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We've reached or are approaching "peak tech". The other day we were discussing Pablo Azar, "Computer Saturation and the Productivity Slowdown" (Federal Reserve

We've reached or are approaching "peak tech". The other day we were discussing Pablo Azar, "Computer Saturation and the Productivity Slowdown" (Federal Reserve Bank of New York Liberty Street Economics, October 6, 2022) [1] Simply reinventing systems and deliberately obsoleting stuff to create fake demand is over. The metaverse isn't hoing to happen. People are fatigued with tech. We're entering a different era in which we need to make better, more humane and effective technology, not just more and more and more of it. [1] https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2022/10/computer-saturation-and-the-productivity-slowdown/ https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2022/10/comput... EDIT: less trashy link

vkou 4y ago
We may need this, but the stakeholders holding the purse strings don't. And they are the ones who will decide what gets built. It's how we end up with shit like grocery self-checkout machines and robots answering customer support calls. Nobody likes being yelled at by a robot who doesn't understand the situation, except the decision-makers buying the machines. This isn't peak tech, not by a longshot. This is just Intel's competitors eating it's lunch.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Grocery self-checkout machines are great. There's even a system now where you can bring a little scanner with you and scan as you pick them out, that way you can bag them directly in your cart, saving the time of the final scan and the bagging (it was great during the peak of the pandemic, skip the cashier and waiting in the high-population line area). Robots answering support calls are annoying, but self-service websites are pretty good for 99% of things.
  - pcai 4y ago
    the scan as you shop technology is actually being phased out in many chains because the theft rates are unsustainable some wholesale clubs apparently counter this by randomly auditing every cart as you leave, but that seems to leave the whole thing only marginally more efficient than traditional checkout
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      Well, whichever places hang on to them will always at least have this one customer.
    - datavirtue 4y ago
      Yes, apathetic, emasculated, underpaid employees are being used to examine your cart/checkout. I have lost count of how many items I forgot to pay for at Home Depot.
  - vkou 4y ago
    No, they aren't. There's not a single point in time when I have ever scanned my own groceries faster than the guy who does it 8 hours a day. They scream at me when they think I'm stealing (Any human being doing that would instantly be reprimanded by a manager), they have tiny platforms where I can't even fit my groceries and heaven forbid if I do something the machine doesn't like, an attendant needs to come unfuck it for me. The best thing about them is that I can do some work for the store for free as part of my shopping. I can't wait for the next grocery innovation of having the customers stock the shelves from the backroom before they can fill a sack with onions.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      They work for some people not others I guess. I was a cashier for a couple summers. There were a couple members of staff that were really experienced experts who could really fly through the checkout, but there were plenty of us that were just kids working over the summer... Supermarkets have always looked to save cost, it is a price sensitive business after all. At some point you'd give a list to the clerk and they'd put your order together. I'm sure people were annoyed when they had to start doing that clerk's job.
    - MikePlacid 4y ago
      > I can't wait for the next grocery innovation of having the customers stock the shelves from the backroom before they can fill a sack with onions. Think bolder. As a software engineer in the Soviet Union I had to spend about three weeks each year in the collective farm fields planting, tending and harvesting potatoes and cabbages. Since some of my American friends are very fond of socialism these days - these types of “improvement” look definitely a possibility.
      - vkou 4y ago
        You were a professional software engineer in the Soviet Union while still being a high school student? Or do you mean to say that you were one in the 1940s, when people were packed into train cars to bring in the harvest, among other things? Something about this doesn't seem to entirely add up, given that workers in government and defense-critical industries weren't exactly rounded up a la carte to work the fields. Not when there was a dedicated class of kolhozniks that were paid next to nothing, and couldn't really leave the countryside for better jobs in the cities. But now that you mention it, I would pay good money to see the likes of Peter Thiel spend a few weeks a year picking strawberries, or filling grocery bags, or piloting a shitbarge up the Hudson river along with the rest of us. I do keep hearing from that half of the political spectrum that hard, poorly paid work, and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps builds character...
- jmeister 4y ago
  >We may need this, but the stakeholders holding the purse strings don't. And they are the ones who will decide what gets built. It has never been easier to build a business(software). Labor is abundant, and the tech boom has created a million Medicis willing to throw money at wild things. Look at FTX fund for example.
ajross 4y ago
This is actually sort of a strawman. It relies on a definition for "tech" that's different from the English word "technology". You're talking about "peak {tech industry as defined by the last three decades of investment behavior}", and... OK, there's an argument there. But to argue that technology as a whole has stopped is... well, not irrefutable, but almost certainly wrong. And if it's right, wow, is that bleak. Constructed more naturally, your statement here: > we need to make better, more humane and effective technology, not just more and more and more of it. Is certainly true, but frankly is just a tautology. "Technology" as commonly understood means new stuff that makes people's lives better.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  I hoped it was obvious that I chose the word "tech" to mean something less than a grandiose Francis Fukuyama style comment on "The End of Technology".
  - ajross 4y ago
    Yes, but you conflated the two to make your argument. Saying "peak tech is over" to mean "the VC-driven startup grider is out of gas" is fine! Saying that it's over because technology isn't making people's lives better is wrong, because that's what "technology" does, and it doesn't appear to be slowing down to me.
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      > Saying that it's over because technology isn't making people's lives better is wrong, because that's what "technology" does, and it doesn't appear to be slowing down to me. I see two errors here. Defining technology to be "that thing which makes people's lives better" feels weak, even disingenuous, because trivially nuclear missiles and weaponised smallpox are technologies that fail your test. Therefore, there exist technologies that can make peoples' lives worse. The second issue is with your subjective "(people's lives getting better) doesn't appear to be slowing down to me". It's a view you're entitled to hold of course. Maybe you are not aware of other perspectives. It may have escaped your notice that in the last decade digital technologies have substantially changed in their nature. They've been at the centre of scandals over the erosion of democratic values, decline in education, attention disorders, social fragmentation, childhood depression, pollution and e-waste, conflict minerals, energy consumption, loss of privacy, dignity and rights... Must I go on? To hold the idea that "all technologies naturally improve human life" by definition alone seems like a desperate escape from the facts.
Defitio 4y ago
I rethought my reaction to Google IO conference: I found it boring because they showed things which do not have an impact on me. Like 'taking better pictures when you a person of non white color's but that's the wrong attitude. They solve great issues like this and I'm probably more underwhelmed that we even had to fix something like this because it wasn't really solved before. Let's see if/when we get a more stable timeframe back. With COVID and the Russians it's shitty and climate change might already be a regular constant.
- Bloating 4y ago
  Climate Change has been a regular constant since there was a climate
  - Defitio 4y ago
    You should be intelligent enough to make the right assumption of what I'm referencing. If you don't believe in human made climate change pls say so directly so I can ignore you
    - dang 4y ago
      Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? You've been doing it a lot already, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we have to ban such accounts. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  - dang 4y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? You've been doing repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we have to ban such accounts. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
ansible 4y ago
I disagree. We've already passed the tipping point for tech, and investment will continue to accelerate. This is true for various form of artificial intelligence, and the rest of tech. Businesses in general started to see the appeal around the time that the Google Assistant, Cortana, Alexa and Siri started to become actually useful and desired by the general public. Because of that, there will continue to be a push to extend and enhance those capabilities. The current systems can turn a normally worded question into a web search, and present the results in a pleasing manner. The next step is to extend the ability of the systems to actually understand wider and wider ranges of questions. We are still a ways away from having free-flowing conversations with our computers, but there are many steps along the way that are useful of themselves. Advancing this technology is a competitive advantage, and becomes key to drawing in and keeping people in one of the various tech ecosystems (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple). In the wider business world, people are finding new and better ways to apply this technology.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I disagree current systems can turn a web search that presents results in a pleasing manner. I had a horrible time trying to find a specific musician's work on YouTube just last night. It kept recommending me completely unrelated vids as if I was browsing just to browse. It couldn't seem to comprehend that even though I usually watch cute cat videos today I am searching for music, even when I was exact quoting the author's name. I think technology has shifted from giving me what I want to telling me what I want. I really dislike it.
  - foobarian 4y ago
    The current Alexa experience is like guessing the syntax in the early 90s adventure games. It's horrible :-)
    - bornfreddy 4y ago
      But man does it feel good when you guess correctly. :-)
    - 4y ago
ugh123 4y ago
wow what a garbage site that is. ussanews*.com
paxys 4y ago
There is no such thing as "peak tech". There are simply alternating periods of faster and slower growth, and we are currently in the latter.
- bobkazamakis 4y ago
  Do you think these alternative cycles are always the same amplitude? or do you think maybe... we're at peak amplitude of that tech growth cycle that won't be seen again without another major breakthrough technology? Or I guess we can just be pendantic. There are no such thing as alternating periods, all periods of time are exactly the same!
  - victor9000 4y ago
    Ah yes... pedantic contrarianism, unsupported and bluntly stated as fact, the lifeblood of HN threads.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  In terms of human existence tech is overwhelmingly above the average person need. It's not providing anything beside more addictive paths. You don't need more resolution, more bandwidth, more anything.. you probably need less, or more space to reflect and live outside the networked digital realm. ps: to add a bit more, from the few chats I have, people are either saying "well I need that to check my bank account or pay taxes" or "well I need that so I can binge on netflix"
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - yazaddaruvala 4y ago
    > You don't need more resolution, more bandwidth, more anything.. you probably need less, or more space to reflect and live outside the networked digital realm. Better tech is how humans (all of them - rather than the few) get more space to reflect and live outside.
zelias 4y ago
On the contrary, I think the next decade will call for a revolution in physical technologies as opposed to the web-centric mentality of the past few decades.
dougmwne 4y ago
I truly do not think so. I have experienced a handful of magic products, Apple products which are the best example, that are built from incredibly capable software that takes cheap hardware components and makes them sing. All objects could be like this, deep software capabilities running on a few dollars of hardware. I have the idea that the demand for people that can create software is bottomless, that there will always be more thing to turn into perfect iThings.
whoIsYou 4y ago
I think we may have reached peak consumer tech I think there is plenty of industry tech left to be developer
chinabot 4y ago
My laptop is a 1000x the power of the one I had 15 years ago yet I am still stuck with the same hourglass due to shit, bloated and over-complex software stacks. Tell me I'm at peak tech when this is no longer the case.
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  There's no way this is true. You simply aren't accurately remembering the actual experience of using that laptop 15 years ago. For starters, the laptop 15 years ago was using a spinning rust hard disk, so everything was much slower compared to today's lightning fast SSD. I remember when it used to take minutes to boot up a laptop and launch a few applications, and it took almost that long to resume from hibernation. Modern laptops are much, much faster.
  - godelski 4y ago
    I think they are in agreement and retorting the gp who said we are at peak computing. Clearly we aren't if their programs are not launched instantly. Clearly there is room for improvement.
- godelski 4y ago
  I'm with you. The previous sentiment is similar to 35mb of RAM is all you'll ever need. Instead computers are a "build it and they will come" paradigm. Hardware innovation happened in the US when it was cheap and accessible. Not it happens in Shenzhen, where it is cheap and accessible. Programming innovation accelerated when computers became cheap and accessible. I don't see us slowing down anytime soon because you can literally put a computer in anything, and people are trying. Cheaper and more powerful chips just means we can expand into more domains.

vkou 4y ago

We may need this, but the stakeholders holding the purse strings don't. And they are the ones who will decide what gets built. It's how we end up with shit like grocery self-checkout machines and robots answering customer support calls. Nobody likes being yelled at by a robot who doesn't understand the situation, except the decision-makers buying the machines. This isn't peak tech, not by a longshot. This is just Intel's competitors eating it's lunch.

bee_rider 4y ago
Grocery self-checkout machines are great. There's even a system now where you can bring a little scanner with you and scan as you pick them out, that way you can bag them directly in your cart, saving the time of the final scan and the bagging (it was great during the peak of the pandemic, skip the cashier and waiting in the high-population line area). Robots answering support calls are annoying, but self-service websites are pretty good for 99% of things.
- pcai 4y ago
  the scan as you shop technology is actually being phased out in many chains because the theft rates are unsustainable some wholesale clubs apparently counter this by randomly auditing every cart as you leave, but that seems to leave the whole thing only marginally more efficient than traditional checkout
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Well, whichever places hang on to them will always at least have this one customer.
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    Yes, apathetic, emasculated, underpaid employees are being used to examine your cart/checkout. I have lost count of how many items I forgot to pay for at Home Depot.
- vkou 4y ago
  No, they aren't. There's not a single point in time when I have ever scanned my own groceries faster than the guy who does it 8 hours a day. They scream at me when they think I'm stealing (Any human being doing that would instantly be reprimanded by a manager), they have tiny platforms where I can't even fit my groceries and heaven forbid if I do something the machine doesn't like, an attendant needs to come unfuck it for me. The best thing about them is that I can do some work for the store for free as part of my shopping. I can't wait for the next grocery innovation of having the customers stock the shelves from the backroom before they can fill a sack with onions.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    They work for some people not others I guess. I was a cashier for a couple summers. There were a couple members of staff that were really experienced experts who could really fly through the checkout, but there were plenty of us that were just kids working over the summer... Supermarkets have always looked to save cost, it is a price sensitive business after all. At some point you'd give a list to the clerk and they'd put your order together. I'm sure people were annoyed when they had to start doing that clerk's job.
  - MikePlacid 4y ago
    > I can't wait for the next grocery innovation of having the customers stock the shelves from the backroom before they can fill a sack with onions. Think bolder. As a software engineer in the Soviet Union I had to spend about three weeks each year in the collective farm fields planting, tending and harvesting potatoes and cabbages. Since some of my American friends are very fond of socialism these days - these types of “improvement” look definitely a possibility.
    - vkou 4y ago
      You were a professional software engineer in the Soviet Union while still being a high school student? Or do you mean to say that you were one in the 1940s, when people were packed into train cars to bring in the harvest, among other things? Something about this doesn't seem to entirely add up, given that workers in government and defense-critical industries weren't exactly rounded up a la carte to work the fields. Not when there was a dedicated class of kolhozniks that were paid next to nothing, and couldn't really leave the countryside for better jobs in the cities. But now that you mention it, I would pay good money to see the likes of Peter Thiel spend a few weeks a year picking strawberries, or filling grocery bags, or piloting a shitbarge up the Hudson river along with the rest of us. I do keep hearing from that half of the political spectrum that hard, poorly paid work, and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps builds character...
jmeister 4y ago
>We may need this, but the stakeholders holding the purse strings don't. And they are the ones who will decide what gets built. It has never been easier to build a business(software). Labor is abundant, and the tech boom has created a million Medicis willing to throw money at wild things. Look at FTX fund for example.

ajross 4y ago

This is actually sort of a strawman. It relies on a definition for "tech" that's different from the English word "technology". You're talking about "peak {tech industry as defined by the last three decades of investment behavior}", and... OK, there's an argument there. But to argue that technology as a whole has stopped is... well, not irrefutable, but almost certainly wrong. And if it's right, wow, is that bleak. Constructed more naturally, your statement here: > we need to make better, more humane and effective technology, not just more and more and more of it. Is certainly true, but frankly is just a tautology. "Technology" as commonly understood means new stuff that makes people's lives better.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
I hoped it was obvious that I chose the word "tech" to mean something less than a grandiose Francis Fukuyama style comment on "The End of Technology".
- ajross 4y ago
  Yes, but you conflated the two to make your argument. Saying "peak tech is over" to mean "the VC-driven startup grider is out of gas" is fine! Saying that it's over because technology isn't making people's lives better is wrong, because that's what "technology" does, and it doesn't appear to be slowing down to me.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > Saying that it's over because technology isn't making people's lives better is wrong, because that's what "technology" does, and it doesn't appear to be slowing down to me. I see two errors here. Defining technology to be "that thing which makes people's lives better" feels weak, even disingenuous, because trivially nuclear missiles and weaponised smallpox are technologies that fail your test. Therefore, there exist technologies that can make peoples' lives worse. The second issue is with your subjective "(people's lives getting better) doesn't appear to be slowing down to me". It's a view you're entitled to hold of course. Maybe you are not aware of other perspectives. It may have escaped your notice that in the last decade digital technologies have substantially changed in their nature. They've been at the centre of scandals over the erosion of democratic values, decline in education, attention disorders, social fragmentation, childhood depression, pollution and e-waste, conflict minerals, energy consumption, loss of privacy, dignity and rights... Must I go on? To hold the idea that "all technologies naturally improve human life" by definition alone seems like a desperate escape from the facts.

Defitio 4y ago

I rethought my reaction to Google IO conference: I found it boring because they showed things which do not have an impact on me. Like 'taking better pictures when you a person of non white color's but that's the wrong attitude. They solve great issues like this and I'm probably more underwhelmed that we even had to fix something like this because it wasn't really solved before. Let's see if/when we get a more stable timeframe back. With COVID and the Russians it's shitty and climate change might already be a regular constant.

Bloating 4y ago
Climate Change has been a regular constant since there was a climate
- Defitio 4y ago
  You should be intelligent enough to make the right assumption of what I'm referencing. If you don't believe in human made climate change pls say so directly so I can ignore you
  - dang 4y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? You've been doing it a lot already, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we have to ban such accounts. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- dang 4y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? You've been doing repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we have to ban such accounts. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

ansible 4y ago

I disagree. We've already passed the tipping point for tech, and investment will continue to accelerate. This is true for various form of artificial intelligence, and the rest of tech. Businesses in general started to see the appeal around the time that the Google Assistant, Cortana, Alexa and Siri started to become actually useful and desired by the general public. Because of that, there will continue to be a push to extend and enhance those capabilities. The current systems can turn a normally worded question into a web search, and present the results in a pleasing manner. The next step is to extend the ability of the systems to actually understand wider and wider ranges of questions. We are still a ways away from having free-flowing conversations with our computers, but there are many steps along the way that are useful of themselves. Advancing this technology is a competitive advantage, and becomes key to drawing in and keeping people in one of the various tech ecosystems (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple). In the wider business world, people are finding new and better ways to apply this technology.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I disagree current systems can turn a web search that presents results in a pleasing manner. I had a horrible time trying to find a specific musician's work on YouTube just last night. It kept recommending me completely unrelated vids as if I was browsing just to browse. It couldn't seem to comprehend that even though I usually watch cute cat videos today I am searching for music, even when I was exact quoting the author's name. I think technology has shifted from giving me what I want to telling me what I want. I really dislike it.
- foobarian 4y ago
  The current Alexa experience is like guessing the syntax in the early 90s adventure games. It's horrible :-)
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    But man does it feel good when you guess correctly. :-)
  - 4y ago

ugh123 4y ago

wow what a garbage site that is. ussanews*.com

paxys 4y ago

There is no such thing as "peak tech". There are simply alternating periods of faster and slower growth, and we are currently in the latter.

bobkazamakis 4y ago
Do you think these alternative cycles are always the same amplitude? or do you think maybe... we're at peak amplitude of that tech growth cycle that won't be seen again without another major breakthrough technology? Or I guess we can just be pendantic. There are no such thing as alternating periods, all periods of time are exactly the same!
- victor9000 4y ago
  Ah yes... pedantic contrarianism, unsupported and bluntly stated as fact, the lifeblood of HN threads.
agumonkey 4y ago
In terms of human existence tech is overwhelmingly above the average person need. It's not providing anything beside more addictive paths. You don't need more resolution, more bandwidth, more anything.. you probably need less, or more space to reflect and live outside the networked digital realm. ps: to add a bit more, from the few chats I have, people are either saying "well I need that to check my bank account or pay taxes" or "well I need that so I can binge on netflix"
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yazaddaruvala 4y ago
  > You don't need more resolution, more bandwidth, more anything.. you probably need less, or more space to reflect and live outside the networked digital realm. Better tech is how humans (all of them - rather than the few) get more space to reflect and live outside.

zelias 4y ago

On the contrary, I think the next decade will call for a revolution in physical technologies as opposed to the web-centric mentality of the past few decades.

dougmwne 4y ago

I truly do not think so. I have experienced a handful of magic products, Apple products which are the best example, that are built from incredibly capable software that takes cheap hardware components and makes them sing. All objects could be like this, deep software capabilities running on a few dollars of hardware. I have the idea that the demand for people that can create software is bottomless, that there will always be more thing to turn into perfect iThings.

whoIsYou 4y ago

I think we may have reached peak consumer tech I think there is plenty of industry tech left to be developer

chinabot 4y ago

My laptop is a 1000x the power of the one I had 15 years ago yet I am still stuck with the same hourglass due to shit, bloated and over-complex software stacks. Tell me I'm at peak tech when this is no longer the case.

CydeWeys 4y ago
There's no way this is true. You simply aren't accurately remembering the actual experience of using that laptop 15 years ago. For starters, the laptop 15 years ago was using a spinning rust hard disk, so everything was much slower compared to today's lightning fast SSD. I remember when it used to take minutes to boot up a laptop and launch a few applications, and it took almost that long to resume from hibernation. Modern laptops are much, much faster.
- godelski 4y ago
  I think they are in agreement and retorting the gp who said we are at peak computing. Clearly we aren't if their programs are not launched instantly. Clearly there is room for improvement.
godelski 4y ago
I'm with you. The previous sentiment is similar to 35mb of RAM is all you'll ever need. Instead computers are a "build it and they will come" paradigm. Hardware innovation happened in the US when it was cheap and accessible. Not it happens in Shenzhen, where it is cheap and accessible. Programming innovation accelerated when computers became cheap and accessible. I don't see us slowing down anytime soon because you can literally put a computer in anything, and people are trying. Cheaper and more powerful chips just means we can expand into more domains.