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Well, the argument that 1995 through 2015 was a cycle completely different from whatever the next one will be, is not without merit. I mean, it is easy to forg
by Cacti 9y ago
Well, the argument that 1995 through 2015 was a cycle completely different from whatever the next one will be, is not without merit.
I mean, it is easy to forget, but many, many things had to come together at one time in order for this to pop off like it did:
* high speed internet
* widespread consumer demand for high speed internet and services
* multi-core, low-power hardware that gave us smartphones and cheapish "device" pcs like tivo/roku/etc.
* widespread cellular and wifi networks
* miniturization and improvement of many types of sensors
* widespread data collection of all types
* massive investments and growth in consumer GPU devices, which underwrote the ML boom
and I'm probably missing some things, but you get the idea.
All of these things had to come together at the same time to give us the boom that we just went through, and it gave us rise to the likes of Google, Facebook, and so on.
This is very unlikely to repeat itself. Those who grew up in the late 90s, early 2000s may not really notice, but the difference between 1995 and 2010 is astronomical.
This is not to say that we're about to crash, or that there won't be another boom in short order, just that it will likely follow a very different pattern than the previous one. The period of 1995-2010/2015 was really a very unique confluence of events, historically speaking, and over what is really a very, very short time frame. Whereas the current boom is built around leveraging the smartphone and widespread internt access, the next will not be, as it will already be filled out by competitors.
- karmakaze 9y agoThe recent past does appear very special but I wouldn't discount the near future either. e.g. the tech for AlphaGo was made by a startup. In any case I took the piece at it's title's face value, where startups are nowhere near over. Unicorns shouldn't really factor into that.
- Eridrus 9y ago> e.g. the tech for AlphaGo was made by a startup. Making the next AlphaGo is far less accessible than making the next AirBnB. The gold rush where we're basically sticking a web/mobile app on a business and off to the races is ending.
- platz 9y agoTime to sell shovels
- trhway 9y agoNow we start to stick AI on a business. And like with uber/airbnb where an app became the business, we'll see unicorns where the AI will become the business.
- graycat 9y agoAI is some applied math. But as applied math goes, AI is only a tiny fraction, nearly absurdly narrow, and not very impressive. There's a lot more good applied math to be brought forward to exploit the recent fantastic hardware.
- AznHisoka 9y agoThe other half of AI is data. Valuable propietart data. ie credit card transactions or checkin data from foursquare
- DangleWaggle 9y agoCan you give some examples of applied math sub fields that haven't been exploited to their fullest? I'm genuinely interested.
- 9y ago
- adventured 9y agoIt is likely entirely without merit. Many thing had to come together from 1975 to 1995 to enable the things you're referencing. The list you made is not impressive versus the past, it's normal. What happened from 1995 to 2015 that was more important than the Internet, transistor, microprocessor, router, DRAM or the GUI? Good luck resolving that debate. Many thing had to to come together from 1955 to 1975 to.... I don't know how old you are and how familiar you might be with the prior half century plus in tech, but we could be here all day listing the incredible inventions and leaps forward in tech during each of those 20 year periods of time. Nothing has changed fundamentally about what's occurring in tech. The process continues as before. Each new generation thinks what has happened during its era is particularly special or unique versus the past. We see the same generational bias in most everything, from music to politics.
- Cacti 9y agoYes, I am old enough to remember, and I think you are reading more into my post than was there. I am not claiming 1995-2015 was unique in the fundamental factors (we are all riding the exponential curve here), simply that the confluence of advances is unique to that time period, and gives you a unique distribution of companies/organizations/industries/etc. that is very different from other time periods.
- fpig 9y agoOf course the technology wasn't all invented from scratch in that period, but it was when a lot of things progressed just enough to generate massive markets which pulled a lot of money into the system.
- fauigerzigerk 9y agoThat's right, and I'm not at all convinced that the author of the TechCrunch article is correct. But there is one important difference between the past 20 years and the 20 years before that. The number of people participating in a self-employed or entrepreneurial role has been far greater in the past two decades than before. We did see some of that during the PC revolution as well, but it was disproportionally smaller in scale. I haven't done the research to say whether there were historical periods before in which such large swaths of the population were gripped by the idea that they could start their own business based on a new technology. It's possible that it happened before, but I don't think it was like that between 1975 and 1995. Certainly not towards the end of that period because I would remember.
- graycat 9y ago> I mean, it is easy to forget, but many, many things had to come together at one time in order for this to pop off like it did: Yup. You describe a gold mine. Well, there's still a lot of gold in there. The amazing hardware developments you describe are not yet fully exploited.