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The older I get the more I realize how incredibly hard it is to predict anything about the future, especially when it comes to technology. Growing up in the 90

The older I get the more I realize how incredibly hard it is to predict anything about the future, especially when it comes to technology. Growing up in the 90s I thought virtual reality was just around the corner - only now 30 years later are we starting to see virtual reality. 5 years ago it seemed like 100% self driving cars were just around the corner. You can argue we are much closer than we were, but it still seems like we are pretty far away. 10 years ago, the web was dead and apps were the future... today hardly anyone believes apps are the future. I imagine that travel to Mars, and a moon colony seemed like it was just around the corner in 1970 and yet here we are 50 years later and neither one of those came to fruition. The reality is tech is incredibly fast moving, which makes it hard to predict, but still not as fast as we think it is.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
The one thing that is consistent about tech is that prices come down. A 3d printer in 2012 was $2000... a 3d printer that can be that printer is about $300 today. A decent drone was about $3000 back there... $400 can you get you a decent drone today.
- benja123 6y ago
  This is true. Another thing that drove the prices down is the fact that the countries where we outsourced manufacturing have built up their own industry and know how. They are now selling the same products for half the price directly to the consumer.
- tartoran 6y ago
  And $20 can get you an amazingly fun kiddie drone. Got for my son a HS drone and was amazed at what you can get for 20. Yes, prices’ drop is a big one on technology evolution
- Aachen 6y ago
  DRAM would like to have a word with you. And I can't say laptops have improved much for a decade now (you'll see an increase in quality per euro still, but it's very marginal and not a single component made leaps), I was rather disappointed when getting a new one after my 2011 model. Back in the good old days, three years would go by and I'd love the speed of a new one, or of ssds, or the gigabit ethernet, or the 802.11n. Smartphones too. 2011->2017 changed big time - in hardware at least. But now it doesn't really matter if you get a 250 or a 1000 euro phone. You'll get a better camera and some gimmicks like oled (objectively better, I went from oled to lcd and it bothered me for weeks, but honestly I'll use a phone for years, I'm used to it now, and don't miss it at all anymore) or usb-c. Can't do much more without reducing battery life or other aspects. And sometimes they do -- make a worse phone with better specs I mean. People don't mind because it's all the same anyway, the tech is stagnating there. As a rule, you're right, but the exceptions and limitations are also everywhere.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    > But now it doesn't really matter if you get a 250 or a 1000 euro phone. That's the OP's point.
- asdff 6y ago
  Sure, things that were produced by teensy niche companies got cheap when the met the economy of scale. That's true for everything, not just tech. On the other hand, phones are way more expensive today than when the original iPhone came out for 'just' $499, while wages have held steady over that time.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    The iPhone SE is $399 and is a massive improvement over the original iPhone. What has happened over that period is people's expectations have inflated (with some help from the marketers). Oh and wage growth over that period has been reasonably strong (until 2020): https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=unitedstawaggro&v=202104092315V20200908&d1=20110415&h=300&w=600 https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=unitedstawagg...
- Tepix 6y ago
  With 3D printers, it's not so much the price that's an issue. It takes away a lot of space and it needs calibrating, adjusting etc. To me (very occasional user) it seems like going to a fab lab and using their $3000 3d printer is the better option.
solidist 6y ago
"only now 30 years later are we starting to see virtual reality" As Tom Hall said (paraphrase) "No one wants to strap shit to their face". I'd bet it's still very much a novelty in 30 years.
- benja123 6y ago
  I am not sure. In the past year I have actually started to see quite a few non techie friends buy the oculus quest and are avid users. I do feel like we are at a turning point where VR will become the dominant non mobile gaming device of the future. If it will be used much outside of gaming is the big question.
  - bemmu 6y ago
    Agree with you. I think we've just entered a period of rapid adoption, and the driver is FB making better and better low-cost entry level devices, hopefully pulling along more and more competitors.
- toxik 6y ago
  And jesus christ the motion sickness is just unbearable for me. It can ruin me for an entire day.
  - benja123 6y ago
    Try games where you are static (beat saber, table tennis etc.). Do not play games where you are in any vehicle or need to walk around.
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      Yeah, I really wish people qualified where they're having the problems. Seated experiences where you use smooth locomotion are bad. Aircraft (or spaceship) cockpit type experiences are even worse because not only do you have translation that's out of sync with your inner ear and sense of movement, but you have rotation as well (which is much worse). also, newer headsets are much, much better than in the 90s.
retube 6y ago
> today hardly anyone believes apps are the future. oh really? what are people thinking the alternative is?
- akvadrako 6y ago
  I personally think it's going to be more like Office/Emacs with lots of plugins and a distributed content-addressable data store in the background.
  - Sargos 6y ago
    This is exactly what I want to build and think it's one of those foundational building blocks that we can't believe we lived without. Files stored on IPFS with their hash being their universal ID. Metadata would be associated with that IPFS hash such as name, maintainer, description, etc. The storage would be a smart contract on Ethereum with the key being the IPFS hash and the value being the current metadata. It's basically a distributed web app store. Throw on a Sybil resistant voting mechanism and you have a discoverable shared and programmable dataset of applications and modules. If a project like this exists I unfortunately haven't come across it.
  - e3bc54b2 6y ago
    I doubt anything like Emacs will be the future. Emacs was a fluke as were the PCs of a peculiar time where the stars aligned for brief moments. Commercial interests play opposite to creation of anything like Emacs, where everything is customizable and anything can interact with everything. Unless interoperability is mandated somehow, I do not see anything like Emacs in our future.
moosey 6y ago
> I imagine that travel to Mars, and a moon colony seemed like it was just around the corner in 1970 and yet here we are 50 years later and neither one of those came to fruition. It was just around the corner. The grand arc of human life altered course, and it took the market 50 years to catch up to collective action.
- benja123 6y ago
  Well, war and the resulting competition drove the space race. Once the Soviets and Americans decided that space wasn’t worth fighting over they spent their money elsewhere and we stopped advancing in that direction. I usually give a lot of the credit for the recent push back into space to private companies like spaceX, but, now after making this comment part of me is wondering if I am just being naive and the real reason for space becoming a priority again is because China has started to make significant progress in their space program.
  - Ekaros 6y ago
    SpaceX is doing things, but I wonder if that is just result of excess capital we have on markets... Because no one honest can really calculate reasonable return of investment on things like colonisation of Mars...
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      I don't think so, in this case. Their initial starting capital though, that was won on tech startup lottery... As for the Mars thing, SpaceX is funding it with their profits from boring commercial launches, and I don't think that is driven by excess capital on the market.
fma 6y ago
I vividly remember in high school in the late 90s...the Prius was out. I thought the first car that I buy (with my own money) would be an electric vehicle. Though EVs have been around, they aren't mainstream.
fnord77 6y ago
I think the people who were marketing/hyping VR and self-driving cars for their own gain made it seem like those technologies were just around the corner.
- aksss 6y ago
  And also just boring, mundane “futurists” - it’s not as hard to predict the direction of technology as the timing. Futurism is a kind of inspiration porn, I’d say.
young_unixer 6y ago
> 10 years ago, the web was dead and apps were the future... today hardly anyone believes apps are the future. I'm still torn about this. I hope the web wins, but I don't really know if the average mobile user even uses a web browser anymore. And PWAs have been a failure so far, maybe Svelte or WebAssembly could fix this, but I wouldn't put my money on it.
- bagacrap 6y ago
  Browsers aside, a very large number of apps embed web content
- Tepix 6y ago
  I avoid apps whenever i can. A web based solution often provides better privacy.
- bruiseralmighty 6y ago
  I still use safari on an iphone6 to browse youtube, reddit, and whatever else. I like that it saves my tabs for me. I have old ones sitting from nearly 5 or 6 years ago that I still go back to occasionally. I also like purposefully obfuscating browsing social media and youtube so that I spend less time there and am less inclined to use it all day. I can even have a reddit account without ever getting any kind of push notifications. Its great! That being said, I am probably going to get a linux phone once this one finally leaves me, so I do not represent a large segment of the consumer base.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

The one thing that is consistent about tech is that prices come down. A 3d printer in 2012 was $2000... a 3d printer that can be that printer is about $300 today. A decent drone was about $3000 back there... $400 can you get you a decent drone today.

benja123 6y ago
This is true. Another thing that drove the prices down is the fact that the countries where we outsourced manufacturing have built up their own industry and know how. They are now selling the same products for half the price directly to the consumer.
tartoran 6y ago
And $20 can get you an amazingly fun kiddie drone. Got for my son a HS drone and was amazed at what you can get for 20. Yes, prices’ drop is a big one on technology evolution
Aachen 6y ago
DRAM would like to have a word with you. And I can't say laptops have improved much for a decade now (you'll see an increase in quality per euro still, but it's very marginal and not a single component made leaps), I was rather disappointed when getting a new one after my 2011 model. Back in the good old days, three years would go by and I'd love the speed of a new one, or of ssds, or the gigabit ethernet, or the 802.11n. Smartphones too. 2011->2017 changed big time - in hardware at least. But now it doesn't really matter if you get a 250 or a 1000 euro phone. You'll get a better camera and some gimmicks like oled (objectively better, I went from oled to lcd and it bothered me for weeks, but honestly I'll use a phone for years, I'm used to it now, and don't miss it at all anymore) or usb-c. Can't do much more without reducing battery life or other aspects. And sometimes they do -- make a worse phone with better specs I mean. People don't mind because it's all the same anyway, the tech is stagnating there. As a rule, you're right, but the exceptions and limitations are also everywhere.
- fomine3 6y ago
  > But now it doesn't really matter if you get a 250 or a 1000 euro phone. That's the OP's point.
asdff 6y ago
Sure, things that were produced by teensy niche companies got cheap when the met the economy of scale. That's true for everything, not just tech. On the other hand, phones are way more expensive today than when the original iPhone came out for 'just' $499, while wages have held steady over that time.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  The iPhone SE is $399 and is a massive improvement over the original iPhone. What has happened over that period is people's expectations have inflated (with some help from the marketers). Oh and wage growth over that period has been reasonably strong (until 2020): https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=unitedstawaggro&v=202104092315V20200908&d1=20110415&h=300&w=600 https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=unitedstawagg...
Tepix 6y ago
With 3D printers, it's not so much the price that's an issue. It takes away a lot of space and it needs calibrating, adjusting etc. To me (very occasional user) it seems like going to a fab lab and using their $3000 3d printer is the better option.

solidist 6y ago

"only now 30 years later are we starting to see virtual reality" As Tom Hall said (paraphrase) "No one wants to strap shit to their face". I'd bet it's still very much a novelty in 30 years.

benja123 6y ago
I am not sure. In the past year I have actually started to see quite a few non techie friends buy the oculus quest and are avid users. I do feel like we are at a turning point where VR will become the dominant non mobile gaming device of the future. If it will be used much outside of gaming is the big question.
- bemmu 6y ago
  Agree with you. I think we've just entered a period of rapid adoption, and the driver is FB making better and better low-cost entry level devices, hopefully pulling along more and more competitors.
toxik 6y ago
And jesus christ the motion sickness is just unbearable for me. It can ruin me for an entire day.
- benja123 6y ago
  Try games where you are static (beat saber, table tennis etc.). Do not play games where you are in any vehicle or need to walk around.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    Yeah, I really wish people qualified where they're having the problems. Seated experiences where you use smooth locomotion are bad. Aircraft (or spaceship) cockpit type experiences are even worse because not only do you have translation that's out of sync with your inner ear and sense of movement, but you have rotation as well (which is much worse). also, newer headsets are much, much better than in the 90s.

retube 6y ago

> today hardly anyone believes apps are the future. oh really? what are people thinking the alternative is?

akvadrako 6y ago
I personally think it's going to be more like Office/Emacs with lots of plugins and a distributed content-addressable data store in the background.
- Sargos 6y ago
  This is exactly what I want to build and think it's one of those foundational building blocks that we can't believe we lived without. Files stored on IPFS with their hash being their universal ID. Metadata would be associated with that IPFS hash such as name, maintainer, description, etc. The storage would be a smart contract on Ethereum with the key being the IPFS hash and the value being the current metadata. It's basically a distributed web app store. Throw on a Sybil resistant voting mechanism and you have a discoverable shared and programmable dataset of applications and modules. If a project like this exists I unfortunately haven't come across it.
- e3bc54b2 6y ago
  I doubt anything like Emacs will be the future. Emacs was a fluke as were the PCs of a peculiar time where the stars aligned for brief moments. Commercial interests play opposite to creation of anything like Emacs, where everything is customizable and anything can interact with everything. Unless interoperability is mandated somehow, I do not see anything like Emacs in our future.

moosey 6y ago

> I imagine that travel to Mars, and a moon colony seemed like it was just around the corner in 1970 and yet here we are 50 years later and neither one of those came to fruition. It was just around the corner. The grand arc of human life altered course, and it took the market 50 years to catch up to collective action.

benja123 6y ago
Well, war and the resulting competition drove the space race. Once the Soviets and Americans decided that space wasn’t worth fighting over they spent their money elsewhere and we stopped advancing in that direction. I usually give a lot of the credit for the recent push back into space to private companies like spaceX, but, now after making this comment part of me is wondering if I am just being naive and the real reason for space becoming a priority again is because China has started to make significant progress in their space program.
- Ekaros 6y ago
  SpaceX is doing things, but I wonder if that is just result of excess capital we have on markets... Because no one honest can really calculate reasonable return of investment on things like colonisation of Mars...
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    I don't think so, in this case. Their initial starting capital though, that was won on tech startup lottery... As for the Mars thing, SpaceX is funding it with their profits from boring commercial launches, and I don't think that is driven by excess capital on the market.

fma 6y ago

I vividly remember in high school in the late 90s...the Prius was out. I thought the first car that I buy (with my own money) would be an electric vehicle. Though EVs have been around, they aren't mainstream.

fnord77 6y ago

I think the people who were marketing/hyping VR and self-driving cars for their own gain made it seem like those technologies were just around the corner.

aksss 6y ago
And also just boring, mundane “futurists” - it’s not as hard to predict the direction of technology as the timing. Futurism is a kind of inspiration porn, I’d say.

young_unixer 6y ago

> 10 years ago, the web was dead and apps were the future... today hardly anyone believes apps are the future. I'm still torn about this. I hope the web wins, but I don't really know if the average mobile user even uses a web browser anymore. And PWAs have been a failure so far, maybe Svelte or WebAssembly could fix this, but I wouldn't put my money on it.

bagacrap 6y ago
Browsers aside, a very large number of apps embed web content
Tepix 6y ago
I avoid apps whenever i can. A web based solution often provides better privacy.
bruiseralmighty 6y ago
I still use safari on an iphone6 to browse youtube, reddit, and whatever else. I like that it saves my tabs for me. I have old ones sitting from nearly 5 or 6 years ago that I still go back to occasionally. I also like purposefully obfuscating browsing social media and youtube so that I spend less time there and am less inclined to use it all day. I can even have a reddit account without ever getting any kind of push notifications. Its great! That being said, I am probably going to get a linux phone once this one finally leaves me, so I do not represent a large segment of the consumer base.