It’s true, innovation has largely halted at FAANG (which == Silicon Valley in this article), but it’s also not clear to me why that’s a problem. Their products

It’s true, innovation has largely halted at FAANG (which == Silicon Valley in this article), but it’s also not clear to me why that’s a problem. Their products are fully realized - there’s no major societal problem to be solved by a better search engine, smarter smartphone or more connected social network. If I had to pick one major technological advancement being worked on in Silicon Valley that feels like it could be a step change for society, it’d be self-driving cars. Sure, energy and agriculture and biotech are cooking up big stuff as well… but nothing would change day-to-day life more than being able to plug in a destination, sit down and essentially continue your day while you get whisked along - not to mention the incredible reduction in deaths, injury and stress. It would also fundamentally change how cities and suburbs are architected. The problem is that I’m not sure how much of the next steps are technological vs societal/political. My impression, rightly or wrongly, is that if we were to snap our fingers and all be using self-driving teslas or Waymos or whatever tomorrow, traffic accidents would drop precipitously.. like less than 10% of what they are today. But how do we get there? Do we have the stomach as a society to say that a non-zero number of deaths by AI driver are acceptable and even necessary for the greater good? I’m not even sure that I do.