(There are more people working on important problems than in the 1980s. Computer science research used to be about a hundred people each at MIT, CMU, and Stanford, with a few smaller groups elsewhere, plus internal efforts at IBM and Bell Labs. The whole field was tiny. Now, it's larger, but overshadowed by the massive level of activity associated with ads.)
> They're standing way up there on the shoulders of those giants, and we should recognize that.
We do. And they do too.
But they are innovating, and bringing down the cost of putting stuff in orbit is very important progress, no point in belittling that.
If you wanted to say that SpaceX had done 'nothing new' then you're about a year late to the party, they are definitely innovating.
1. Blockchains/smart contracts,
2. Garbled circuits/Snarks/MPC (Multi-Party Computation)
3. IO/VBB Program obfuscation,
4. FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption),
5. Machine Learning/Vision,
6. Global/Solar-scale performant and secure routing protocols,
7. TEE (Trusted Execution Environments),
8. Advanced P2P systems like IPFS,
9. Bioinfomatiks.
...
Bret's talk about their group's vision for computing - https://vimeo.com/115154289 - really helps people who think computing is "done" and all the interesting stuff is figured out.
Scion is a clean slate internet architecture research design (including routing)[0].
>It seems like bgpsec is about as good as we are going to get.
I was author on a paper [1] that reduced some of the downsides to the RPKI (the PKI BGPSEC relies on).
There is also interesting work on getting most of the security from BGPSEC without complete BGPSEC deployment [2].
In a different direction, as we build the internet of the inner solar system we will need protocols with different properties than those we needed for terrestrial networks.
[0]: https://www.scion-architecture.net/
[1]: "From the Consent of the Routed: Improving the Transparency of the RPKI" http://cs-people.bu.edu/heilman/sigRPKI_full.pdf
[2]: "Jumpstarting BGP Security with Path-End Validation" http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2934883&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFI...
Sorry about the rant, but I get the impression that the authors of replacement protocols like these are more interested in becoming academically famous for being the inventor of the Internet (i.e. The next Vincent Cerf) rather than proposing solutions to existing systems.
I would be interested in new protocols for super high latency networks (i.e. The solar system model).
The RPKI work and path end validation work is interesting and I haven't seen those papers before (been disconnected from publications recently). Thanks for the links.
A list of hard problems we could be tackling: 1) the world is going to run out of fossil fuels, 2) we are destroying the human ecosystem by global warming, 3) there exists a very large amount of inequality between the upper and lower class in our society and the gap is only increasing, 4) we have more and more humans of whom society demands "work" to get "pay" in order to survive even as we come up with ways of replacing more and more "jobs" with "automation", 5) there are many subsets of our population divided by axes such as race and sexuality which are discriminated against by others in both direct and indirect systematic ways, 6) we have a limited number of antibiotics that are generally safe for widespread usage and pathogens are adapting, 7) for numerous and potentially diverse reasons an increasingly large fraction of our society is being turned off of science and has stopped believing in basic things like the benefits of even our oldest and most trusted vaccinations, 8) humans continue to die from diseases like cancer, 9) governments and companies have begun to usher in a dystopian era of surveillance under the guise of protecting us from terrorists and spam and serving us advertisements.
A couple of these problems can be addressed with the technologies you listed, but even in the core of some of these communities that want to address problems 5, 7, and 9 you honestly just end up finding a lot of people who are exacerbating problems 2, 3, 4, and (annoyingly) 9.
I despise the cloud :(. It was just so much harder for people to abuse the crap out of us when the concept of a computer was something that, even if it could connect to other computers to get information, was not something that fundamentally relied on other computers and which stored all of its information on other computers and could be remotely controlled by other computers. We are to the point where arguing that I "own" the device on which I am typing this message almost doesn't make sense: I am borrowing it from Apple and I can only hope that they don't screw me too hard :(.
Many of the problems you listed are likely only solvable by large scale social movements. Solutions to important technology problems change the landscape over which progress is made but they are not social movements themselves.
>It was just so much harder for people to abuse the crap out of us when the concept of a computer was something that, even if it could connect to other computers to get information, was not something that fundamentally relied on other computers and which stored all of its information on other computers and could be remotely controlled by other computers.
The cloud is the new word for mainframe. The PC pushed things away from mainframes then the internet/cloud pushed back. Blockchains are interesting space between these extremes.
If anything, we agree on one point: that computers failed to solve those problems, and where we thought they would--Twitter being a great example--they quite arguably made the problem much much worse.
That is why I will argue computers feel so much more depressing today: we have been slowly coming to the realization--not just in the past few years but since at least the 50s (if not the turn of the last century)--that the entire concept of a utopian technofuture is probably a fantasy and dystopias now seem so close that we barely find the idea compelling to talk about anymore.
Not dying should be the first on that list, for obvious reasons, and becoming multi-planetary reduces the chance of (all the) humans dying exponentially for each planet colonized.
Are we even the same species with any of the same concerns by the time we get to Alpha Centauri planet?
These notions still coming from the mouths of my generation are getting a bit bonkers to me as I age.
Let's work towards a goal we'll never be able to validate actually happens, as we'll be dead before we get close. Let's build a system that coerces people towards that goal.
Let's chew up more and more of this planet researching and building towards technologies and fucking over the next gen of humans here.
Because a generation that grew up watching Star Trek wished it would happen real bad!
1. The earth will still be inhabitable in the short run. Even with worst case global warming x10. It will be a lot different, and probably not better, but we can still survive here.
2. 99% of human history people lived without liberties or human rights that became a theme of anti-autocratic philosophies and cultures that grew out of The Enlightenment to make the modern day world possible. Alan Turing would have been tortured to death in earlier years. These last few hundred years may very well be an anamoly, and while we know humans exhibit a tendency towards immoral, autocraric leadership, we should take advantage of the fact we live in the best 0.1% of time in history to develop such technology. It may be that in the short run is the only foreseeable possibile time to become inter-planetary.
3. Competition is what propels human progress
4. Global warming bureaucracies have the same problems the War on Poverty, War on Drugs, and prohibition democracies have. All these problems could be solved by your standard intelligent young adult, but they aren't because of bureaucratic inertia and politics. They are problems of people and human culture of greed.
5. I don't watch Star Trek
While management is cluelessly guiding what software is developed, we'll never put the requisite effort into those problems.
They want return on investment, not idealism.
The sad reality is that most software engineers want to work on these problems, but instead have to work on pumping out CRUD apps and proprietary APIs of questionable social value to pay the bills.
Physics has the same problem. Upwards of 20k people in the APS... most working on very obscure problems spraying "shittonium on silicon 111" or making no progress in various theories of everything.
Still plenty of important and interesting problems in CS, some of which I've been lucky enough to work on.
Blockchain stuff is pretty useful and interesting, though it could all fall apart with some breakthrough in crypto.
Machine learning is mostly used for stupid stuff like getting people to click on ads, but there's lots of interesting use cases for it which haven't been explored yet.
There's also a lot of work to be done on the core tools used in ML; while everyone babbles about deep learning, boosting, PGMs and topological data analysis still have a lot of low hanging fruit IMO.
One that people don't think about enough: non-standard computing architectures. Quantum computing hasn't produced anything of note yet, but it's hardly the only potential area of research here. Simply using stuff like old school Harvard architectures has tremendous implications for security (no more buffer overflows, yo), but nobody bothers thinking these things through and implementing.
At this point it seems unlikely that a breakthrough in crypto could kill blockchains without killing nearly all of modern cryptography. For instance we can build blockchains which are secure even against quantum computers. We can build blockchains that make no number theoretic assumptions using only secure hash functions. Any technique which can break all techniques we have of inventing hard to solve problems (i.e. cryptography), would have a massive impact on technology.
A breakthrough in crypto that would destroy blockchains is much more likely to be a technology which is significantly better than a blockchain for what we want to do with blockchains. That would also be a exciting result.
That's the problem with foundational research: It always looks obscure and impractical until suddenly there's a huge breakthrough out of nowhere. Same dynamic as with startups, where 99% will never make a significant mark of any kind, while 1% change the world forever. And you cannot know in advance which startup (or which foundational research) falls into which category.
Personally I think it's not because we were working on great new tech products then. I think it's because we knew we were at the forefront on a tsunami of a tech sea change of historic proportions that was obviously reinventing much of everyday life in ways we didn't yet understand, from the global public commons to the local grocery store. The question on everyone's lips was, where will it end? What's happening? Where is the world going next? And can I play?
Then from 2005 to maybe 2012 we saw an apparent renewal of tectonic forces as mobile smartphones surged forth and all of us became incessantly and globally interconnected.
But now, in today's hindsight, we've had some time to get perspective, and we're disappointed. Where was that brave new world we were promised? We've gained tweets, social and news feeds, e-books and e-tail, and handheld GPS. But we've never been more aware of how meaninglessly trivial tech's ultimate tsunami -- small talk, or how thoroughly manipulated we've let ourselves be by corporations whose highest calling is to sell us ever more trumped-up commodities and ever greater dependency on their latest bit-of-the-nonce drug fix.
O where have you gone, Gene Roddenberry?
I do feel a bit nostalgic about the 80s; the music, the big hair, and feelings of immanent nuclear doom, and the eventual fall of the Iron Curtain: a very unique feel to this era. Granted I was a teenager for most of it, so maybe that's why.
As for age: the main thing I've noticed is my hairline and my joints aren't what they used to be. Exercise, eating right and occasional fasting seems to stave off msot of the physiological effects of aging. I'm pretty sure working in a creative field (and being around a lot of younger people) helps a lot with the psychological aspects.
Something I try to continuously tell myself is that "It's still early days" because while it doesn't feel like it - I think it is.
Look at the massive shifts we've seen in social media use (Friendster > MySpace > Facebook + Twitter > Snap) - at near any point in their usage you could have reasonably said: "I don't see how anyone could overthrow one of these - they're too big"
There is so much future still to invent.
Just my observation and not being described accurately and clearly enough here. But I hope you get what I'm trying to say.
The difference with computing was on-going Moore's law (forever young), which now slows/ends. Worse, though they still shrink, the cheapest node remains at 28nm. Cheapness fuels revolution. Peak silicon has passed.
We could get a new technology (like fracking etc and peak oil), as Kurzweil suggests for the singularity.
I don't believe search is mature. We haven't seen a lot of innovations in web search for a while and what we know as web search is probably the best Google can do. It's probably not the best possible web search though. Just the best from Google.
The reason nobody is there to challenge Google is because noone has come up with a way to fund a web search engine other than through ads. Challenging Google probably also means challenging the whole ad industry. It's a rough climb.
The internet titans of today will be replaced or be forced to change as the next wave of innovation takes over.
There may be a lull right now, but either AI or augmented reality looks like a good candidate for the next cycle.
Remember that towards the end of the 90s, Netscape - the one promising new startup that threatened to break the Windows monopoly - had just had its ass handed to it by IE, with some spectacularly underhanded tactics. All the dot-coms had required hundreds of millions in funding and were rapidly blowing through them, with no sign of a profitable business model.
Hope didn't really return to techies until the mid-2000s, when a bunch of events (Google's IPO, acquisitions of Flickr & del.icio.us, development of Rails/Django/JQuery/MySQL, and founding of Facebook, Reddit, and YCombinator) made people realize "Hey, maybe it's not the end of history after all. People have actually been doing pretty cool stuff all this time when we weren't looking."
2015 seems like it was the new 2000. That'd put us around 2002-2003 right now, complete with the huge focus on P2P, security, and government overreach, and with a couple years to go before we realize that not everybody gave up.
What happened in the mid-2000s was that open-source software (and later Apple) finally broke Microsoft's hold on the route to the consumer, and suddenly small teams of people could deliver software that billions of people could use. There's a similar situation in R&D now; I remember that when I left Google 3 years ago, there was a whole lot of really cool stuff being developed that has yet to see the light of day. No corporation can hold innovation back forever though, because of Joy's Law: "No matter who you are, the majority of smart people do not work for you."
Mature industries, absent disruptive technology changes, tend to consolidate and be dominated.
Yes, Moore's law may seem to be slowing down right now, but all you need to do is look at the size, energy consumption, and ability of a human brain to realize that nature has blindly created a much more advanced "technology" than what we currently have.
Next, look at flying. Birds are nature's most advanced flying machines. We've been able to expand on that to the point where we have jets and even reusable rockets that can go a thousand times faster than the fastest bird.
Right now, computing is at the "man puts big flaps on his arms and jumps off high ledge" point. Once we figure out the "first airplane", AKA wright brothers moment, Moore's law will explode.
Before the web, there was the PC revolution. And...microcomputers before that, I think?
It's true, computing technologies mature and there are fewer opportunities for real break throughs. But then new technologies arrive for the cycle to start over again.
Google, Apple, and Microsoft, though, seem pretty safe.
I just bought a couple of Raspberry Pis and I get the same exciting this-is-the-start-of-something-really-cool vibe from them as I did from my first Apple II back in 1980.
I feel like the only thing we've actually lost was the requirement to use iTunes to set up a new iDevice, and good riddance to that. An iPod really was a peripheral whereas their modern successors are fully-fledged mobile computers.
If you mean use an iPad as an external display, that's a rather niche use. Is there a reason that the 3rd party app Duet Display doesn't meet your needs?
I've used Mint since then; never looked back. Mint on an old X220 thinkpad is better than anything mac has done since then. Requires a bit of overhead on setup to get power management right, but I paid that price years ago and can endlessly clone HD images.
Bonus is, most of my work product ends up on the EC2 anyway.