15 ms·

Startup Stagnation

82 points by jonemo 14y ago

jayunit 14y ago
Reminds me of http://www.foundersfund.com/the-future http://www.foundersfund.com/the-future
- zio99 14y ago
  Exactly! This article just belittles the work of startups and is demeaning to all the work that founders are putting in. Groupon didn’t think that selling 2-for-1 pizza coupons were beneath them - that’s how they started out. And that’s how a lot of companies got to where they are now - through a series of incremental and attainable steps, often riddled with failures and in industries they are no longer in now. But each lesson helps them gain traction and find product/market fit along the way. It's not that 140 characters is of less value than a spaceship. The important thing is to start, not lose hope, and keep on trucking. Or we wouldn't have any of the conglomerates we have today.
  - jfb 14y ago
    OK, this is tangential to your post and the OP but … using Groupon as an example of anything other than shell games and Ponzi schemes strikes me as more than a little bit naïve.
    - zio99 14y ago
      I think you may have misunderstood. I wasn't agreeing with the OP. And I wouldn't be naïve to recognize that Groupon is in the business of selling. There are a lot of skeletons in the closet for MySpace as well (their cursor icons that you downloaded in the 90s would be labelled as spyware today since they snooped on users and sold the information). I am not discounting that, but if the OP is to say that our solution to our stagnation is to simply "make software more meaningful" and has an Amy Hoy quote to back up his claim, then I would have to respectfully disagree with some examples below: From YC's recent batch, sure, we've got Makr.io and ReelSurfer that would be classified as "startup porn" by the OP, but you cannot discount Double, Dreamforge, Coco Controller are in the business of selling, addressing customer's pain points and actually being meaningful to its users. Customers are not naïve. His gross oversimplication of the startup industry by quoting Pinterest as dumbification of society is what bothers me.
      - jfb 14y ago
        OK, thanks for the clarification. On my bad days, I crabbily agree with the OP's general contention that the software startup industry is cramped and largely idea-poor. Most of the time, though, yeah. It's a pants argument.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
"If you enjoy thoughtful and smart writing, and being a part of a meaningful conversation ..." Then don't read this guy apparently. A page of snarky comments? When YC invests in a promising team that has yet to have an idea that is "investing in nothing", but a MacArthur Genius Grant is "investing in the future" ? I understand that to a lot of people outside of the startup eco-system or outside of technology in general don't "get" what it is we do, they also don't "get" how Google makes billions shoving just the right advertisement in front of them at just the right time, and they don't "get" that they haven't looked in a paper copy of the Yellow Pages in years or cracked open any of the 27 volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia on their shelf that they got for their kids 10 years ago. But to spend time and energy hating on something you don't understand, well that isn't really a meaningful use of your time is it? And telling someone who is having a great time doing something they love that it isn't "meaningful" is also just mean.
- zio99 14y ago
  Agree with you Chuck. That's exactly the point made in Startup Principles: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/25124056077/startup-principles-the-3ps http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/25124056077/startup-... That companies like Google, RIM and 3M take the world by storm by solving real pressure/pain points of customers in a small and disruptive way. There is no overnight success as a case study on 3M concludes: http://brownieinmotion.ca/3m.html http://brownieinmotion.ca/3m.html
- tomrod 14y ago
  I agree. I've been very impressed with the gambles and payoffs YC has made.
- finch 14y ago
  I understand the ecosystem and work in the design industry. I am not downplaying the value of startups or saying investing in them are bad things at all. I say in the essay that some great thinking/innovation is coming from startups and will continue to. However, people that make a living in the technology and design industry will sooner or later have to consider what we are building. Unfortunately, this is only an excerpt and doesn't allow for the complete context. I go into some products/startups that are solving some interesting problems. Thanks for the feedback.
c0da 14y ago
“Some of the most successful technology companies haven’t done much for job growth: “Take the ubiquitous iPod. It’s created less than 14,000 jobs in the U.S., Internet giant Google, 20,000 employees, Twitter, a mere 300”” It's absolutely absurd to imply that the extent of Google's effect on our economy is a sum of their employees. That quote completely mis-understands how markets work. Google provides services that have completely revolutionized how people find information and build buisnesses. Of course that has impacted job growth.
- sampsonjs 14y ago
  Indeed, without Google and Sillicon Valley's contributions to job growth, we would live in a nightmare world where unemployment has soared past 8 percent.
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  I don't disagree, but it's worth noting that if a business comes along and creates 20,000 jobs by putting (say) 100,000 people out of work, that's going to have a negative effect on the economy. Many of those newly unemployed people are going to be using your service to find out how to get their unemployment check. That said, government protection of buggy whip makers doesn't work. Look at the ridiculous legally mandated benefits for railroad engineers. I think there's reason to be concerned about how non-information folks are going to be making money in the next fifty years. After all, how much of the economy can be producing hamburgers, entertainment and technology?
  - Sambdala 14y ago
    You mean it's going to have a positive effect on the economy? You no longer have 100,000 people digging and refilling proverbial holes, so they're now free to contribute in other ways. Of course that's going to cause some short term friction, but a refusal to see past that friction would still have >90% of us working a family farm for a living.
    - Negitivefrags 14y ago
kerryiob 14y ago
I think the points made are good. Modern efficiencies have eliminated a lot of jobs. Fact. No point in arguing about whether it's good or bad. It just is. So don't waste time trying to defend Apple or Google. They are just successful in their time. Good for them. Consider though, that many of us who are fortunate enough to be working in the information tech / startup area, are focusing most of our efforts of creating products consumers don't even know they want or need yet, but we hope they find super cool. Hopefully the product gives us enough users to figure out how to make money off ads or something. Cool, fine. I have to agree that it's a shame that there isn't more momentum behind figuring out how to solve problems that people already have. Figuring out problems that would benefit the vast majority of people who don't work in information technology, who just so happen to be finding it harder to find good jobs because of information technology.
- pron 14y ago
  I don't think you must necessarily "solve problems that people already have", nor that startups don't do that. I think the article is just a call for startup founders and investors to think first about how meaningful their product is. But it's not that they don't do that already. Many know damn well that their product, though very cool, has little "true" significance, and they do it anyways. Why? Some of the reasons are mentioned in the article. The startup economy pushes founders towards products that could reap quick exits, so many startups just try to solve smaller and smaller problems. It's not that they're not real – they're just very small. Also, in most cases, these are the only problems a small company has the resources to tackle. This economy, in turn, makes it socially acceptable, and even respectable, to address all of those minor, "meaningless", issues. There's no one to blame – it's just the market (said with some irony). If we must blame someone, though, I think it's the big companies. Instead of putting a lot of money into research (and only they have the resources to solve the big problems), they prefer – because it's much cheaper – to wait for a startup to successfully solve a minor problem, and then acquire it. Those acquisitions make the prospects of founding a startup to solves a minor pain-point less risky, and so more people do it.
chime 14y ago
I think there is an underlying assumption when VCs "invest in nothing" - the founder knows how to make a startup succeed, the actual product notwithstanding. The biggest risk in startups today is not the product, but the founders ability to succeed. The idea doesn't matter, the execution doesn't matter, the connections don't matter, even the near-term profits don't matter. What matters is if you can get a million people to use the product regularly. Risk(Founders who have done that once and have no product now) < Risk(First-time founders with a product). This brings me to the biggest problem with startups that nobody seems to address and in fact, every successful/smart/talented/skilled person contributes towards it - every single startup is reinventing the wheel and that is inefficient. Step back and think about any given startup. They have to do all of the following: Setup accounting/legal/corporation, manage employees/payroll/benefits, perform data analysis/SEO/marketing, excel at PR/word-of-mouth, engage with users, encourage developers, design their brand, manage infrastructure (even AWS/Heroku accounts need pampering), source funding, present at tradeshows/industry-conferences, and tons of other boring things that you will see mentioned in expensive 20 page e-books and "X things you should do" lists. The worst part is that they have to this on top of making their product work in every environment: multiple browsers, mobile devices, app stores, online/offline modes, hi-res/lo-res graphics, hi/lo bandwidth, multiple languages/regions, and do all of that 24/7. Why isn't all of the repeatable stuff outsourced in bulk, while still enabling the founders to develop the product and own equity? If you work for Google, you don't have to worry about any of this and just hack away on your code and let someone else market it and manage payroll. But you're trading away your high-equity/high-risk for a fixed salary/bonus. Why isn't there a median between coding at Google with no equity/risk and do-everything in your startup? Being an early hire at a startup doesn't cut it because it's high-risk/low-equity. Imagine if you could join YC and all you have to worry about is making a good product and someone else manages everything, while you still get to collect X% of your product sales. And if you feel YC isn't doing a good enough job, you can easily switch to XYZ and after a brief catch-up, they can take over everything. Certainly this happens already during acquisitions or switching vendors. Why can't there be a one-stop-shop-startup-vendor who handles everything about running a startup? And why can't there be more of them so they can all compete for the best founders/products? I know I've simplified a lot of complex issues here but I think big ideas start with solving difficult problems. And running a startup isn't easy. Running 800 is near impossible. But it could happen. Off-topic but related: I kept trying to clean my LCD thinking there were small spots on it. Turns out it is the site's background.
theoj 14y ago
>> The 19th-century kitchen was built around a live fireplace, but then we rapidly benefited from electricity, water, and gas stoves. Then the past fifty years brought no major technological changes. Ever heard of microwave ovens? Automatic dishwashers? Pretty significant kitchen innovations in the last 50 years.
- finch 14y ago
  Cowen is talking about major/radical innovation, not iterative/incremental change. Yes, a microwave is significant if you have only ever used a stove. But going from a live fireplace to the other technology he mentions is a major change.
  - theoj 14y ago
    >> Yes, a microwave is significant if you have only ever used a stove. But going from a live fireplace to the other technology he mentions is a major change. I would argue that the microwave oven is a significant innovation because it's not based on burning fuel -- wood or gas -- as was done in previous stoves.
  - pron 14y ago
    True, but to be fair, radical innovation is usually the low-hanging fruit of some new discovery.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  I remember sitting down on a plane once and striking up a conversation with the passenger next to me. They were visiting their grand parent and thought it was amazing that their grand parent had been alive both when people thought it was impossible to fly (1900) and when we had a plane that could fly into space (the Space Shuttle). They said this wistfully like they would never see that kind of change in their life. I asked them about their laptop. It was a Sony Vaio, they were going to watch a movie later on it. I pointed out that when they were born the thought of an individual owning a computer all to themselves was absurd, that their laptop had more compute power and storage than all the computers at NASA had when they sent a man to the Moon, and that their computer would do more calculations in the two hours of showing a movie than were done during the Manhattan project to design the A-bomb. The difference was that you only see the change in the rear view mirror and even then only if you know what you are looking for. Sailors think they are holding a straight course but when you look back at the wake you see if its really straight or not. The article's cites Tyler Cowen who suffers from this same blind spot. There are literally thousands of things that have changed in a kitchen, from Microwaves to the Silicone cooking mats which keep your cookies from sticking to the layered composites that do heat spreading on ceramic cook tops. But you don't "see" those as a casual user (and I'm guessing Tyler only casually uses his kitchen) just like my seat mate as a casual user of their laptop didn't "see" the change it represented. There must be a name for that.
moocow01 14y ago
One thing Ive realized after working in software for a while is that software itself has very little ability to be applied in a way that is directly transformative to the human condition. By and large software is a tool to carry out an existing process or idea in a more efficient way, and in this regard it is a job-destroyer ready to eat the work of anyone who performs non-creative or intellectual tasks. This is what software does and the reason it can be so profitable - you can effectively capture the cost savings of automating very large processes. In fact the majority of startups when you strip them of their branding and buzzwords are just this ... they provide increased efficiency around an existing process whether it be social or business or otherwise. There is nothing inherently wrong with this in that it is the business of software. Additionally it also absolutely does not mean that these companies do not matter or are inconsequential but if you are looking for the true way software is transformational to the human condition, I think many are looking through the wrong lense completely... The way software is truly transformational to the human condition is by freeing more and more of us from doing mindless tasks that only feel good to some due the distortions our current educational system and perverted social incentives. We should be celebrating the destruction of automatable jobs so more of us can be free to live better in whatever way that may mean. This doesn't happen in reality because our current system gives little to no rewards for doing other things like living, experiencing, helping, or learning - what actually happens to those people is that they go without another job and flounder. There are very few ladders to guide anyone displaced and thats a shame because their energy could be used in an endless number of ways for society.
- marquis 14y ago
  >software itself has very little ability to be applied in a way that is directly transformative to the human condition I have to disagree on at least the area of communications. I travel all the time and if I'd have been doing this in the 90s I'd either have a hefty phone bill or I'd not be able to keep in touch with my family. More than likely, I'd not keep in touch with my friends and keep my friends, and know my place in this world through my friends. I agree, a lot of software is just convenience, such as better flight search that replaced my travel agent, or the ability to pay my bills online so when I get do home the power is still on. >The way software is truly transformational to the human condition is by freeing more and more of us from doing mindless tasks I also celebrate the destruction of the mindless job. I can't remember where I read this yesterday, but someone mentioned imagine you are having a conversation with yourself from 100 years ago: the amount of free time we have because of automation is astounding and I can only hope it gets better. I like to be creative on my free time, but the paradox is that I need a lot of free time to be creative. I find myself spending time on programming or thinking about the automating of tasks instead of just doing them once a week. I hope to find a balance over time and I do jump on anything that can save me from mundane activities.
nickdpi 14y ago
Worth noting that this is an excerpt of a (much) longer essay in Distance: http://distance.cc http://distance.cc Some of the critiques here are totally fair, but folks should read the whole thing before forming a final opinion.
kylebrown 14y ago
> The truth is, we may well be in the largest slowdown of technological growth in human history. Economist Tyler Cowen calls this the “great stagnation.” relevant relink: Peter Thiel and George Gilder debate the prospects for technology and economic growth[1]. The basis of Thiel's argument comes down to the price of energy. He's bearish. He notes that Warren Buffet's biggest bet, which is on trains that transport 40% by volume coal, is a bet that clean, cheap energy tech will fail. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRrLyckg8Nc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRrLyckg8Nc
AtTheLast 14y ago
"In short, if software is truly eating the world, then it needs to be more meaningful." I think we are slowly getting there. But, areas such as politics, education and medicine are really behind the curve. I've noticed a lot more start ups focused on the well being of humanity and our personal lives. Sites like nextdoor.com and myenergy.com come to mind.
AndrewKemendo 14y ago
If the goal is to give everyone a job, we are definitely on the wrong track. We should strive for the world where you don't actually need a job, then all this jobs "gained/lost" talk would be moot. I know I'm not the only one who has read Player Piano.

Startup Stagnation

82 points by jonemo 14y ago

jayunit 14y ago

Reminds me of http://www.foundersfund.com/the-future http://www.foundersfund.com/the-future

zio99 14y ago
Exactly! This article just belittles the work of startups and is demeaning to all the work that founders are putting in. Groupon didn’t think that selling 2-for-1 pizza coupons were beneath them - that’s how they started out. And that’s how a lot of companies got to where they are now - through a series of incremental and attainable steps, often riddled with failures and in industries they are no longer in now. But each lesson helps them gain traction and find product/market fit along the way. It's not that 140 characters is of less value than a spaceship. The important thing is to start, not lose hope, and keep on trucking. Or we wouldn't have any of the conglomerates we have today.
- jfb 14y ago
  OK, this is tangential to your post and the OP but … using Groupon as an example of anything other than shell games and Ponzi schemes strikes me as more than a little bit naïve.
  - zio99 14y ago
    I think you may have misunderstood. I wasn't agreeing with the OP. And I wouldn't be naïve to recognize that Groupon is in the business of selling. There are a lot of skeletons in the closet for MySpace as well (their cursor icons that you downloaded in the 90s would be labelled as spyware today since they snooped on users and sold the information). I am not discounting that, but if the OP is to say that our solution to our stagnation is to simply "make software more meaningful" and has an Amy Hoy quote to back up his claim, then I would have to respectfully disagree with some examples below: From YC's recent batch, sure, we've got Makr.io and ReelSurfer that would be classified as "startup porn" by the OP, but you cannot discount Double, Dreamforge, Coco Controller are in the business of selling, addressing customer's pain points and actually being meaningful to its users. Customers are not naïve. His gross oversimplication of the startup industry by quoting Pinterest as dumbification of society is what bothers me.
    - jfb 14y ago
      OK, thanks for the clarification. On my bad days, I crabbily agree with the OP's general contention that the software startup industry is cramped and largely idea-poor. Most of the time, though, yeah. It's a pants argument.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

"If you enjoy thoughtful and smart writing, and being a part of a meaningful conversation ..." Then don't read this guy apparently. A page of snarky comments? When YC invests in a promising team that has yet to have an idea that is "investing in nothing", but a MacArthur Genius Grant is "investing in the future" ? I understand that to a lot of people outside of the startup eco-system or outside of technology in general don't "get" what it is we do, they also don't "get" how Google makes billions shoving just the right advertisement in front of them at just the right time, and they don't "get" that they haven't looked in a paper copy of the Yellow Pages in years or cracked open any of the 27 volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia on their shelf that they got for their kids 10 years ago. But to spend time and energy hating on something you don't understand, well that isn't really a meaningful use of your time is it? And telling someone who is having a great time doing something they love that it isn't "meaningful" is also just mean.

zio99 14y ago
Agree with you Chuck. That's exactly the point made in Startup Principles: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/25124056077/startup-principles-the-3ps http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/25124056077/startup-... That companies like Google, RIM and 3M take the world by storm by solving real pressure/pain points of customers in a small and disruptive way. There is no overnight success as a case study on 3M concludes: http://brownieinmotion.ca/3m.html http://brownieinmotion.ca/3m.html
tomrod 14y ago
I agree. I've been very impressed with the gambles and payoffs YC has made.
finch 14y ago
I understand the ecosystem and work in the design industry. I am not downplaying the value of startups or saying investing in them are bad things at all. I say in the essay that some great thinking/innovation is coming from startups and will continue to. However, people that make a living in the technology and design industry will sooner or later have to consider what we are building. Unfortunately, this is only an excerpt and doesn't allow for the complete context. I go into some products/startups that are solving some interesting problems. Thanks for the feedback.

c0da 14y ago

“Some of the most successful technology companies haven’t done much for job growth: “Take the ubiquitous iPod. It’s created less than 14,000 jobs in the U.S., Internet giant Google, 20,000 employees, Twitter, a mere 300”” It's absolutely absurd to imply that the extent of Google's effect on our economy is a sum of their employees. That quote completely mis-understands how markets work. Google provides services that have completely revolutionized how people find information and build buisnesses. Of course that has impacted job growth.

sampsonjs 14y ago
Indeed, without Google and Sillicon Valley's contributions to job growth, we would live in a nightmare world where unemployment has soared past 8 percent.
fusiongyro 14y ago
I don't disagree, but it's worth noting that if a business comes along and creates 20,000 jobs by putting (say) 100,000 people out of work, that's going to have a negative effect on the economy. Many of those newly unemployed people are going to be using your service to find out how to get their unemployment check. That said, government protection of buggy whip makers doesn't work. Look at the ridiculous legally mandated benefits for railroad engineers. I think there's reason to be concerned about how non-information folks are going to be making money in the next fifty years. After all, how much of the economy can be producing hamburgers, entertainment and technology?
- Sambdala 14y ago
  You mean it's going to have a positive effect on the economy? You no longer have 100,000 people digging and refilling proverbial holes, so they're now free to contribute in other ways. Of course that's going to cause some short term friction, but a refusal to see past that friction would still have >90% of us working a family farm for a living.
  - Negitivefrags 14y ago

kerryiob 14y ago

I think the points made are good. Modern efficiencies have eliminated a lot of jobs. Fact. No point in arguing about whether it's good or bad. It just is. So don't waste time trying to defend Apple or Google. They are just successful in their time. Good for them. Consider though, that many of us who are fortunate enough to be working in the information tech / startup area, are focusing most of our efforts of creating products consumers don't even know they want or need yet, but we hope they find super cool. Hopefully the product gives us enough users to figure out how to make money off ads or something. Cool, fine. I have to agree that it's a shame that there isn't more momentum behind figuring out how to solve problems that people already have. Figuring out problems that would benefit the vast majority of people who don't work in information technology, who just so happen to be finding it harder to find good jobs because of information technology.

pron 14y ago
I don't think you must necessarily "solve problems that people already have", nor that startups don't do that. I think the article is just a call for startup founders and investors to think first about how meaningful their product is. But it's not that they don't do that already. Many know damn well that their product, though very cool, has little "true" significance, and they do it anyways. Why? Some of the reasons are mentioned in the article. The startup economy pushes founders towards products that could reap quick exits, so many startups just try to solve smaller and smaller problems. It's not that they're not real – they're just very small. Also, in most cases, these are the only problems a small company has the resources to tackle. This economy, in turn, makes it socially acceptable, and even respectable, to address all of those minor, "meaningless", issues. There's no one to blame – it's just the market (said with some irony). If we must blame someone, though, I think it's the big companies. Instead of putting a lot of money into research (and only they have the resources to solve the big problems), they prefer – because it's much cheaper – to wait for a startup to successfully solve a minor problem, and then acquire it. Those acquisitions make the prospects of founding a startup to solves a minor pain-point less risky, and so more people do it.

chime 14y ago

I think there is an underlying assumption when VCs "invest in nothing" - the founder knows how to make a startup succeed, the actual product notwithstanding. The biggest risk in startups today is not the product, but the founders ability to succeed. The idea doesn't matter, the execution doesn't matter, the connections don't matter, even the near-term profits don't matter. What matters is if you can get a million people to use the product regularly. Risk(Founders who have done that once and have no product now) < Risk(First-time founders with a product). This brings me to the biggest problem with startups that nobody seems to address and in fact, every successful/smart/talented/skilled person contributes towards it - every single startup is reinventing the wheel and that is inefficient. Step back and think about any given startup. They have to do all of the following: Setup accounting/legal/corporation, manage employees/payroll/benefits, perform data analysis/SEO/marketing, excel at PR/word-of-mouth, engage with users, encourage developers, design their brand, manage infrastructure (even AWS/Heroku accounts need pampering), source funding, present at tradeshows/industry-conferences, and tons of other boring things that you will see mentioned in expensive 20 page e-books and "X things you should do" lists. The worst part is that they have to this on top of making their product work in every environment: multiple browsers, mobile devices, app stores, online/offline modes, hi-res/lo-res graphics, hi/lo bandwidth, multiple languages/regions, and do all of that 24/7. Why isn't all of the repeatable stuff outsourced in bulk, while still enabling the founders to develop the product and own equity? If you work for Google, you don't have to worry about any of this and just hack away on your code and let someone else market it and manage payroll. But you're trading away your high-equity/high-risk for a fixed salary/bonus. Why isn't there a median between coding at Google with no equity/risk and do-everything in your startup? Being an early hire at a startup doesn't cut it because it's high-risk/low-equity. Imagine if you could join YC and all you have to worry about is making a good product and someone else manages everything, while you still get to collect X% of your product sales. And if you feel YC isn't doing a good enough job, you can easily switch to XYZ and after a brief catch-up, they can take over everything. Certainly this happens already during acquisitions or switching vendors. Why can't there be a one-stop-shop-startup-vendor who handles everything about running a startup? And why can't there be more of them so they can all compete for the best founders/products? I know I've simplified a lot of complex issues here but I think big ideas start with solving difficult problems. And running a startup isn't easy. Running 800 is near impossible. But it could happen. Off-topic but related: I kept trying to clean my LCD thinking there were small spots on it. Turns out it is the site's background.

theoj 14y ago

>> The 19th-century kitchen was built around a live fireplace, but then we rapidly benefited from electricity, water, and gas stoves. Then the past fifty years brought no major technological changes. Ever heard of microwave ovens? Automatic dishwashers? Pretty significant kitchen innovations in the last 50 years.

finch 14y ago
Cowen is talking about major/radical innovation, not iterative/incremental change. Yes, a microwave is significant if you have only ever used a stove. But going from a live fireplace to the other technology he mentions is a major change.
- theoj 14y ago
  >> Yes, a microwave is significant if you have only ever used a stove. But going from a live fireplace to the other technology he mentions is a major change. I would argue that the microwave oven is a significant innovation because it's not based on burning fuel -- wood or gas -- as was done in previous stoves.
- pron 14y ago
  True, but to be fair, radical innovation is usually the low-hanging fruit of some new discovery.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
I remember sitting down on a plane once and striking up a conversation with the passenger next to me. They were visiting their grand parent and thought it was amazing that their grand parent had been alive both when people thought it was impossible to fly (1900) and when we had a plane that could fly into space (the Space Shuttle). They said this wistfully like they would never see that kind of change in their life. I asked them about their laptop. It was a Sony Vaio, they were going to watch a movie later on it. I pointed out that when they were born the thought of an individual owning a computer all to themselves was absurd, that their laptop had more compute power and storage than all the computers at NASA had when they sent a man to the Moon, and that their computer would do more calculations in the two hours of showing a movie than were done during the Manhattan project to design the A-bomb. The difference was that you only see the change in the rear view mirror and even then only if you know what you are looking for. Sailors think they are holding a straight course but when you look back at the wake you see if its really straight or not. The article's cites Tyler Cowen who suffers from this same blind spot. There are literally thousands of things that have changed in a kitchen, from Microwaves to the Silicone cooking mats which keep your cookies from sticking to the layered composites that do heat spreading on ceramic cook tops. But you don't "see" those as a casual user (and I'm guessing Tyler only casually uses his kitchen) just like my seat mate as a casual user of their laptop didn't "see" the change it represented. There must be a name for that.

moocow01 14y ago

One thing Ive realized after working in software for a while is that software itself has very little ability to be applied in a way that is directly transformative to the human condition. By and large software is a tool to carry out an existing process or idea in a more efficient way, and in this regard it is a job-destroyer ready to eat the work of anyone who performs non-creative or intellectual tasks. This is what software does and the reason it can be so profitable - you can effectively capture the cost savings of automating very large processes. In fact the majority of startups when you strip them of their branding and buzzwords are just this ... they provide increased efficiency around an existing process whether it be social or business or otherwise. There is nothing inherently wrong with this in that it is the business of software. Additionally it also absolutely does not mean that these companies do not matter or are inconsequential but if you are looking for the true way software is transformational to the human condition, I think many are looking through the wrong lense completely... The way software is truly transformational to the human condition is by freeing more and more of us from doing mindless tasks that only feel good to some due the distortions our current educational system and perverted social incentives. We should be celebrating the destruction of automatable jobs so more of us can be free to live better in whatever way that may mean. This doesn't happen in reality because our current system gives little to no rewards for doing other things like living, experiencing, helping, or learning - what actually happens to those people is that they go without another job and flounder. There are very few ladders to guide anyone displaced and thats a shame because their energy could be used in an endless number of ways for society.

marquis 14y ago
>software itself has very little ability to be applied in a way that is directly transformative to the human condition I have to disagree on at least the area of communications. I travel all the time and if I'd have been doing this in the 90s I'd either have a hefty phone bill or I'd not be able to keep in touch with my family. More than likely, I'd not keep in touch with my friends and keep my friends, and know my place in this world through my friends. I agree, a lot of software is just convenience, such as better flight search that replaced my travel agent, or the ability to pay my bills online so when I get do home the power is still on. >The way software is truly transformational to the human condition is by freeing more and more of us from doing mindless tasks I also celebrate the destruction of the mindless job. I can't remember where I read this yesterday, but someone mentioned imagine you are having a conversation with yourself from 100 years ago: the amount of free time we have because of automation is astounding and I can only hope it gets better. I like to be creative on my free time, but the paradox is that I need a lot of free time to be creative. I find myself spending time on programming or thinking about the automating of tasks instead of just doing them once a week. I hope to find a balance over time and I do jump on anything that can save me from mundane activities.

nickdpi 14y ago

Worth noting that this is an excerpt of a (much) longer essay in Distance: http://distance.cc http://distance.cc Some of the critiques here are totally fair, but folks should read the whole thing before forming a final opinion.

kylebrown 14y ago

> The truth is, we may well be in the largest slowdown of technological growth in human history. Economist Tyler Cowen calls this the “great stagnation.” relevant relink: Peter Thiel and George Gilder debate the prospects for technology and economic growth[1]. The basis of Thiel's argument comes down to the price of energy. He's bearish. He notes that Warren Buffet's biggest bet, which is on trains that transport 40% by volume coal, is a bet that clean, cheap energy tech will fail. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRrLyckg8Nc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRrLyckg8Nc

AtTheLast 14y ago

"In short, if software is truly eating the world, then it needs to be more meaningful." I think we are slowly getting there. But, areas such as politics, education and medicine are really behind the curve. I've noticed a lot more start ups focused on the well being of humanity and our personal lives. Sites like nextdoor.com and myenergy.com come to mind.

AndrewKemendo 14y ago

If the goal is to give everyone a job, we are definitely on the wrong track. We should strive for the world where you don't actually need a job, then all this jobs "gained/lost" talk would be moot. I know I'm not the only one who has read Player Piano.