Big tech products are mostly useless | Hacker News Reader

Big tech products are mostly useless

theguardian.com

173 pointsahjones135 comments

The comments here seem to focus on the specific examples, but this misses the point of the article, which I take to be that _every_ new product or feature, no matter how minor or how incremental, is treated as the second coming of the 100x engineer and the cheering crowds hand-picked to promote whatever they see aren't helping by covering it rabidly.

He's not wrong, but I've heard that complaint about the tech press in general for years, so I'm not sure its bringing anything new to the table on HN.

But at the same time, "some of these will surely turn out to be revolutionary eventually" isn't a great excuse to treat everything as revolutionary before it has a chance to even be seen in the field.

I don't think the messianic cheering is the real problem.

Here's a short and not very complete list of unsolved meta-problems:

Even when products and systems are revolutionary, there are unexpected negative consequences (e.g. FB and Cambridge Analytica)

All systems can be trolled and abused, and if they can be, they will be (e.g. fake reviews on Amazon etc.)

AI doesn't actually work all that well yet. (Neither Siri nor Alexa truly pass a conversational Turing test, which means there's a lot of guessing about whether or not any novel request will generate a useful response.)

IT systems and products of all kinds are brittle, unreliable, and often downright stupid. Users don't trust updates and feature changes, and often they're right to do so. Given that, why would AI "products" be any better or more reliable?

> AI doesn't actually work all that well yet. (Neither Siri nor Alexa truly pass a conversational Turing test...)

When we pass the Turing test it means we've got actual AI.

But I'm not sure there'll ever be a clear line. So Duplex kind of passes it in a very narrow context. Whether or not the person at the end of the line was actually fooled or not is a slightly different question. They could have just been humouring what they figured was a weird automated system.

But it's not like Google won't improve exponentially with this. They've now got a basic AI conversation system that they hope people will use and feed it data of actual conversations.

So Duplex v2 will have an expanded system where they can handle ten times the number of scenarios and questions.

The more I think about it, the more impressive it seems. Most attempts at a Turing test are text only where the subject is supposed to be a 13yo immigrant boy. Here Google's jumping straight to voice conversations.

I don't think there's a clear line either. Even the Turing Test is notional - a conversation with a high schooler is going to be easier to fake than a conversation with an English professor.

I can imagine in the future there will be some kind of approximate conversational AI rating analogous to Flesch-Kincaid for text.

But I left a problem off my list, which is that we unconsciously demand AI should be better than average human performance.

If you monitor your conversations with people, you'll find there are regular misses where one person either mishears words, doesn't understand what's said, or misinterprets a subtext.

We cut human conversations a lot of slack. We're used to thinking of humans as independent agents, and there are social conventions about asking for more information and admitting - or sometimes denying - mistakes.

But there's an unconscious expectation that AI should operate at a better-than-human level before it's considered reliable.

We're more likely to think "Stupid machine!" if something isn't understood than we would with a human. So AI will have to cross the Uncanny Turning Valley before we really trust it. And because we're dealing with automated interpretations of human agency, errors will be harder to forgive.

You can already see this with driverless cars, where any accident is considered a failure. Even though statistically an AI may be much safer than the average human, it's not considered good enough unless it can deal with situations that an average human would have no hope of dealing with.

> we unconsciously demand AI should be better than average human performance.

Yeah I agree it's an unfair demand.

Especially given how much more powerful human brains are than computers we should perhaps be having a go a humans for not trying hard enough.

The wins of things like Go and Chess by computers has been down played because humans 'only' learned that stuff 100,000 years ago.

Personally I think that driverless cars work better as passive systems that augment humans for the moment rather than the dodgy crossover that is Autopilot. I think that car AIs can be trained to deal with extreme circumstances by running simulations of crashes millions of times over and then they're capable of taking over if the driver ever becomes unwell or hits black ice.

But this is all temporary, as soon as their vision systems match humans they will only ever improve over what we have. This Stanford self-driving car sliding between four perfect donuts is amazing [0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/LDprUza7yT4?t=31m38s

> Neither Siri nor Alexa truly pass a conversational Turing test

Even with the constrained grammar, neither of them passes the test of reliably producing the same result for the same phrase under good conditions. If the error rate is well into the double digits for simple structured queries using a constrained vocabulary it seems like the Turing test is still pretty far off.

New and improved Tide. New formula! Better than ever! I think that's just the hyperbole of marketing. Most people should be immune now. That's probably why marketers target youngsters so much; most haven't caught on to the enormity of the BS just yet.

Re: "some of these will surely turn out to be revolutionary eventually" -- It may be true, but the real question is do YOU want to be the guinea pig to test them. Unless your job or shop is R&D, it's usually best to let other companies kick the tires; get the kinks out; and most importantly, test it for your particular domain.

Domain-mismatch is a common problem: something is expanding rapidly, but in the end doesn't work on many or most niches. One size does NOT fit all.

An example is the no-sql movement. People started writing ALL new applications with it, thinking "it's the future". Turns out the regular RDBMS are still the better option 98%+ of the time. "Microservices" are a similar boondoggle. Make sure you really need it.

I think it's the scale. Be in love with the future products we're using your money to play with don't focus on our actual products because they're really just more expensive than before(no control over life cycle, same features as before) and don't actually add much value but have huge margins.

If his point is that "_every_ new product or feature, no matter how minor or how incremental, is treated as the second coming" then he's picked a bad example in Google Duplex in that it does seem noteable - the HN coverage was the second highest voted and most commented story this month (1875 points, 750 comments). It's not that booking hairdresser is a big deal - it's not. It's that it seems kind of half way between Siri and passing the Turing test which is a big deal.

Claques are nothing new. People have been rigging crowds for a very long time. It certainly doesn't seem newsworthy to me that tech is doing it.

Look at all the hours we get to spend on making voice apps that make phone calls when both sides having access to quickly update the ledger is already a thing: calendars

So instead of debating solutions to local needs with neighbors, we fetishize juicing Googles stock price and enabling them to build things that mathematicians already figured out the theory and limits to years ago

This is nonsense.

It’s one thing to theorize the Higgs and build an LHC

It’s another to build chat bots with our time so we can avoid menial scheduling.

Feed people misdirection about how the economy needs this cause we’re all too dumb to figure out our own lives (translation: elites lose power if we do that) and you keep getting these stupid generational pyramid schemes: we buy in now on some vague promise of a future payout we’ll not be around to collect on

Corporate is the church now. Love it or be ostricized.

While your points on the economy are valid, I disagree with your take on Duplex.

Duplex isn't about scheduling or calendars, it's about robots conversing with humans. It's proof of concept, a stepping stone on the path to general artificial intelligence.

Now, when was the last time you came to book a haircut or restaurant table and concluded that the task was so onerous that you would ideally delegate it to a machine? And even if you can easily think of a scenario, would there not be something ethically questionable about doing so, if the person at the other end had no idea who or what they were talking to?

I hate talking on the phone. If I can't fill out a web form (login-free please) or send an email to complete some task like that, I'd love to have a robot do it for me. I don't see anything unethical about this as long as the robot performs the task reasonably well, doesn't waste the receptionist's time, etc....

The classic hacker ethic says it's bad for humans to be required to waste time on something a machine could do, and Google has just expanded the list of things machines can do. Of course, under that framework, it would be preferable to automate the receptionist taking the call as well.

I'm eager for this technology to become more general-purpose. For months, I've had a case open with an airline over an item that went missing from my checked bag. The only way to get updates is to call them on the phone. It first goes to an IVR, then a call center in India where the call is screened by a person, and only then to the actual department that can give me useful information. There is no direct line (I asked). The process is obviously designed to frustrate users so they give up. The hassle is arguably not worth the $90 they owe me, but I don't want to let them get away with it. I really wish I could have a robot talk to them.

Hmm, different strokes - different folks. I actually like to talk to people on the phone. Maybe I need to get out more, but when you can get to a real human, the issues at hand tend to get easier to deal with. Phone trees are a nightmare for me, and I just spam 0 until I get someone (typically works alright, but not always).

The trick, I have found, is to treat the other person on the line, as well, a real person. When they say their name, say it back to them, ask them how their day is, chat for a second about how it's their Wednesday (halfway there!), what the weather like where they are (Broncos are going to have a tough game, eh?), etc. Even just 30 seconds of chatter will get you great service. So many people treat them as 'the help', so when you come in and treat them as an equal human, their day just got a little better, and they'll treat you better too, because you treated them well first.

And I mean you really get better service. That direct line to their manager's manager? You have that now, just because you were nice. That bouquet of flowers for your mom/wife? It just got a little larger, because you asked them how their day is going. That bill you are having trouble paying? It's 15% off, because you complained about the snow too. Yeah, it's not a lot. Yeah, it happens maybe 1/10 times. But it is worth 30 seconds.

Besides, you got to make an actual human's day better. No one is too busy for that, for good manners and a smile, even if it's over the phone.

The reasons I would like refer a human or automaton depends upon the kind of transaction I need. If it’s something I think is done pretty often I’ll look for a web form with a workflow that someone has invested some time into to make sure the business process works. Additionally, 90% of the time I call a human to do this I can clearly tell that they’re filling out yet another form or even the same one I just had problems with - this is ultimately a UX and business process failure that results in a call center call. I typically wind up playing “let me spell my address and e-mail to someone using variations of military phonetic semaphores” when I can just type it in myself. The number of errors I’ve had over repeating entries over the phone that have resulted in rather serious repercussions are too numerous that I’d rather just type forms in myself if possible.

Where I want a person is when I want to bypass processes completely or I have a big exception that warrants a human. So if I’m calling your call center, you may as well send me up to tier 3 or higher because I’m going to be a pain.

And given I did support for a couple years myself, sure I’ll try to make their day a bit better where I can and try to have all my info ready and to be as calm as possible. Because I know it can take a while, so I usually have an hour or two set aside for these calls and can just wait and not have to hurry anyone.

I hate IVRs and phone trees too. I probably want the interaction to be a self-service website, depending on the context (making a restaurant reservation, delivery order, etc... are absolutely good fits for this).

For actually resolving a customer service issue, sure I'd rather talk to a human. I do try to be nice to them, and it does, indeed often result in better service.

For getting an update on what's going on with the request I made three months ago, I want a website, or push notifications by email.

Now the companies are gonna have to dial 0 for a human.

(Imagine a shopkeeper with a thick scottish accent). "We've got an opening for 4pm wednesday." "I'm sorry, I could not understand you. Please repeat that."

You have been able to book, as well as pay for, essentially any restaurant in China via WeChat for years. In Sweden most new services like authentication, payments or digital mail are by local companies. The world is increasingly routing around US tech companies to solve these problems.

No worries, soon enough we'll be rid of the horror that is "human interaction". I'm sure that this will have 0 widspread social implications.

Calling on the phone to reserve a table is not a meaningful or valuable human interaction to me. I doubt it is for the person whose job it is to take that call.

I'm pretty much the same way, but found it helps if you make it a goal to get the other person to break out of the script during the call. Say something silly, ask them how their day is going, ask them how busy they are today, if they get tired of calls like these, etc etc.

It is valuable for that person, that's how they're generating their income...

Answering the phone is often not the person's primary job; it may even be a distraction.

Even if a person's job is entirely replaced by a machine, the historical economic impact of automation has not been a reduction in employment nor an increase in inequality as the luddites feared.

Yeah, but I guess the bigger question is: is this convenience so large that it justifies that a single company puts a wall around a market with a gate with their name on it?

What do you mean? Has Google patented the use of computer-generated voices / language to contact a business?

No (or perhaps yes), but they are a big player, and this is a typical winner-takes-all situation. Soon everybody will access business X through Google, and this gives Google power over these businesses, just like Amazon has power over third-party sellers, for instance. For the consumer it means a minor convenience, but for the business-owner it means tougher competition, and loss of identity of their business. It's like selling software for years, then suddenly Apple comes along, "forces" you to use the AppStore, and demands a cut.

In short: the problem is that a company now regulates your market.

Ideally the other end would not rely on the phone, but so long as they do, yes. Anything to remove it from the lives of the rest of us is a good thing.

Of course, like raking leaves in your lawn, you’re going to run into a kind of diminishing returns situation. So I agree, albeit with an obvious point, My only qualm (beyond the banality of the thesis) is that this dude is forgetting about some other cool advances, such as the sharing economy (Uber/Lyft and airbnb) which kind of changed the world a little, messenger apps (which made day to day life a little more convenient for many and also played a role in some big geopolitical events). Also just b/c google launched its search engine in 99 or whatever doesn’t mean that they stopped innovating - incremental improvements in search have made it 1000x what it was then, and if you showed google maps to someone from 2000, they would think it is magic. The tools for making tech have gotten a lot better too, even if most of the use cases have already been covered. AI and blockchain can be revolutionary. The problem is how we structure society, where we’re all either just trying to make our daily bread or get rich, and this leads to a lot of misdirected effort.

> this dude is forgetting about some other cool advances, such as the sharing economy (Uber/Lyft and airbnb) which kind of changed the world a little

Beyond the “sharing” misnomer, those were proven concepts with existing industries. So far what's been proved is that if you're willing to pour billions of dollars into a company you can produce a better app than the incumbents, and that you can see short-term gains if you're willing to break the law and/or subsidize heavily.

> if you showed google maps to someone from 2000, they would think it is magic.

By 2000 the most likely reaction would have been “oh, it's like MapQuest but faster”. Google Maps reflects a lot of evolutionary improvements but the big change was the rise of the advertising model meaning that you didn't have to pay a third-party for GIS software or a subscription service to get annual map updates.

> > if you showed google maps to someone from 2000, they would think it is magic.

> By 2000 the most likely reaction would have been “oh, it's like MapQuest but faster”.

Depends on context. Sure, maybe if you showed it to them on desktop with basic operations (e.g., turned off traffic display, etc.)

Show using it on mobile for navigation with “Ok, Google, navigate to...” with turn-by-turn navigation and real-time, traffic-based route adjustment with voice promoted and confirmation, and it's at least as far beyond 2000s MapQuest as that version of MapQuest is above a dead-tree book of maps.

It's not obvious the sharing economy is actually a win. It's certainly a change, but particularly with Uber and with gig-economy delivery services, drivers aren't necessarily happier, better paid, and less stressed than they would have been with a less disrupted job.

Sometimes the consequences take a while to work through. What will Amazon do after it kills bricks and mortar? How many customers will it have when most of the population is barely scraping by with gig economy now-you-see-it-now-you-don't income?

His point is most, not all, tech innovations don't really pan out. Sure there are examples of great products but there also examples of big duds. For example, according to an EPI paper sharing economy accounts for less than 0.1% of total economy:

https://www.epi.org/press/uber-drivers-earn-the-equivalent-o...

So, not a win really. At least not right now.

Almost all innovation in general doesn't pan out.

Look at all the money we spend on medical/pharma research. Most of it doesn't pan out, but we're basically ok with that since the rewards are pretty large when it does.

cool advances, such as the sharing economy (Uber/Lyft and airbnb)

Unlicensed minicabs and illegal sublets had already been invented. Putting an app on them is not exactly innovative.

That is not his point. His point is that big flashy introductions never (almost) materialize in something truly world-changing. When was the sharing economy introduced? No one knows, it just happened organically.

Well... I don't particularly agree with everything this guy is saying, but he is right about the internet of things. In my experience, it is quite useless, and it is a danger to privacy. One of the my friends constantly uses Amazon Alexa and Siri for even the most basic questions like, "What is x + y?" which could be easily done faster on a desk calculator. Either I am a person who likes to make things more inconvenient for myself, or I just don't understand modern technology.

I think IoT doesn't yet deliver an order of magnitude value-add over analog technologies. It's really not so hard for me to flip my own light switch or find some music to play without issuing voice commands. And I never have to worry about a light switch getting borked by a bad update or malware or connectivity issues.

When my home is smart enough to cook all my meals and do dishes and fold laundry, then I'm ready to buy into it.

I can agree on the privacy concerns front, but for what it's worth, I've found my Google Home to be quite helpful. So if we're solely talking about how it can be helpful:

- When I'm cooking and my hands are dirty and I want to set a timer

- When I'm cooking and my hands are dirty and I want to change music/lower volume/raise volume/call someone (or do a measurement conversion)

- Turning off all the lights in my house when I'm already in bed and forgot whether I left some on

- Laying in bed with the gf and asking random questions out of curiosity

- Asking how long it will take to get somewhere if my gf and I are pondering some place to eat but are at the dinner table without our phones

- Get home after having a few beers and dive into the messy chicken wings with both my hands, and then realize I want to turn on the TV, play a show or change the current one on my Shield.. perfect use for the GH

- Since I already look at my phone way too much (potentially straining muscles in my neck), I can leave my phone in another room and still get quick answers to deep life questions without tilting my neck downwards

They're all __super__ minor of course, but honestly, I'm so used to the convenience now it actually feels weird to have to do some of these things 'manually'. I do understand there are serious concerns about privacy that may or may not offset the benefits, definitely plenty of room for discussion on that.

Yeah, I see. I don't know, due to my Russo-Ukrainian accent, I have been dissuaded from using voice recognition software since Siri was released.

But, I see how useful it can be when your hands are busy! My home has an ancient early 2000 smart home installed, which can be updated at a pretty big price, so I don't bother. I guess I am just used to my "inconvenience."

> "What is x + y?" which could be easily done faster on a desk calculator.

Yes, assuming you're already sitting at your desk, with your desk calculator in hand.

Also, this might be a generational gap issue here, but desk calculator? Not smartphone? (And if I'm at my desk, my goto is usually "ipython<ENTER>x+y<ENTER>" anyway.)

Okay, sorry man. Due to me being a huge computer geek, I refer to most calculators as. "desk calculators," due to my experience with old technology and Unix software. Let's just say that I am part of the earliest Gen Z's. (I came from a second world country, so, maybe that's why I have more experience with older tech.)

Sorry, my point wasn't to call you out - but it's unequivocally faster to call out "Hey Dingbat, what's 7 + 17" than it is to pull out a device, unless that device is already unlocked and in your hand.

(Also, howdy fellow second-world country person! Pretty nice to meet someone who knows the term :P)

That's quite untrue for more complex examples of 7 + 17.

"Hey Dingbat, what's 10 percent of 50 times 33 times 125. Oh sorry, 10 percent of open parentheses 50 times 33 times 125 close parentheses".

Even just talking it is substantially slower than typing the number into a calculator. App, desktop, or phone.

Especially when there are parenthesis. And when you are in the kitchen, well... it is loud. Accents mess the voice recognition + the sound of the kitchen.

> "What is x + y?" which could be easily done faster on a desk calculator.

I seriously doubt that even if we still lived in a world where normal people actually owned calculators. This is just "No wireless. Less space than a nomad." again.

You'd be surprised, people still own calculators! Also, please, don't call me a nomad. As a programmer, I always have a binary and scientific calculator at hand.

And just because I don't particularly enjoy IOT of Wireless Headphones, does not mean that I am a nomad, mate!

"It’s years since Silicon Valley gave us a game-changer. Instead, from curing disease to colonies on Mars, we’re fed overblown promises" Come on. "We don't have a colony on Mars yet" doesn't mean there isn't crazy innovation going on with extremely tangible benefits. Any of the following is a game-changer.

1. Dec'15 SpaceX performs first ever orbital-class rocket landing on land.

2. Apr'16 SpaceX performs first ever orbital-class rocket landing on a ship.

3. Mar'17 SpaceX reuses first orbital-class rocket.

4. Feb'18 SpaceX launches Falcon Heavy, the highest payload capacity of any currently operational launch vehicle.

5. May'18 SpaceX launches Falcon 9 Block 5, set to give USA direct human access to space (in late 2018) for the first time since Mar'11.

SpaceX is a Los Angeles based company, and Elon Musk also lives in Los Angeles. I’m not sure if that counts as Silicon Valley.

Agreed, but TFA targets SpaceX directly from the subtitle on.

Sounds like a list of things pulled from a SpaceX brochure, not sure how exactly they are game changers.

Well sure, any company that makes game changing advances is going to list them in its brochure.

Assuming positive intent rather than sarcasm, so here's why they're game changers:

1.2.3. landing and reusing orbital rockets will deliver a huge increase in launch frequency and a huge reduction in cost, both acting to increase humanity's practical access to space. It's the difference between building a plane that flies once and building a plane that files a hundred times.

4. Falcon Heavy allows us to launch higher payload missions that was possible before. Especially since nobody assembles spacecraft in orbit, this raises the cap on how massive a spacecraft humanity can operate.

5. Giving America the ability to put humans in space without relying on the Russian Soyuz is a political and strategic victory for the US.

Sure, there will not be another social network or another smartphone, but innovation is still taking place in many other areas. It's often hard to see what game-changers look like ahead-of-time before they are actually recognized as such (otherwise, we'd all be successful VCs).

"Why is Elon Musk wasting his time getting us to Mars when there are problems on Earth that need fixing?!?"

You jest, but it's worth referencing the "Why explore space?"[1] letter. Penned back during the Space Race, as a response to a nun concerned with apparently wasteful spending, contrasted to poverty suffered by the people she was working with.

On a lighter note: we've put people on the Moon before we've put wheels on the luggage[2]. Exploration before comforts.

[1] http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

[2] https://betafactory.com/what-came-first-wheeled-luggage-or-a...

I'm joking, but only because people are still writing these articles, e.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/02/elon-mu...

The pessimistic response to articles like that is that making Mars habitable is a more realistic goal than preventing humans from making earth uninhabitable.

If Mars eventually becomes habitable, how long do you think it will take before we make it uninhabitable?

Same thing can be said about lunar exploration project which in hindsight brought the personal computing revolution.

I hear that a lot, but I confess I don't understand.

With Apollo, the government (NASA and DOD) had specific hard requirements, and went to private contractors to build them. Those private contractors created such things as the integrated circuit, and then later sold them to other markets. Everybody wins.

With SpaceX, they're using (AFAICT) mostly standard parts, like computers running Linux. They're not developing any new computer technology, and they're one private company so they're not marketing it beyond space flight.

(They are doing great new things with systems integration, but it's not clear how that would benefit anyone outside that space program, and they're not publishing much information, anyway.)

I always thought the major benefit of Project Apollo was that it was public spending on R&D. How will private spaceflight companies like SpaceX benefit non-spaceflight-related endeavors?

SpaceX still has suppliers and employees who will diffuse the knowledge into the rest of the industry eventually.

SpaceX is definitely doing less R&D than the Apollo program, but it's also not eating 1.6% of the federal budget (~$60bn/yr), so I don't think it's fair to expect the same level of R&D.

I think it's also clear that SpaceX is going to drive cost of access to space down for other industries, e.g. telecommunications, surveying, etc, which will against have knock on effects for other industries.

Elon Musk should probably focus his immediate efforts on saving Tesla from bankruptcy.

Unfortunately, this article seems as empty and uninteresting as the products it's criticizing. The Guardian should ask idlewords to write one for them instead.

For us living inside the feedback loop of the tech world it might be hard to see the relative importance of some of the things. I think he brings up an interesting topic from the perspective of someone living outside of the tech world.

I don't disagree that the topic is important, I just think we have much better critiques being written on that topic regularly, from both inside and outside the tech industry.

Also, the SV reality distortion field hasn't infected all the tech industry. In the companies I worked, nobody was convinced we were changing the world, we're just writing some tools for cash.

I'm not surprised since the day I got into an argument with the guardians senior tech editor and he tried to argue Foss didn't matter and Linux was a fanboy fad...

The senior editor...

If you're a software developer that's certainly a valid gripe but what if you're part of the 99.999% of people who use computers but don't run servers? Linux doesn't run your desktop or iOS devices and if Google swapped the kernel on Android the users wouldn't notice.

It might be true in case of the Linux kernel, but I think that most software that one is using is made of many many FOSS libraries. Imagine that all libraries and compilers are either from the OS vendor or proprietary. We would see much less software. People may not run servers, but they are surely using the software running on them - same thing applies. Android has much more FOSS than only kernel, and I'm not talking about AOSP.

Chrome, Safari, OS X, Firefox are standing upon millions of lines of open source code.

Now FOSS is at least a crankshaft of software world. Even if that would be all there is to it, you couldn't say that it doesn't matter.

Well from a desktop perspective that's kinda true.

The main point of this article is mostly misguided, IMO. The real one is that you don't know which tech innovation will have a great impact before hand.

Most of the things that has big impacts are actually things we skip through. For example, we have a pretty decent camera in our pockets at all times. We take pictures constantly. The "selfie" revolution, one that has big impacts in how we perceive ourselves and want other to perceive us is enabled by having an small quality camera around. At some point passing from "terrible quality" to "good enough quality" made a jump in that. Sure, not everyone takes selfies. But it has been a big change in photography in the last 10 years or so. So big we have a new name for something it exist before.

I'm pretty sure that being able to track a run and share it on social networks is a big motivator to do exercise, for example.

I seems weird to me talking to AI, and even weirder that "the future" is calling to a shop with an AI instead of using some sort of web shop/app/whatever to get an appointment.

But who knows...

Most revolutions have been silent revolutions. The only one that was an instant world event was the iPhone launch. All the technologies named in the article; Wifi, Google Search, Facebook, Twitter, even YouTube and Wikipedia were not introduced to millions of people at once in a Silicon Valley event. AI will change the world, but it'll be slow, like how the internet changed the world little by little replacing retail, letters, phone calls, and now maybe 40 years later, TV. AI is a process revolution, not a product revolution. So he's right, big tech products have been mostly useless, specially compared to their promises.

My takeaway: Many technological innovations don't turn out to be world-changing events. And those that do take several years to trickle down to mainstream usage.

For those of us that keep a skeptical mindset when evaluating new technology, none of this comes as a surprise.

Let's remember this, from the last few years, written by numerous major media editorial pages (paraphrasing, of course): "Silicon Valley never tackles the big issues. They just invent frivolous new gadgets which no on really needs, or some new app that shares pictures of cute kittens or is the next social network. They should focus on big picture issues - hunger, housing, crime, etc."

Those are harder to approach and solve, and you need more patience for results. Now we see complaining that the nifty gadgets aren't coming like they used to. Hmm.

Hunger, crime, these are not technological issues solvable by tech companies, unless your idea of a solution involves building a more effective police state. These are political issues our leadership has neither the will nor incentive to solve.

For example, Housing isn't a problem, it's an investment opportunity. The people donating to your campaign wouldn't like it if their investments were pushed down in value.

An app can't fix your economy being dominated by bad actors.

hunger- Has been mostly solved thanks to GMO increasing crop yields.

crime- Is strongly correlated with poverty, which has been rapidly reduced globally thanks to technological innovation

Housing- Will be solved by tech making remote work viable and thus reducing demand in cities. Automation and some form of income stipend could also allow people to live in more affordable places rather than cities.

Your view of "tech" is pretty stunted if you only think web apps.

> Will be solved by tech making remote work viable and thus reducing demand in cities

Remote work is viable, and yet the major tech companies are focused on hiring developers in a small number of overcrowded cities (or moving developers that it hires into those cities). I expect no solution to housing or remote work from them.

Isn't that exactly why we should expect a solution from them? Google knows first-hand why some leaders are opposed to remote work, and stands to make a lot of money if they can overcome it.

They haven’t shown any interest in doing so; if they are going to, I’d first expect some indications from them that they see it as a problem.

> crime- Is strongly correlated with poverty, which has been rapidly reduced globally thanks to technological innovation

Small scale crime might be. White collar crime is adversely correlated, strongly, with poverty. And it sinks entire nations.

What nation has been sunk by white collar crime? I'm not disagreeing that it's bad, but I don't think it's that bad.

Wasn't the global recession caused by white collar crime?

Wait, is that article simply ignoring that self-driving car are now commercially available in Phoenix? That’s probably a bigger revolution than the steam engine, and someone’s take on this is “That’s it?”

Let’s ignore the shattering impact of incredibly convenient video streaming, content filtering via image tagging, electric cars, transportation or food on demand, having contactless payment available to anyone for pennies…

MTurk pays offensively little, sure, but thanks to ‘Silicon Valley’ anyone can work now, no matter how much discrimination or how remote they are — and buy groceries with it. If the accusation is “building”, Amazon built it. If you want it to be more lucrative, you can either legally enforce minimum wage, or start tasks that pay more.

Shelter, like food, is a problem we solved a while ago, as long as you can afford it: inequality is a problem, but you can’t blame AirBnB, SpareRoom and countless others for allowing people to find others with a lifestyle, a schedule that fit them so that they can save on rent. Let’s not talk about how internet empowered people to compare mortgages.

Crime: Well, yes, Silicon Valley has done a lot for Law enforcement, but expectedly and Thank God, not as a B2C business model.

I’m honestly more confused arguing that article than I would argue with a flat-earther. At least a flat-earther is probably right when they say that you have not personally checked yourself for what you claim.

> Wait, is that article simply ignoring that self-driving car are now commercially available in Phoenix? That’s probably a bigger revolution than the steam engine, and someone’s take on this is “That’s it?

Are you being ironic? The steam engine literally reshaped the world. I think you express exactly what the author is talking about: Acting as if just by announcing it, it has already succeeded.

But imagine someone sitting there in 1804 Wales, looking at the first steam train, saying "slow down buddy you haven't actually changed anything yet". It seems like there's a sense in which this is short-sighted.

Of course is short sighted, but those are not the only two options. You can think the idea will change the world without drinking the cool-aid that it already has.

The cars work. It’s not a stretch to understand what will happen as Waymo scales operation -- and it’s not ironic that not just replacing the vast majority of working class job, but making transport virtually free will have a bigger impact that the steam engine had. There is a lot that happens in history with understanding, threats and promisses.

As much as I want it to happen, and as much as I agree with you that in the near future is going to happen, I think you are missing the context. You seem to be forgetting we already have cars. Not only that, we already have planes, bullet trains, spaceships, etc. We even have the bicycle; transport has been "free" for a long time. The only thing equivalent to the steam engine in impact would be teleportation. That is the jump from the horse to a train, or from a train to an airplane. Self driving cars are cool, they are not steam-engine-in-the-1800s cool.

Steam engine made operational cost of transport an order of magnitude cheaper (while capital expenditure was two orders of magnitude higher) by using coal instead of oats (and locomotive instead of a horse-driven cart).

Self-driving cars will lower the operational cost of transport by another order of magnitude, but barely raise capital expenditure, actually probably concentrating it dramatically (as Waymo will probably build cars that cost double and can drive ten to a hundred times further).

Self driving car is essentially tele-transportation in your sleep.

With constant innovation the temptation to jump to the next new thing is great. This mitigates the value you gain by using something regularly and consistently over a long term period.

I've used Evernote since 2012 - when I started it really wasn't that useful. But now, after over 6 years of using it daily, I have a huge body of content personal to me which I find tremendously useful. This only came about because I didn't jump to the next shiny alternative.

I predict that AI has 5-10 more years of "mostly useless" ahead until it suddenly becomes interesting.

Another thing he criticised was the Internet of Things and other gadgets: I agree with the author on that one. I hope it dies a quick death. If there's a tradeoff between an internet-connected device that lasts 1-2 years and a not-connected device lasting 20 years, I would always chose the longer-lasting one.

The crowd on here seems to have a valid complaint against the IoTs while being very short sighted on what actually can be done.

Currently most companies want to be Facebook or Google and collect all the data they possibly can while putting out a mediocre/bad product with no security that only works when there is an internet. No consumer actually wants this.

Instead of killing the industry, we need a new generation of companies that put out products that function the same or ideally better than their analog competitors. Data collection, such as usage information, and internet connectivity will be what sets these products apart from their traditional competitors. However, the emphasis should be on sending that data to the owner of the product, instead of sending it to the cloud for the companies benefit. Optimizing energy usage, learning usage patterns, etc will be great differentiators. My products working together will be an even bigger differentiator

Aggregation of that data can be useful, and could be opt in. I'd love to know that I seem to use way more energy than other people around me. Perhaps I have a bad AC, or my insulation is particularly bad.

The biggest issue right now is that companies are putting out insecure products that are completely broken if the parent company of the product are left out of the loop. The products need to work locally, with no reliance on the parent company, and only rely on a company server for true enhancements that can not be calculated locally.

You are describing the ideal. But for some reason all that companies can come up with are closed "ecosystems" where systems work well with each other as long as you buy everything from the same manufacturer. Interoperability and open standards seem to be in no companies' interest. Where is that new generation of companies going to come from?

> I'd love to know that I seem to use way more energy than other people around me. Perhaps I have a bad AC, or my insulation is particularly bad.

Or perhaps you are running too many always-on IoT devices :-) SCNR

If the established players are all interested in siphoning that data, who will fund the development of such technology?

The problem is a lot of these world-changing technologies seem inevitable only in hindsight. Read decades of science fiction before the '90s, and nobody predicted the idea of everyone carrying a personal phone with them at all times. Much less connecting it to a global data network.

These things always look inevitable in hindsight. But it takes some real cleverness to get them in foresight.

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.

- Nikola Tesla, 1926.

https://kottke.org/18/04/nikola-tesla-predicted-the-smartpho...

to be fair that was not science fiction

Not only were personal wireless communications predicted, but also that we'd be absorbed by them in social situations!

https://punch.photoshelter.com/image/I00006GHuH4c0Ojo

Dick Tracy in the 40's Edit: Star Trek communicators, 1960's

Star Trek communicators seem a lot more like walkie-talkies than phones.

edit: Note that only active duty Starfleet personnel seem to carry communicators. Civilians do not.

I don't know about this. I think they can be useless, useful, and terrifying all at the same time. I walked into my local petco one day and saw these:

https://www.glofish.com

Useless, all that technology expressing itself in making glowing fish. The tech behind it however is incredibly useful. But wow, the existential dread watching them swim around under a black light was considerable.

Or on the other shelves, looking and seeing dog or cat "calming collars" that use pheromones tailored specifically for individual species. I mean, its funny at how useless and useful it is at the same time. Is your dog a worrywart? Use pheromones to make him stress free! But you wonder some day if some bright tech baron will start to make human calming collars, or bracelets, or what have you...

Maybe not big tech per se, but the writer of this article might have a failure of imagination if they only see the uselessness.

This is dense, I think there are a few threads of reason though. The exaggeration in marketing common in tech is quite tumultuous. The AI behind duplex is a staggering technical achievement, and really is a small whistle at how AI is going to start to change some fundamental aspects of society. To say AI is not going to be a fundamental change to our literal society in the very near future is naive. But I can understand how the trivialness of the use case is playing down the real achievement here.

I do think though that AI is the last "fundamental" change information technologies will bring though. From here out, the future is in the convergence of other hard sciences with advanced IT. Each "Big thing" has been a fundamental building block. By themselves small, but they get significant as they combine.

> I do think though that AI is the last "fundamental" change information technologies will bring though.

There are wast continents of mostly unexplored or abandoned territory in IT. Moreover, some of them are well documented. Some of them were documented in 1970s. The fact that IT professionals today don't know about them and can't imagine anything more significant than "AI" for pizza ordering, is unsettling. Just to name a few things Alan Kay often talks about:

- Automated system integration or tools for generalized interconnection of applications available to end users.

- WYSIWYG for the Web.

- Constraint-based problem-solvers accessible to mere mortals.

- Agent oriented programming with UI simple enough for normal people to use.

- Dynamic simulations in "normal" software (not CADs)

I am absolutely sickened by the fact that the most common response to this list is "nobody needs this". As far as I'm concerned, each of those things is needed orders of magnitude more than a haircut-scheduling AI.

You misunderstand what I mean then. I view "AI" as a series of technologies which can be applied to a problem space. You're right in that there is a lot of open problem space, and there's definately a lot of additional technologies which can be discovered in the indivudal categories of technologies. I just don't know what the next "major" category of technology is.

For your example, automated system integration is the combination of existing technologies. That's mostly what I'm implying. We have breadth, now the work is on the depth.

> automated system integration is the combination of existing technologies.

Which ones? As far as I can see, it's all manual right now. Service integration is probably the largest area of IT at the moment and it sucks in more and more engineers every year. So maybe the notion of "web services" and "APIs" simply aren't the right ways to go about it.

What is the real technical achievement behind Duplex? What we've seen is a rather short tech demo.

Speech synthesis has improved, but are you saying that Duplex is a massive step forward in speech recognition and natural language processing too?

It’s a major payoff of a lot of small research advances made by Google over the last few years. In and of itself it’s not a terribly groundbreaking research result, but a bunch of parallel AI, NLP, and systems research had to go into this to take it from toy experience to what will eventually be a robust service. This is the promise of AI in the 2020s: incremental services that chip away at various low-cognition but high-variance/pattern-based tasks that litter our home and professional lives.

I feel like more than half the earths population already talks in 'preordained cliches'.

He cites social media as "These things have changed the world" and rubbishes Google Duplex. But back when they started Twitter and the like seemed a bit of a joke but increased in scope. And AI like Duplex will do so too. The fact that AI is a bit rubbish in some ways just now doesn't mean it won't change the world shortly.

This is only one small part of the article, but: I think the revolution in Duplex isn't about letting customers use it to schedule appointments and stuff. I think its much more significant from the perspective of using it as a way to improve Google's data for themselves. They mentioned they're going to use it soon to improve the accuracy of their business open/close times. Imagine other applications; asking businesses how busy it is right now, confirming road closures with municipal governments, etc.

Also imagine it opened up on Google Cloud, in a product similar to AWS Connect.

Finally, imagine this: They've always had a huge amount of data for human voices to train their AI models. Here's one more; being able to call anyone on the planet and get them talking in a way that is natural, then using the data on the other end of the phone to further train the accuracy of the voices they use. Kind of like ReCaptcha, but for voices.

Great, so Google can get even more data. Huzzah!? Why is that a good thing, and what benefit does it provide to consumers? The only thing you mentioned that has even marginal benefit to the public is better search data, and I get less and less convinced that this will happen. I may be an outlier, but I have found Google search less useful in the past year, unless I go through steps to avoid personalization. Rather than search the part # that I requested, it just thinks I want to go to digikey.

And dear God, spam calls are already bad enough, why do we want to make them even more realistic? I fail to see even one application where I would prefer to talk to a more realistic robot.

The big picture innovations take longer and arrive slower, but the small, life-enhancing improvements deliver so smoothly and consistently that you don't notice until they're taken away. It's only when you have to use a 5-year-old phone or application that you realise how much worse things were back then.

I use a 6 year old phone. It has a third party extra thick battery and a microSD card slot. It does the core functions of a phone just as well as a modern one (voice call, SMS, clock, calculator, flashlight, music player). The camera is worse, but if I cared about quality I'd use a standalone camera. As for apps/Internet, it's roughly the same as modern phones: a whole lot of barely usable garbage only suitable for emergency use when you don't have access to a desktop. It seems to me that any modern phone would be a downgrade.

I saw a funny cloud today, I took a picture of it. I usually don't carry an extra standalone camera with me all day just for moments like that.

I can also google up information about light-bulbs when I'm standing at the store wondering if I should get X or Y. Or if some product doesn't specify if it's gluten free or not and the ingredients look a little iffy.

There are plenty of tiny improvements. It doesn't revolutionize my life, but having my old Nokia would definitely be a downgrade.

A 6 year old phone is still capable of doing that I think Samsung Galaxy was at version 3 or 4 around 2012, Nokia was big before 2007, 11 years ago.

If the case being made is just that we don't need the absolutely latest smartphone, I'm totally onboard.

But there is also a lot of offhand grumpiness about how we don't need all this technology, which I disagree with. Technology improves our lives, but it's not always apparent right away.

Five years ago I had a phone with buttons and rarely had to stop the impulse of trowing it into a wall because google kept installing updates to apps I don't want and can't do more than factory reset.

Sure, I didn't have a fancy app to look at the timetable for the bus, but there was a wap-page I could use and frankly the apps are about as frustrating but now because touch interactions so often go wrong without real buttons.

And I use both vim and ssh daily, rarely wishing I had an new app to replace them with.

Swap out the stock distribution - I'm assuming Android here - for something like AOSP, leave off the Google-specific bits (i.e. do not install 'gapps' or anything which depends on it, install the mock-google-bits instead if you want to run something which depends on Google play services. Use F-Droid instead of the Google play store. Voila, a phone which does not do silly updates behind your back, does not install apps you do not want and which should last for years and years - mine is about 7.5 years old now.

Regardless of whether big tech is doing anything useful it's obvious that we have fewer important innovations now than in the period around the late 19th, early 20th century when we got: electricity, electric motors, dynamite, phones, cars, concrete, planes, tractors, radio, plastic, assembly lines and modern forms of business organization. If we go a little further into the 20th century we get nuclear power and the transistor.

I don't think we'll see another time period like that. But that's not really a bad thing. You can only discover really important things once and then they eventually become part of everyday life. A more interesting question is how to sustain our standard of living when we can no longer expect high economic growth from new innovations.

To me many products are just the result of management asking engineers to apply the company IP to make something that can be sold. The market is saturated in every niche with a huge load of products compared to the number of potential buyers, so they have to act creatively in the hope one day they make a killer gimmick. Example: if IoT and AI are the new words, then everything must be connected and/or exhibit human-like intelligence, at the risk of developing junk product with no actual usefulness, like shoes asking politely the user if they can twit in real time how much his feet stink after a long walk. But again that is rather the result of management looking for money in every possible way than brilliant minds attempting to solve vital problems.

My problem with the innovations mentioned in the article lie mainly in the ‘predictive text’ emails from the google presentation. Such a small, minutely helpful feature, and yet like the author mentions could lead to an even more technologically led “groupthink” society, where machines determine our current cliches, which no one will break from. Anyways, I get that big innovations really come as several small innovations, but who out there is imagining the future of this technology, as some were imagining the smartphone or tablet a decade before it’s advent? I have yet to read anything by anyone who has a vision for the next big AI innovation, no matter how moonshot-y

And even if you can easily think of a scenario, would there not be something ethically questionable about doing so, if the person at the other end had no idea who or what they were talking to?

Generally I consider something ethically questionable when a person is harmed in some way. Can someone explain how a receptionist might be harmed by unknowingly booking an appointment with a robot instead of a person? The real person shows up. The business gets an appointment. The receptionist does their job. Where does the ethical question come in?

Deception is a form of harm.

So children are harmed by believing in Santa Claus? If you politely tell someone you enjoyed their cooking even if it wasn't to your taste, you've harmed them?

Context matters. Deception, in and of itself, is not inherently harmful.

It makes literally 0 difference in the life of the person booking the appointment if it's a robot or a human telling them the desired time and date.

>might Duplex be a grim portal into a future in which high-flyers get digital “assistants” to do their chores

High flyers = people that own an Android phone and get haircuts.

Its a good thing and that's how i should be. Startups have 1% chance of success and probably less when it reaches IPO. If big tech with deep pockets have far better shot (say 50%), then the level playing field would slip further and further away from startups. Innovation would stop and we will go back to the era of Microsoft/Oracle killing companies like Netscape.

Tech inspires science fiction and science fiction inspires tech.

Although we won't ever have a time machine that travels backwards in time, there are a lot of commonplace things that were once science fiction.

Self driving cars

Tesla electric cars and electric car infrastructure

The sharing economy where we rent instead of buy things hopefully will stop or at least slow our rabid consumption

These are huge changes in the way we will live our lives.

>I thought about a vision of the near future in which half the human race will converse in preordained cliches.

Maybe that's how the "Darmok and Jalad" language came about.

Duplex has the possibility of being huge. Think of how many boring / transactional phone calls are made each day.

> Every now and again, at some huge auditorium, a senior staff member at one of the big firms based in northern California – ordinarily a man...

Absolutely irrelevant to the topic. I already ignore the hype, but I think I'll also ignore this author's hyperbole.

This is just pointless pessimistic ranting.

It’s a journalist with an opinion on something he has no expertise in. I recommend not reading it. He doesn’t understand that the toy apps that are barely usable by enthusiasts today improve rapidly until using them is mundane and normal. There’s a pg essay on how the best startups are the ones where people think it’s a toy or a feature that’s relevant.

Don’t read the article.

I agree! Hy Brasil is not sinking, ignore the panic mongers, there are others with more experience in these matters than you... https://youtu.be/qJh6EQ5gv7g

For anyone else who didn’t get the reference that was sarcasm.

http://www.subzin.com/quotes/M106664b34/Erik+the+Viking/Hy-B....

On a non-sarcastic note the toy that’s barely usable by hobbyists is the early adopter segment, after the innovators. There’s a reasonable explanation at businessdictionary.

http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/early-adopters....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com