier and faster, it becomes possible to do more. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has done more -- and I don't necessarily just mean work at my job, I mean hobbies and projects and artwork and things that I want to do, completely disconnected from needing to do them -- because it's a lot easier to find information, order things, talk to other people, etc. Projects that would have just been too complex to get off the ground a few decades ago, because they would have involved multiple library trips and probably bunches of ILLs and perhaps correspondence with various people, each letter having a significant roundtrip time, are the work of a few nights of reading online, a couple of online orders, and a weekend. It's not AI, but it's certainly an enhancement. I'm not sure that there are any entirely new categories of things that people, as a group, can do that we weren't able to do before computerization, but it's certainly possible for an individual to do more, and a number of artificial limitations have basically disappeared.
npsimons 11y ago
I still relish this true story of progress: my father, who started programming with punch cards in high school that he had to send off to the nearest university and wait a week for results, now has a computer in his pocket with orders of magnitude more computing power and capacity, plus it's connected to a storehouse of information that one could not exhaust in a lifetime. Sure, optimists will predict more favorable outcomes, but as XKCD (rightly) says to those asking "where's my flying car?", the answer is: we have helicopters.

awinter-py 11y ago

e-commerce is cool but not because we've invented smarter rules for it. amazon isn't that different from sears 116 years ago; collab filtering is a difference, but that's a stat algo, not something humans design. They also use TLA+ for their distributed systems -- i.e. they're solving problems at the limit of unassisted human understanding. (TLA and CF are definitely solid examples of human augmentation; but that doesn't mean e-commerce is. the merchant is being augmented, not the customer). grindr as a proxy for any service that says 'match me with an arbitrary person with these characteristics at this place and time'. grindr was one of the early successful ones. stackoverflow careers (or monster.com, god help us) also belongs on this list. and SMS as an alternative to making plans and sticking to them; remember when you had to be on time and couldn't edit plans on the way?

Kadin 11y ago
Taken individually, all the improvements might seem merely like changes in degree -- Amazon is an improved Sears, Roebuck; Wikipedia is an online version of Britannica, etc. -- but in the aggregate it creates a difference in kind. By making things easier and faster, it becomes possible to do more. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has done more -- and I don't necessarily just mean work at my job, I mean hobbies and projects and artwork and things that I want to do, completely disconnected from needing to do them -- because it's a lot easier to find information, order things, talk to other people, etc. Projects that would have just been too complex to get off the ground a few decades ago, because they would have involved multiple library trips and probably bunches of ILLs and perhaps correspondence with various people, each letter having a significant roundtrip time, are the work of a few nights of reading online, a couple of online orders, and a weekend. It's not AI, but it's certainly an enhancement. I'm not sure that there are any entirely new categories of things that people, as a group, can do that we weren't able to do before computerization, but it's certainly possible for an individual to do more, and a number of artificial limitations have basically disappeared.

npsimons 11y ago

I still relish this true story of progress: my father, who started programming with punch cards in high school that he had to send off to the nearest university and wait a week for results, now has a computer in his pocket with orders of magnitude more computing power and capacity, plus it's connected to a storehouse of information that one could not exhaust in a lifetime. Sure, optimists will predict more favorable outcomes, but as XKCD (rightly) says to those asking "where's my flying car?", the answer is: we have helicopters.