11 ms·

Big tech products are mostly useless

173 points by ahjones 8y ago

icebraining 8y ago
Unfortunately, this article seems as empty and uninteresting as the products it's criticizing. The Guardian should ask idlewords to write one for them instead.
- jannes 8y ago
  For us living inside the feedback loop of the tech world it might be hard to see the relative importance of some of the things. I think he brings up an interesting topic from the perspective of someone living outside of the tech world.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    I don't disagree that the topic is important, I just think we have much better critiques being written on that topic regularly, from both inside and outside the tech industry. Also, the SV reality distortion field hasn't infected all the tech industry. In the companies I worked, nobody was convinced we were changing the world, we're just writing some tools for cash.
- arca_vorago 8y ago
  I'm not surprised since the day I got into an argument with the guardians senior tech editor and he tried to argue Foss didn't matter and Linux was a fanboy fad... The senior editor...
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    Well from a desktop perspective that's kinda true.
  - acdha 8y ago
    If you're a software developer that's certainly a valid gripe but what if you're part of the 99.999% of people who use computers but don't run servers? Linux doesn't run your desktop or iOS devices and if Google swapped the kernel on Android the users wouldn't notice.
    - hawski 8y ago
      It might be true in case of the Linux kernel, but I think that most software that one is using is made of many many FOSS libraries. Imagine that all libraries and compilers are either from the OS vendor or proprietary. We would see much less software. People may not run servers, but they are surely using the software running on them - same thing applies. Android has much more FOSS than only kernel, and I'm not talking about AOSP. Chrome, Safari, OS X, Firefox are standing upon millions of lines of open source code. Now FOSS is at least a crankshaft of software world. Even if that would be all there is to it, you couldn't say that it doesn't matter.
barry-cotter 8y ago
It’s a journalist with an opinion on something he has no expertise in. I recommend not reading it. He doesn’t understand that the toy apps that are barely usable by enthusiasts today improve rapidly until using them is mundane and normal. There’s a pg essay on how the best startups are the ones where people think it’s a toy or a feature that’s relevant. Don’t read the article.
- travis_brooks 8y ago
  I agree! Hy Brasil is not sinking, ignore the panic mongers, there are others with more experience in these matters than you... https://youtu.be/qJh6EQ5gv7g https://youtu.be/qJh6EQ5gv7g
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    For anyone else who didn’t get the reference that was sarcasm. http://www.subzin.com/quotes/M106664b34/Erik+the+Viking/Hy-Brasil+is+not+sinking http://www.subzin.com/quotes/M106664b34/Erik+the+Viking/Hy-B.... On a non-sarcastic note the toy that’s barely usable by hobbyists is the early adopter segment, after the innovators. There’s a reasonable explanation at businessdictionary. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/early-adopters.html http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/early-adopters....
deweller 8y ago
My takeaway: Many technological innovations don't turn out to be world-changing events. And those that do take several years to trickle down to mainstream usage. For those of us that keep a skeptical mindset when evaluating new technology, none of this comes as a surprise.
jannes 8y ago
I predict that AI has 5-10 more years of "mostly useless" ahead until it suddenly becomes interesting. Another thing he criticised was the Internet of Things and other gadgets: I agree with the author on that one. I hope it dies a quick death. If there's a tradeoff between an internet-connected device that lasts 1-2 years and a not-connected device lasting 20 years, I would always chose the longer-lasting one.
- Larrikin 8y ago
  The crowd on here seems to have a valid complaint against the IoTs while being very short sighted on what actually can be done. Currently most companies want to be Facebook or Google and collect all the data they possibly can while putting out a mediocre/bad product with no security that only works when there is an internet. No consumer actually wants this. Instead of killing the industry, we need a new generation of companies that put out products that function the same or ideally better than their analog competitors. Data collection, such as usage information, and internet connectivity will be what sets these products apart from their traditional competitors. However, the emphasis should be on sending that data to the owner of the product, instead of sending it to the cloud for the companies benefit. Optimizing energy usage, learning usage patterns, etc will be great differentiators. My products working together will be an even bigger differentiator Aggregation of that data can be useful, and could be opt in. I'd love to know that I seem to use way more energy than other people around me. Perhaps I have a bad AC, or my insulation is particularly bad. The biggest issue right now is that companies are putting out insecure products that are completely broken if the parent company of the product are left out of the loop. The products need to work locally, with no reliance on the parent company, and only rely on a company server for true enhancements that can not be calculated locally.
  - philipov 8y ago
    If the established players are all interested in siphoning that data, who will fund the development of such technology?
  - jannes 8y ago
    You are describing the ideal. But for some reason all that companies can come up with are closed "ecosystems" where systems work well with each other as long as you buy everything from the same manufacturer. Interoperability and open standards seem to be in no companies' interest. Where is that new generation of companies going to come from?
lmm 8y ago
The big picture innovations take longer and arrive slower, but the small, life-enhancing improvements deliver so smoothly and consistently that you don't notice until they're taken away. It's only when you have to use a 5-year-old phone or application that you realise how much worse things were back then.
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  Five years ago I had a phone with buttons and rarely had to stop the impulse of trowing it into a wall because google kept installing updates to apps I don't want and can't do more than factory reset. Sure, I didn't have a fancy app to look at the timetable for the bus, but there was a wap-page I could use and frankly the apps are about as frustrating but now because touch interactions so often go wrong without real buttons. And I use both vim and ssh daily, rarely wishing I had an new app to replace them with.
  - Yetanfou 8y ago
    Swap out the stock distribution - I'm assuming Android here - for something like AOSP, leave off the Google-specific bits (i.e. do not install 'gapps' or anything which depends on it, install the mock-google-bits instead if you want to run something which depends on Google play services. Use F-Droid instead of the Google play store. Voila, a phone which does not do silly updates behind your back, does not install apps you do not want and which should last for years and years - mine is about 7.5 years old now.
- mrob 8y ago
  I use a 6 year old phone. It has a third party extra thick battery and a microSD card slot. It does the core functions of a phone just as well as a modern one (voice call, SMS, clock, calculator, flashlight, music player). The camera is worse, but if I cared about quality I'd use a standalone camera. As for apps/Internet, it's roughly the same as modern phones: a whole lot of barely usable garbage only suitable for emergency use when you don't have access to a desktop. It seems to me that any modern phone would be a downgrade.
jaimebuelta 8y ago
The main point of this article is mostly misguided, IMO. The real one is that you don't know which tech innovation will have a great impact before hand. Most of the things that has big impacts are actually things we skip through. For example, we have a pretty decent camera in our pockets at all times. We take pictures constantly. The "selfie" revolution, one that has big impacts in how we perceive ourselves and want other to perceive us is enabled by having an small quality camera around. At some point passing from "terrible quality" to "good enough quality" made a jump in that. Sure, not everyone takes selfies. But it has been a big change in photography in the last 10 years or so. So big we have a new name for something it exist before. I'm pretty sure that being able to track a run and share it on social networks is a big motivator to do exercise, for example. I seems weird to me talking to AI, and even weirder that "the future" is calling to a shop with an AI instead of using some sort of web shop/app/whatever to get an appointment. But who knows...
- redial 8y ago
  Most revolutions have been silent revolutions. The only one that was an instant world event was the iPhone launch. All the technologies named in the article; Wifi, Google Search, Facebook, Twitter, even YouTube and Wikipedia were not introduced to millions of people at once in a Silicon Valley event. AI will change the world, but it'll be slow, like how the internet changed the world little by little replacing retail, letters, phone calls, and now maybe 40 years later, TV. AI is a process revolution, not a product revolution. So he's right, big tech products have been mostly useless, specially compared to their promises.
fortythirteen 8y ago
> Every now and again, at some huge auditorium, a senior staff member at one of the big firms based in northern California – ordinarily a man... Absolutely irrelevant to the topic. I already ignore the hype, but I think I'll also ignore this author's hyperbole.
philipodonnell 8y ago
The comments here seem to focus on the specific examples, but this misses the point of the article, which I take to be that _every_ new product or feature, no matter how minor or how incremental, is treated as the second coming of the 100x engineer and the cheering crowds hand-picked to promote whatever they see aren't helping by covering it rabidly. He's not wrong, but I've heard that complaint about the tech press in general for years, so I'm not sure its bringing anything new to the table on HN. But at the same time, "some of these will surely turn out to be revolutionary eventually" isn't a great excuse to treat everything as revolutionary before it has a chance to even be seen in the field.
- sharemywin 8y ago
  I think it's the scale. Be in love with the future products we're using your money to play with don't focus on our actual products because they're really just more expensive than before(no control over life cycle, same features as before) and don't actually add much value but have huge margins.
- Clubber 8y ago
  New and improved Tide. New formula! Better than ever! I think that's just the hyperbole of marketing. Most people should be immune now. That's probably why marketers target youngsters so much; most haven't caught on to the enormity of the BS just yet.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  I don't think the messianic cheering is the real problem. Here's a short and not very complete list of unsolved meta-problems: Even when products and systems are revolutionary, there are unexpected negative consequences (e.g. FB and Cambridge Analytica) All systems can be trolled and abused, and if they can be, they will be (e.g. fake reviews on Amazon etc.) AI doesn't actually work all that well yet. (Neither Siri nor Alexa truly pass a conversational Turing test, which means there's a lot of guessing about whether or not any novel request will generate a useful response.) IT systems and products of all kinds are brittle, unreliable, and often downright stupid. Users don't trust updates and feature changes, and often they're right to do so. Given that, why would AI "products" be any better or more reliable?
ribchinski 8y ago
Well... I don't particularly agree with everything this guy is saying, but he is right about the internet of things. In my experience, it is quite useless, and it is a danger to privacy. One of the my friends constantly uses Amazon Alexa and Siri for even the most basic questions like, "What is x + y?" which could be easily done faster on a desk calculator. Either I am a person who likes to make things more inconvenient for myself, or I just don't understand modern technology.
- tvanantwerp 8y ago
  I think IoT doesn't yet deliver an order of magnitude value-add over analog technologies. It's really not so hard for me to flip my own light switch or find some music to play without issuing voice commands. And I never have to worry about a light switch getting borked by a bad update or malware or connectivity issues. When my home is smart enough to cook all my meals and do dishes and fold laundry, then I'm ready to buy into it.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  > "What is x + y?" which could be easily done faster on a desk calculator. I seriously doubt that even if we still lived in a world where normal people actually owned calculators. This is just "No wireless. Less space than a nomad." again.
  - ribchinski 8y ago
    You'd be surprised, people still own calculators! Also, please, don't call me a nomad. As a programmer, I always have a binary and scientific calculator at hand. And just because I don't particularly enjoy IOT of Wireless Headphones, does not mean that I am a nomad, mate!
- wakkaflokka 8y ago
  I can agree on the privacy concerns front, but for what it's worth, I've found my Google Home to be quite helpful. So if we're solely talking about how it can be helpful: - When I'm cooking and my hands are dirty and I want to set a timer - When I'm cooking and my hands are dirty and I want to change music/lower volume/raise volume/call someone (or do a measurement conversion) - Turning off all the lights in my house when I'm already in bed and forgot whether I left some on - Laying in bed with the gf and asking random questions out of curiosity - Asking how long it will take to get somewhere if my gf and I are pondering some place to eat but are at the dinner table without our phones - Get home after having a few beers and dive into the messy chicken wings with both my hands, and then realize I want to turn on the TV, play a show or change the current one on my Shield.. perfect use for the GH - Since I already look at my phone way too much (potentially straining muscles in my neck), I can leave my phone in another room and still get quick answers to deep life questions without tilting my neck downwards They're all __super__ minor of course, but honestly, I'm so used to the convenience now it actually feels weird to have to do some of these things 'manually'. I do understand there are serious concerns about privacy that may or may not offset the benefits, definitely plenty of room for discussion on that.
redleggedfrog 8y ago
Let's remember this, from the last few years, written by numerous major media editorial pages (paraphrasing, of course): "Silicon Valley never tackles the big issues. They just invent frivolous new gadgets which no on really needs, or some new app that shares pictures of cute kittens or is the next social network. They should focus on big picture issues - hunger, housing, crime, etc." Those are harder to approach and solve, and you need more patience for results. Now we see complaining that the nifty gadgets aren't coming like they used to. Hmm.
- philipov 8y ago
  Hunger, crime, these are not technological issues solvable by tech companies, unless your idea of a solution involves building a more effective police state. These are political issues our leadership has neither the will nor incentive to solve. For example, Housing isn't a problem, it's an investment opportunity. The people donating to your campaign wouldn't like it if their investments were pushed down in value. An app can't fix your economy being dominated by bad actors.
  - galieos_ghost 8y ago
    hunger- Has been mostly solved thanks to GMO increasing crop yields. crime- Is strongly correlated with poverty, which has been rapidly reduced globally thanks to technological innovation Housing- Will be solved by tech making remote work viable and thus reducing demand in cities. Automation and some form of income stipend could also allow people to live in more affordable places rather than cities. Your view of "tech" is pretty stunted if you only think web apps.
    - mcphage 8y ago
      > Will be solved by tech making remote work viable and thus reducing demand in cities Remote work is viable, and yet the major tech companies are focused on hiring developers in a small number of overcrowded cities (or moving developers that it hires into those cities). I expect no solution to housing or remote work from them.
markatkinson 8y ago
I feel like more than half the earths population already talks in 'preordained cliches'.
QueensGambit 8y ago
Its a good thing and that's how i should be. Startups have 1% chance of success and probably less when it reaches IPO. If big tech with deep pockets have far better shot (say 50%), then the level playing field would slip further and further away from startups. Innovation would stop and we will go back to the era of Microsoft/Oracle killing companies like Netscape.
bmans94 8y ago
My problem with the innovations mentioned in the article lie mainly in the ‘predictive text’ emails from the google presentation. Such a small, minutely helpful feature, and yet like the author mentions could lead to an even more technologically led “groupthink” society, where machines determine our current cliches, which no one will break from. Anyways, I get that big innovations really come as several small innovations, but who out there is imagining the future of this technology, as some were imagining the smartphone or tablet a decade before it’s advent? I have yet to read anything by anyone who has a vision for the next big AI innovation, no matter how moonshot-y
013a 8y ago
This is only one small part of the article, but: I think the revolution in Duplex isn't about letting customers use it to schedule appointments and stuff. I think its much more significant from the perspective of using it as a way to improve Google's data for themselves. They mentioned they're going to use it soon to improve the accuracy of their business open/close times. Imagine other applications; asking businesses how busy it is right now, confirming road closures with municipal governments, etc. Also imagine it opened up on Google Cloud, in a product similar to AWS Connect. Finally, imagine this: They've always had a huge amount of data for human voices to train their AI models. Here's one more; being able to call anyone on the planet and get them talking in a way that is natural, then using the data on the other end of the phone to further train the accuracy of the voices they use. Kind of like ReCaptcha, but for voices.
- zrobotics 8y ago
  Great, so Google can get even more data. Huzzah!? Why is that a good thing, and what benefit does it provide to consumers? The only thing you mentioned that has even marginal benefit to the public is better search data, and I get less and less convinced that this will happen. I may be an outlier, but I have found Google search less useful in the past year, unless I go through steps to avoid personalization. Rather than search the part # that I requested, it just thinks I want to go to digikey. And dear God, spam calls are already bad enough, why do we want to make them even more realistic? I fail to see even one application where I would prefer to talk to a more realistic robot.
loblollyboy 8y ago
Of course, like raking leaves in your lawn, you’re going to run into a kind of diminishing returns situation. So I agree, albeit with an obvious point, My only qualm (beyond the banality of the thesis) is that this dude is forgetting about some other cool advances, such as the sharing economy (Uber/Lyft and airbnb) which kind of changed the world a little, messenger apps (which made day to day life a little more convenient for many and also played a role in some big geopolitical events). Also just b/c google launched its search engine in 99 or whatever doesn’t mean that they stopped innovating - incremental improvements in search have made it 1000x what it was then, and if you showed google maps to someone from 2000, they would think it is magic. The tools for making tech have gotten a lot better too, even if most of the use cases have already been covered. AI and blockchain can be revolutionary. The problem is how we structure society, where we’re all either just trying to make our daily bread or get rich, and this leads to a lot of misdirected effort.
- redial 8y ago
  That is not his point. His point is that big flashy introductions never (almost) materialize in something truly world-changing. When was the sharing economy introduced? No one knows, it just happened organically.
- thisisit 8y ago
  His point is most, not all, tech innovations don't really pan out. Sure there are examples of great products but there also examples of big duds. For example, according to an EPI paper sharing economy accounts for less than 0.1% of total economy: https://www.epi.org/press/uber-drivers-earn-the-equivalent-of-9-21-in-hourly-wages-uber-and-other-gig-platforms-account-for-far-less-of-the-economy-than-many-estimates-suggest/ https://www.epi.org/press/uber-drivers-earn-the-equivalent-o... So, not a win really. At least not right now.
  - Eridrus 8y ago
    Almost all innovation in general doesn't pan out. Look at all the money we spend on medical/pharma research. Most of it doesn't pan out, but we're basically ok with that since the rewards are pretty large when it does.
kerrsclyde 8y ago
With constant innovation the temptation to jump to the next new thing is great. This mitigates the value you gain by using something regularly and consistently over a long term period. I've used Evernote since 2012 - when I started it really wasn't that useful. But now, after over 6 years of using it daily, I have a huge body of content personal to me which I find tremendously useful. This only came about because I didn't jump to the next shiny alternative.
bertil 8y ago
Wait, is that article simply ignoring that self-driving car are now commercially available in Phoenix? That’s probably a bigger revolution than the steam engine, and someone’s take on this is “That’s it?” Let’s ignore the shattering impact of incredibly convenient video streaming, content filtering via image tagging, electric cars, transportation or food on demand, having contactless payment available to anyone for pennies… MTurk pays offensively little, sure, but thanks to ‘Silicon Valley’ anyone can work now, no matter how much discrimination or how remote they are — and buy groceries with it. If the accusation is “building”, Amazon built it. If you want it to be more lucrative, you can either legally enforce minimum wage, or start tasks that pay more. Shelter, like food, is a problem we solved a while ago, as long as you can afford it: inequality is a problem, but you can’t blame AirBnB, SpareRoom and countless others for allowing people to find others with a lifestyle, a schedule that fit them so that they can save on rent. Let’s not talk about how internet empowered people to compare mortgages. Crime: Well, yes, Silicon Valley has done a lot for Law enforcement, but expectedly and Thank God, not as a B2C business model. I’m honestly more confused arguing that article than I would argue with a flat-earther. At least a flat-earther is probably right when they say that you have not personally checked yourself for what you claim.
- redial 8y ago
  > Wait, is that article simply ignoring that self-driving car are now commercially available in Phoenix? That’s probably a bigger revolution than the steam engine, and someone’s take on this is “That’s it? Are you being ironic? The steam engine literally reshaped the world. I think you express exactly what the author is talking about: Acting as if just by announcing it, it has already succeeded.
  - amarkov 8y ago
    But imagine someone sitting there in 1804 Wales, looking at the first steam train, saying "slow down buddy you haven't actually changed anything yet". It seems like there's a sense in which this is short-sighted.
    - 8y ago
nmeofthestate 8y ago
>might Duplex be a grim portal into a future in which high-flyers get digital “assistants” to do their chores High flyers = people that own an Android phone and get haircuts.
beat 8y ago
The problem is a lot of these world-changing technologies seem inevitable only in hindsight. Read decades of science fiction before the '90s, and nobody predicted the idea of everyone carrying a personal phone with them at all times. Much less connecting it to a global data network. These things always look inevitable in hindsight. But it takes some real cleverness to get them in foresight.
- redial 8y ago
  When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket. - Nikola Tesla, 1926. https://kottke.org/18/04/nikola-tesla-predicted-the-smartphone-in-1926 https://kottke.org/18/04/nikola-tesla-predicted-the-smartpho...
  - zerostar07 8y ago
    to be fair that was not science fiction
- ilkan 8y ago
  Dick Tracy in the 40's Edit: Star Trek communicators, 1960's
  - beat 8y ago
    Star Trek communicators seem a lot more like walkie-talkies than phones. edit: Note that only active duty Starfleet personnel seem to carry communicators. Civilians do not.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Not only were personal wireless communications predicted, but also that we'd be absorbed by them in social situations! https://punch.photoshelter.com/image/I00006GHuH4c0Ojo https://punch.photoshelter.com/image/I00006GHuH4c0Ojo
swalsh 8y ago
This is dense, I think there are a few threads of reason though. The exaggeration in marketing common in tech is quite tumultuous. The AI behind duplex is a staggering technical achievement, and really is a small whistle at how AI is going to start to change some fundamental aspects of society. To say AI is not going to be a fundamental change to our literal society in the very near future is naive. But I can understand how the trivialness of the use case is playing down the real achievement here. I do think though that AI is the last "fundamental" change information technologies will bring though. From here out, the future is in the convergence of other hard sciences with advanced IT. Each "Big thing" has been a fundamental building block. By themselves small, but they get significant as they combine.
- new299 8y ago
  What is the real technical achievement behind Duplex? What we've seen is a rather short tech demo. Speech synthesis has improved, but are you saying that Duplex is a massive step forward in speech recognition and natural language processing too?
  - beisner 8y ago
    It’s a major payoff of a lot of small research advances made by Google over the last few years. In and of itself it’s not a terribly groundbreaking research result, but a bunch of parallel AI, NLP, and systems research had to go into this to take it from toy experience to what will eventually be a robust service. This is the promise of AI in the 2020s: incremental services that chip away at various low-cognition but high-variance/pattern-based tasks that litter our home and professional lives.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- romaniv 8y ago
  > I do think though that AI is the last "fundamental" change information technologies will bring though. There are wast continents of mostly unexplored or abandoned territory in IT. Moreover, some of them are well documented. Some of them were documented in 1970s. The fact that IT professionals today don't know about them and can't imagine anything more significant than "AI" for pizza ordering, is unsettling. Just to name a few things Alan Kay often talks about: - Automated system integration or tools for generalized interconnection of applications available to end users. - WYSIWYG for the Web. - Constraint-based problem-solvers accessible to mere mortals. - Agent oriented programming with UI simple enough for normal people to use. - Dynamic simulations in "normal" software (not CADs) I am absolutely sickened by the fact that the most common response to this list is "nobody needs this". As far as I'm concerned, each of those things is needed orders of magnitude more than a haircut-scheduling AI.
mLuby 8y ago
"It’s years since Silicon Valley gave us a game-changer. Instead, from curing disease to colonies on Mars, we’re fed overblown promises" Come on. "We don't have a colony on Mars yet" doesn't mean there isn't crazy innovation going on with extremely tangible benefits. Any of the following is a game-changer. 1. Dec'15 SpaceX performs first ever orbital-class rocket landing on land. 2. Apr'16 SpaceX performs first ever orbital-class rocket landing on a ship. 3. Mar'17 SpaceX reuses first orbital-class rocket. 4. Feb'18 SpaceX launches Falcon Heavy, the highest payload capacity of any currently operational launch vehicle. 5. May'18 SpaceX launches Falcon 9 Block 5, set to give USA direct human access to space (in late 2018) for the first time since Mar'11.
- notable_user 8y ago
  SpaceX is a Los Angeles based company, and Elon Musk also lives in Los Angeles. I’m not sure if that counts as Silicon Valley.
  - mLuby 8y ago
    Agreed, but TFA targets SpaceX directly from the subtitle on.
- Hydraulix989 8y ago
  Sure, there will not be another social network or another smartphone, but innovation is still taking place in many other areas. It's often hard to see what game-changers look like ahead-of-time before they are actually recognized as such (otherwise, we'd all be successful VCs).
- Eridrus 8y ago
  "Why is Elon Musk wasting his time getting us to Mars when there are problems on Earth that need fixing?!?"
  - tarunkotia 8y ago
    Same thing can be said about lunar exploration project which in hindsight brought the personal computing revolution.
Zak 8y ago
Now, when was the last time you came to book a haircut or restaurant table and concluded that the task was so onerous that you would ideally delegate it to a machine? And even if you can easily think of a scenario, would there not be something ethically questionable about doing so, if the person at the other end had no idea who or what they were talking to? I hate talking on the phone. If I can't fill out a web form (login-free please) or send an email to complete some task like that, I'd love to have a robot do it for me. I don't see anything unethical about this as long as the robot performs the task reasonably well, doesn't waste the receptionist's time, etc.... The classic hacker ethic says it's bad for humans to be required to waste time on something a machine could do, and Google has just expanded the list of things machines can do. Of course, under that framework, it would be preferable to automate the receptionist taking the call as well. I'm eager for this technology to become more general-purpose. For months, I've had a case open with an airline over an item that went missing from my checked bag. The only way to get updates is to call them on the phone. It first goes to an IVR, then a call center in India where the call is screened by a person, and only then to the actual department that can give me useful information. There is no direct line (I asked). The process is obviously designed to frustrate users so they give up. The hassle is arguably not worth the $90 they owe me, but I don't want to let them get away with it. I really wish I could have a robot talk to them.
- amelius 8y ago
  Yeah, but I guess the bigger question is: is this convenience so large that it justifies that a single company puts a wall around a market with a gate with their name on it?
  - ryanmonroe 8y ago
    What do you mean? Has Google patented the use of computer-generated voices / language to contact a business?
    - amelius 8y ago
      No (or perhaps yes), but they are a big player, and this is a typical winner-takes-all situation. Soon everybody will access business X through Google, and this gives Google power over these businesses, just like Amazon has power over third-party sellers, for instance. For the consumer it means a minor convenience, but for the business-owner it means tougher competition, and loss of identity of their business. It's like selling software for years, then suddenly Apple comes along, "forces" you to use the AppStore, and demands a cut. In short: the problem is that a company now regulates your market.
imgabe 8y ago
And even if you can easily think of a scenario, would there not be something ethically questionable about doing so, if the person at the other end had no idea who or what they were talking to? Generally I consider something ethically questionable when a person is harmed in some way. Can someone explain how a receptionist might be harmed by unknowingly booking an appointment with a robot instead of a person? The real person shows up. The business gets an appointment. The receptionist does their job. Where does the ethical question come in?
- Hydraulix989 8y ago
  Deception is a form of harm.
  - imgabe 8y ago
    So children are harmed by believing in Santa Claus? If you politely tell someone you enjoyed their cooking even if it wasn't to your taste, you've harmed them? Context matters. Deception, in and of itself, is not inherently harmful. It makes literally 0 difference in the life of the person booking the appointment if it's a robot or a human telling them the desired time and date.
IshKebab 8y ago
This is just pointless pessimistic ranting.
M_Bakhtiari 8y ago
>I thought about a vision of the near future in which half the human race will converse in preordained cliches. Maybe that's how the "Darmok and Jalad" language came about.
Noos 8y ago
I don't know about this. I think they can be useless, useful, and terrifying all at the same time. I walked into my local petco one day and saw these: https://www.glofish.com https://www.glofish.com Useless, all that technology expressing itself in making glowing fish. The tech behind it however is incredibly useful. But wow, the existential dread watching them swim around under a black light was considerable. Or on the other shelves, looking and seeing dog or cat "calming collars" that use pheromones tailored specifically for individual species. I mean, its funny at how useless and useful it is at the same time. Is your dog a worrywart? Use pheromones to make him stress free! But you wonder some day if some bright tech baron will start to make human calming collars, or bracelets, or what have you... Maybe not big tech per se, but the writer of this article might have a failure of imagination if they only see the uselessness.
jeffreyrogers 8y ago
Regardless of whether big tech is doing anything useful it's obvious that we have fewer important innovations now than in the period around the late 19th, early 20th century when we got: electricity, electric motors, dynamite, phones, cars, concrete, planes, tractors, radio, plastic, assembly lines and modern forms of business organization. If we go a little further into the 20th century we get nuclear power and the transistor. I don't think we'll see another time period like that. But that's not really a bad thing. You can only discover really important things once and then they eventually become part of everyday life. A more interesting question is how to sustain our standard of living when we can no longer expect high economic growth from new innovations.
ape4 8y ago
Duplex has the possibility of being huge. Think of how many boring / transactional phone calls are made each day.
squarefoot 8y ago
To me many products are just the result of management asking engineers to apply the company IP to make something that can be sold. The market is saturated in every niche with a huge load of products compared to the number of potential buyers, so they have to act creatively in the hope one day they make a killer gimmick. Example: if IoT and AI are the new words, then everything must be connected and/or exhibit human-like intelligence, at the risk of developing junk product with no actual usefulness, like shoes asking politely the user if they can twit in real time how much his feet stink after a long walk. But again that is rather the result of management looking for money in every possible way than brilliant minds attempting to solve vital problems.
triviatise 8y ago
Self driving cars Tesla electric cars and electric car infrastructure The sharing economy where we rent instead of buy things hopefully will stop or at least slow our rabid consumption These are huge changes in the way we will live our lives.
tim333 8y ago
He cites social media as "These things have changed the world" and rubbishes Google Duplex. But back when they started Twitter and the like seemed a bit of a joke but increased in scope. And AI like Duplex will do so too. The fact that AI is a bit rubbish in some ways just now doesn't mean it won't change the world shortly.
gymshoes 8y ago
Tech inspires science fiction and science fiction inspires tech. Although we won't ever have a time machine that travels backwards in time, there are a lot of commonplace things that were once science fiction.

173 points by ahjones 8y ago

Unfortunately, this article seems as empty and uninteresting as the products it's criticizing. The Guardian should ask idlewords to write one for them instead.

jannes 8y ago
For us living inside the feedback loop of the tech world it might be hard to see the relative importance of some of the things. I think he brings up an interesting topic from the perspective of someone living outside of the tech world.
- icebraining 8y ago
  I don't disagree that the topic is important, I just think we have much better critiques being written on that topic regularly, from both inside and outside the tech industry. Also, the SV reality distortion field hasn't infected all the tech industry. In the companies I worked, nobody was convinced we were changing the world, we're just writing some tools for cash.
arca_vorago 8y ago
I'm not surprised since the day I got into an argument with the guardians senior tech editor and he tried to argue Foss didn't matter and Linux was a fanboy fad... The senior editor...
- akvadrako 8y ago
  Well from a desktop perspective that's kinda true.
- acdha 8y ago
  If you're a software developer that's certainly a valid gripe but what if you're part of the 99.999% of people who use computers but don't run servers? Linux doesn't run your desktop or iOS devices and if Google swapped the kernel on Android the users wouldn't notice.
  - hawski 8y ago
    It might be true in case of the Linux kernel, but I think that most software that one is using is made of many many FOSS libraries. Imagine that all libraries and compilers are either from the OS vendor or proprietary. We would see much less software. People may not run servers, but they are surely using the software running on them - same thing applies. Android has much more FOSS than only kernel, and I'm not talking about AOSP. Chrome, Safari, OS X, Firefox are standing upon millions of lines of open source code. Now FOSS is at least a crankshaft of software world. Even if that would be all there is to it, you couldn't say that it doesn't matter.

barry-cotter 8y ago

It’s a journalist with an opinion on something he has no expertise in. I recommend not reading it. He doesn’t understand that the toy apps that are barely usable by enthusiasts today improve rapidly until using them is mundane and normal. There’s a pg essay on how the best startups are the ones where people think it’s a toy or a feature that’s relevant. Don’t read the article.

travis_brooks 8y ago
I agree! Hy Brasil is not sinking, ignore the panic mongers, there are others with more experience in these matters than you... https://youtu.be/qJh6EQ5gv7g https://youtu.be/qJh6EQ5gv7g
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  For anyone else who didn’t get the reference that was sarcasm. http://www.subzin.com/quotes/M106664b34/Erik+the+Viking/Hy-Brasil+is+not+sinking http://www.subzin.com/quotes/M106664b34/Erik+the+Viking/Hy-B.... On a non-sarcastic note the toy that’s barely usable by hobbyists is the early adopter segment, after the innovators. There’s a reasonable explanation at businessdictionary. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/early-adopters.html http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/early-adopters....

deweller 8y ago

My takeaway: Many technological innovations don't turn out to be world-changing events. And those that do take several years to trickle down to mainstream usage. For those of us that keep a skeptical mindset when evaluating new technology, none of this comes as a surprise.

jannes 8y ago

I predict that AI has 5-10 more years of "mostly useless" ahead until it suddenly becomes interesting. Another thing he criticised was the Internet of Things and other gadgets: I agree with the author on that one. I hope it dies a quick death. If there's a tradeoff between an internet-connected device that lasts 1-2 years and a not-connected device lasting 20 years, I would always chose the longer-lasting one.

Larrikin 8y ago
The crowd on here seems to have a valid complaint against the IoTs while being very short sighted on what actually can be done. Currently most companies want to be Facebook or Google and collect all the data they possibly can while putting out a mediocre/bad product with no security that only works when there is an internet. No consumer actually wants this. Instead of killing the industry, we need a new generation of companies that put out products that function the same or ideally better than their analog competitors. Data collection, such as usage information, and internet connectivity will be what sets these products apart from their traditional competitors. However, the emphasis should be on sending that data to the owner of the product, instead of sending it to the cloud for the companies benefit. Optimizing energy usage, learning usage patterns, etc will be great differentiators. My products working together will be an even bigger differentiator Aggregation of that data can be useful, and could be opt in. I'd love to know that I seem to use way more energy than other people around me. Perhaps I have a bad AC, or my insulation is particularly bad. The biggest issue right now is that companies are putting out insecure products that are completely broken if the parent company of the product are left out of the loop. The products need to work locally, with no reliance on the parent company, and only rely on a company server for true enhancements that can not be calculated locally.
- philipov 8y ago
  If the established players are all interested in siphoning that data, who will fund the development of such technology?
- jannes 8y ago
  You are describing the ideal. But for some reason all that companies can come up with are closed "ecosystems" where systems work well with each other as long as you buy everything from the same manufacturer. Interoperability and open standards seem to be in no companies' interest. Where is that new generation of companies going to come from?

lmm 8y ago

The big picture innovations take longer and arrive slower, but the small, life-enhancing improvements deliver so smoothly and consistently that you don't notice until they're taken away. It's only when you have to use a 5-year-old phone or application that you realise how much worse things were back then.

SiempreViernes 8y ago
Five years ago I had a phone with buttons and rarely had to stop the impulse of trowing it into a wall because google kept installing updates to apps I don't want and can't do more than factory reset. Sure, I didn't have a fancy app to look at the timetable for the bus, but there was a wap-page I could use and frankly the apps are about as frustrating but now because touch interactions so often go wrong without real buttons. And I use both vim and ssh daily, rarely wishing I had an new app to replace them with.
- Yetanfou 8y ago
  Swap out the stock distribution - I'm assuming Android here - for something like AOSP, leave off the Google-specific bits (i.e. do not install 'gapps' or anything which depends on it, install the mock-google-bits instead if you want to run something which depends on Google play services. Use F-Droid instead of the Google play store. Voila, a phone which does not do silly updates behind your back, does not install apps you do not want and which should last for years and years - mine is about 7.5 years old now.
mrob 8y ago
I use a 6 year old phone. It has a third party extra thick battery and a microSD card slot. It does the core functions of a phone just as well as a modern one (voice call, SMS, clock, calculator, flashlight, music player). The camera is worse, but if I cared about quality I'd use a standalone camera. As for apps/Internet, it's roughly the same as modern phones: a whole lot of barely usable garbage only suitable for emergency use when you don't have access to a desktop. It seems to me that any modern phone would be a downgrade.

jaimebuelta 8y ago

The main point of this article is mostly misguided, IMO. The real one is that you don't know which tech innovation will have a great impact before hand. Most of the things that has big impacts are actually things we skip through. For example, we have a pretty decent camera in our pockets at all times. We take pictures constantly. The "selfie" revolution, one that has big impacts in how we perceive ourselves and want other to perceive us is enabled by having an small quality camera around. At some point passing from "terrible quality" to "good enough quality" made a jump in that. Sure, not everyone takes selfies. But it has been a big change in photography in the last 10 years or so. So big we have a new name for something it exist before. I'm pretty sure that being able to track a run and share it on social networks is a big motivator to do exercise, for example. I seems weird to me talking to AI, and even weirder that "the future" is calling to a shop with an AI instead of using some sort of web shop/app/whatever to get an appointment. But who knows...

redial 8y ago
Most revolutions have been silent revolutions. The only one that was an instant world event was the iPhone launch. All the technologies named in the article; Wifi, Google Search, Facebook, Twitter, even YouTube and Wikipedia were not introduced to millions of people at once in a Silicon Valley event. AI will change the world, but it'll be slow, like how the internet changed the world little by little replacing retail, letters, phone calls, and now maybe 40 years later, TV. AI is a process revolution, not a product revolution. So he's right, big tech products have been mostly useless, specially compared to their promises.

fortythirteen 8y ago

> Every now and again, at some huge auditorium, a senior staff member at one of the big firms based in northern California – ordinarily a man... Absolutely irrelevant to the topic. I already ignore the hype, but I think I'll also ignore this author's hyperbole.

philipodonnell 8y ago

The comments here seem to focus on the specific examples, but this misses the point of the article, which I take to be that _every_ new product or feature, no matter how minor or how incremental, is treated as the second coming of the 100x engineer and the cheering crowds hand-picked to promote whatever they see aren't helping by covering it rabidly. He's not wrong, but I've heard that complaint about the tech press in general for years, so I'm not sure its bringing anything new to the table on HN. But at the same time, "some of these will surely turn out to be revolutionary eventually" isn't a great excuse to treat everything as revolutionary before it has a chance to even be seen in the field.

sharemywin 8y ago
I think it's the scale. Be in love with the future products we're using your money to play with don't focus on our actual products because they're really just more expensive than before(no control over life cycle, same features as before) and don't actually add much value but have huge margins.
Clubber 8y ago
New and improved Tide. New formula! Better than ever! I think that's just the hyperbole of marketing. Most people should be immune now. That's probably why marketers target youngsters so much; most haven't caught on to the enormity of the BS just yet.
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
I don't think the messianic cheering is the real problem. Here's a short and not very complete list of unsolved meta-problems: Even when products and systems are revolutionary, there are unexpected negative consequences (e.g. FB and Cambridge Analytica) All systems can be trolled and abused, and if they can be, they will be (e.g. fake reviews on Amazon etc.) AI doesn't actually work all that well yet. (Neither Siri nor Alexa truly pass a conversational Turing test, which means there's a lot of guessing about whether or not any novel request will generate a useful response.) IT systems and products of all kinds are brittle, unreliable, and often downright stupid. Users don't trust updates and feature changes, and often they're right to do so. Given that, why would AI "products" be any better or more reliable?

ribchinski 8y ago

Well... I don't particularly agree with everything this guy is saying, but he is right about the internet of things. In my experience, it is quite useless, and it is a danger to privacy. One of the my friends constantly uses Amazon Alexa and Siri for even the most basic questions like, "What is x + y?" which could be easily done faster on a desk calculator. Either I am a person who likes to make things more inconvenient for myself, or I just don't understand modern technology.

tvanantwerp 8y ago
I think IoT doesn't yet deliver an order of magnitude value-add over analog technologies. It's really not so hard for me to flip my own light switch or find some music to play without issuing voice commands. And I never have to worry about a light switch getting borked by a bad update or malware or connectivity issues. When my home is smart enough to cook all my meals and do dishes and fold laundry, then I'm ready to buy into it.
IshKebab 8y ago
> "What is x + y?" which could be easily done faster on a desk calculator. I seriously doubt that even if we still lived in a world where normal people actually owned calculators. This is just "No wireless. Less space than a nomad." again.
- ribchinski 8y ago
  You'd be surprised, people still own calculators! Also, please, don't call me a nomad. As a programmer, I always have a binary and scientific calculator at hand. And just because I don't particularly enjoy IOT of Wireless Headphones, does not mean that I am a nomad, mate!
wakkaflokka 8y ago
I can agree on the privacy concerns front, but for what it's worth, I've found my Google Home to be quite helpful. So if we're solely talking about how it can be helpful: - When I'm cooking and my hands are dirty and I want to set a timer - When I'm cooking and my hands are dirty and I want to change music/lower volume/raise volume/call someone (or do a measurement conversion) - Turning off all the lights in my house when I'm already in bed and forgot whether I left some on - Laying in bed with the gf and asking random questions out of curiosity - Asking how long it will take to get somewhere if my gf and I are pondering some place to eat but are at the dinner table without our phones - Get home after having a few beers and dive into the messy chicken wings with both my hands, and then realize I want to turn on the TV, play a show or change the current one on my Shield.. perfect use for the GH - Since I already look at my phone way too much (potentially straining muscles in my neck), I can leave my phone in another room and still get quick answers to deep life questions without tilting my neck downwards They're all __super__ minor of course, but honestly, I'm so used to the convenience now it actually feels weird to have to do some of these things 'manually'. I do understand there are serious concerns about privacy that may or may not offset the benefits, definitely plenty of room for discussion on that.

redleggedfrog 8y ago

Let's remember this, from the last few years, written by numerous major media editorial pages (paraphrasing, of course): "Silicon Valley never tackles the big issues. They just invent frivolous new gadgets which no on really needs, or some new app that shares pictures of cute kittens or is the next social network. They should focus on big picture issues - hunger, housing, crime, etc." Those are harder to approach and solve, and you need more patience for results. Now we see complaining that the nifty gadgets aren't coming like they used to. Hmm.

philipov 8y ago
Hunger, crime, these are not technological issues solvable by tech companies, unless your idea of a solution involves building a more effective police state. These are political issues our leadership has neither the will nor incentive to solve. For example, Housing isn't a problem, it's an investment opportunity. The people donating to your campaign wouldn't like it if their investments were pushed down in value. An app can't fix your economy being dominated by bad actors.
- galieos_ghost 8y ago
  hunger- Has been mostly solved thanks to GMO increasing crop yields. crime- Is strongly correlated with poverty, which has been rapidly reduced globally thanks to technological innovation Housing- Will be solved by tech making remote work viable and thus reducing demand in cities. Automation and some form of income stipend could also allow people to live in more affordable places rather than cities. Your view of "tech" is pretty stunted if you only think web apps.
  - mcphage 8y ago
    > Will be solved by tech making remote work viable and thus reducing demand in cities Remote work is viable, and yet the major tech companies are focused on hiring developers in a small number of overcrowded cities (or moving developers that it hires into those cities). I expect no solution to housing or remote work from them.

markatkinson 8y ago

I feel like more than half the earths population already talks in 'preordained cliches'.

QueensGambit 8y ago

Its a good thing and that's how i should be. Startups have 1% chance of success and probably less when it reaches IPO. If big tech with deep pockets have far better shot (say 50%), then the level playing field would slip further and further away from startups. Innovation would stop and we will go back to the era of Microsoft/Oracle killing companies like Netscape.

bmans94 8y ago

My problem with the innovations mentioned in the article lie mainly in the ‘predictive text’ emails from the google presentation. Such a small, minutely helpful feature, and yet like the author mentions could lead to an even more technologically led “groupthink” society, where machines determine our current cliches, which no one will break from. Anyways, I get that big innovations really come as several small innovations, but who out there is imagining the future of this technology, as some were imagining the smartphone or tablet a decade before it’s advent? I have yet to read anything by anyone who has a vision for the next big AI innovation, no matter how moonshot-y

013a 8y ago

This is only one small part of the article, but: I think the revolution in Duplex isn't about letting customers use it to schedule appointments and stuff. I think its much more significant from the perspective of using it as a way to improve Google's data for themselves. They mentioned they're going to use it soon to improve the accuracy of their business open/close times. Imagine other applications; asking businesses how busy it is right now, confirming road closures with municipal governments, etc. Also imagine it opened up on Google Cloud, in a product similar to AWS Connect. Finally, imagine this: They've always had a huge amount of data for human voices to train their AI models. Here's one more; being able to call anyone on the planet and get them talking in a way that is natural, then using the data on the other end of the phone to further train the accuracy of the voices they use. Kind of like ReCaptcha, but for voices.

zrobotics 8y ago
Great, so Google can get even more data. Huzzah!? Why is that a good thing, and what benefit does it provide to consumers? The only thing you mentioned that has even marginal benefit to the public is better search data, and I get less and less convinced that this will happen. I may be an outlier, but I have found Google search less useful in the past year, unless I go through steps to avoid personalization. Rather than search the part # that I requested, it just thinks I want to go to digikey. And dear God, spam calls are already bad enough, why do we want to make them even more realistic? I fail to see even one application where I would prefer to talk to a more realistic robot.

loblollyboy 8y ago

Of course, like raking leaves in your lawn, you’re going to run into a kind of diminishing returns situation. So I agree, albeit with an obvious point, My only qualm (beyond the banality of the thesis) is that this dude is forgetting about some other cool advances, such as the sharing economy (Uber/Lyft and airbnb) which kind of changed the world a little, messenger apps (which made day to day life a little more convenient for many and also played a role in some big geopolitical events). Also just b/c google launched its search engine in 99 or whatever doesn’t mean that they stopped innovating - incremental improvements in search have made it 1000x what it was then, and if you showed google maps to someone from 2000, they would think it is magic. The tools for making tech have gotten a lot better too, even if most of the use cases have already been covered. AI and blockchain can be revolutionary. The problem is how we structure society, where we’re all either just trying to make our daily bread or get rich, and this leads to a lot of misdirected effort.

redial 8y ago
That is not his point. His point is that big flashy introductions never (almost) materialize in something truly world-changing. When was the sharing economy introduced? No one knows, it just happened organically.
thisisit 8y ago
His point is most, not all, tech innovations don't really pan out. Sure there are examples of great products but there also examples of big duds. For example, according to an EPI paper sharing economy accounts for less than 0.1% of total economy: https://www.epi.org/press/uber-drivers-earn-the-equivalent-of-9-21-in-hourly-wages-uber-and-other-gig-platforms-account-for-far-less-of-the-economy-than-many-estimates-suggest/ https://www.epi.org/press/uber-drivers-earn-the-equivalent-o... So, not a win really. At least not right now.
- Eridrus 8y ago
  Almost all innovation in general doesn't pan out. Look at all the money we spend on medical/pharma research. Most of it doesn't pan out, but we're basically ok with that since the rewards are pretty large when it does.

kerrsclyde 8y ago

With constant innovation the temptation to jump to the next new thing is great. This mitigates the value you gain by using something regularly and consistently over a long term period. I've used Evernote since 2012 - when I started it really wasn't that useful. But now, after over 6 years of using it daily, I have a huge body of content personal to me which I find tremendously useful. This only came about because I didn't jump to the next shiny alternative.

bertil 8y ago

Wait, is that article simply ignoring that self-driving car are now commercially available in Phoenix? That’s probably a bigger revolution than the steam engine, and someone’s take on this is “That’s it?” Let’s ignore the shattering impact of incredibly convenient video streaming, content filtering via image tagging, electric cars, transportation or food on demand, having contactless payment available to anyone for pennies… MTurk pays offensively little, sure, but thanks to ‘Silicon Valley’ anyone can work now, no matter how much discrimination or how remote they are — and buy groceries with it. If the accusation is “building”, Amazon built it. If you want it to be more lucrative, you can either legally enforce minimum wage, or start tasks that pay more. Shelter, like food, is a problem we solved a while ago, as long as you can afford it: inequality is a problem, but you can’t blame AirBnB, SpareRoom and countless others for allowing people to find others with a lifestyle, a schedule that fit them so that they can save on rent. Let’s not talk about how internet empowered people to compare mortgages. Crime: Well, yes, Silicon Valley has done a lot for Law enforcement, but expectedly and Thank God, not as a B2C business model. I’m honestly more confused arguing that article than I would argue with a flat-earther. At least a flat-earther is probably right when they say that you have not personally checked yourself for what you claim.

redial 8y ago
> Wait, is that article simply ignoring that self-driving car are now commercially available in Phoenix? That’s probably a bigger revolution than the steam engine, and someone’s take on this is “That’s it? Are you being ironic? The steam engine literally reshaped the world. I think you express exactly what the author is talking about: Acting as if just by announcing it, it has already succeeded.
- amarkov 8y ago
  But imagine someone sitting there in 1804 Wales, looking at the first steam train, saying "slow down buddy you haven't actually changed anything yet". It seems like there's a sense in which this is short-sighted.
  - 8y ago

nmeofthestate 8y ago

>might Duplex be a grim portal into a future in which high-flyers get digital “assistants” to do their chores High flyers = people that own an Android phone and get haircuts.

beat 8y ago

The problem is a lot of these world-changing technologies seem inevitable only in hindsight. Read decades of science fiction before the '90s, and nobody predicted the idea of everyone carrying a personal phone with them at all times. Much less connecting it to a global data network. These things always look inevitable in hindsight. But it takes some real cleverness to get them in foresight.

redial 8y ago
When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket. - Nikola Tesla, 1926. https://kottke.org/18/04/nikola-tesla-predicted-the-smartphone-in-1926 https://kottke.org/18/04/nikola-tesla-predicted-the-smartpho...
- zerostar07 8y ago
  to be fair that was not science fiction
ilkan 8y ago
Dick Tracy in the 40's Edit: Star Trek communicators, 1960's
- beat 8y ago
  Star Trek communicators seem a lot more like walkie-talkies than phones. edit: Note that only active duty Starfleet personnel seem to carry communicators. Civilians do not.
icebraining 8y ago
Not only were personal wireless communications predicted, but also that we'd be absorbed by them in social situations! https://punch.photoshelter.com/image/I00006GHuH4c0Ojo https://punch.photoshelter.com/image/I00006GHuH4c0Ojo

swalsh 8y ago

This is dense, I think there are a few threads of reason though. The exaggeration in marketing common in tech is quite tumultuous. The AI behind duplex is a staggering technical achievement, and really is a small whistle at how AI is going to start to change some fundamental aspects of society. To say AI is not going to be a fundamental change to our literal society in the very near future is naive. But I can understand how the trivialness of the use case is playing down the real achievement here. I do think though that AI is the last "fundamental" change information technologies will bring though. From here out, the future is in the convergence of other hard sciences with advanced IT. Each "Big thing" has been a fundamental building block. By themselves small, but they get significant as they combine.

new299 8y ago
What is the real technical achievement behind Duplex? What we've seen is a rather short tech demo. Speech synthesis has improved, but are you saying that Duplex is a massive step forward in speech recognition and natural language processing too?
- beisner 8y ago
  It’s a major payoff of a lot of small research advances made by Google over the last few years. In and of itself it’s not a terribly groundbreaking research result, but a bunch of parallel AI, NLP, and systems research had to go into this to take it from toy experience to what will eventually be a robust service. This is the promise of AI in the 2020s: incremental services that chip away at various low-cognition but high-variance/pattern-based tasks that litter our home and professional lives.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
romaniv 8y ago
> I do think though that AI is the last "fundamental" change information technologies will bring though. There are wast continents of mostly unexplored or abandoned territory in IT. Moreover, some of them are well documented. Some of them were documented in 1970s. The fact that IT professionals today don't know about them and can't imagine anything more significant than "AI" for pizza ordering, is unsettling. Just to name a few things Alan Kay often talks about: - Automated system integration or tools for generalized interconnection of applications available to end users. - WYSIWYG for the Web. - Constraint-based problem-solvers accessible to mere mortals. - Agent oriented programming with UI simple enough for normal people to use. - Dynamic simulations in "normal" software (not CADs) I am absolutely sickened by the fact that the most common response to this list is "nobody needs this". As far as I'm concerned, each of those things is needed orders of magnitude more than a haircut-scheduling AI.

mLuby 8y ago

"It’s years since Silicon Valley gave us a game-changer. Instead, from curing disease to colonies on Mars, we’re fed overblown promises" Come on. "We don't have a colony on Mars yet" doesn't mean there isn't crazy innovation going on with extremely tangible benefits. Any of the following is a game-changer. 1. Dec'15 SpaceX performs first ever orbital-class rocket landing on land. 2. Apr'16 SpaceX performs first ever orbital-class rocket landing on a ship. 3. Mar'17 SpaceX reuses first orbital-class rocket. 4. Feb'18 SpaceX launches Falcon Heavy, the highest payload capacity of any currently operational launch vehicle. 5. May'18 SpaceX launches Falcon 9 Block 5, set to give USA direct human access to space (in late 2018) for the first time since Mar'11.

notable_user 8y ago
SpaceX is a Los Angeles based company, and Elon Musk also lives in Los Angeles. I’m not sure if that counts as Silicon Valley.
- mLuby 8y ago
  Agreed, but TFA targets SpaceX directly from the subtitle on.
Hydraulix989 8y ago
Sure, there will not be another social network or another smartphone, but innovation is still taking place in many other areas. It's often hard to see what game-changers look like ahead-of-time before they are actually recognized as such (otherwise, we'd all be successful VCs).
Eridrus 8y ago
"Why is Elon Musk wasting his time getting us to Mars when there are problems on Earth that need fixing?!?"
- tarunkotia 8y ago
  Same thing can be said about lunar exploration project which in hindsight brought the personal computing revolution.

Zak 8y ago

Now, when was the last time you came to book a haircut or restaurant table and concluded that the task was so onerous that you would ideally delegate it to a machine? And even if you can easily think of a scenario, would there not be something ethically questionable about doing so, if the person at the other end had no idea who or what they were talking to? I hate talking on the phone. If I can't fill out a web form (login-free please) or send an email to complete some task like that, I'd love to have a robot do it for me. I don't see anything unethical about this as long as the robot performs the task reasonably well, doesn't waste the receptionist's time, etc.... The classic hacker ethic says it's bad for humans to be required to waste time on something a machine could do, and Google has just expanded the list of things machines can do. Of course, under that framework, it would be preferable to automate the receptionist taking the call as well. I'm eager for this technology to become more general-purpose. For months, I've had a case open with an airline over an item that went missing from my checked bag. The only way to get updates is to call them on the phone. It first goes to an IVR, then a call center in India where the call is screened by a person, and only then to the actual department that can give me useful information. There is no direct line (I asked). The process is obviously designed to frustrate users so they give up. The hassle is arguably not worth the $90 they owe me, but I don't want to let them get away with it. I really wish I could have a robot talk to them.

amelius 8y ago
Yeah, but I guess the bigger question is: is this convenience so large that it justifies that a single company puts a wall around a market with a gate with their name on it?
- ryanmonroe 8y ago
  What do you mean? Has Google patented the use of computer-generated voices / language to contact a business?
  - amelius 8y ago
    No (or perhaps yes), but they are a big player, and this is a typical winner-takes-all situation. Soon everybody will access business X through Google, and this gives Google power over these businesses, just like Amazon has power over third-party sellers, for instance. For the consumer it means a minor convenience, but for the business-owner it means tougher competition, and loss of identity of their business. It's like selling software for years, then suddenly Apple comes along, "forces" you to use the AppStore, and demands a cut. In short: the problem is that a company now regulates your market.

imgabe 8y ago

And even if you can easily think of a scenario, would there not be something ethically questionable about doing so, if the person at the other end had no idea who or what they were talking to? Generally I consider something ethically questionable when a person is harmed in some way. Can someone explain how a receptionist might be harmed by unknowingly booking an appointment with a robot instead of a person? The real person shows up. The business gets an appointment. The receptionist does their job. Where does the ethical question come in?

Hydraulix989 8y ago
Deception is a form of harm.
- imgabe 8y ago
  So children are harmed by believing in Santa Claus? If you politely tell someone you enjoyed their cooking even if it wasn't to your taste, you've harmed them? Context matters. Deception, in and of itself, is not inherently harmful. It makes literally 0 difference in the life of the person booking the appointment if it's a robot or a human telling them the desired time and date.

IshKebab 8y ago

This is just pointless pessimistic ranting.

M_Bakhtiari 8y ago

>I thought about a vision of the near future in which half the human race will converse in preordained cliches. Maybe that's how the "Darmok and Jalad" language came about.

Noos 8y ago

I don't know about this. I think they can be useless, useful, and terrifying all at the same time. I walked into my local petco one day and saw these: https://www.glofish.com https://www.glofish.com Useless, all that technology expressing itself in making glowing fish. The tech behind it however is incredibly useful. But wow, the existential dread watching them swim around under a black light was considerable. Or on the other shelves, looking and seeing dog or cat "calming collars" that use pheromones tailored specifically for individual species. I mean, its funny at how useless and useful it is at the same time. Is your dog a worrywart? Use pheromones to make him stress free! But you wonder some day if some bright tech baron will start to make human calming collars, or bracelets, or what have you... Maybe not big tech per se, but the writer of this article might have a failure of imagination if they only see the uselessness.

jeffreyrogers 8y ago

Regardless of whether big tech is doing anything useful it's obvious that we have fewer important innovations now than in the period around the late 19th, early 20th century when we got: electricity, electric motors, dynamite, phones, cars, concrete, planes, tractors, radio, plastic, assembly lines and modern forms of business organization. If we go a little further into the 20th century we get nuclear power and the transistor. I don't think we'll see another time period like that. But that's not really a bad thing. You can only discover really important things once and then they eventually become part of everyday life. A more interesting question is how to sustain our standard of living when we can no longer expect high economic growth from new innovations.

ape4 8y ago

Duplex has the possibility of being huge. Think of how many boring / transactional phone calls are made each day.

squarefoot 8y ago

To me many products are just the result of management asking engineers to apply the company IP to make something that can be sold. The market is saturated in every niche with a huge load of products compared to the number of potential buyers, so they have to act creatively in the hope one day they make a killer gimmick. Example: if IoT and AI are the new words, then everything must be connected and/or exhibit human-like intelligence, at the risk of developing junk product with no actual usefulness, like shoes asking politely the user if they can twit in real time how much his feet stink after a long walk. But again that is rather the result of management looking for money in every possible way than brilliant minds attempting to solve vital problems.

triviatise 8y ago

Self driving cars Tesla electric cars and electric car infrastructure The sharing economy where we rent instead of buy things hopefully will stop or at least slow our rabid consumption These are huge changes in the way we will live our lives.

tim333 8y ago

He cites social media as "These things have changed the world" and rubbishes Google Duplex. But back when they started Twitter and the like seemed a bit of a joke but increased in scope. And AI like Duplex will do so too. The fact that AI is a bit rubbish in some ways just now doesn't mean it won't change the world shortly.

gymshoes 8y ago

Tech inspires science fiction and science fiction inspires tech. Although we won't ever have a time machine that travels backwards in time, there are a lot of commonplace things that were once science fiction.