20 ms·

Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future

256 points by chrismealy 15y ago

Casseres 15y ago
Maybe I'm missing the purpose of the article, but I am responding to how I interpreted it. What will our future be like if we all focus our lives around little boxes in our hands rather than the vast open spaces around us? Perhaps we should invent a future where the technology are the tools we use to enhance our life, not control our life. In Star Trek, people weren't addicted to PADDs or spend every living moment in the Holo Deck. In fact the episodes where technology controlled people, we recognized the technology as evil. Invent something to enhance our lives, not control them.
- mgkimsal 15y ago
  Who are you to be telling someone their life isn't being 'enhanced' by their usage of whatever tools/sites/technology they choose?
- pyre 15y ago
  If someone is 'addicted' to Facebook, is technology really controlling them, or is it more that they have lost control of themselves? Are they really addicted to technology or just addicted to hanging out with their friends (which technology -- e.g. smartphones + Facebook -- enables to happen anywhere, not just when you're able to schedule time to meet in person). Also: 1. Perhaps Star Trek is an unrealistic prediction of how man will interact with technology in the future. 2. Perhaps your (and the author's) view of things is skewed by selection bias. I.e. you're around people that are more 'addicted' to technology than others. 3. You're forgetting that in Star Trek the human race has had a sort of epiphany centered around first contact with an alien species.
  - korussian 15y ago
    Also remember that in Star Trek the most ubiquitous technology was the pin-on-walkie-talkie, during use of which people would look up at the ceiling. It was a show defined by the 80's/90's, with several plotlines that could have been resolved by someone having an iPhone in their pocket, or by the Enterprise having smart drones. There were only a couple of episodes that dealt with holodeck addiction, and just one or two in which the holodeck was used to its full potential: as a reconfigurable-on-the-fly work space that can tie into ship-systems, and either show or replicate any hardware or display you describe verbally. If the holodeck were a real thing, I would rarely come out of there. I'd just make real friends inside other holodecks, and we'd spend our lives learning and creating stuff. It would be an enormous social problem. 60's StarTrek tech doesn't count. Although Kirk's stylus/pad for signatures is not unlike the UPS guy's… and I'll bet Uhura's metallic ear slab was bluetooth.
    - korussian 15y ago
      Sorry, apparently a single star makes everything after it italic… until a later star. Can't edit/delete. My bad.
- DennisP 15y ago
  The addicts are in the Borg cubes.
moocow01 15y ago
Its very difficult for me to ascertain if its just me or the following is a growing sentiment... I'm not wowed by hardly anything that comes out of consumer internet tech anymore. Before anyone gets out a pitchfork I have actively contributed and worked on products in the past that are part of the behemoth of services/apps/sites etc that have become mundane to me so I deserve my own criticism as well. But the majority of launches especially for the past couple years in the media seems like the same deck chairs (mobile/social/photos/ads/etc) rearranged in a different order. Overtime Ive just lost interest in tech blogs in that I rarely see something that I'd consider genuinely interesting tech from a product or engineering or consumer perspective. Maybe I'm just getting old? On the other hand if I'm not out of touch it seems like it could be a great time to step out of 'traditional' consumer tech and push on some of the 'new' things like 3D printing, robotics, computer vision, etc as well as seek out applications towards other industries (education, health, food, etc.)
- ismarc 15y ago
  At its heart, the internet is about information dissemination, in whatever form that information takes. Discovery has always been the issue, from link portals to message boards to search engines, it's finding information you're interested in. The current "social network" trends are another aspect of that discovery process. The difference being that an individual (or company) can more directly impact how the discovery is made and who makes it. This makes it more viable for an individual to provide information and it to be discovered. I think all of the 'mundane' applications of it you see are exploring different facets of the same thing. What we have is a specialization of one aspect of the internet (dissemination of personal information to a small network) and I think the next step will be the same for different categories of information. Not a "social network for code", but a platform for discovery that appropriately fits the niche. We then get q hierarchical discovery model where you search for where to find the information, and then search for the information. But we need all the boring steps in between to find the right model for each niche.
- AVTizzle 15y ago
  I'm with you, to an extent. Interestingly it was the recent excitement around the Pebble watch that made me realize how indifferent I'd become to a lot of new consumer WEB products. I guess I realized Pebble was exciting because it was a new platform with new opportunities and possibilities. I think that explains a lot of the excitement around the upcoming "SmartTV" frontier too. Even mobile is still young enough that new, exciting applications are still pushing boundaries and blowing minds - though it's maturing rapidly. But as far as classic web products - the web is a much, much more mature canvas with much more solidified players. Of course it'll lose some of that excitement, naturally...
lucisferre 15y ago
This type of "whatever's new is old" complaining is pretty cliche. I mean, of course people are going to try to innovate in evolutionary ways more than revolutionary ways. Revolutionary innovation is at least partially random and obviously much higher risk. It often comes as a result of many people iterating many times on the same-old-same-old. This article really seems to do nothing other than state the obvious and offers no real suggestions or directions for where to go or what to do next. Oh right, biotech, cure for cancer, end hunger, solve the energy crisis, etc. Because no one has tried or is trying to solve those, and they are clearly as easy as figuring out how to get people to share photos of themselves.
- bicknergseng 15y ago
  I agree... but I'd like to phrase it the way I thought of it. The evolution the article made me think of is not really innovation but rather integration. Things like Google Wallet, mobile apps, etc... they aren't new technologies, they're current or old technologies applied in different ways. If the article's author wants innovation on the scale of the electronic computer or space flight, you've got to understand that that kind of innovation is far more difficult to create, as you pointed out.
superasn 15y ago
There is lots of stuff happening which I hope we'll probably see integrated soon in our mobile phones. The top two things which I'm waiting to see in my mobile is 1) The lightfield camera and 2) a device like the "sixth sense".
- icefox 15y ago
  Pick up this magnetic wedding ring and you can feel electro magnetic fields. The massive field microwave puts out is the most amusing one I have found so far. http://www.supermagnetman.net/index.php?cPath=61 http://www.supermagnetman.net/index.php?cPath=61
- johnwyles 15y ago
  is the lytro really all that impressive that you would list it as one of two things you want to see in mobile? i think i would rather see about a dozen other things in mobile before I really cared about shifting focus for my crappy mobile pics - NFC being chief among them
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gavinlynch 15y ago
I fail to understand this article because I think there are so many different topics the author touches on.. Innovation. Culture. Tech business and startups.. I think the author is conflating some of these concepts or just misunderstanding some. For instance, innovation. What does Facebook have to do with innovation? I'm sure there are a few innovative things they have done, but in my view the outline for the broad concept of what their social service accomplishes had been drawn clearly before their rise to dominance. They just did it better than most, and reached a critical mass in terms of user base. If the author is simply bored of taking pictures on a phone and beaming them halfway around the world because it's now commonplace... I'm sorry, I don't know what to tell you. There will be another shiny new toy invented that will be another great extension or augmentation of the human experience for you to enjoy in a few years, doubtlessly. So cheer up. One thing I know is true: All of these things that are being built on the internet and the internet itself.. They are just different vehicles for human expression; they are all extensions of the human thought, the human environment; all facets of ourselves as a species. I think the author of this article flounders about in coming up with what is "next" because they don't really understand the reasons why the successful products appeared in the first place: Nobody at Facebook invented the idea that humans like to be in contact with each other. Nobody at Pinterest came up with the idea that humans collect things that they find interesting. Humans have been doing that for as long as we've been around. Nobody at Instagram invented the idea that humans are creatures who crave artistic expression. When we didn't have canvas or quill or a camera, we painted on cave walls. All of these companies just fascilitated a need that was already there, whether people were concious of it or not. I would argue that these products were inevitable, it was just a matter of who would get there first. If you want to try to answer the obtuse question of "What is next", a question that comes from a confused origin.... You only have to study human nature. That would be my answer. If the author is soliciting advise about the next hot startup to invest in, that's a totally different ballgame.
- prostoalex 15y ago
  tl;dr "Outside of iPhone, Kindle and mobile applications you nerds have invented absolutely nothing over past 10 years".
thorin_2 15y ago
Why can't the next area of innovation be in education? I’m not talking solely about the transition from print to digital, but rather a complete reset on education with technology at its core rather than at the periphery? Rethink the status quo, with no sacred cows (teachers, buses, grades, testing, - even classrooms all up for grabs). Imagine tablet devices or similar technology that provide individualized, adaptive teaching programs that exhibit techniques that allowed students to progress each at their own pace, using highly innovative and entertaining forms of education. Imagine all progress (and regress) made by the student as a form of continual testing and as gates to increasingly more complex subjects, with programs that adapt to a student’s areas of weakness (and strengths), hitting at core concepts from different angles and in ways that appeal to that individuals ideal method of learning, until that student was able to progress to the next concept, or skip and then revisit once a complementary concepts is are understood that would augment that student’s ability to master the concept they skipped earlier. Imagine technological innovation that allowed us to take a less linear approach to certain subjects, which is the only method today given the constraints of 1:* teacher:students and the invisible “bar” which forces certain students to move at the lowest common denominator pace, while taxing other students to keep, such as those that have difficulty learning in the cookie cutter way. Imagine applications that blend multiple subjects (math, science, history), presenting the material not using your standard “preach at you” teaching technique, but instead using role-based or video game style interactive learning that makes the kid WANT to study, gets excited about the subject. Envision a system where the best teachers become the product managers that formulate the logic and program flow for those innovative applications, and your run-of-the-mill teacher becomes a custodian for keeping things under control while the students interact with their devices, and of course, with each other, as social interaction is essential for their well-being as well. Sure there would be many hurdles, not the least of these being teachers unions and the hurdle of changing centuries of preconceived notions of how education should be accomplished, but hey, the author asked for what the next revolutionary idea could be, and a transformation in education with technology at its core has my vote.
- mattquinn 15y ago
  I have a lot of issues with what you just posted. Perhaps the biggest is enforcing a division between "best teachers" and "run-of-the-mill teachers" into a corporate project management of sorts. I'm not sure where you work, but just imagine if someone deemed you a "run-of-the-mill" employee and relegated you to watching people interact with tablets all day. Some areas of life require a delicate moderation of technology, and education is one of them. Anyone who drools over education as a "start-up opportunity" likely hasn't done their research.
dude_abides 15y ago
Most revolutionary things take some time before people realize that they are revolutionary. - Google launched in 1998, people realized how revolutionary it was by around 2000. - Facebook launched in 2004, it took till about 2007 for people to realize how game-changing its going to be. - IPhone launched in 2007, and within a year (after 3G + AppStore was launched) it was clear that this is game-changing. My point is: It could very well be that the next game-changer is already out there and we just don't know it yet. What could it be? Well I don't know... Google self-driving car? Khan Academy? Square? Your guess is as good as mine.
- AVTizzle 15y ago
  The new hardware platforms are each going to give birth to their own frontiers of opportunity. Bezos' TED Talk on "The Next Web Innovation" alluded to how each innovation would allow for new innovations. I'm looking at new hardware like watches (Pebble), SmartTVs, and maybe Google Glasses if can be accepted culturally (more so than bluetooth headsets have been) as all potentially amazing new canvasses for creation. Highly recommend this TED talk. It's amazingly optimistic and paints a beautiful future for technology innovation: http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_bezos_on_the_next_web_innovation.html http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_bezos_on_the_next_web_innovati...
blhack 15y ago
I'm really sick of hearing all of the hatred that facebook gets. It's a useful tool that I use every day for organizing meetups and, in my opinion, is superior to a mailing list in pretty much every single way. My local reddit users group has almost 1000 members in it, and has no branched into several "sub groups" [a book club, a film club, a music club, a workout club, and a hacker club]. Just now before reading this, I found a movie to go to tonight with somebody, committed to start reading a book with somebody else, and got invited to an event this Friday. Oh, and somebody who is planning an event for this Saturday asked me to RSVP. Last weekend our group had a nearly 100-person strong "masquerade" at a bar in Phoenix. We pretty-much took over the bar. None of this stuff would happen if not for facebook, and I know this because there have been active attempts within our community to push stuff back onto reddit, all of which have failed. Facebook is a useful tool to me, and a useful tool to a lot of other people. If it disappeared tomorrow, it would effect me in a very negative way.
- sp332 15y ago
  People react negatively to FB because they are abusing their usefulness. Want to easily find someone to go to a movie with? Fine, give us your web browsing history, your friends list, your email addresses, your phone numbers, your social calendar, your location history, where you lived, worked, and went to school, many full-text conversations with your close friends, and... oh yeah any pictures of you that all your friends on FB take, plus you should tag your friends in pictures that you take. That way we can correlate your location retroactively even if you don't personally "check-in" with us. Did I mention that your friends list isn't private, law enforcement can get all this data at any time, and we're using all this data for business purposes?
  - crazygringo 15y ago
    But they're not doing it for nefarious reasons. Having all this information together is genuinely useful for users. That's why they do it! People want it, and for good reason. The side-effect that all this information provides an unsettlingly complete snapshot of your life, trusted to a single entity, is an inevitable byproduct. Facebook has certainly made a few mistakes, but the things people complain about aren't specific to Facebook -- they're inherent to any useful, complete social network. Is there a consumer-friendly solution to this dilemma? I'm not sure. Privacy-wise, you can't have your cake (super-connected with your friends) and eat it too (keep the site from knowing about all those connections).
yonasb 15y ago
I don't like these "where's the innovation" posts, too negative. There's lots of exciting software being built. I will however admit that, in general, the Glass Project was the most exciting thing I've seen in a while. So maybe this is really about the lack of innovation in the hardware space
- hkmurakami 15y ago
  If it is the case that innovation in HW is lagging behind innovation in SW at this time, then it would seem that investors have something to do with the phenomenon, not just the entrepreneurs. When I read the line below today, it was alarming to me: >Then he hit a roadblock. A big one. Migicovsky couldn’t raise more money. Few investors were interested in betting on a hardware startup, or dealing with the headaches that often come with manufacturing goods [1] Perhaps the bulk of entrepreneurs and investors are after the "quick money". I know some pure finance types currently at Tristate area hedge funds contemplating a switch to Venture Capital (I urged him to reconsider, for a variety of reasons). If hypothetically, investors pat the entrepreneur on the back for the quick flip web startup, and the entrepreneur pats the investor on the back for financing his quick flip web startup, then is it any wonder that perhaps, HW entrepreneurs get lost in the fervor? Hypothetically. [1]http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2012-04-17-rejected-by-vcs-pebble-watch-raises-3-8m-on-kickstarter/ http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2012-04-17-rejected-by-vc...
  - yonasb 15y ago
    Totally agree. Not sure if that's the case across the board with VC's but it does make sense.
- zerostar07 15y ago
  I 'm with you on the hardware angle. Seriously, where's the SDK and the apps for my programmable home cleaning/general purpose robot? It's not like it costs much nowadays to stack a robot arm on top of a roomba. What about cars, where is my inspector-gadget car that parks itself and doesn't let accidents happen? Embedded software should not be limited to flashing leds with arduinos. Edit: Somewhat related: http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2012/04/global-robot-population.html http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2012/04/global-robot-populatio...
dasil003 15y ago
This guy is simply failing to see the forest for the trees. Yes, the past 30 years have been an amazing whirlwind of development of consumer computing technology. Yes, things won't be jumping by leaps and bounds the way they were when the basic hardware and bandwidth were getting up to speed. The latest social app is not going to blow you away the same way, say, the invention of the Internet did when you first discovered it. But I'm sure it pales in comparison to the wow-factor of the telegraph when it was first invented. We live in a time when computing technology has filtered out to the mass populace. It is an interesting time to be sure. But we are just scratching the surface of what is possible with computers. There is tons of work to be done to refine the art of computation, which I believe ends with creating AI that can do things we are incapable of doing as humans. That is still a very long way off. And assuming all goes smoothly without any major natural disasters or self-destruction, after that, there will be a new chapter in human existence where I believe we will have to come to grips with having automated everything and no longer having to employee people en masse. Where will we find meaning once the struggle to survive is pushed so far from our daily concerns? The point is things are constantly evolving, and there is no chance that things are about to get boring. "Web", "Social", and "Mobile" are only "done" if you are tech pundit looking to summarize the state of the world in a tidy 800 words. The reality is that these things are just building blocks whose novelty has worn off, but whose ultimate utility is far from being realized.
anigbrowl 15y ago
From the previously-posted thread on this that got no other replies: an astute article. One thing not addressed here is the failure of the Smantic Web paradigm to really take off; I don't know whether this is because of a lack of critical mass in the quantity of semantically coded data or the immaturity of ontology frameworks or something else - my best guess being that the browser is no more suitable to traversal of the semantic web than FTP/ Archie/ Veronica/ Gopher were suitable browsing tools for hyperterxt - although each solved 'part of the puzzle.'
- lars 15y ago
  The semantic web has one huge problem imo: There was/is typically zero incentive to semantically encode data. As shown by things like IBMs Watson, you're better off extracting sentence semantics with NLP than by hoping someone has encoded the data for you. Another thing is that huge ontological databases actually exist, it's just that no one seems to be able to use them for anything useful. Knowledge bases and formal reasoning over them used to be a big deal in AI. This comes from someone who tried to do a startup that essentially tried to incentivize creating semantic data. It's a hard earned lesson, but I now have zero belief that manual formalization of data is ever going to take off. Even if lots of cool things would be possible if it did.
  - anigbrowl 15y ago
    Largely agree. What saddens me is that the extracted semantics are not apparently being shared or exchanged automatically, which is holding us back. On the upside, I remember the view that mass internet usage couldn't take off because open protocols didn't provide sufficient economic incentives for private actors, but that turned out OK. would be quite interested in hearing more about your startup if you want to post to HN or correspond via gmail.
    - lars 15y ago
      No prob, I'll send you an email when I get home from work.
  - 15y ago
srconstantin 15y ago
Web apps are cheap to build, easy to learn how to build, fall into a predictable model for investors, and are equipped with lots of social institutions (like YC) encouraging people to build web startups. So, all things being equal, we should expect more people to be creating web apps (compared to other kinds of technology) than their profitability or social value would warrant. Framing makes a big difference. If there were an established culture and set of resources for engineering or biomedical startups, they might seem less daunting.
sparknlaunch12 15y ago
Is the new future offline? We have grown attached to our electronic devices and online friends. Maybe we need to step back and think about going back?
- icebraining 15y ago
  Why?
  - deleted 15y ago
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  - mtts 15y ago
    We're so enthusiastic about the possibilities the internet offers us that we want to do everything online now, even things we're hardwired to do irl. Inane chatter in real life causes your body to release hormones that make you feel good. Inane chatter on facebook not so much. So maybe the future is indeed that we learn to take the internet for what it is: a fantastic tool for disseminating information and doing business, but nothing more. So the challenge will be to give people meaningful ways to interact with each other in real life now that the human component has been taken out of things like education and shopping.
    - icebraining 15y ago
      We're so enthusiastic about the possibilities the internet offers us that we want to do everything online now, even things we're hardwired to do irl. We're "hardwired" to do everything IRL, simply because we couldn't have evoved to adapt to it in such a small period of time. But here's others technologies that we weren't "hardwired" for, and which actually "re-wired" us: Language and Agriculture. I'm having an hard time figuring out how doesn't your argument apply to them too. Inane chatter in real life causes your body to release hormones that make you feel good. Inane chatter on facebook not so much. Well, I actually find inane chatter to be painful anywhere, but; the Internet is just Facebook now? I'm not hardwired to play online games, but they do make our bodies release dopamine and cortisol, even though we're not hardwired for it. So maybe the future is indeed that we learn to take the internet for what it is: a fantastic tool for disseminating information and doing business, but nothing more. But we're not hardwired for that either. How is that application good? Shouldn't we be transmitting information in form of songs, as it's natural? So the challenge will be to give people meaningful ways to interact with each other in real life now that the human component has been taken out of things like education and shopping. When was the human component taken out of things like education? And did the introduction of the web really remove a meaningful interaction, or did it just free up time that can now be spent with e.g. your family instead of with salespeople? Because that's my (anecdotal) experience.
kylebrown 15y ago
I hope the author (Alexis Madrigal - usually writes on energy issues) is right. By now a "startup" is presumed to be more of the same first-world social-mobile navel-gazing. The world will be better off if/when such forays stop being the most profitable. (good sign in Bloomberg news today: US wireless contracts "may have shrunk for the first time ever in the first quarter.") Its anyone's guess how much innovation the next decade will bring in energy and biotech. But as for IT, my money is on the opportunities that will come from bridging the digital divide (emerging markets). The Wired article "Want to become an Internet billionaire? Move to Africa" didn't get much interest from HN[1] though it was also covered in Forbes. The informal economy (as written about in Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy by Robert Neuwirth) is an oft-overlooked angle which should be particularly interesting, as it intersects more and more with an expanding global internet. 1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3210000 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3210000
brownbat 15y ago
| The question is, as it has always been: now what? | Decades ago, the answer was, "Build the Internet." Fifteen years ago, it was, "Build the Web." Five years ago, the answers were probably, "Build the social network" In other words, when you read near future sci fi and think, "that's a cool piece of plausible tech that I really want right now!" what is it? "We are prosthetic gods." That quote dates back farther than you might think. Printing, telecom, radio, the internet, the web, the social network, the smart phone... all of these take the sum of human knowledge/experience and inch it slightly closer to my brain. The next step is to have it rest right against my temple while we debate whether or not to break out the scalpel. Hate to jump on the bandwagon, but I'm ready for the Goggles. Google's commercials don't scrape the surface of what it could mean to have internet-enabled constant-on cameras on everyone's face, for better and worse. But that's the next space I want to explore.
iRobot 15y ago
Shame so much talent is wasted creating so much shit all with the ultimate object of dumbing down the populous to a bunch of media consumers.
jcc80 15y ago
I think Louis CK said it best, "Everything is amazing and nobody's happy." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk Sorry but Social mobile local (or as people cooler than me are calling it, SoMoLo) is still pretty new. You're just going to have to "suffer" through a little more. I get the author's point that it seems like the same things are getting made and funded over and over. But with only about 1/2 the U.S. pop. owning smartphones, you can't blame people too much for trying to stake their claim. Anything more innovative might be too early anyways.
thatusertwo 15y ago
An inovation incentive from consumers would probably work better then the current system.
0xFFFFFFF 15y ago
The preface to the article says this guy is a reknown journalist. But I fail to see any insights worth noting in his writing. Is he imagining that if we charges users to access digital resources that we'll stop mining data? And why does he care if companies exploiting "free" are losing money? Is he invested in them? I'll bet if I sent this guy a demo to boot up that allowed him to connect to peers directly and bypass all the data mining, all the spam, and allow for all the convergence he could ever want, he'd balk because it didn't have "big buttons". One things is for sure, the internet holds no promise for any improvement in journalism. It just keeps getting worse.
rohern 15y ago
This article is spot on in its thesis, though not always in its arguments. Everyone is convinced -- because the people who work in marketing are happy because they can sell ads -- that social media is an important thing. It is not. Social media is people doing what they were already doing, only more often and anywhere. Flirting with girls, talking with friends, etc. Making these activities digital is not changing society or improving lives. It is the same society and the same lives, with more time spent on these activities. Never has anyone gone to bed thinking "Gosh, I wish I had spent more time looking at funny pictures of strangers today." People often go to bed regretting not doing what they could have done when instead they were on Facebook and Twitter and [insert the names of 90% of the startups you have heard of]. Every founder will go on and on about "changing the world" if you let him. This is as if changing the world were something worth doing for its own sake. If you see a problem that is worth fixing and you fix it, then the change effected is important and even virtuous. But the key is that problem must be worth solving. Just because a petulant and spoiled American wants his iced mocha faster does not mean that speeding up sales of mocha is a worthy problem. Can you make money doing it? Probably. I went to school to become an engineer (I'm 24) because I thought that computers and the internet were going to make invention and innovation possible even for people who did not work for industrial laboratories. Maybe the hugely reduced barriers to entry into the technology sector that resulted from cheap computers and good programming tools would lead young and eager people of brilliance to found ambitious companies to finally -- aren't we all sick of being exasperated by the mediocrity of culture and politics in the past 20 years? -- steer human life into better modes of existence and a new frontier of boldness. Sure, the internet cannot do this all on its own, but is such a powerful and promising tool, that maybe it would start things. This has not happened. There are a few gems like SpaceX and Willow Garage that seek out challenge in this way, but they are doing it independent of the cheapness and openness that computers now allow. Worse, many of the companies that have been founded are dedicated to aggressively ruining the internet by making it a place for sucking up private information, showing ads, and selling the same old useless junk. What it seems to me this article is about is that innovation in technology right now is about money, not about betterment. A billion dollars was just spent on Instagram. To do what? If you are so in the bubble of the "startup world" that you do not see the self-evident absurdity of a situation in which that is a possible and reasonable event, you are become blinded. Stop thinking like a marketer and think like an inventor with balls. Stop trying to get rich unless you are getting rich by doing something that is worth doing. I write this as someone who honestly loves technology, hacking, the hacker ethic, and HN, but I walk around Palo Alto every day being slowly crushed by disappointment. The problem is not that the good hackers are being spread across too many companies, it is that too many companies are not doing things worthy of hackers.
smugengineer69 15y ago
I really don't think people understand how new ideas come about. It is simply a fact of life that the newest, most different, paradigm-breaking idea will almost always make people uncomfortable. People aren't going to like it, because likely most of them won't understand it. It is going to come out of an extremely unlikely location, perhaps even a cesspool like 4chan where you throw feces at the wall and see what sticks. Relatedly, the idea that innovation and monetary success are in any way intertwined is laughable. I can make money off of anything. This is not a hard skill, this is not an admirable skill, and the thinking required to get people to spend money is the basest, most despicable form of thinking imaginable. If we're going to Truly innovate, we need to break things. Break everything. Ironically, what I mean here is the exact opposite of the meaning typically assigned to the buzzword "disruptive". We need to make people uncomfortable so they can realize just how comfortable they can be. No one agrees with real change, no one actually wants to be disrupted, and Real Creativity is an inherently mischievous little devil who most people get angry with and want nothing to do with. The vast majority of so-called entrepreneurs are lifeless copy machines with no original ideas who are too-concerned with the remnants of their highschool popularity contest to even get close to coming up with anything new. We need to realize that the way most people think change is going to happen is not the way it does happen, or ever has happened. In the minds of most people, when you get down to it, change sucks, we hate it, and would rather sit around circlejerking about how innovative we are than go out into the streets and actually light the world on fire.
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guelo 15y ago
Sure there are a lot of smart people wasting away figuring out how to sell ads more efficiently. But I think we're still fairly reliably being wowed several times a year. Right now Kickstarter is the big wow for a lot of people, they're doing some real revolutionary work on the future of business and work. With Etsy being a good wow along the same lines before that. Obviously the iPad is making explosive entries into all kinds of industries which are being revolutionized for the 2nd or 3rd time in the last 20 years. And this guy talks like the iPhone happened ages ago, it was only 5 years ago, 4 years since the amazements started emanating from the app store. I'm not too worried, change is accelerating and the wows will keep on coming. Five years from now should look more different from today then today looks compared to 2007. The main dangers are monopolistic predator companies, walled gardens, and government intrusion. Other than that, we will continue being blown away for years to come.
swalsh 15y ago
I think there's a new paradigm in the making, many people are talking about it... but it's young. The internet of stuff is next! A lot of the building blocks are in place, personally I think Arduino is a really big component that is driving the revolution and Kickstarter is providing a surprisingly good platform for funding it. However there's still a few missing components. One of the goals of LTE is to power this new network, but existing carrier business models don't seem appropriate. As a consumer I'm really not interested in paying $20 (or more!) a month for each my fridge, and toaster, and television, and door to be connected. Light Squared was a promising push in the right direction, which unfortunately failed. Along the same lines of networking though, I think there's a lot of really good opportunities for low end hardware. Qualcomm dominates the market in LTE chipsets, but good luck getting access to the developer stuff as an indie user. API's tying all these components together will be essential.
- mtts 15y ago
  I'd love for this to be true, but I think it isn't. An internet of stuff depends on raw materials being dirt cheap. Unfortunately, during the last five years or so the price of raw materials has started to increase, not decrease, and for reasons so fundamental it's unlikely this process will end soon. So rather than an internet of stuff the new paradigm in the making will probably have something to with scarcity. No idea what, exactly, but my bet would definitely on a future of scarcity rather than a future of abundance.
- redwood 15y ago
  3d printing!!!
dharma1 15y ago
I think it's the way evolution works. Sometimes it's slow for a while - then things click into place and there is rapid progress. The Khan Academy (and other free online, high quality education) is probably the most revolutionary thing that has come out of the internet in the past few years. I don't know how much effect it has at the moment in the developing world - whether resources like that are used in the classroom and by students - but the potential for transformation is huge. There is an enormous amount of people in the world with untapped talent because of lack of access to high quality education. Biotech, synthetic biology etc aside, I think the next thing to facilitate change in computing is portable display technology - for personal use maybe it will be Google Glass once it's a mature product. For shared use I think low cost, lightweight high res laser/LED pico projectors will take off in the next couple of years. The computer itself will be a tablet/mobile phone, either with its own display or hooked up to one of these new display devices. Battery tech is another interesting one - once we work out how to produce cheap, high energy density, long life batteries from a natural resource that is abundant, we'll see a lot of accelerated progress in several areas. Of course the 1st world problems of not having enough cool gadgets and software will be put into perspective when the Earth's limited food/energy resources vs growing population starts playing out for real.
stcredzero 15y ago
Social media does contribute to communications and economic growth, in the same way automobiles have. Social media also has real downsides, in much the same way. That said, reading about SpaceX excites me much more than reading about Instagram.
hxa7241 15y ago
> More money has got to change hands. No, quite the opposite. If you really want to be bold about inventing the future, money is one of the things that needs to be replaced. The internet is, in a general sense, a technology for cooperation -- for organising collective activities through shared information. Money is really just an information channel for doing that too, but it is now comparatively obsolete.
- josh33 15y ago
  Money is a receipt given for value created. I think you mean to say that dollars and pesos should be replaced, which I agree with to a point. However, giving up money, to a government, is like giving up sovereignty. How could a government fund wars or welfare if they couldn't print money.
  - eli_gottlieb 15y ago
    No, money is a receipt given for rivalrous, excludable property owned, and then sold off, or for excludable services rendered. We thus have an economic system that hugely neglects the provision of commons and public goods.
phodo 15y ago
Here is one simple attempt to explain the value of many of the startups that are otherwise dismissed by such naysayers, although coming from a heavy tech background I am the first to admit that some of these startups are incremental and featurettes at best. We are in the age of sensors and A/D conversion. Many (not all) startups today do operate at the app layer... they are web / mobile apps etc. They produce tools that enable us to consume and produce info... at scale... we're talking millions of people are slowly but surely doing the analog-to-digital conversion for a future. At a mass scale, the result will be x,y,z,t,status,interest,social,connection connections/graphs for many things across many verticals. Privacy issues aside (they cannot be ignored, but bare with me for a second), the end result is a real-time layer on the world that exists in the digital domain, not the analog one. We are creating a world of installing "sensors" through market forces. There is a step function in innovation (a new S-curve, if you will) that will occur at some point, that will be dependent on the world where things are digitized (the one we are creating now) in order to unlock innovation further. Not just technically, but from an adoption/diffusion/comfort level in society. We are going through that now... so the outcome ain't so bleak. At the end of this particular journey (call it a bubble, call it something else), we will have 1 billion+ people who a) are comfortable with sensors / digitizing their stuff and themselves b) and are doing it. We are converging on a dominant design of what a digitized world looks like, through market forces! And in more recent years, the big data techniques emerging that will also be pushed by market forces. The best way to think about that is the following: In the ABSENCE of the incremental innovation (instagram of x, pinterest for y), I can imagine many future business and technology plans saying: we would like to build this technology, but it is not feasible because it requires a world where everyone is a sensor. Or even better, our new technology can change the world, but it assumes that people / things are digitized. tl;dr: current crop of startups are creating sensors for big data and other processes. This can create future innovation opps that leverage this big data in new and profound ways. The absence of such startups is a blocker for that future class of innovation. Hope not too incoherent... typing this at 30,000 feet in a cramped seat.
jonhacck 15y ago
reach me on jonhacc@yahoo.com for : penetration testing of your website sceurity audit(s) DATABASE RETRIEVAL, HACKING OF WEBSITES & Hacking Accounts which include FACEBOOK,TWITTER this is pretty easy,MYSPACE,SKYPE, OVO .and email accounts such YAHOO,AOL ,HOTMAIL ,GMX,GMAIL AND OTHER EMAIL SERVICES BOTH PRIVATE AND GENERAL i send you a SCREENSHOT.I require either a Name, Friend ID, or E-mail address of the targets account(s)i can also get into BLACKBERRY AND APPLE SMARTPHONES AND OTHER SMART PHONES AND GET VALUABLE DATA. I ALSO SELL SMTP ,LEADS ,PHONE VERIFIED ACCOUNTS (CRAIGLIST,FACEBOOK,EMAILS,) ICAN POST ON CRIAGLIST) I ALSO SELL PAYPALL ACCOUNT, WESTERN UNION PAYOUT INFORMATION I have the help of a current 0-Day Exploit that allows me to gain remote access to the website servers and from there I find the password which is usually in an MD5 hash, from that I must decrypt to get the real password. The entire process takes about 10 minutes-15 hourS to complete. All passwords are tested out 3 times before they get issued to any clients.I also rip Standards from websites.I accept payment through LR (Liberty Reserve) Only.I hardly ever USE WESTERN UNION! YOU CAN REACH ME ON :JONHACC@yahoo.com (SEND ME AN IM THROUGH Y! MESSENGER OR MAIL)

256 points by chrismealy 15y ago

Maybe I'm missing the purpose of the article, but I am responding to how I interpreted it. What will our future be like if we all focus our lives around little boxes in our hands rather than the vast open spaces around us? Perhaps we should invent a future where the technology are the tools we use to enhance our life, not control our life. In Star Trek, people weren't addicted to PADDs or spend every living moment in the Holo Deck. In fact the episodes where technology controlled people, we recognized the technology as evil. Invent something to enhance our lives, not control them.

mgkimsal 15y ago
Who are you to be telling someone their life isn't being 'enhanced' by their usage of whatever tools/sites/technology they choose?
pyre 15y ago
If someone is 'addicted' to Facebook, is technology really controlling them, or is it more that they have lost control of themselves? Are they really addicted to technology or just addicted to hanging out with their friends (which technology -- e.g. smartphones + Facebook -- enables to happen anywhere, not just when you're able to schedule time to meet in person). Also: 1. Perhaps Star Trek is an unrealistic prediction of how man will interact with technology in the future. 2. Perhaps your (and the author's) view of things is skewed by selection bias. I.e. you're around people that are more 'addicted' to technology than others. 3. You're forgetting that in Star Trek the human race has had a sort of epiphany centered around first contact with an alien species.
- korussian 15y ago
  Also remember that in Star Trek the most ubiquitous technology was the pin-on-walkie-talkie, during use of which people would look up at the ceiling. It was a show defined by the 80's/90's, with several plotlines that could have been resolved by someone having an iPhone in their pocket, or by the Enterprise having smart drones. There were only a couple of episodes that dealt with holodeck addiction, and just one or two in which the holodeck was used to its full potential: as a reconfigurable-on-the-fly work space that can tie into ship-systems, and either show or replicate any hardware or display you describe verbally. If the holodeck were a real thing, I would rarely come out of there. I'd just make real friends inside other holodecks, and we'd spend our lives learning and creating stuff. It would be an enormous social problem. 60's StarTrek tech doesn't count. Although Kirk's stylus/pad for signatures is not unlike the UPS guy's… and I'll bet Uhura's metallic ear slab was bluetooth.
  - korussian 15y ago
    Sorry, apparently a single star makes everything after it italic… until a later star. Can't edit/delete. My bad.
DennisP 15y ago
The addicts are in the Borg cubes.

moocow01 15y ago

Its very difficult for me to ascertain if its just me or the following is a growing sentiment... I'm not wowed by hardly anything that comes out of consumer internet tech anymore. Before anyone gets out a pitchfork I have actively contributed and worked on products in the past that are part of the behemoth of services/apps/sites etc that have become mundane to me so I deserve my own criticism as well. But the majority of launches especially for the past couple years in the media seems like the same deck chairs (mobile/social/photos/ads/etc) rearranged in a different order. Overtime Ive just lost interest in tech blogs in that I rarely see something that I'd consider genuinely interesting tech from a product or engineering or consumer perspective. Maybe I'm just getting old? On the other hand if I'm not out of touch it seems like it could be a great time to step out of 'traditional' consumer tech and push on some of the 'new' things like 3D printing, robotics, computer vision, etc as well as seek out applications towards other industries (education, health, food, etc.)

ismarc 15y ago
At its heart, the internet is about information dissemination, in whatever form that information takes. Discovery has always been the issue, from link portals to message boards to search engines, it's finding information you're interested in. The current "social network" trends are another aspect of that discovery process. The difference being that an individual (or company) can more directly impact how the discovery is made and who makes it. This makes it more viable for an individual to provide information and it to be discovered. I think all of the 'mundane' applications of it you see are exploring different facets of the same thing. What we have is a specialization of one aspect of the internet (dissemination of personal information to a small network) and I think the next step will be the same for different categories of information. Not a "social network for code", but a platform for discovery that appropriately fits the niche. We then get q hierarchical discovery model where you search for where to find the information, and then search for the information. But we need all the boring steps in between to find the right model for each niche.
AVTizzle 15y ago
I'm with you, to an extent. Interestingly it was the recent excitement around the Pebble watch that made me realize how indifferent I'd become to a lot of new consumer WEB products. I guess I realized Pebble was exciting because it was a new platform with new opportunities and possibilities. I think that explains a lot of the excitement around the upcoming "SmartTV" frontier too. Even mobile is still young enough that new, exciting applications are still pushing boundaries and blowing minds - though it's maturing rapidly. But as far as classic web products - the web is a much, much more mature canvas with much more solidified players. Of course it'll lose some of that excitement, naturally...

lucisferre 15y ago

This type of "whatever's new is old" complaining is pretty cliche. I mean, of course people are going to try to innovate in evolutionary ways more than revolutionary ways. Revolutionary innovation is at least partially random and obviously much higher risk. It often comes as a result of many people iterating many times on the same-old-same-old. This article really seems to do nothing other than state the obvious and offers no real suggestions or directions for where to go or what to do next. Oh right, biotech, cure for cancer, end hunger, solve the energy crisis, etc. Because no one has tried or is trying to solve those, and they are clearly as easy as figuring out how to get people to share photos of themselves.

bicknergseng 15y ago
I agree... but I'd like to phrase it the way I thought of it. The evolution the article made me think of is not really innovation but rather integration. Things like Google Wallet, mobile apps, etc... they aren't new technologies, they're current or old technologies applied in different ways. If the article's author wants innovation on the scale of the electronic computer or space flight, you've got to understand that that kind of innovation is far more difficult to create, as you pointed out.

superasn 15y ago

There is lots of stuff happening which I hope we'll probably see integrated soon in our mobile phones. The top two things which I'm waiting to see in my mobile is 1) The lightfield camera and 2) a device like the "sixth sense".

icefox 15y ago
Pick up this magnetic wedding ring and you can feel electro magnetic fields. The massive field microwave puts out is the most amusing one I have found so far. http://www.supermagnetman.net/index.php?cPath=61 http://www.supermagnetman.net/index.php?cPath=61
johnwyles 15y ago
is the lytro really all that impressive that you would list it as one of two things you want to see in mobile? i think i would rather see about a dozen other things in mobile before I really cared about shifting focus for my crappy mobile pics - NFC being chief among them

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

gavinlynch 15y ago

I fail to understand this article because I think there are so many different topics the author touches on.. Innovation. Culture. Tech business and startups.. I think the author is conflating some of these concepts or just misunderstanding some. For instance, innovation. What does Facebook have to do with innovation? I'm sure there are a few innovative things they have done, but in my view the outline for the broad concept of what their social service accomplishes had been drawn clearly before their rise to dominance. They just did it better than most, and reached a critical mass in terms of user base. If the author is simply bored of taking pictures on a phone and beaming them halfway around the world because it's now commonplace... I'm sorry, I don't know what to tell you. There will be another shiny new toy invented that will be another great extension or augmentation of the human experience for you to enjoy in a few years, doubtlessly. So cheer up. One thing I know is true: All of these things that are being built on the internet and the internet itself.. They are just different vehicles for human expression; they are all extensions of the human thought, the human environment; all facets of ourselves as a species. I think the author of this article flounders about in coming up with what is "next" because they don't really understand the reasons why the successful products appeared in the first place: Nobody at Facebook invented the idea that humans like to be in contact with each other. Nobody at Pinterest came up with the idea that humans collect things that they find interesting. Humans have been doing that for as long as we've been around. Nobody at Instagram invented the idea that humans are creatures who crave artistic expression. When we didn't have canvas or quill or a camera, we painted on cave walls. All of these companies just fascilitated a need that was already there, whether people were concious of it or not. I would argue that these products were inevitable, it was just a matter of who would get there first. If you want to try to answer the obtuse question of "What is next", a question that comes from a confused origin.... You only have to study human nature. That would be my answer. If the author is soliciting advise about the next hot startup to invest in, that's a totally different ballgame.

prostoalex 15y ago
tl;dr "Outside of iPhone, Kindle and mobile applications you nerds have invented absolutely nothing over past 10 years".

thorin_2 15y ago

Why can't the next area of innovation be in education? I’m not talking solely about the transition from print to digital, but rather a complete reset on education with technology at its core rather than at the periphery? Rethink the status quo, with no sacred cows (teachers, buses, grades, testing, - even classrooms all up for grabs). Imagine tablet devices or similar technology that provide individualized, adaptive teaching programs that exhibit techniques that allowed students to progress each at their own pace, using highly innovative and entertaining forms of education. Imagine all progress (and regress) made by the student as a form of continual testing and as gates to increasingly more complex subjects, with programs that adapt to a student’s areas of weakness (and strengths), hitting at core concepts from different angles and in ways that appeal to that individuals ideal method of learning, until that student was able to progress to the next concept, or skip and then revisit once a complementary concepts is are understood that would augment that student’s ability to master the concept they skipped earlier. Imagine technological innovation that allowed us to take a less linear approach to certain subjects, which is the only method today given the constraints of 1:* teacher:students and the invisible “bar” which forces certain students to move at the lowest common denominator pace, while taxing other students to keep, such as those that have difficulty learning in the cookie cutter way. Imagine applications that blend multiple subjects (math, science, history), presenting the material not using your standard “preach at you” teaching technique, but instead using role-based or video game style interactive learning that makes the kid WANT to study, gets excited about the subject. Envision a system where the best teachers become the product managers that formulate the logic and program flow for those innovative applications, and your run-of-the-mill teacher becomes a custodian for keeping things under control while the students interact with their devices, and of course, with each other, as social interaction is essential for their well-being as well. Sure there would be many hurdles, not the least of these being teachers unions and the hurdle of changing centuries of preconceived notions of how education should be accomplished, but hey, the author asked for what the next revolutionary idea could be, and a transformation in education with technology at its core has my vote.

mattquinn 15y ago
I have a lot of issues with what you just posted. Perhaps the biggest is enforcing a division between "best teachers" and "run-of-the-mill teachers" into a corporate project management of sorts. I'm not sure where you work, but just imagine if someone deemed you a "run-of-the-mill" employee and relegated you to watching people interact with tablets all day. Some areas of life require a delicate moderation of technology, and education is one of them. Anyone who drools over education as a "start-up opportunity" likely hasn't done their research.

dude_abides 15y ago

Most revolutionary things take some time before people realize that they are revolutionary. - Google launched in 1998, people realized how revolutionary it was by around 2000. - Facebook launched in 2004, it took till about 2007 for people to realize how game-changing its going to be. - IPhone launched in 2007, and within a year (after 3G + AppStore was launched) it was clear that this is game-changing. My point is: It could very well be that the next game-changer is already out there and we just don't know it yet. What could it be? Well I don't know... Google self-driving car? Khan Academy? Square? Your guess is as good as mine.

AVTizzle 15y ago
The new hardware platforms are each going to give birth to their own frontiers of opportunity. Bezos' TED Talk on "The Next Web Innovation" alluded to how each innovation would allow for new innovations. I'm looking at new hardware like watches (Pebble), SmartTVs, and maybe Google Glasses if can be accepted culturally (more so than bluetooth headsets have been) as all potentially amazing new canvasses for creation. Highly recommend this TED talk. It's amazingly optimistic and paints a beautiful future for technology innovation: http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_bezos_on_the_next_web_innovation.html http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_bezos_on_the_next_web_innovati...

blhack 15y ago

I'm really sick of hearing all of the hatred that facebook gets. It's a useful tool that I use every day for organizing meetups and, in my opinion, is superior to a mailing list in pretty much every single way. My local reddit users group has almost 1000 members in it, and has no branched into several "sub groups" [a book club, a film club, a music club, a workout club, and a hacker club]. Just now before reading this, I found a movie to go to tonight with somebody, committed to start reading a book with somebody else, and got invited to an event this Friday. Oh, and somebody who is planning an event for this Saturday asked me to RSVP. Last weekend our group had a nearly 100-person strong "masquerade" at a bar in Phoenix. We pretty-much took over the bar. None of this stuff would happen if not for facebook, and I know this because there have been active attempts within our community to push stuff back onto reddit, all of which have failed. Facebook is a useful tool to me, and a useful tool to a lot of other people. If it disappeared tomorrow, it would effect me in a very negative way.

sp332 15y ago
People react negatively to FB because they are abusing their usefulness. Want to easily find someone to go to a movie with? Fine, give us your web browsing history, your friends list, your email addresses, your phone numbers, your social calendar, your location history, where you lived, worked, and went to school, many full-text conversations with your close friends, and... oh yeah any pictures of you that all your friends on FB take, plus you should tag your friends in pictures that you take. That way we can correlate your location retroactively even if you don't personally "check-in" with us. Did I mention that your friends list isn't private, law enforcement can get all this data at any time, and we're using all this data for business purposes?
- crazygringo 15y ago
  But they're not doing it for nefarious reasons. Having all this information together is genuinely useful for users. That's why they do it! People want it, and for good reason. The side-effect that all this information provides an unsettlingly complete snapshot of your life, trusted to a single entity, is an inevitable byproduct. Facebook has certainly made a few mistakes, but the things people complain about aren't specific to Facebook -- they're inherent to any useful, complete social network. Is there a consumer-friendly solution to this dilemma? I'm not sure. Privacy-wise, you can't have your cake (super-connected with your friends) and eat it too (keep the site from knowing about all those connections).

yonasb 15y ago

I don't like these "where's the innovation" posts, too negative. There's lots of exciting software being built. I will however admit that, in general, the Glass Project was the most exciting thing I've seen in a while. So maybe this is really about the lack of innovation in the hardware space

hkmurakami 15y ago
If it is the case that innovation in HW is lagging behind innovation in SW at this time, then it would seem that investors have something to do with the phenomenon, not just the entrepreneurs. When I read the line below today, it was alarming to me: >Then he hit a roadblock. A big one. Migicovsky couldn’t raise more money. Few investors were interested in betting on a hardware startup, or dealing with the headaches that often come with manufacturing goods [1] Perhaps the bulk of entrepreneurs and investors are after the "quick money". I know some pure finance types currently at Tristate area hedge funds contemplating a switch to Venture Capital (I urged him to reconsider, for a variety of reasons). If hypothetically, investors pat the entrepreneur on the back for the quick flip web startup, and the entrepreneur pats the investor on the back for financing his quick flip web startup, then is it any wonder that perhaps, HW entrepreneurs get lost in the fervor? Hypothetically. [1]http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2012-04-17-rejected-by-vcs-pebble-watch-raises-3-8m-on-kickstarter/ http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2012-04-17-rejected-by-vc...
- yonasb 15y ago
  Totally agree. Not sure if that's the case across the board with VC's but it does make sense.
zerostar07 15y ago
I 'm with you on the hardware angle. Seriously, where's the SDK and the apps for my programmable home cleaning/general purpose robot? It's not like it costs much nowadays to stack a robot arm on top of a roomba. What about cars, where is my inspector-gadget car that parks itself and doesn't let accidents happen? Embedded software should not be limited to flashing leds with arduinos. Edit: Somewhat related: http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2012/04/global-robot-population.html http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2012/04/global-robot-populatio...

dasil003 15y ago

This guy is simply failing to see the forest for the trees. Yes, the past 30 years have been an amazing whirlwind of development of consumer computing technology. Yes, things won't be jumping by leaps and bounds the way they were when the basic hardware and bandwidth were getting up to speed. The latest social app is not going to blow you away the same way, say, the invention of the Internet did when you first discovered it. But I'm sure it pales in comparison to the wow-factor of the telegraph when it was first invented. We live in a time when computing technology has filtered out to the mass populace. It is an interesting time to be sure. But we are just scratching the surface of what is possible with computers. There is tons of work to be done to refine the art of computation, which I believe ends with creating AI that can do things we are incapable of doing as humans. That is still a very long way off. And assuming all goes smoothly without any major natural disasters or self-destruction, after that, there will be a new chapter in human existence where I believe we will have to come to grips with having automated everything and no longer having to employee people en masse. Where will we find meaning once the struggle to survive is pushed so far from our daily concerns? The point is things are constantly evolving, and there is no chance that things are about to get boring. "Web", "Social", and "Mobile" are only "done" if you are tech pundit looking to summarize the state of the world in a tidy 800 words. The reality is that these things are just building blocks whose novelty has worn off, but whose ultimate utility is far from being realized.

anigbrowl 15y ago

From the previously-posted thread on this that got no other replies: an astute article. One thing not addressed here is the failure of the Smantic Web paradigm to really take off; I don't know whether this is because of a lack of critical mass in the quantity of semantically coded data or the immaturity of ontology frameworks or something else - my best guess being that the browser is no more suitable to traversal of the semantic web than FTP/ Archie/ Veronica/ Gopher were suitable browsing tools for hyperterxt - although each solved 'part of the puzzle.'

lars 15y ago
The semantic web has one huge problem imo: There was/is typically zero incentive to semantically encode data. As shown by things like IBMs Watson, you're better off extracting sentence semantics with NLP than by hoping someone has encoded the data for you. Another thing is that huge ontological databases actually exist, it's just that no one seems to be able to use them for anything useful. Knowledge bases and formal reasoning over them used to be a big deal in AI. This comes from someone who tried to do a startup that essentially tried to incentivize creating semantic data. It's a hard earned lesson, but I now have zero belief that manual formalization of data is ever going to take off. Even if lots of cool things would be possible if it did.
- anigbrowl 15y ago
  Largely agree. What saddens me is that the extracted semantics are not apparently being shared or exchanged automatically, which is holding us back. On the upside, I remember the view that mass internet usage couldn't take off because open protocols didn't provide sufficient economic incentives for private actors, but that turned out OK. would be quite interested in hearing more about your startup if you want to post to HN or correspond via gmail.
  - lars 15y ago
    No prob, I'll send you an email when I get home from work.
- 15y ago

srconstantin 15y ago

Web apps are cheap to build, easy to learn how to build, fall into a predictable model for investors, and are equipped with lots of social institutions (like YC) encouraging people to build web startups. So, all things being equal, we should expect more people to be creating web apps (compared to other kinds of technology) than their profitability or social value would warrant. Framing makes a big difference. If there were an established culture and set of resources for engineering or biomedical startups, they might seem less daunting.

sparknlaunch12 15y ago

Is the new future offline? We have grown attached to our electronic devices and online friends. Maybe we need to step back and think about going back?

icebraining 15y ago
Why?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- mtts 15y ago
  We're so enthusiastic about the possibilities the internet offers us that we want to do everything online now, even things we're hardwired to do irl. Inane chatter in real life causes your body to release hormones that make you feel good. Inane chatter on facebook not so much. So maybe the future is indeed that we learn to take the internet for what it is: a fantastic tool for disseminating information and doing business, but nothing more. So the challenge will be to give people meaningful ways to interact with each other in real life now that the human component has been taken out of things like education and shopping.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    We're so enthusiastic about the possibilities the internet offers us that we want to do everything online now, even things we're hardwired to do irl. We're "hardwired" to do everything IRL, simply because we couldn't have evoved to adapt to it in such a small period of time. But here's others technologies that we weren't "hardwired" for, and which actually "re-wired" us: Language and Agriculture. I'm having an hard time figuring out how doesn't your argument apply to them too. Inane chatter in real life causes your body to release hormones that make you feel good. Inane chatter on facebook not so much. Well, I actually find inane chatter to be painful anywhere, but; the Internet is just Facebook now? I'm not hardwired to play online games, but they do make our bodies release dopamine and cortisol, even though we're not hardwired for it. So maybe the future is indeed that we learn to take the internet for what it is: a fantastic tool for disseminating information and doing business, but nothing more. But we're not hardwired for that either. How is that application good? Shouldn't we be transmitting information in form of songs, as it's natural? So the challenge will be to give people meaningful ways to interact with each other in real life now that the human component has been taken out of things like education and shopping. When was the human component taken out of things like education? And did the introduction of the web really remove a meaningful interaction, or did it just free up time that can now be spent with e.g. your family instead of with salespeople? Because that's my (anecdotal) experience.

kylebrown 15y ago

I hope the author (Alexis Madrigal - usually writes on energy issues) is right. By now a "startup" is presumed to be more of the same first-world social-mobile navel-gazing. The world will be better off if/when such forays stop being the most profitable. (good sign in Bloomberg news today: US wireless contracts "may have shrunk for the first time ever in the first quarter.") Its anyone's guess how much innovation the next decade will bring in energy and biotech. But as for IT, my money is on the opportunities that will come from bridging the digital divide (emerging markets). The Wired article "Want to become an Internet billionaire? Move to Africa" didn't get much interest from HN[1] though it was also covered in Forbes. The informal economy (as written about in Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy by Robert Neuwirth) is an oft-overlooked angle which should be particularly interesting, as it intersects more and more with an expanding global internet. 1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3210000 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3210000

brownbat 15y ago

| The question is, as it has always been: now what? | Decades ago, the answer was, "Build the Internet." Fifteen years ago, it was, "Build the Web." Five years ago, the answers were probably, "Build the social network" In other words, when you read near future sci fi and think, "that's a cool piece of plausible tech that I really want right now!" what is it? "We are prosthetic gods." That quote dates back farther than you might think. Printing, telecom, radio, the internet, the web, the social network, the smart phone... all of these take the sum of human knowledge/experience and inch it slightly closer to my brain. The next step is to have it rest right against my temple while we debate whether or not to break out the scalpel. Hate to jump on the bandwagon, but I'm ready for the Goggles. Google's commercials don't scrape the surface of what it could mean to have internet-enabled constant-on cameras on everyone's face, for better and worse. But that's the next space I want to explore.

iRobot 15y ago

Shame so much talent is wasted creating so much shit all with the ultimate object of dumbing down the populous to a bunch of media consumers.

jcc80 15y ago

I think Louis CK said it best, "Everything is amazing and nobody's happy." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk Sorry but Social mobile local (or as people cooler than me are calling it, SoMoLo) is still pretty new. You're just going to have to "suffer" through a little more. I get the author's point that it seems like the same things are getting made and funded over and over. But with only about 1/2 the U.S. pop. owning smartphones, you can't blame people too much for trying to stake their claim. Anything more innovative might be too early anyways.

thatusertwo 15y ago

An inovation incentive from consumers would probably work better then the current system.

0xFFFFFFF 15y ago

The preface to the article says this guy is a reknown journalist. But I fail to see any insights worth noting in his writing. Is he imagining that if we charges users to access digital resources that we'll stop mining data? And why does he care if companies exploiting "free" are losing money? Is he invested in them? I'll bet if I sent this guy a demo to boot up that allowed him to connect to peers directly and bypass all the data mining, all the spam, and allow for all the convergence he could ever want, he'd balk because it didn't have "big buttons". One things is for sure, the internet holds no promise for any improvement in journalism. It just keeps getting worse.

rohern 15y ago

This article is spot on in its thesis, though not always in its arguments. Everyone is convinced -- because the people who work in marketing are happy because they can sell ads -- that social media is an important thing. It is not. Social media is people doing what they were already doing, only more often and anywhere. Flirting with girls, talking with friends, etc. Making these activities digital is not changing society or improving lives. It is the same society and the same lives, with more time spent on these activities. Never has anyone gone to bed thinking "Gosh, I wish I had spent more time looking at funny pictures of strangers today." People often go to bed regretting not doing what they could have done when instead they were on Facebook and Twitter and [insert the names of 90% of the startups you have heard of]. Every founder will go on and on about "changing the world" if you let him. This is as if changing the world were something worth doing for its own sake. If you see a problem that is worth fixing and you fix it, then the change effected is important and even virtuous. But the key is that problem must be worth solving. Just because a petulant and spoiled American wants his iced mocha faster does not mean that speeding up sales of mocha is a worthy problem. Can you make money doing it? Probably. I went to school to become an engineer (I'm 24) because I thought that computers and the internet were going to make invention and innovation possible even for people who did not work for industrial laboratories. Maybe the hugely reduced barriers to entry into the technology sector that resulted from cheap computers and good programming tools would lead young and eager people of brilliance to found ambitious companies to finally -- aren't we all sick of being exasperated by the mediocrity of culture and politics in the past 20 years? -- steer human life into better modes of existence and a new frontier of boldness. Sure, the internet cannot do this all on its own, but is such a powerful and promising tool, that maybe it would start things. This has not happened. There are a few gems like SpaceX and Willow Garage that seek out challenge in this way, but they are doing it independent of the cheapness and openness that computers now allow. Worse, many of the companies that have been founded are dedicated to aggressively ruining the internet by making it a place for sucking up private information, showing ads, and selling the same old useless junk. What it seems to me this article is about is that innovation in technology right now is about money, not about betterment. A billion dollars was just spent on Instagram. To do what? If you are so in the bubble of the "startup world" that you do not see the self-evident absurdity of a situation in which that is a possible and reasonable event, you are become blinded. Stop thinking like a marketer and think like an inventor with balls. Stop trying to get rich unless you are getting rich by doing something that is worth doing. I write this as someone who honestly loves technology, hacking, the hacker ethic, and HN, but I walk around Palo Alto every day being slowly crushed by disappointment. The problem is not that the good hackers are being spread across too many companies, it is that too many companies are not doing things worthy of hackers.

smugengineer69 15y ago

I really don't think people understand how new ideas come about. It is simply a fact of life that the newest, most different, paradigm-breaking idea will almost always make people uncomfortable. People aren't going to like it, because likely most of them won't understand it. It is going to come out of an extremely unlikely location, perhaps even a cesspool like 4chan where you throw feces at the wall and see what sticks. Relatedly, the idea that innovation and monetary success are in any way intertwined is laughable. I can make money off of anything. This is not a hard skill, this is not an admirable skill, and the thinking required to get people to spend money is the basest, most despicable form of thinking imaginable. If we're going to Truly innovate, we need to break things. Break everything. Ironically, what I mean here is the exact opposite of the meaning typically assigned to the buzzword "disruptive". We need to make people uncomfortable so they can realize just how comfortable they can be. No one agrees with real change, no one actually wants to be disrupted, and Real Creativity is an inherently mischievous little devil who most people get angry with and want nothing to do with. The vast majority of so-called entrepreneurs are lifeless copy machines with no original ideas who are too-concerned with the remnants of their highschool popularity contest to even get close to coming up with anything new. We need to realize that the way most people think change is going to happen is not the way it does happen, or ever has happened. In the minds of most people, when you get down to it, change sucks, we hate it, and would rather sit around circlejerking about how innovative we are than go out into the streets and actually light the world on fire.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

guelo 15y ago

Sure there are a lot of smart people wasting away figuring out how to sell ads more efficiently. But I think we're still fairly reliably being wowed several times a year. Right now Kickstarter is the big wow for a lot of people, they're doing some real revolutionary work on the future of business and work. With Etsy being a good wow along the same lines before that. Obviously the iPad is making explosive entries into all kinds of industries which are being revolutionized for the 2nd or 3rd time in the last 20 years. And this guy talks like the iPhone happened ages ago, it was only 5 years ago, 4 years since the amazements started emanating from the app store. I'm not too worried, change is accelerating and the wows will keep on coming. Five years from now should look more different from today then today looks compared to 2007. The main dangers are monopolistic predator companies, walled gardens, and government intrusion. Other than that, we will continue being blown away for years to come.

swalsh 15y ago

I think there's a new paradigm in the making, many people are talking about it... but it's young. The internet of stuff is next! A lot of the building blocks are in place, personally I think Arduino is a really big component that is driving the revolution and Kickstarter is providing a surprisingly good platform for funding it. However there's still a few missing components. One of the goals of LTE is to power this new network, but existing carrier business models don't seem appropriate. As a consumer I'm really not interested in paying $20 (or more!) a month for each my fridge, and toaster, and television, and door to be connected. Light Squared was a promising push in the right direction, which unfortunately failed. Along the same lines of networking though, I think there's a lot of really good opportunities for low end hardware. Qualcomm dominates the market in LTE chipsets, but good luck getting access to the developer stuff as an indie user. API's tying all these components together will be essential.

mtts 15y ago
I'd love for this to be true, but I think it isn't. An internet of stuff depends on raw materials being dirt cheap. Unfortunately, during the last five years or so the price of raw materials has started to increase, not decrease, and for reasons so fundamental it's unlikely this process will end soon. So rather than an internet of stuff the new paradigm in the making will probably have something to with scarcity. No idea what, exactly, but my bet would definitely on a future of scarcity rather than a future of abundance.
redwood 15y ago
3d printing!!!

dharma1 15y ago

I think it's the way evolution works. Sometimes it's slow for a while - then things click into place and there is rapid progress. The Khan Academy (and other free online, high quality education) is probably the most revolutionary thing that has come out of the internet in the past few years. I don't know how much effect it has at the moment in the developing world - whether resources like that are used in the classroom and by students - but the potential for transformation is huge. There is an enormous amount of people in the world with untapped talent because of lack of access to high quality education. Biotech, synthetic biology etc aside, I think the next thing to facilitate change in computing is portable display technology - for personal use maybe it will be Google Glass once it's a mature product. For shared use I think low cost, lightweight high res laser/LED pico projectors will take off in the next couple of years. The computer itself will be a tablet/mobile phone, either with its own display or hooked up to one of these new display devices. Battery tech is another interesting one - once we work out how to produce cheap, high energy density, long life batteries from a natural resource that is abundant, we'll see a lot of accelerated progress in several areas. Of course the 1st world problems of not having enough cool gadgets and software will be put into perspective when the Earth's limited food/energy resources vs growing population starts playing out for real.

stcredzero 15y ago

Social media does contribute to communications and economic growth, in the same way automobiles have. Social media also has real downsides, in much the same way. That said, reading about SpaceX excites me much more than reading about Instagram.

hxa7241 15y ago

> More money has got to change hands. No, quite the opposite. If you really want to be bold about inventing the future, money is one of the things that needs to be replaced. The internet is, in a general sense, a technology for cooperation -- for organising collective activities through shared information. Money is really just an information channel for doing that too, but it is now comparatively obsolete.

josh33 15y ago
Money is a receipt given for value created. I think you mean to say that dollars and pesos should be replaced, which I agree with to a point. However, giving up money, to a government, is like giving up sovereignty. How could a government fund wars or welfare if they couldn't print money.
- eli_gottlieb 15y ago
  No, money is a receipt given for rivalrous, excludable property owned, and then sold off, or for excludable services rendered. We thus have an economic system that hugely neglects the provision of commons and public goods.

phodo 15y ago

Here is one simple attempt to explain the value of many of the startups that are otherwise dismissed by such naysayers, although coming from a heavy tech background I am the first to admit that some of these startups are incremental and featurettes at best. We are in the age of sensors and A/D conversion. Many (not all) startups today do operate at the app layer... they are web / mobile apps etc. They produce tools that enable us to consume and produce info... at scale... we're talking millions of people are slowly but surely doing the analog-to-digital conversion for a future. At a mass scale, the result will be x,y,z,t,status,interest,social,connection connections/graphs for many things across many verticals. Privacy issues aside (they cannot be ignored, but bare with me for a second), the end result is a real-time layer on the world that exists in the digital domain, not the analog one. We are creating a world of installing "sensors" through market forces. There is a step function in innovation (a new S-curve, if you will) that will occur at some point, that will be dependent on the world where things are digitized (the one we are creating now) in order to unlock innovation further. Not just technically, but from an adoption/diffusion/comfort level in society. We are going through that now... so the outcome ain't so bleak. At the end of this particular journey (call it a bubble, call it something else), we will have 1 billion+ people who a) are comfortable with sensors / digitizing their stuff and themselves b) and are doing it. We are converging on a dominant design of what a digitized world looks like, through market forces! And in more recent years, the big data techniques emerging that will also be pushed by market forces. The best way to think about that is the following: In the ABSENCE of the incremental innovation (instagram of x, pinterest for y), I can imagine many future business and technology plans saying: we would like to build this technology, but it is not feasible because it requires a world where everyone is a sensor. Or even better, our new technology can change the world, but it assumes that people / things are digitized. tl;dr: current crop of startups are creating sensors for big data and other processes. This can create future innovation opps that leverage this big data in new and profound ways. The absence of such startups is a blocker for that future class of innovation. Hope not too incoherent... typing this at 30,000 feet in a cramped seat.

jonhacck 15y ago

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