4 ms·

One thing that’s fascinating to me is that these straight out of sci-fi things are novelties or demos, and don’t seem all that popular. Most people just aren’t

by api 1y ago

One thing that’s fascinating to me is that these straight out of sci-fi things are novelties or demos, and don’t seem all that popular. Most people just aren’t interested. It’s the “boring” stuff that’s interesting: automating drudgery work, a better way to research, etc. I’ve been predicting for years that glasses — whether AR or VR — are and will remain niche. I don’t think most people want them.

afavour 1y ago
> Most people just aren’t interested. Which makes sense, really. Buying an expensive pair of glasses so that I can point at an object and say “what is that” is a cool parlour trick but I can imagine very few scenarios where I’ve wished I had that functionality. Realtime translation… absolutely a feature I’d use. For a week a year, max. IMO the killer, everyday application just isn’t there yet. I’m still not sure what it would be.
- glhaynes 1y ago
  And those are also all things that a smartphone can do (often a little worse, admittedly). Which you'll have with you anyway because of all the things it does much better than glasses can and likely ever could.
Bjartr 1y ago
These statements were true of the Internet too. Until it wasn't. It'll be a slow burn and then one day you turn around and notice it's everywhere. Even post dotcom bust there was still this generally shared understanding that you probably shouldn't meet people you met on the Internet and you shouldn't get in strangers cars. Today we use the Internet for the purpose of summoning strangers to us for the purpose of getting in their cars, and it's completely banal to do so. These shifts take time and in the early-adopter stage the applications look half-baked, or solutions looking for a problem. That's because most of them are. The few that aren't will accrete over time until there's a solid base.
- asadotzler 1y ago
  That was not my experience. I was meeting web chat friends IRL in 1995 and none of us were the least bit afraid. IRC and the web were everything SnapChat is today and not considered any stranger than AOL IM from 5 years before that which were hardly different from the BBSes that came before the subscription services. So, lots of people were meeting online in 1995. 5 years later couples who met on the internet were all over the place. When I moved to Silicon Valley in 2000, "I met my wife online" was hardly even a conversation starter. (I did meet my wife at The State of Insanity web chat boards in 1995.) Also, from 1998-2008, the world invested precisely what it's now invested in the last decade of LLM AIs and was already adding over a trillion dollars annually to the global economy. AI, with that same spending over about the same amount of time, is still an economic black hole and no one has any answers that would satisfy anyone other than VC about how it's all going to pay for itself. The internet, and particularly email, IM and the web, were going strong in the 90s and by the mid-2000s were absolutely dominant. This re-writing of history to suggest that AI deserves more runway to burn more hundreds of billions on things that will have no staying power like the trillion dollars in internet build out between '98-'08. These things don't take time. The whole broadband internet took about a decade and about as much money as AI has gotten in this latest bubble. At least when the dot com bubble burst, we had infrastructure with staying power and real societal value, unlike AI which will leave us with next to nothing when its bubble pops.
  - bandrami 1y ago
    This is what I keep coming back to. If this is actually supercharging e.g. software developers, why aren't we absolutely awash in better software?
    - nathanappere 1y ago
      Because most software doesn’t need to be good, but just hit the “kind of does the job well enough” line. It improves velocity for this usecase.
      - 1y ago
fennecbutt 1y ago
People were resistant to cell phones, too. To computers, to the Internet, to online articles and news replacing newspapers and TV programs. Thid I'd why it sucks that glass was shot down when that technology will soar in a few decades. People need to be more forward looking and open to change imo. It affects society in very negative ways. Imagine if people had planned for social media when it was first becoming a thing. We'd have safety nets, and an actual fucking plan.

by api 1y ago

afavour 1y ago

> Most people just aren’t interested. Which makes sense, really. Buying an expensive pair of glasses so that I can point at an object and say “what is that” is a cool parlour trick but I can imagine very few scenarios where I’ve wished I had that functionality. Realtime translation… absolutely a feature I’d use. For a week a year, max. IMO the killer, everyday application just isn’t there yet. I’m still not sure what it would be.

glhaynes 1y ago
And those are also all things that a smartphone can do (often a little worse, admittedly). Which you'll have with you anyway because of all the things it does much better than glasses can and likely ever could.

Bjartr 1y ago

These statements were true of the Internet too. Until it wasn't. It'll be a slow burn and then one day you turn around and notice it's everywhere. Even post dotcom bust there was still this generally shared understanding that you probably shouldn't meet people you met on the Internet and you shouldn't get in strangers cars. Today we use the Internet for the purpose of summoning strangers to us for the purpose of getting in their cars, and it's completely banal to do so. These shifts take time and in the early-adopter stage the applications look half-baked, or solutions looking for a problem. That's because most of them are. The few that aren't will accrete over time until there's a solid base.

asadotzler 1y ago
That was not my experience. I was meeting web chat friends IRL in 1995 and none of us were the least bit afraid. IRC and the web were everything SnapChat is today and not considered any stranger than AOL IM from 5 years before that which were hardly different from the BBSes that came before the subscription services. So, lots of people were meeting online in 1995. 5 years later couples who met on the internet were all over the place. When I moved to Silicon Valley in 2000, "I met my wife online" was hardly even a conversation starter. (I did meet my wife at The State of Insanity web chat boards in 1995.) Also, from 1998-2008, the world invested precisely what it's now invested in the last decade of LLM AIs and was already adding over a trillion dollars annually to the global economy. AI, with that same spending over about the same amount of time, is still an economic black hole and no one has any answers that would satisfy anyone other than VC about how it's all going to pay for itself. The internet, and particularly email, IM and the web, were going strong in the 90s and by the mid-2000s were absolutely dominant. This re-writing of history to suggest that AI deserves more runway to burn more hundreds of billions on things that will have no staying power like the trillion dollars in internet build out between '98-'08. These things don't take time. The whole broadband internet took about a decade and about as much money as AI has gotten in this latest bubble. At least when the dot com bubble burst, we had infrastructure with staying power and real societal value, unlike AI which will leave us with next to nothing when its bubble pops.
- bandrami 1y ago
  This is what I keep coming back to. If this is actually supercharging e.g. software developers, why aren't we absolutely awash in better software?
  - nathanappere 1y ago
    Because most software doesn’t need to be good, but just hit the “kind of does the job well enough” line. It improves velocity for this usecase.
    - 1y ago

fennecbutt 1y ago

People were resistant to cell phones, too. To computers, to the Internet, to online articles and news replacing newspapers and TV programs. Thid I'd why it sucks that glass was shot down when that technology will soar in a few decades. People need to be more forward looking and open to change imo. It affects society in very negative ways. Imagine if people had planned for social media when it was first becoming a thing. We'd have safety nets, and an actual fucking plan.