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Web Design: The First 100 Years (2014)

988 points by jmduke 11y ago

Animats 11y ago
"The White Nerd's Burden" - must use that one. Kipling's words almost fit: Take up the White Man’s burden— Send forth the best ye breed— Go send your sons to exile To serve your captives' need To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild— Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half devil and half child Take up the White Man’s burden In patience to abide To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple An hundred times made plain To seek another’s profit And work another’s gain Take up the White Man’s burden— And reap his old reward: The blame of those ye better The hate of those ye guard— The cry of hosts ye humour (Ah slowly) to the light: "Why brought ye us from bondage, “Our loved Egyptian night?” Take up the White Man’s burden- Have done with childish days- The lightly proffered laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years, Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers!
- deleted 11y ago
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- wfn 11y ago
  I'm sad to see this one being downvoted. It's a good poem, and not only eclectically on-topic.
- tim333 11y ago
  >Kipling's words almost fit Almost but not quite. I note you've skipped perhaps the most memorable line "Take up the White Man's burden, The savage wars of peace". I'm hoping that the White Nerds may be able to bring peace through the likes of Zuckerberg connecting everyone rather then Bush / Cheney and similar's savage wars. At least cellphones cause less collateral damage than cluster bombs.
manachar 11y ago
This comes across a little like "get off my lawn", but you got to admit, the web has gotten pretty awful in the last few years. I enjoy my time online less and less as more content is stuffed into single-page app walled gardens that load massive quantities of cruft, ads, and tracking code. I almost preferred the flash-era. It seems that the goal of the web as being user-centric has taken the back seat to trying to convince the user that they're just a passive recipient of crafted experiences whose only purpose is to click ads or open their wallet.
- thecopy 11y ago
  >I enjoy my time online less and less as more content is stuffed into single-page app walled gardens that load massive quantities of cruft, ads, and tracking code. I almost preferred the flash-era. Agreed. I have noticed that I avoid heavy sites and prefer light static HTML sites with server side rendered content. For example, when I go to Reddit i always check the url of a link before i decide to click it, if it is a "magazine" site or "engadget" site or the like, i won't click it.
- TheGunner 11y ago
  This is a great point and I completely agree, as guff as the internet may have been 10/15 years ago I certainly enjoyed it more
- sealthedeal 11y ago
  Static HTML, server side rendering, simplicity at its finest.
- dntrkv 11y ago
  I completely disagree. I think the web has improved in almost every way. Sure, there are shitty content sites whose main goal is to get ad clicks, but those have been around for a long time and the ads have actually become less obnoxious than before. There is so much better content nowadays presented in much cleaner and focused layouts. And the UX of most websites has improved dramatically. Look at sites like YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, Vine, reddit, Spotify, Soundcloud and compare them to the equivalent sites 5-10 years ago. It's not even a contest, the new sites are better in every way.
_mgr 11y ago
"We see a whole ecosystem of startups and businesses that seem to exist only to serve one other[sic]" This line should have "...with ads" appended to it. Or "...Javascript Frameworks".
hrayr 11y ago
This seems to be an older version of the talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwhZ3KEqUlw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwhZ3KEqUlw
- dugditches 11y ago
  At the top of the page " This is the expanded version of a talk I gave on September 9, 2014, at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC. "
nulltype 11y ago
If you like this dude (or maybe if you don't like him) you can help send him to Antarctica: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/431908798/send-idle-words-to-antarctica https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/431908798/send-idle-wor...
- codinghorror 11y ago
  Yes please he is one of the best writers on the web in my estimation. Plus, he runs pinboard. I backed it, you should too!
  - look_lookatme 11y ago
    I don't back Kickstarters that often but in this case idlewords is getting 200 bucks from me.
metasean 11y ago
I'm glad I have Pinboard to save this article to [1]. And hopefully it will still be at the same url in 8 years [2]. [1] The author of the article runs Pinboard.in [2] From the article, "What I've learned is, about 5% of this disappears every year, at a pretty steady rate. A customer of mine just posted how 90% of what he saved in 1997 is gone."
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csirac2 11y ago
Around 2012 I worked with a team migrating some content from a very large static HTML site dating back to 1992. We scoffed at the awful ad-hoc nature of it all, just a pile of static hand-coded HTML pages. But the 2002-2005 stuff had aged much worse. At some point there was fancy site generator that had used javascript for everything, and the javascript apparently only worked properly in IE6. So most of the navigation was busted in a modern browser, and needed special scrapers to parse out what should have been plain old <a href...> tags. Now, I regularly think back to that crusty old HTML3 static site that had sat there for 15-20 years and think: I wonder if my AngularJS/D3.js/jqGrid/etc. single-page app will even load in a browser 20 years from now, let alone perform as originally intended...
- bigger_cheese 11y ago
  It's not just HTML. I think any proprietary standard runs the risk. We've been burned at my work by old word and word perfect documents from early 90's refusing to render properly in new versions of office. I think they tried about three recent versions of office before they gave up and resorted to scanning in hard copies as PDF's to recover some documents. Access databases are also notorious for this problem. A lot of business apps were written with Access in the mid 90's and it has now become too expensive/time consuming to migrate them off of a dead technology. In business world stuff tends to run far longer than softawre developers consider. Hell COBOL and PL/1 stuff runs in some places still.
  - thejosh 11y ago
    While not as old as your examples, Windows 2003 has just reached EOL, so there are going to be many "crusty" applications that will need to be migrated.
  - jakub_h 11y ago
    That's exactly why I'm partial to Common Lisp. People can badmouth it as much as they want, but I'm still running Maxima on it, AND the application's language still isn't set in stone by design. (You've also reminded me again that there's market for document-structure-reconstructing OCR.)
Cerium 11y ago
As soon as I saw the simple design I was hoping that the design would 'improve' as I scrolled down the page.
- nulltype 11y ago
  But instead the words just blew your mind as you scrolled down the page.
  - tudorw 11y ago
    I didn't even need to look at the pictures :)
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      On mobile, I couldn't (without side-scrolling). But yeah, the writing is great.
rtpg 11y ago
The little bit about people believing the "AIs will take over the world" non-sense is gold. I am still shocked that Elon Musk seriously believes in the pseudosciency "well Google has gotten better so obviously we will build a self-learning self-replicating AI that will also control our nukes and also be connected in a way and have the capabilities to actually really kill all humans." Meanwhile researchers can't get an AI to tell the difference between birds and houses. EDIT: I looked a bit more into the research that these people are funding. A huge amount of it does seem very silly, but there is an angle that is valid: dealing with things like HFT algorithms or routing algorithms causing chaos in finance or logistics.
- andrewchambers 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure that software can tell the difference between birds and houses now.
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    On the other hand, Google's software can't tell the difference between black people and gorillas. http://mashable.com/2015/07/01/google-photos-black-people-gorillas/ http://mashable.com/2015/07/01/google-photos-black-people-go...
    - jakub_h 11y ago
      I'm actually quite pleasantly surprised that we've already reached this level of functionality. Imagine aliens coming to our planet and starting classifying stuff on Earth. The idea that alien intelligence without some seeded knowledge would mistakenly make this inference doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility.
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    If StreetView blurring is anything to go by, it can't tell the difference between a human face and a brick wall. I'd excuse that by saying it's tuned to be extremely conservative and not accidentally miss someone, but it routinely misses faces too. Even our purpose-built image recognition has a long way to go.
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dwaltrip 11y ago
This was an interesting article with some well made points. However I think there is a fundamental difference that is being overlooked here. Whoever invents the next user interface paradigm can do so with essentially zero cost (assuming they own a laptop). The same cannot be said about inventing the next paradigm of travel.
thaumaturgy 11y ago
If Maciej hadn't written this, I would still feel alone in how I see the technological world. I really can't express how grateful I am that this exists. There is a vast, vast gulf between what the majority of software developers seem to think users want, and what users actually want. And this isn't a Henry Ford "they wanted faster horses" sort of thing, this is a, "users don't just hate change, they resent it" sort of thing. I work directly with end users. It's mostly over email now, my tech still works with them in person, face-to-face, in their business or home. We get so many complaints. So many questions: "do I really have to upgrade this?" "I liked this the way it was." "It worked just fine, why are they changing it again?" Every time I try to argue on behalf of my customers, here or elsewhere, it gets ignored, or downvoted, or rebutted with, "but my users say they always want the latest and greatest..." There are 100 million people in the United States alone over the age of 50. How much new software is designed for them? How much new software exists merely as a tool, comfortable with being put away days or weeks at a time, and doesn't try to suck you in to having to sign in to it on a regular basis to see what other people are doing with it? How much of our technology -- not just software, but hardware here too -- is designed to work with trembling hands, poor eyesight, or users who are easily confused? There are over a hundred million people that don't understand why your site needs a "cookie" to render, that can't tell the difference between an actual operating system warning and an ad posing as one, that aren't sure what to do when the IRS sends them an email about last year's tax return with a .doc attached. (That one happened today.) For these people, the technology most of us build really really sucks. And that is a growing demographic, not a shrinking one...
- yosefk 11y ago
  I program for a living and I know why sites need "cookies", and still, for me most software really really sucks. Just because I can figure out how each and every new cell phone works doesn't mean I want to, similarly for other kinds of gratuitous changes and incompatibilities. And BTW systems built "by hackers for hackers" are among the worst offenders (*nix clones in general and Linux distributions in particular are good examples.)
  - unimpressive 11y ago
Totient 11y ago
I agree, and disagree with the author. > "Vision 1: CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS." > This is the correct vision. I would say this is a correct vision, which I happen to be in favor of. But I don't understand why it has to be an "us vs. them" dynamic between this and the "BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN CONSTRUCTION" vision. Even in strawman form, I'm unapologetically in favor of it. I do want it to go right. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon - I think human-level AI by 2075 [1] is wildly optimistic - but I hope it does happen eventually, without wiping out everything we hold dear. > I'm a little embarrassed to talk about it, because it's so stupid. My first thought was "Try describing the internet to someone 100 years ago - your claim that there is going to be an interconnected global network of electricity-powered adding machines that transport pictures of moving sex by pretending they are made of numbers is going to sound stupid." But if you want to make fun of Elon Musk because "Obama just has to sit there and listen to this shit", what about: Shane Legg: "If there is ever to be something approaching absolute power, a superintelligent machine would come close. By definition, it would be capable of achieving a vast range of goals in a wide range of environments. If we carefully prepare for this possibility in advance, not only might we avert disaster, we might bring about an age of prosperity unlike anything seen before." Stuart Russel: "Just as nuclear fusion researchers consider the problem of containment of fusion reactions as one of the primary problems of their field, it seems inevitable that issues of control and safety will become central to AI as the field matures." Or freaking Alan Turing: "There would be plenty to do in trying to keep one’s intelligence up to the standards set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers…At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control." > But you all need to pick a side. I don't want to pick a side. I'm in favor of connecting the world now, making it better for everyone. I'd also like to see the world get much better in the more (hopefully not too) distant future. [1] http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf
- noamyoungerm 11y ago
  >My first thought was "Try describing the internet to someone 100 years ago - your claim that there is going to be an interconnected global network of electricity-powered adding machines that transport pictures of moving sex by pretending they are made of numbers is going to sound stupid." Because you're limiting yourself to a single sentence. How about this: "The internet is essentially an expansion of the concept of a telegraph - it is already possible to pass any type of information between two distant people almost instantly. The internet combines this system of information transfer with machines that know how to respond to messages without human intervention - under the condition that the messages follow a certain set of rules. By defining these rules in advance, the telegraph system, which up to now only transferred individual letters, can be co-opted to send things such as pictures and films. The machine can tell who is speaking with it, and perform tasks for that particular person upon request." This does not sound stupid - it might take some explaining, but anyone with a brain between their ears can understand the basic concept of fast information transfer. They might not think of all of the possible uses of such an invention right away, but I bet that they would easily understand the uses if they were explained in terms of things these people already know.
mozumder 11y ago
I love this so much. So glad someone wrote this! I really can't believe how "into" tech people are. It's just a boring tool for your life, not an end-goal in itself. BTW I feel the only leading company that is aligned with this vision is Apple.
- _mgr 11y ago
  "BTW I feel the only leading company that is aligned with this vision is Apple." I wanted to say something to this effect but the last 12-18 months has shown that Apple is losing its way also.
  - marincounty 11y ago
    Yea, I'm beginning to think Steve Jobs was Apple? Apple needs a chief who lives gadgets, demands perfection, and most importantly grew up poor, or middle class. I don't think there's too many Steve Jobs out there? You can't produce another Steve Jobs with a good resume, or education. I think that rebellion in him, maybe because he lived through the 60's, is missing in many CEO's? He was really one of a kind! I always thought I wouldn't want him as a friend, but I would want him running my company. (I'm not condoning angry, perfectionists who happen to be in power--you people are not not Steve Jobs--no matter how hard you try.) In my life, I have only seen one Steve! RIP!
    - tim333 11y ago
      Quite a lot was Jony Ive. I'm optimistic the good design will go on.
- sunwooz 11y ago
  Strange considering that the only reason you're alive today is because of technology. There is no set end-goal. You create your own end-goal. That's the point of human existence, to create your own meaning.
  - coldtea 11y ago
jodrellblank 11y ago
There's a slight difference in that we don't have supersonic animals on Earth, we don't see any interstellar spaceships, and we don't see anything even remotely like that - no animal metabolism that compares to the scale of the controlled energy release of a rocket engine or a nuclear power plant - but we do see much much better information processing systems than our current computers, and they are very energy efficient. They are built of meat and not exotic superconducting Buckywhatever, they are limited by constraints on heat dissipation and oxygen/glucose supply - problems which are easy to work around with electric pumps, heat pumps and industrial food supply - and by a historic need for sleep. Maybe exponential progress has to slow, but can we dismiss intelligent non-humans in the same way we can dismiss space stations or interstellar travel? Space stations are a cost. Free workers is a saving. Shouldn't we expect human technology will approach animal intelligence in one substrate and design or another? And then surpass it a little by removing some of the obvious constraints?
- idlewords 11y ago
  This is a good question, and I think will have to wait on a better understanding of what we mean by intelligence, which right now is a term that carries a lot of luggage. It may be that the situation is similar to biochemistry. We observe exquisitely complex synthetic pathways in the natural world, and can to some extent harness and retool things to our benefit, but our capacity to design those reactions from scratch is almost nil compared to what goes on in the simplest living cell. It may be that creating those fast rockets that don't exist in nature is orders of magnitude easier than writing a catbot. That's an open question and so far the evidence is on the side of it being far out of our grasp.
  - jodrellblank 11y ago
    The situations are still very different; following the exponential growth of travel speed (the article's graphs leading to interstellar travel) would need something like a wormhole generator or a warp drive. - A space shuttle with a warp drive powered by a captive black hole (or whatever) needs huge industry or government levels of cash; anyone with a few hundred dollars, a cloud computing account and an internet connection can look at brain scan data and write software tests, or join in protein folding distributed experiments. - The kind of engineering to create a skyscraper sized machine needs Lockheed-Martin size factories and hundreds of specialist component makers, and a lot of metal and employees. Poking at cell-sized biology can be done in a small room by one or two people, a small machine and a single UPS delivery of supplies. - There's not much profit in building a space station. There's a lot of profit waiting for reconnecting severed spinal columns, converting atmospheric CO2 into oily hydrocarbon chains powered by photosynthesis, searching email by intelligent context understanding. Yes we can't do either, but outdoing current computing ability seems much closer - more people have the opportunity, more people have the incentive, there are many more avenues of approach, and we know it's fundamentally possible - than outdoing current rocket engines. Closer, and more useful.
flohofwoe 11y ago
From the article: Soviet engineers lacked the computers to calculate all the bending and wiggling the wings would do if you hung the engines under them, so they just strapped engines on the back. This sounds like a myth to me, is there any evidence that missing computer power was the reason for tail-engine-designs? There have been a number of western civilian jet planes from that era with tail engines too (for instance the Boeing 727). AFAIK the wing-mounted engines won in the end because they are easier to maintain, which might not have been such a strong factor in the 50's and 60's. I find it more likely that Soviet design bureaus didn't pay much attention to operating efficiency and put more effort into building planes that can operate from 'rougher' air strips, etc. But I'm not an aeroplane expert.
- Animats 11y ago
  "I find it more likely that Soviet design bureaus didn't pay much attention to operating efficiency and put more effort into building planes that can operate from 'rougher' air strips, etc." Soviet designs, even civilian transports, were usually able to operate from short, unimproved aircraft. The AN-22, with 12 wheels on the main gear and a high wing, was the most impressive version of that approach. Soviet civil jetliners post-1970 look much like their Western counterparts. There were Soviet designs in the 1960s with engines in the wing or at the tail, but there were all sort of engine placements in the early days. Today, the usual position is on a pylon below and slightly in front of the wing. Here's a detailed discussion of why, from a Stanford AA241, Intro. to Aircraft Design.[1] [1] http://adg.stanford.edu/aa241/propulsion/engineplacement.html http://adg.stanford.edu/aa241/propulsion/engineplacement.htm...
- idlewords 11y ago
  Joe Sutter (father of the 747) recounts a private meeting in a Paris restaurant where Boeing engineers briefed the Russians how to hang engines under the wing, and in return the Russians told Boeing how to machine titanium. Many of the relevant drawings having been made on the tablecloth, the Russians were careful to take it with them.
- billforsternz 11y ago
  The Ilyushin Il-62 shares exactly the same configuration (high tail, 4 engines on the back) as the British VC-10. I think the VC-10 predated the Il-62, but I might just be expressing a prejudice and assuming the Soviet plane was a clone. I always thought the VC-10 (and the Il-62 for that matter) was rather gorgeous, apropos of nothing. The VC-10 as a Western four engined large (for the time) narrow body intercontinental jetliner competed directly with the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8. It's fair to say it did was roundly trounced in this competition. I don't know why exactly. Possibly late to the party. Possibly the victim of superior US technology and/or salesmanship.
MichaelCrawford 11y ago
I often ask other coders to contemplate "What software that we write today will still be in use 10,000 years from now?" That I am unable to answer that question is a primary reason I write English text rather than code the last ten years.
- sangnoir 11y ago
  Your English text (and English in general, as we know it) will not be in use in 10,000 years. There seems to be a widespread, almost instinctive desire to achieve permanence (works or monuments) in humans, which I do not fully understand. People want to make a dent on the universe, to be 'remembered as heroes' etc. Nothing lasts forever, not your works, not your memory. All will be lost in the mists of time. I don't see this as a reason for nihilism either, you can make a difference with your efforts - it just won't last forever (or even 1,000 years, let alone 10,000). That's ok.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >I don't see this as a reason for nihilism either, you can make a difference with your efforts - it just won't last forever (or even 1,000 years, let alone 10,000) Urgghh, the inventor of fire disagrees...
    - tonyedgecombe 11y ago
      What was his name?
      - coldtea 11y ago
        I said it: Urgghh.
    - Tinyyy 11y ago
      Can you really ‘invent’ fire, though? I think ‘discovering’ would be a more apt word. Maybe you can invent a specific way to make fire, such as rubbing sticks together, but evidently we don’t do that anymore.
baddox 11y ago
> The Concorde entered commercial service and safely ferried douchebags across the Atlantic for 25 years. Why this? I mean that seriously. Forget that it's unnecessary. I don't even get the stereotype being referenced.
- ElmUser1022 11y ago
  I agree, very America biased article..
- ajdlinux 11y ago
  Because a seat on Concorde cost significantly more than a regular first-class seat on a transoceanic flight. If you had enough money to afford it...
  - jkoschei 11y ago
    ...you must be a terrible person? The Concorde/douchebag line was a good segue into the logical inconsistencies of the second part of this talk.
    - pessimizer 11y ago
      > ...you must be a terrible person? Yes. You may not share the opinion, but surely you understand the reasoning.
  - baddox 11y ago
    I'm not familiar with "douchebag" being used to mean wealthy.
tempodox 11y ago
Yay, I couldn't agree more. Those truths are seldom mentioned, and even more seldom so many of them at a time. If only I could find out who held this talk, there doesn't seem to be any hint or signature.
- klez 11y ago
  It was from Maciej Ceglowski, founder of Pinboard.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Maciej doesn't take suggestions well, but I do wish he'd byline and date his work. This is at least dated.
Animats 11y ago
Well, the biggest current problem is that everything had to be redesigned for fat fingers and small screens. The worst expression of this was Windows 8, which made desktops look like tablets, and was rejected by the market. Then there's cutesy web design; Flash ten years ago, "material design" now. Just because you can animate everything doesn't mean you should. (Annoyingly, the one browser thing that ought to be animated isn't. When you click on a link that exits the page, nothing happens until the new page loads, often leading to unnecessary double clicking. The browser should blank the old page, or grey it out, or dissolve to the new page, or do some kind of transition.) As for the big stuff, the AI-driven future is going to be interesting. The big threat, as I point out occasionally, is not Terminator robots. It's Goldman Sachs run by a a machine learning system optimizing for maximum stockholder value.
- mmahemoff 11y ago
  "Just because you can animate everything doesn't mean you should." Material design guidelines agree with you. Animations are supposed to be meaningful and illuminate on what's happening internally rather than being superfluous flourishes. What you might really mean here is the time-honoured principle of seeing a good design somewhere and mindlessly cargo-culting it to produce a bad design somewhere else.
- bergie 11y ago
  When you click on a link that exits the page, nothing happens until the new page loads, often leading to unnecessary double clicking. The browser should blank the old page, or grey it out, or dissolve to the new page, or do some kind of transition.) This is actually something Google made a proposal about: http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/11/20/chromes-upcoming-navigation-transitions-api-will-make-the-web-animate-and-flow-like-material-design-in-android/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/11/20/chromes-upcoming-nav...
  - Animats 11y ago
    It's not making it cute that matters. It's making it fast. With modern slow, bloated web sites, there are much longer delays between clicking on a link and the page display than there used to be. Especially on a slow mobile connection. Something needs to visibly happen as soon as you leave the page, even if the browser hasn't even received any packets from the new site yet.
acqq 11y ago
It was not obvious at the start to me, it was written by Maciej Ceglowski: http://idlewords.com/about.htm http://idlewords.com/about.htm the guy behind Pinboard!
jacquesm 11y ago
I'd be more than happy to contribute to the sustained applause, this echos just about all of my sentiments about the web. And it is a call to action, not just a 'nice to read' piece. So, what are we going to do about it?
zubairq 11y ago
I agree with this article. Old things are sometimes the best: http://coils.cc/coils/old-things.html http://coils.cc/coils/old-things.html
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Jean-Philipe 11y ago
Well written, fun to read. Thanks!
dghf 11y ago
> Software forever remains at the limits of what people will put up with. That needs immortalising. Cegłowski's Law?
ucaetano 11y ago
"What is the web actually for?" I'm surprised he left out "porn"...
- marknutter 11y ago
  I think "cats" in this context refers to all the stuff on the web that doesn't seem important, but that people actually like to use the web for; including pornography.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I think a good way to drive a joke home would be to say that "web is for pussies" while displaying photo of a pussycat.
stasm 11y ago
Maciej makes a great point about diminishing returns. We're quite good at extrapolating trend lines and yet we're terrible at predicting the future because it's very hard to guess where optimizations will happen. The 'good enough' seems to be the bane of any futuristic outlook. Technological progress seems to obey the laws of friction; it behaves like light which refracts when it enters a denser substance. I'm still learning to embrace the 'good enough.' For instance, minimalism only works if it's good enough for the users. I feel like this predicate is often forgotten and we end up with designs which are minimal for their own sake.
veddox 11y ago
Finally a technology prophet who doesn't prophesy digital utopia! Although I can't imagine that everything he says is correct (purely statistically speaking), I do think that if anybody reads this in twenty years he/she will recognize his/her present fairly well. P.S. Is this page being archived anywhere?
vixsomnis 11y ago
I think the web (www) won't change much at all, but that doesn't mean the way we interconnect with others won't. This seems ultimately shortsighted. Human "progress" (increasing interconnection -- such as urbanization and population density) has been growing exponentially[1] since the birth of agriculture allowed humans to form societies. Relative to this kind of momentum, the web is only a hint of the interconnection and globalization to come. The web may stagnate and become self-serving (as opposed to being useful), but this has no bearing on whether we'll eventually be able to simulate a human brain in its entirety or reach some {uto,dysto}pian future where all of our consciousnesses are somehow woven together. I'm not saying that technology will be our salvation, but the graphs and trends don't lie. We are at a very interesting time in human history: we are either going to continue interconnecting exponentially or there will be some catastrophic event. There's no room on those curves for a plateau. Whether humanity passes the torch of technological innovation to AI (voluntarily or coerced) or we suffer a self-wrought apocalypse, I don't know, but there is certainly reason to fear the changes the future will bring. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/human-progress-charts-2011-3?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/human-progress-charts-2011-3?... (This link isn't specifically tied to my argument. It's just the first set of graphs I found illustrating the long-term growth of humanity.)
dcposch 11y ago
The first half of this talk is excellent. The story of air travel--how the engineers of the 60s thought that we'd have supersonic jets and flying cars within a few years--that's a great cautionary tale. Evolutionary biologists call it Punctuated Equilibrium: the idea that progress comes in spurts. The warning--that the evolution of computer hardware and software might be radically slower over the next 50 years than it was over the past 50--seems timely and reasonable. The second half is not excellent. Bad mental habits and weak arguments are on display. * Imprecision. Specifically: choosing sentences for their "punch", like a bumper sticker, without caring whether they make sense: "There is something quite colonial, too, about collecting data from users [...] I think of it as the White Nerd's Burden." "It's a kind of software Manifest Destiny." ...cool story, bro * Excessive negativity. If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading Everything is Problematic -- it really helped me understand where people like Maciej are coming from. http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/11/everything-problematic/ http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/11/everything-problematic/ * Disrespect. "Google works on some loopy stuff in between plastering the Internet with ads." I guess 40 years ago he would have said "AT&T works on some loopy stuff in between sending you phone bills". Organizations like Bell Labs--or Google X--are treasures, and as engineers we should be glad they exist. In short: haters gonna hate
- eevilspock 11y ago
  > choosing sentences for their "punch", like a bumper sticker > In short: haters gonna hate and > * Disrespect. > ...cool story, bro
  - tljr 11y ago
    haters gonna hate, indeed.
  - qwtel 11y ago
    this goes to show that negativity is contingent, not that the author's points are invalid.
- vul6 11y ago
  I totally agree, the first half about progress in air travel and computer science is great, the rest not so really
ccanassa 11y ago
The "is good enough" mentality might be true if you are talking about browsing Facebook, reading email, etc. But other areas of the technology are still very far from being "good enough" and still pushing technology forward. The gaming industry is one great example of this.
- babatong 11y ago
  I don't think the gaming industry is a good example for what you're saying. Video games have barely shown any development since the mid 2000s. The first Crysis game was released in 2007 (8! years ago) and despite being an unoptimised mess is still graphically superior to most things released today. Almost all windows games released are still primarily built on DirectX 9 (with a few optional newer components), despite DirectX 12 coming with Windows 10. In fact, the major development studios have decided, that the performance offered by cheaply mass-produced consoles with yesterday's hardware is good enough. Why do you think specialised PC gaming communities are complaining that consoles are holding development back? If anything I'd say the gaming industry is the embodiment of the "is good enough" mentality.
  - ccanassa 11y ago
    Not sure If I completely agree with you but I understand your point. I just think that there is still a few companies pushing things forward. Star Citizen is a good example of a game doing that. 4K displays is also something that might give a boost to the current GPU technology. One funny note: I just checked the Crysis system requirements and I needs 1GB of RAM to run. That's not enough RAM to run even Minecraft these days :)
mwcampbell 11y ago
He criticizes his second vision, the Silicon Valley vision of software eating the world. But where I live (Wichita, Kansas), Uber is actually better than the conventional taxi services. As in, when uber was temporarily shut down in Kansas and I tried to call a conventional taxi to my home, I waited over half an hour, it never showed up, and I had to cancel. So the second vision resonates with me, and I don't even live in Silicon Valley. What am I missing? Edit: It's not just one anecdote. TO quote the OP: > We started with music and publishing. Then retailing. Now we're apparently doing taxis. Yes, and software has made each of these better. The vision of software improving the world seems to actually be working.
- tljr 11y ago
  one anecdote does not dismiss a compelling theory.
nly 11y ago
This guys dig at AI is a little conflicted with the exponential hangover idea. Sure we can only simulate a 300 neuron worm right now but, if we every achieve a computationally bound solution and experience exponential growth at a rate similar to Moores Law, in 50 years we could be watching real AI cat videos on Youtube, complete with awful UI controls that customise the feline personality in realtime. Oh, in Javascript of course.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  100 years ago we couldn't compute. 150 years ago we didn't even know neurons existed. I wouldn't be so fast about discounting the progress here.
- scott_karana 11y ago
  > if we every achieve a computationally bound solution and experience exponential growth at a rate similar to Moores Law, His point is that we won't continue the curve, and he's offered evidence/opinion that we're already starting to plateau. Which means AI would need to be solved within ~current computational bounds.
  - tim333 11y ago
    We're plateauing on single processor performance. Not on parallel computing.
    - scott_karana 11y ago
      Not physically, not yet. But it seems like high-performance parallel computing paradigms are forgotten and reinvented every year.
      - tim333 11y ago
        Yup. Better software needed. But as an indication of how close we're getting Hans Moravec, a robot builder and robotics professor did a quite reasonable calculation of the processing power needed to build something equivalent to a human brain, using computer style algorithms rather than nerve simulation and came up with 100 million MIPS, ie. 100 terraflops (http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm) If you compare that with 2015 hardware then the Nvidia Titan X GPU does about 7 terraflops and costs about $1000 so with 15 Titans and a $20k system an hacker can have a reasonable go at building a human level AI (excluding memory hardware that is). That's only recently come about that that kind of power is getting down to hacker budget levels. It'll take a while to sort the software. Though some recent software stories like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9584325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9584325 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736598 show progress.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
I think Maciej is actually confusing two different groups of people/concepts, conflating them both under the same label of "Vision 2: FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE". One group wants to actually fix the world with software (or technology). The other wants to monetize the living shit out of it. A big part of the startup ecosystem is the second group. A fridge that tracks its content is a very useful piece of technology (that is also nowhere to be bought, by the way). A fridge talking on Twitter is someone's attempt at selling more fridges. The products 'idlewords is criticizing are not made to be useful, they are made to be sold at a profit, which often goes against usability. It's clearly visible in the IoT sphere. Most of the popular devices are just toys sold to gullible, who have no idea how to use them to better their lives. A lot of this stuff shouldn't be even web-connected, especially not to a third-party server. It's all done because the company is making more money on your data than on selling the devices themselves. A tell-tale sign of company not really designing a tool but just trying to monetize you? No ability to export your data for your own analysis, or to hook up to the data stream at the same level of access as vendor's app has. Please don't confuse people trying to fix the world with software with people trying to make a buck while telling you lies about fixing the world. -- As for technology being "good enough", I think that being good enough is a state, not a goal. Anything there is is always good enough for whatever people are doing with it. Fixing the world is a goal (which I support). Creating better future is a goal. What we now have is mostly people blindly following potential gradients set by markets, like water flowing downhill. -- I'm not going to comment much on "Vision 3", because the description seems - to put it very nicely - not well thought out, and just a regurgitation of popular media biases. I'll just leave a FAQ from people believing in AI risks that addresses them [0], as well as some quotes from real AI researchers that also believe in AI risk [1] (the media seems to paint the picture that there are no prominent figures in the field who hold that opinion). Also [2] may be of interest. [0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/meq/top_92_myths_about_ai_risk/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/meq/top_92_myths_about_ai_risk/ [1] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/22/ai-researchers-on-ai-risk/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/22/ai-researchers-on-ai-ri... [2] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/29/no-time-like-the-present-for-ai-safety-work/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/29/no-time-like-the-presen...
rsync 11y ago
What a nicely designed website. Readable, usable, doesn't peg my CPU or do weird things as I scroll. I viewed the source and it is clean and readable - no evidence of some lame IDE sticking in forty  's or twnety nested tables just because you wanted your column two pixels to the left. I wish more of the web looked like this and it makes me happy to see that some smart folks value design like this.
sangnoir 11y ago
It is hard to figure out when exponential growth will end while you are in the middle of it. Linus said something relevant to this in a recent interview on Slashdot[1], answering a question on dangerous AI. To paraphrase him: people are crazy to think that exponential growth lasts forever. As impressive as it may be (at the time), it's only the beginning of an S-curve. I've extracted a small part of his answer below. I think the whole interview is worth reading (it's a general interview, not AI-specific) ... I'd expect just more of (and much fancier) rather targeted AI, rather than anything human-like at all. Language recognition, pattern recognition, things like that. I just don't see the situation where you suddenly have some existential crisis because your dishwasher is starting to discuss Sartre with you. The whole "Singularity" kind of event? Yeah, it's science fiction, and not very good SciFi at that, in my opinion. Unending exponential growth? What drugs are those people on? I mean, really.. It's like Moore's law - yeah, it's very impressive when something can (almost) be plotted on an exponential curve for a long time. Very impressive indeed when it's over many decades. But it's _still_ just the beginning of the "S curve". Anybody who thinks any different is just deluding themselves. There are no unending exponentials 1. http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/06/30/0058243/interviews-linus-torvalds-answers-your-question http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/06/30/0058243/interviews-...
- tim333 11y ago
  I don't think singularity stuff relies on exponential growth lasting for ever. Only for AI performance to significantly exceed human. And I'm not sure there's anything magical about the human brain that will stop tech achieving similar performance before it runs into barriers.
  - daveloyall 11y ago
    Right. I'll attempt to bolster your argument, if I may... We know that human and animal brains are made out of simple components. Probably the same components. The difference between animals and humans seems to be in how those components are arranged and how many of them there are. We've already demonstrated digital components that approximate individual neurons, and we've already demonstrated wiring groups of them up to perform useful work. I think that if we find ourselves at an inflection point in history, it is because there might exist some relatively simply arrangement of digital neurons which results in a machine which can learn some sort of rudimentary self awareness[1] while also possessing a computer's ability to do math, store data, and recall data, communicate on the internet, etc. 1. Spend year of days with a newborn if you don't already know that humans have to learn it, too.
kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
Another nice parallel with the 747/2707 is that the Core line was derived from the Pentium M which was done by Intel's B-team in Israel while the big boys got to work on the future with Itanium and P4.
- idlewords 11y ago
  Oh wow, thanks so much for pointing that out! I wish I had known that writing the talk.
vlunkr 11y ago
This is my favorite: "The world is just one big hot mess, an accident of history. Nothing is done as efficiently or cleverly as it could be if it were designed from scratch by California programmers. The world is a crufty legacy system crying out to be optimized." Sadly this is the way I think sometimes.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Just remove the "designed from scratch by California programmers" and tell me how this quote isn't blindingly, obviously true. The world is a mess and screams to be fixed, and not only technologists see it.
  - vlunkr 11y ago
    Eh, maybe if you are a very cynical person, which is the point the author was trying to make.
kleer001 11y ago
>The first group wants to CONNECT THE WORLD. > >The second group wants to EAT THE WORLD. > >And the third group wants to END THE WORLD. > >These visions are not compatible. Correct. Just as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, etc are not compatible. But just let's looks around, there's lots of incompatible things going on. The future can never be evenly distributed. So, parts of all these futures will live on in stumbling synchrony. And I say they're all driven by internal logic and pure fan-boy squeee. > There's no law that says that things are guaranteed to keep getting better. This seems like it should be written in stone and placed over the mantle.
TexMitchell 11y ago
The presentation is available for viewing here: https://youtu.be/nwhZ3KEqUlw https://youtu.be/nwhZ3KEqUlw I must say I think the written one is better. It has additional information that I found interesting.
scottfits 11y ago
This was a great read. In my mind, it reminded me of the true underlying simplicity of everything on the web. He's right--we are riding the shockwaves of the computer revolution and its fizzling down. The transistor is getting smaller (I think Intel's newest one is 7 nanometers) but soon we won't be able to physically make it any smaller. Does this mean the computing revolution is over? No. I think it just means the future is going to be about combining computing with other fields like medicine, the arts, and so on.
emehrkay 11y ago
As a web developer I read this and think "progressive enhancement." HTML & CSS are designed in a pretty decent way: ignore the stuff it doesn't understand. The second half of this article makes me want to do better. Write better software, create things that matter and will last long(er). Very entertaining and funny article, btw.
queryly 11y ago
This is a great article. Great writing! Software eats the world, or it may not. I don't think most of startups are doing what they do to realize that goal. All they do is to solve a specific problem with technology. Of course if the "problems" aren't there, they would fail. I don't know what the action items are for the tech communities after reading the article. We find something interesting to do with our tech talent, and aren't really trying to choose which future we want to live in. Regardless, Maciej has some great insight and offers some different prospective in tech/web.
spopejoy 11y ago
OK I'm just going to say it. This author SERIOUSLY needs to consider making their prose gender-neutral. I could care less what the time period is, it's hostile to women to talk about the engineer "as a boy" and talk about the 787's "grandfather". It's freaking 2015, GET OVER the all-male pronoun business already!!
- idlewords 11y ago
  The scenario involves a notional Boeing engineer from 1965. My hands are really tied. Point taken on the 'grandfather' bit, though!
SZJX 11y ago
The criticism on vision 2 is weak. He didn't offer many examples about how this vision made the world a worse place. I also don't see how this is comparable with "scientific Marxism" or whatnot. Those historic examples he listed there, while seemingly calling themselves "scientific" on the surface, are actually many times a mess born out of imagination. Now, as long as changes are happening out of laws of market, out of people actually using the products and appreciating the benefits, I don't see it being much of a problem. Technology is doing a lot, and as well said, change in productivity is the only real way to progress human society. We shouldn't relent our thoughts on this front. It's not "colonialism" or whatsoever. On every leap of productivity the human beings make, there has to be some group of people who are leading the job. This is not inherently evil.
Houshalter 11y ago
Ok this article is good but the tangent into the singularity is just stupid: >In fact, forget about worms—we barely have computers powerful enough to emulate the hardware of a Super Nintendo. He just disproved his own point: Emulation is hard, but it's possible to run much faster software directly optimized for your system or build it in hardware. >If you talk to anyone who does serious work in artificial intelligence (and it's significant that the people most afraid of AI and nanotech have the least experience with it) they will tell you that progress is slow and linear, just like in other scientific fields. What?! Has he actually talked to anyone doing "serious work in artificial intelligence"? I am certain they would not say it is "slow and linear".

988 points by jmduke 11y ago

"The White Nerd's Burden" - must use that one. Kipling's words almost fit: Take up the White Man’s burden— Send forth the best ye breed— Go send your sons to exile To serve your captives' need To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild— Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half devil and half child Take up the White Man’s burden In patience to abide To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple An hundred times made plain To seek another’s profit And work another’s gain Take up the White Man’s burden— And reap his old reward: The blame of those ye better The hate of those ye guard— The cry of hosts ye humour (Ah slowly) to the light: "Why brought ye us from bondage, “Our loved Egyptian night?” Take up the White Man’s burden- Have done with childish days- The lightly proffered laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years, Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers!

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wfn 11y ago
I'm sad to see this one being downvoted. It's a good poem, and not only eclectically on-topic.
tim333 11y ago
>Kipling's words almost fit Almost but not quite. I note you've skipped perhaps the most memorable line "Take up the White Man's burden, The savage wars of peace". I'm hoping that the White Nerds may be able to bring peace through the likes of Zuckerberg connecting everyone rather then Bush / Cheney and similar's savage wars. At least cellphones cause less collateral damage than cluster bombs.

manachar 11y ago

This comes across a little like "get off my lawn", but you got to admit, the web has gotten pretty awful in the last few years. I enjoy my time online less and less as more content is stuffed into single-page app walled gardens that load massive quantities of cruft, ads, and tracking code. I almost preferred the flash-era. It seems that the goal of the web as being user-centric has taken the back seat to trying to convince the user that they're just a passive recipient of crafted experiences whose only purpose is to click ads or open their wallet.

thecopy 11y ago
>I enjoy my time online less and less as more content is stuffed into single-page app walled gardens that load massive quantities of cruft, ads, and tracking code. I almost preferred the flash-era. Agreed. I have noticed that I avoid heavy sites and prefer light static HTML sites with server side rendered content. For example, when I go to Reddit i always check the url of a link before i decide to click it, if it is a "magazine" site or "engadget" site or the like, i won't click it.
TheGunner 11y ago
This is a great point and I completely agree, as guff as the internet may have been 10/15 years ago I certainly enjoyed it more
sealthedeal 11y ago
Static HTML, server side rendering, simplicity at its finest.
dntrkv 11y ago
I completely disagree. I think the web has improved in almost every way. Sure, there are shitty content sites whose main goal is to get ad clicks, but those have been around for a long time and the ads have actually become less obnoxious than before. There is so much better content nowadays presented in much cleaner and focused layouts. And the UX of most websites has improved dramatically. Look at sites like YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, Vine, reddit, Spotify, Soundcloud and compare them to the equivalent sites 5-10 years ago. It's not even a contest, the new sites are better in every way.

_mgr 11y ago

"We see a whole ecosystem of startups and businesses that seem to exist only to serve one other[sic]" This line should have "...with ads" appended to it. Or "...Javascript Frameworks".

hrayr 11y ago

This seems to be an older version of the talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwhZ3KEqUlw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwhZ3KEqUlw

dugditches 11y ago
At the top of the page " This is the expanded version of a talk I gave on September 9, 2014, at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC. "

nulltype 11y ago

If you like this dude (or maybe if you don't like him) you can help send him to Antarctica: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/431908798/send-idle-words-to-antarctica https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/431908798/send-idle-wor...

codinghorror 11y ago
Yes please he is one of the best writers on the web in my estimation. Plus, he runs pinboard. I backed it, you should too!
- look_lookatme 11y ago
  I don't back Kickstarters that often but in this case idlewords is getting 200 bucks from me.

metasean 11y ago

I'm glad I have Pinboard to save this article to [1]. And hopefully it will still be at the same url in 8 years [2]. [1] The author of the article runs Pinboard.in [2] From the article, "What I've learned is, about 5% of this disappears every year, at a pretty steady rate. A customer of mine just posted how 90% of what he saved in 1997 is gone."

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csirac2 11y ago

Around 2012 I worked with a team migrating some content from a very large static HTML site dating back to 1992. We scoffed at the awful ad-hoc nature of it all, just a pile of static hand-coded HTML pages. But the 2002-2005 stuff had aged much worse. At some point there was fancy site generator that had used javascript for everything, and the javascript apparently only worked properly in IE6. So most of the navigation was busted in a modern browser, and needed special scrapers to parse out what should have been plain old <a href...> tags. Now, I regularly think back to that crusty old HTML3 static site that had sat there for 15-20 years and think: I wonder if my AngularJS/D3.js/jqGrid/etc. single-page app will even load in a browser 20 years from now, let alone perform as originally intended...

bigger_cheese 11y ago
It's not just HTML. I think any proprietary standard runs the risk. We've been burned at my work by old word and word perfect documents from early 90's refusing to render properly in new versions of office. I think they tried about three recent versions of office before they gave up and resorted to scanning in hard copies as PDF's to recover some documents. Access databases are also notorious for this problem. A lot of business apps were written with Access in the mid 90's and it has now become too expensive/time consuming to migrate them off of a dead technology. In business world stuff tends to run far longer than softawre developers consider. Hell COBOL and PL/1 stuff runs in some places still.
- thejosh 11y ago
  While not as old as your examples, Windows 2003 has just reached EOL, so there are going to be many "crusty" applications that will need to be migrated.
- jakub_h 11y ago
  That's exactly why I'm partial to Common Lisp. People can badmouth it as much as they want, but I'm still running Maxima on it, AND the application's language still isn't set in stone by design. (You've also reminded me again that there's market for document-structure-reconstructing OCR.)

Cerium 11y ago

As soon as I saw the simple design I was hoping that the design would 'improve' as I scrolled down the page.

nulltype 11y ago
But instead the words just blew your mind as you scrolled down the page.
- tudorw 11y ago
  I didn't even need to look at the pictures :)
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    On mobile, I couldn't (without side-scrolling). But yeah, the writing is great.

rtpg 11y ago

The little bit about people believing the "AIs will take over the world" non-sense is gold. I am still shocked that Elon Musk seriously believes in the pseudosciency "well Google has gotten better so obviously we will build a self-learning self-replicating AI that will also control our nukes and also be connected in a way and have the capabilities to actually really kill all humans." Meanwhile researchers can't get an AI to tell the difference between birds and houses. EDIT: I looked a bit more into the research that these people are funding. A huge amount of it does seem very silly, but there is an angle that is valid: dealing with things like HFT algorithms or routing algorithms causing chaos in finance or logistics.

andrewchambers 11y ago
I'm pretty sure that software can tell the difference between birds and houses now.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  On the other hand, Google's software can't tell the difference between black people and gorillas. http://mashable.com/2015/07/01/google-photos-black-people-gorillas/ http://mashable.com/2015/07/01/google-photos-black-people-go...
  - jakub_h 11y ago
    I'm actually quite pleasantly surprised that we've already reached this level of functionality. Imagine aliens coming to our planet and starting classifying stuff on Earth. The idea that alien intelligence without some seeded knowledge would mistakenly make this inference doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility.
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  If StreetView blurring is anything to go by, it can't tell the difference between a human face and a brick wall. I'd excuse that by saying it's tuned to be extremely conservative and not accidentally miss someone, but it routinely misses faces too. Even our purpose-built image recognition has a long way to go.

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dwaltrip 11y ago

This was an interesting article with some well made points. However I think there is a fundamental difference that is being overlooked here. Whoever invents the next user interface paradigm can do so with essentially zero cost (assuming they own a laptop). The same cannot be said about inventing the next paradigm of travel.

thaumaturgy 11y ago

If Maciej hadn't written this, I would still feel alone in how I see the technological world. I really can't express how grateful I am that this exists. There is a vast, vast gulf between what the majority of software developers seem to think users want, and what users actually want. And this isn't a Henry Ford "they wanted faster horses" sort of thing, this is a, "users don't just hate change, they resent it" sort of thing. I work directly with end users. It's mostly over email now, my tech still works with them in person, face-to-face, in their business or home. We get so many complaints. So many questions: "do I really have to upgrade this?" "I liked this the way it was." "It worked just fine, why are they changing it again?" Every time I try to argue on behalf of my customers, here or elsewhere, it gets ignored, or downvoted, or rebutted with, "but my users say they always want the latest and greatest..." There are 100 million people in the United States alone over the age of 50. How much new software is designed for them? How much new software exists merely as a tool, comfortable with being put away days or weeks at a time, and doesn't try to suck you in to having to sign in to it on a regular basis to see what other people are doing with it? How much of our technology -- not just software, but hardware here too -- is designed to work with trembling hands, poor eyesight, or users who are easily confused? There are over a hundred million people that don't understand why your site needs a "cookie" to render, that can't tell the difference between an actual operating system warning and an ad posing as one, that aren't sure what to do when the IRS sends them an email about last year's tax return with a .doc attached. (That one happened today.) For these people, the technology most of us build really really sucks. And that is a growing demographic, not a shrinking one...

yosefk 11y ago
I program for a living and I know why sites need "cookies", and still, for me most software really really sucks. Just because I can figure out how each and every new cell phone works doesn't mean I want to, similarly for other kinds of gratuitous changes and incompatibilities. And BTW systems built "by hackers for hackers" are among the worst offenders (*nix clones in general and Linux distributions in particular are good examples.)
- unimpressive 11y ago

Totient 11y ago

I agree, and disagree with the author. > "Vision 1: CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS." > This is the correct vision. I would say this is a correct vision, which I happen to be in favor of. But I don't understand why it has to be an "us vs. them" dynamic between this and the "BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN CONSTRUCTION" vision. Even in strawman form, I'm unapologetically in favor of it. I do want it to go right. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon - I think human-level AI by 2075 [1] is wildly optimistic - but I hope it does happen eventually, without wiping out everything we hold dear. > I'm a little embarrassed to talk about it, because it's so stupid. My first thought was "Try describing the internet to someone 100 years ago - your claim that there is going to be an interconnected global network of electricity-powered adding machines that transport pictures of moving sex by pretending they are made of numbers is going to sound stupid." But if you want to make fun of Elon Musk because "Obama just has to sit there and listen to this shit", what about: Shane Legg: "If there is ever to be something approaching absolute power, a superintelligent machine would come close. By definition, it would be capable of achieving a vast range of goals in a wide range of environments. If we carefully prepare for this possibility in advance, not only might we avert disaster, we might bring about an age of prosperity unlike anything seen before." Stuart Russel: "Just as nuclear fusion researchers consider the problem of containment of fusion reactions as one of the primary problems of their field, it seems inevitable that issues of control and safety will become central to AI as the field matures." Or freaking Alan Turing: "There would be plenty to do in trying to keep one’s intelligence up to the standards set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers…At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control." > But you all need to pick a side. I don't want to pick a side. I'm in favor of connecting the world now, making it better for everyone. I'd also like to see the world get much better in the more (hopefully not too) distant future. [1] http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf

noamyoungerm 11y ago
>My first thought was "Try describing the internet to someone 100 years ago - your claim that there is going to be an interconnected global network of electricity-powered adding machines that transport pictures of moving sex by pretending they are made of numbers is going to sound stupid." Because you're limiting yourself to a single sentence. How about this: "The internet is essentially an expansion of the concept of a telegraph - it is already possible to pass any type of information between two distant people almost instantly. The internet combines this system of information transfer with machines that know how to respond to messages without human intervention - under the condition that the messages follow a certain set of rules. By defining these rules in advance, the telegraph system, which up to now only transferred individual letters, can be co-opted to send things such as pictures and films. The machine can tell who is speaking with it, and perform tasks for that particular person upon request." This does not sound stupid - it might take some explaining, but anyone with a brain between their ears can understand the basic concept of fast information transfer. They might not think of all of the possible uses of such an invention right away, but I bet that they would easily understand the uses if they were explained in terms of things these people already know.

mozumder 11y ago

I love this so much. So glad someone wrote this! I really can't believe how "into" tech people are. It's just a boring tool for your life, not an end-goal in itself. BTW I feel the only leading company that is aligned with this vision is Apple.

_mgr 11y ago
"BTW I feel the only leading company that is aligned with this vision is Apple." I wanted to say something to this effect but the last 12-18 months has shown that Apple is losing its way also.
- marincounty 11y ago
  Yea, I'm beginning to think Steve Jobs was Apple? Apple needs a chief who lives gadgets, demands perfection, and most importantly grew up poor, or middle class. I don't think there's too many Steve Jobs out there? You can't produce another Steve Jobs with a good resume, or education. I think that rebellion in him, maybe because he lived through the 60's, is missing in many CEO's? He was really one of a kind! I always thought I wouldn't want him as a friend, but I would want him running my company. (I'm not condoning angry, perfectionists who happen to be in power--you people are not not Steve Jobs--no matter how hard you try.) In my life, I have only seen one Steve! RIP!
  - tim333 11y ago
    Quite a lot was Jony Ive. I'm optimistic the good design will go on.
sunwooz 11y ago
Strange considering that the only reason you're alive today is because of technology. There is no set end-goal. You create your own end-goal. That's the point of human existence, to create your own meaning.
- coldtea 11y ago

jodrellblank 11y ago

There's a slight difference in that we don't have supersonic animals on Earth, we don't see any interstellar spaceships, and we don't see anything even remotely like that - no animal metabolism that compares to the scale of the controlled energy release of a rocket engine or a nuclear power plant - but we do see much much better information processing systems than our current computers, and they are very energy efficient. They are built of meat and not exotic superconducting Buckywhatever, they are limited by constraints on heat dissipation and oxygen/glucose supply - problems which are easy to work around with electric pumps, heat pumps and industrial food supply - and by a historic need for sleep. Maybe exponential progress has to slow, but can we dismiss intelligent non-humans in the same way we can dismiss space stations or interstellar travel? Space stations are a cost. Free workers is a saving. Shouldn't we expect human technology will approach animal intelligence in one substrate and design or another? And then surpass it a little by removing some of the obvious constraints?

idlewords 11y ago
This is a good question, and I think will have to wait on a better understanding of what we mean by intelligence, which right now is a term that carries a lot of luggage. It may be that the situation is similar to biochemistry. We observe exquisitely complex synthetic pathways in the natural world, and can to some extent harness and retool things to our benefit, but our capacity to design those reactions from scratch is almost nil compared to what goes on in the simplest living cell. It may be that creating those fast rockets that don't exist in nature is orders of magnitude easier than writing a catbot. That's an open question and so far the evidence is on the side of it being far out of our grasp.
- jodrellblank 11y ago
  The situations are still very different; following the exponential growth of travel speed (the article's graphs leading to interstellar travel) would need something like a wormhole generator or a warp drive. - A space shuttle with a warp drive powered by a captive black hole (or whatever) needs huge industry or government levels of cash; anyone with a few hundred dollars, a cloud computing account and an internet connection can look at brain scan data and write software tests, or join in protein folding distributed experiments. - The kind of engineering to create a skyscraper sized machine needs Lockheed-Martin size factories and hundreds of specialist component makers, and a lot of metal and employees. Poking at cell-sized biology can be done in a small room by one or two people, a small machine and a single UPS delivery of supplies. - There's not much profit in building a space station. There's a lot of profit waiting for reconnecting severed spinal columns, converting atmospheric CO2 into oily hydrocarbon chains powered by photosynthesis, searching email by intelligent context understanding. Yes we can't do either, but outdoing current computing ability seems much closer - more people have the opportunity, more people have the incentive, there are many more avenues of approach, and we know it's fundamentally possible - than outdoing current rocket engines. Closer, and more useful.

flohofwoe 11y ago

From the article: Soviet engineers lacked the computers to calculate all the bending and wiggling the wings would do if you hung the engines under them, so they just strapped engines on the back. This sounds like a myth to me, is there any evidence that missing computer power was the reason for tail-engine-designs? There have been a number of western civilian jet planes from that era with tail engines too (for instance the Boeing 727). AFAIK the wing-mounted engines won in the end because they are easier to maintain, which might not have been such a strong factor in the 50's and 60's. I find it more likely that Soviet design bureaus didn't pay much attention to operating efficiency and put more effort into building planes that can operate from 'rougher' air strips, etc. But I'm not an aeroplane expert.

Animats 11y ago
"I find it more likely that Soviet design bureaus didn't pay much attention to operating efficiency and put more effort into building planes that can operate from 'rougher' air strips, etc." Soviet designs, even civilian transports, were usually able to operate from short, unimproved aircraft. The AN-22, with 12 wheels on the main gear and a high wing, was the most impressive version of that approach. Soviet civil jetliners post-1970 look much like their Western counterparts. There were Soviet designs in the 1960s with engines in the wing or at the tail, but there were all sort of engine placements in the early days. Today, the usual position is on a pylon below and slightly in front of the wing. Here's a detailed discussion of why, from a Stanford AA241, Intro. to Aircraft Design.[1] [1] http://adg.stanford.edu/aa241/propulsion/engineplacement.html http://adg.stanford.edu/aa241/propulsion/engineplacement.htm...
idlewords 11y ago
Joe Sutter (father of the 747) recounts a private meeting in a Paris restaurant where Boeing engineers briefed the Russians how to hang engines under the wing, and in return the Russians told Boeing how to machine titanium. Many of the relevant drawings having been made on the tablecloth, the Russians were careful to take it with them.
billforsternz 11y ago
The Ilyushin Il-62 shares exactly the same configuration (high tail, 4 engines on the back) as the British VC-10. I think the VC-10 predated the Il-62, but I might just be expressing a prejudice and assuming the Soviet plane was a clone. I always thought the VC-10 (and the Il-62 for that matter) was rather gorgeous, apropos of nothing. The VC-10 as a Western four engined large (for the time) narrow body intercontinental jetliner competed directly with the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8. It's fair to say it did was roundly trounced in this competition. I don't know why exactly. Possibly late to the party. Possibly the victim of superior US technology and/or salesmanship.

MichaelCrawford 11y ago

I often ask other coders to contemplate "What software that we write today will still be in use 10,000 years from now?" That I am unable to answer that question is a primary reason I write English text rather than code the last ten years.

sangnoir 11y ago
Your English text (and English in general, as we know it) will not be in use in 10,000 years. There seems to be a widespread, almost instinctive desire to achieve permanence (works or monuments) in humans, which I do not fully understand. People want to make a dent on the universe, to be 'remembered as heroes' etc. Nothing lasts forever, not your works, not your memory. All will be lost in the mists of time. I don't see this as a reason for nihilism either, you can make a difference with your efforts - it just won't last forever (or even 1,000 years, let alone 10,000). That's ok.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >I don't see this as a reason for nihilism either, you can make a difference with your efforts - it just won't last forever (or even 1,000 years, let alone 10,000) Urgghh, the inventor of fire disagrees...
  - tonyedgecombe 11y ago
    What was his name?
    - coldtea 11y ago
      I said it: Urgghh.
  - Tinyyy 11y ago
    Can you really ‘invent’ fire, though? I think ‘discovering’ would be a more apt word. Maybe you can invent a specific way to make fire, such as rubbing sticks together, but evidently we don’t do that anymore.

baddox 11y ago

> The Concorde entered commercial service and safely ferried douchebags across the Atlantic for 25 years. Why this? I mean that seriously. Forget that it's unnecessary. I don't even get the stereotype being referenced.

ElmUser1022 11y ago
I agree, very America biased article..
ajdlinux 11y ago
Because a seat on Concorde cost significantly more than a regular first-class seat on a transoceanic flight. If you had enough money to afford it...
- jkoschei 11y ago
  ...you must be a terrible person? The Concorde/douchebag line was a good segue into the logical inconsistencies of the second part of this talk.
  - pessimizer 11y ago
    > ...you must be a terrible person? Yes. You may not share the opinion, but surely you understand the reasoning.
- baddox 11y ago
  I'm not familiar with "douchebag" being used to mean wealthy.

tempodox 11y ago

Yay, I couldn't agree more. Those truths are seldom mentioned, and even more seldom so many of them at a time. If only I could find out who held this talk, there doesn't seem to be any hint or signature.

klez 11y ago
It was from Maciej Ceglowski, founder of Pinboard.
dredmorbius 11y ago
Maciej doesn't take suggestions well, but I do wish he'd byline and date his work. This is at least dated.

Animats 11y ago

Well, the biggest current problem is that everything had to be redesigned for fat fingers and small screens. The worst expression of this was Windows 8, which made desktops look like tablets, and was rejected by the market. Then there's cutesy web design; Flash ten years ago, "material design" now. Just because you can animate everything doesn't mean you should. (Annoyingly, the one browser thing that ought to be animated isn't. When you click on a link that exits the page, nothing happens until the new page loads, often leading to unnecessary double clicking. The browser should blank the old page, or grey it out, or dissolve to the new page, or do some kind of transition.) As for the big stuff, the AI-driven future is going to be interesting. The big threat, as I point out occasionally, is not Terminator robots. It's Goldman Sachs run by a a machine learning system optimizing for maximum stockholder value.

mmahemoff 11y ago
"Just because you can animate everything doesn't mean you should." Material design guidelines agree with you. Animations are supposed to be meaningful and illuminate on what's happening internally rather than being superfluous flourishes. What you might really mean here is the time-honoured principle of seeing a good design somewhere and mindlessly cargo-culting it to produce a bad design somewhere else.
bergie 11y ago
When you click on a link that exits the page, nothing happens until the new page loads, often leading to unnecessary double clicking. The browser should blank the old page, or grey it out, or dissolve to the new page, or do some kind of transition.) This is actually something Google made a proposal about: http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/11/20/chromes-upcoming-navigation-transitions-api-will-make-the-web-animate-and-flow-like-material-design-in-android/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/11/20/chromes-upcoming-nav...
- Animats 11y ago
  It's not making it cute that matters. It's making it fast. With modern slow, bloated web sites, there are much longer delays between clicking on a link and the page display than there used to be. Especially on a slow mobile connection. Something needs to visibly happen as soon as you leave the page, even if the browser hasn't even received any packets from the new site yet.

acqq 11y ago

It was not obvious at the start to me, it was written by Maciej Ceglowski: http://idlewords.com/about.htm http://idlewords.com/about.htm the guy behind Pinboard!

jacquesm 11y ago

I'd be more than happy to contribute to the sustained applause, this echos just about all of my sentiments about the web. And it is a call to action, not just a 'nice to read' piece. So, what are we going to do about it?

zubairq 11y ago

I agree with this article. Old things are sometimes the best: http://coils.cc/coils/old-things.html http://coils.cc/coils/old-things.html

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Jean-Philipe 11y ago

Well written, fun to read. Thanks!

dghf 11y ago

> Software forever remains at the limits of what people will put up with. That needs immortalising. Cegłowski's Law?

ucaetano 11y ago

"What is the web actually for?" I'm surprised he left out "porn"...

marknutter 11y ago
I think "cats" in this context refers to all the stuff on the web that doesn't seem important, but that people actually like to use the web for; including pornography.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I think a good way to drive a joke home would be to say that "web is for pussies" while displaying photo of a pussycat.

stasm 11y ago

Maciej makes a great point about diminishing returns. We're quite good at extrapolating trend lines and yet we're terrible at predicting the future because it's very hard to guess where optimizations will happen. The 'good enough' seems to be the bane of any futuristic outlook. Technological progress seems to obey the laws of friction; it behaves like light which refracts when it enters a denser substance. I'm still learning to embrace the 'good enough.' For instance, minimalism only works if it's good enough for the users. I feel like this predicate is often forgotten and we end up with designs which are minimal for their own sake.

veddox 11y ago

Finally a technology prophet who doesn't prophesy digital utopia! Although I can't imagine that everything he says is correct (purely statistically speaking), I do think that if anybody reads this in twenty years he/she will recognize his/her present fairly well. P.S. Is this page being archived anywhere?

vixsomnis 11y ago

I think the web (www) won't change much at all, but that doesn't mean the way we interconnect with others won't. This seems ultimately shortsighted. Human "progress" (increasing interconnection -- such as urbanization and population density) has been growing exponentially[1] since the birth of agriculture allowed humans to form societies. Relative to this kind of momentum, the web is only a hint of the interconnection and globalization to come. The web may stagnate and become self-serving (as opposed to being useful), but this has no bearing on whether we'll eventually be able to simulate a human brain in its entirety or reach some {uto,dysto}pian future where all of our consciousnesses are somehow woven together. I'm not saying that technology will be our salvation, but the graphs and trends don't lie. We are at a very interesting time in human history: we are either going to continue interconnecting exponentially or there will be some catastrophic event. There's no room on those curves for a plateau. Whether humanity passes the torch of technological innovation to AI (voluntarily or coerced) or we suffer a self-wrought apocalypse, I don't know, but there is certainly reason to fear the changes the future will bring. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/human-progress-charts-2011-3?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/human-progress-charts-2011-3?... (This link isn't specifically tied to my argument. It's just the first set of graphs I found illustrating the long-term growth of humanity.)

dcposch 11y ago

The first half of this talk is excellent. The story of air travel--how the engineers of the 60s thought that we'd have supersonic jets and flying cars within a few years--that's a great cautionary tale. Evolutionary biologists call it Punctuated Equilibrium: the idea that progress comes in spurts. The warning--that the evolution of computer hardware and software might be radically slower over the next 50 years than it was over the past 50--seems timely and reasonable. The second half is not excellent. Bad mental habits and weak arguments are on display. * Imprecision. Specifically: choosing sentences for their "punch", like a bumper sticker, without caring whether they make sense: "There is something quite colonial, too, about collecting data from users [...] I think of it as the White Nerd's Burden." "It's a kind of software Manifest Destiny." ...cool story, bro * Excessive negativity. If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading Everything is Problematic -- it really helped me understand where people like Maciej are coming from. http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/11/everything-problematic/ http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/11/everything-problematic/ * Disrespect. "Google works on some loopy stuff in between plastering the Internet with ads." I guess 40 years ago he would have said "AT&T works on some loopy stuff in between sending you phone bills". Organizations like Bell Labs--or Google X--are treasures, and as engineers we should be glad they exist. In short: haters gonna hate

eevilspock 11y ago
> choosing sentences for their "punch", like a bumper sticker > In short: haters gonna hate and > * Disrespect. > ...cool story, bro
- tljr 11y ago
  haters gonna hate, indeed.
- qwtel 11y ago
  this goes to show that negativity is contingent, not that the author's points are invalid.
vul6 11y ago
I totally agree, the first half about progress in air travel and computer science is great, the rest not so really

ccanassa 11y ago

The "is good enough" mentality might be true if you are talking about browsing Facebook, reading email, etc. But other areas of the technology are still very far from being "good enough" and still pushing technology forward. The gaming industry is one great example of this.

babatong 11y ago
I don't think the gaming industry is a good example for what you're saying. Video games have barely shown any development since the mid 2000s. The first Crysis game was released in 2007 (8! years ago) and despite being an unoptimised mess is still graphically superior to most things released today. Almost all windows games released are still primarily built on DirectX 9 (with a few optional newer components), despite DirectX 12 coming with Windows 10. In fact, the major development studios have decided, that the performance offered by cheaply mass-produced consoles with yesterday's hardware is good enough. Why do you think specialised PC gaming communities are complaining that consoles are holding development back? If anything I'd say the gaming industry is the embodiment of the "is good enough" mentality.
- ccanassa 11y ago
  Not sure If I completely agree with you but I understand your point. I just think that there is still a few companies pushing things forward. Star Citizen is a good example of a game doing that. 4K displays is also something that might give a boost to the current GPU technology. One funny note: I just checked the Crysis system requirements and I needs 1GB of RAM to run. That's not enough RAM to run even Minecraft these days :)

mwcampbell 11y ago

He criticizes his second vision, the Silicon Valley vision of software eating the world. But where I live (Wichita, Kansas), Uber is actually better than the conventional taxi services. As in, when uber was temporarily shut down in Kansas and I tried to call a conventional taxi to my home, I waited over half an hour, it never showed up, and I had to cancel. So the second vision resonates with me, and I don't even live in Silicon Valley. What am I missing? Edit: It's not just one anecdote. TO quote the OP: > We started with music and publishing. Then retailing. Now we're apparently doing taxis. Yes, and software has made each of these better. The vision of software improving the world seems to actually be working.

tljr 11y ago
one anecdote does not dismiss a compelling theory.

nly 11y ago

This guys dig at AI is a little conflicted with the exponential hangover idea. Sure we can only simulate a 300 neuron worm right now but, if we every achieve a computationally bound solution and experience exponential growth at a rate similar to Moores Law, in 50 years we could be watching real AI cat videos on Youtube, complete with awful UI controls that customise the feline personality in realtime. Oh, in Javascript of course.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
100 years ago we couldn't compute. 150 years ago we didn't even know neurons existed. I wouldn't be so fast about discounting the progress here.
scott_karana 11y ago
> if we every achieve a computationally bound solution and experience exponential growth at a rate similar to Moores Law, His point is that we won't continue the curve, and he's offered evidence/opinion that we're already starting to plateau. Which means AI would need to be solved within ~current computational bounds.
- tim333 11y ago
  We're plateauing on single processor performance. Not on parallel computing.
  - scott_karana 11y ago
    Not physically, not yet. But it seems like high-performance parallel computing paradigms are forgotten and reinvented every year.
    - tim333 11y ago
      Yup. Better software needed. But as an indication of how close we're getting Hans Moravec, a robot builder and robotics professor did a quite reasonable calculation of the processing power needed to build something equivalent to a human brain, using computer style algorithms rather than nerve simulation and came up with 100 million MIPS, ie. 100 terraflops (http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm) If you compare that with 2015 hardware then the Nvidia Titan X GPU does about 7 terraflops and costs about $1000 so with 15 Titans and a $20k system an hacker can have a reasonable go at building a human level AI (excluding memory hardware that is). That's only recently come about that that kind of power is getting down to hacker budget levels. It'll take a while to sort the software. Though some recent software stories like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9584325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9584325 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736598 show progress.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

I think Maciej is actually confusing two different groups of people/concepts, conflating them both under the same label of "Vision 2: FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE". One group wants to actually fix the world with software (or technology). The other wants to monetize the living shit out of it. A big part of the startup ecosystem is the second group. A fridge that tracks its content is a very useful piece of technology (that is also nowhere to be bought, by the way). A fridge talking on Twitter is someone's attempt at selling more fridges. The products 'idlewords is criticizing are not made to be useful, they are made to be sold at a profit, which often goes against usability. It's clearly visible in the IoT sphere. Most of the popular devices are just toys sold to gullible, who have no idea how to use them to better their lives. A lot of this stuff shouldn't be even web-connected, especially not to a third-party server. It's all done because the company is making more money on your data than on selling the devices themselves. A tell-tale sign of company not really designing a tool but just trying to monetize you? No ability to export your data for your own analysis, or to hook up to the data stream at the same level of access as vendor's app has. Please don't confuse people trying to fix the world with software with people trying to make a buck while telling you lies about fixing the world. -- As for technology being "good enough", I think that being good enough is a state, not a goal. Anything there is is always good enough for whatever people are doing with it. Fixing the world is a goal (which I support). Creating better future is a goal. What we now have is mostly people blindly following potential gradients set by markets, like water flowing downhill. -- I'm not going to comment much on "Vision 3", because the description seems - to put it very nicely - not well thought out, and just a regurgitation of popular media biases. I'll just leave a FAQ from people believing in AI risks that addresses them [0], as well as some quotes from real AI researchers that also believe in AI risk [1] (the media seems to paint the picture that there are no prominent figures in the field who hold that opinion). Also [2] may be of interest. [0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/meq/top_92_myths_about_ai_risk/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/meq/top_92_myths_about_ai_risk/ [1] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/22/ai-researchers-on-ai-risk/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/22/ai-researchers-on-ai-ri... [2] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/29/no-time-like-the-present-for-ai-safety-work/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/29/no-time-like-the-presen...

rsync 11y ago

What a nicely designed website. Readable, usable, doesn't peg my CPU or do weird things as I scroll. I viewed the source and it is clean and readable - no evidence of some lame IDE sticking in forty  's or twnety nested tables just because you wanted your column two pixels to the left. I wish more of the web looked like this and it makes me happy to see that some smart folks value design like this.

sangnoir 11y ago

It is hard to figure out when exponential growth will end while you are in the middle of it. Linus said something relevant to this in a recent interview on Slashdot[1], answering a question on dangerous AI. To paraphrase him: people are crazy to think that exponential growth lasts forever. As impressive as it may be (at the time), it's only the beginning of an S-curve. I've extracted a small part of his answer below. I think the whole interview is worth reading (it's a general interview, not AI-specific) ... I'd expect just more of (and much fancier) rather targeted AI, rather than anything human-like at all. Language recognition, pattern recognition, things like that. I just don't see the situation where you suddenly have some existential crisis because your dishwasher is starting to discuss Sartre with you. The whole "Singularity" kind of event? Yeah, it's science fiction, and not very good SciFi at that, in my opinion. Unending exponential growth? What drugs are those people on? I mean, really.. It's like Moore's law - yeah, it's very impressive when something can (almost) be plotted on an exponential curve for a long time. Very impressive indeed when it's over many decades. But it's _still_ just the beginning of the "S curve". Anybody who thinks any different is just deluding themselves. There are no unending exponentials 1. http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/06/30/0058243/interviews-linus-torvalds-answers-your-question http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/06/30/0058243/interviews-...

tim333 11y ago
I don't think singularity stuff relies on exponential growth lasting for ever. Only for AI performance to significantly exceed human. And I'm not sure there's anything magical about the human brain that will stop tech achieving similar performance before it runs into barriers.
- daveloyall 11y ago
  Right. I'll attempt to bolster your argument, if I may... We know that human and animal brains are made out of simple components. Probably the same components. The difference between animals and humans seems to be in how those components are arranged and how many of them there are. We've already demonstrated digital components that approximate individual neurons, and we've already demonstrated wiring groups of them up to perform useful work. I think that if we find ourselves at an inflection point in history, it is because there might exist some relatively simply arrangement of digital neurons which results in a machine which can learn some sort of rudimentary self awareness[1] while also possessing a computer's ability to do math, store data, and recall data, communicate on the internet, etc. 1. Spend year of days with a newborn if you don't already know that humans have to learn it, too.

kevin_thibedeau 11y ago

Another nice parallel with the 747/2707 is that the Core line was derived from the Pentium M which was done by Intel's B-team in Israel while the big boys got to work on the future with Itanium and P4.

idlewords 11y ago
Oh wow, thanks so much for pointing that out! I wish I had known that writing the talk.

vlunkr 11y ago

This is my favorite: "The world is just one big hot mess, an accident of history. Nothing is done as efficiently or cleverly as it could be if it were designed from scratch by California programmers. The world is a crufty legacy system crying out to be optimized." Sadly this is the way I think sometimes.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Just remove the "designed from scratch by California programmers" and tell me how this quote isn't blindingly, obviously true. The world is a mess and screams to be fixed, and not only technologists see it.
- vlunkr 11y ago
  Eh, maybe if you are a very cynical person, which is the point the author was trying to make.

kleer001 11y ago

>The first group wants to CONNECT THE WORLD. > >The second group wants to EAT THE WORLD. > >And the third group wants to END THE WORLD. > >These visions are not compatible. Correct. Just as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, etc are not compatible. But just let's looks around, there's lots of incompatible things going on. The future can never be evenly distributed. So, parts of all these futures will live on in stumbling synchrony. And I say they're all driven by internal logic and pure fan-boy squeee. > There's no law that says that things are guaranteed to keep getting better. This seems like it should be written in stone and placed over the mantle.

TexMitchell 11y ago

The presentation is available for viewing here: https://youtu.be/nwhZ3KEqUlw https://youtu.be/nwhZ3KEqUlw I must say I think the written one is better. It has additional information that I found interesting.

scottfits 11y ago

This was a great read. In my mind, it reminded me of the true underlying simplicity of everything on the web. He's right--we are riding the shockwaves of the computer revolution and its fizzling down. The transistor is getting smaller (I think Intel's newest one is 7 nanometers) but soon we won't be able to physically make it any smaller. Does this mean the computing revolution is over? No. I think it just means the future is going to be about combining computing with other fields like medicine, the arts, and so on.

emehrkay 11y ago

As a web developer I read this and think "progressive enhancement." HTML & CSS are designed in a pretty decent way: ignore the stuff it doesn't understand. The second half of this article makes me want to do better. Write better software, create things that matter and will last long(er). Very entertaining and funny article, btw.

queryly 11y ago

This is a great article. Great writing! Software eats the world, or it may not. I don't think most of startups are doing what they do to realize that goal. All they do is to solve a specific problem with technology. Of course if the "problems" aren't there, they would fail. I don't know what the action items are for the tech communities after reading the article. We find something interesting to do with our tech talent, and aren't really trying to choose which future we want to live in. Regardless, Maciej has some great insight and offers some different prospective in tech/web.

spopejoy 11y ago

OK I'm just going to say it. This author SERIOUSLY needs to consider making their prose gender-neutral. I could care less what the time period is, it's hostile to women to talk about the engineer "as a boy" and talk about the 787's "grandfather". It's freaking 2015, GET OVER the all-male pronoun business already!!

idlewords 11y ago
The scenario involves a notional Boeing engineer from 1965. My hands are really tied. Point taken on the 'grandfather' bit, though!

SZJX 11y ago

The criticism on vision 2 is weak. He didn't offer many examples about how this vision made the world a worse place. I also don't see how this is comparable with "scientific Marxism" or whatnot. Those historic examples he listed there, while seemingly calling themselves "scientific" on the surface, are actually many times a mess born out of imagination. Now, as long as changes are happening out of laws of market, out of people actually using the products and appreciating the benefits, I don't see it being much of a problem. Technology is doing a lot, and as well said, change in productivity is the only real way to progress human society. We shouldn't relent our thoughts on this front. It's not "colonialism" or whatsoever. On every leap of productivity the human beings make, there has to be some group of people who are leading the job. This is not inherently evil.

Houshalter 11y ago

Ok this article is good but the tangent into the singularity is just stupid: >In fact, forget about worms—we barely have computers powerful enough to emulate the hardware of a Super Nintendo. He just disproved his own point: Emulation is hard, but it's possible to run much faster software directly optimized for your system or build it in hardware. >If you talk to anyone who does serious work in artificial intelligence (and it's significant that the people most afraid of AI and nanotech have the least experience with it) they will tell you that progress is slow and linear, just like in other scientific fields. What?! Has he actually talked to anyone doing "serious work in artificial intelligence"? I am certain they would not say it is "slow and linear".