Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

I was just thinking the other day that we're in (or are at least entering) a slightly sad era as far as tech is concerned. Not too long ago (it feels, anyway) there was this explosion of possibilities when smartphones arrived on the scene. People were doing genuinely impressive and innovative things at a fair clip.

That's kind of dried up now. The latest iterations of smartphones are just minor progressions on previous models. Supposed new frontiers (AR/VR, self driving cars) have largely disappointed. The problems (the real problems) we face today like climate change, growing income inequality, stagnating public transit, aren't really solvable by most of us in tech. In fact, in retrospect I wonder how many problems we were really solving anyway (is Uber just a giant VC investment bubble? Will we look back on it as a distraction from improving public transit?)

...so yeah, I dunno. Feels like we're in a fallow year or few. It's not that problems aren't solvable, it's that they will take wide scale activism and a great deal of human work. A new API or tool isn't going to cut it.

I'd agree we're in a fallow period and have been since 2015 or so.

I was thinking recently about the nature of fallow periods in tech and wondering if they're actually tied up with emotional cycling in the general public. It's impossible for millions of people to remain excited forever. Instead, we get bubble years where new innovations are coming out fast and furious, sentiment is rising, people are happy and excited, prosperity will go on forever; hype years, where the public unconsciously knows the innovations being hyped aren't useful but companies still have money to burn; and then we get bust years where everyone gets disillusioned, there are predictions that everything useful has already been invented, much teeth-gnashing about the decline of innovation, and an increased focus on politics, social ills, and gaming or other distractions (none of which ever get solved or go away, we just forget about them during bubble years).

Thinking about tech cycles in my own lifetime, we had bubble (1981-1987, driven by the PC & GUI), hype (1987-1991, driven by AI, 3D graphics, CD-ROMs, speech recognition), bust (1991-1995), bubble (1995-1998, Internet), hype (1998-2001, dot-coms), bust (2001-2004), bubble (2004-2007, Web 2.0), hype (2007-2008, when everybody and their mother had a social network), bust (2009-2010), bubble (2011-2014, mobile), hype (2014-2015: AR/VR, AI, smartwatches, self-driving cars, Theranos, Juicero), bust (2016-present). Bust cycles seem to last 3-4 years, so we're probably nearing the end of this one, but it's still unclear what round of innovations will kick off the next bubble.

Interesting analysis. I don't see "Quantum Computing" in there (maybe next?) and would throw "Blockchain" into the 2014-15 hype set.

depends on how you look at bust years. i would argue that 2009 and 2010 still fall into the social network bubble. i would probably combine 2007-2015 into one long excitement period transitioning from social networks to iphone apps to blockchain/ar/vr/self driving cars etc.

5G will probably bring in another wave of smartphone and IoT innovation. Imagine what can be done when sensors/cameras can transmit 10x the amount of data per second that they can now. I'm especially interested in how this might enable low-cost high-quality telemedicine.

> Imagine what can be done when sensors/cameras can transmit 10x the amount of data per second that they can now.

I've thought about this before and honestly I can't come up with many things. Telemedicine in terms of speaking to a doctor over video is already very possible over the connections we have today. Bringing that to a wider audience (say, third world countries) is an interesting possibility, but it also requires bringing 5G to third world countries, so I don't think that's going to happen too quickly.

Aside from that, what does 5G really bring us? The same stuff, only faster. I mean, good, sure. But it's not that inspiring.

https://www.geek.com/tech/worlds-first-5g-powered-remote-bra...

https://www.cnet.com/news/5g-could-make-self-driving-cars-sm...

There's also the possibility of much faster speeds even in areas without 5g, since the competition will make 3g speeds a really bad look.

For most IoT applications an increase in bandwidth wouldn't be as beneficial as, for example, a decrease in power usage or an increase in range (without also increasing power usage/complexity/etc).

Having tried to work with Sigfox & Lora, I can only concur

They are great, but some use cases quickly hit their limits

If you model the capabilities of a software/hardware package as intelligence, then it's easy to see that a handheld device is a "node" of intelligence. And then, between (non-airgapped) nodes, there are "pipes" carrying intelligence between the "personal" nodes (e.g., computers, smartphones, etc.) and the "corporate" nodes (e.g., servers, cloud services, etc.).

The question is this: if the bandwidth of the pipe is expanded to infinity, does the intelligence inhered in the personal owned device remain, or does it wither away... into a rented, datamined, and preternaturally infrastructurally fragile "the cloud"?

Thus far the evidence seems to suggest that "another wave of smartphone and IoT innovation" will fully and finally turn personal devices into dumb terminals administered according to the whim of the Great IBM in the Sky.

Otoh, smartphones dumbed down technology. Research in new interfaces got limited to touchscreens, and content got limited to whatever fits in a feed. I think smartphones took us back. We re still typing out thoughts through keyboards

For smartphones, I think there's a huge amount of work still needed to make them accessible/understandable/safe for the uninitiated, including but not limited to the elderly and isolated. If, as seems horribly likely, we're moving toward a future where smartphones are not optional, something has to give.

The obvious problem is that it's not a glamorous or technically impressive thing to be working on, and isn't going to be remotely interesting to the people who'd be working on it because, well, they already know how to use their smartphones.

Just add physical knobs and buttons. Older people are much more familiar with those. It might also improve accessibility

Where did the assumption that tech solves big problems come in? Consumer problems of course, but societal problems? Somehow people assumed that solving the problem of being bored on the train is a short jump from solving the problem of housing costs and its not.

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