Whatever happened to the Next Big Things?
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The consumer electronics industry is desperate for something new they can sell to everybody. VR headgear was the last big hope. There's nothing after that nearing production. The industry is forced into price competition on existing stuff. Look how cheap huge-screen TVs have become.
This is the downside of the "digital convergence" - no need for new hardware; new things are just apps.
Some of the next big things turned out to be too hard. Flying cars - batteries still too heavy, jet engines still too expensive. Self-driving - harder to do than expected, hardware too expensive. Internet of Things - to do much of anything that affects the real world, it requires installation, which Silicon Valley isn't set up to do. (If "we service what we sell" Sears was still around...) That's also the big problem with home solar. Robot vacuum cleaners - still not very good vacuums. Robots that can handle things - robotic manipulation in unstructured situations still works badly after 50 years.
Their solution is to make disposable hardware, and the only way to update apps is to buy this year's hardware (if the company is still in business).
I'd go with Crispr.. and stem cell therapy.
People kind of assume that tech development will always be there and even increase but I don't think that's an assumption we can make.
To be truely impactful, the development needs to be in areas that are important to humanity. Where are those areas? it's all in Maslow's heirarchy of needs. Most human beings (99% ~ even those in supposedly 1st world countries) are at the bottom-most level: Shelter, Food. In this modern world, you need 3 other things as well: Transportation to go to the job, education to get the job, and medical insurance to keep the money you earn. to be truely impactful, innovation needs to happen in one of those 5 major areas: shelter, food, transporation, education or medical.
No way. Life expectancy is going DOWN in the U.S. While true that this is because of the opioid problem, if there were substantial improvements in medicine these improvements would save more lives than opioids were killing.
1. The textiles revolution, involving automated (repeated-process or repeated-cycle) and powered (waterwheel) processing.
2. Steam, itself occurring over at least three stages, Newcomen (1712), Watt (1776), and high-pressure steam (1800). Arguably also the Parsons steam turbine (1884), still a power mainstay.
3. Metallurgy, most especially iron and steel, with puddling (Henry Cort, 1784) and Bessemer (1856), though there've been major 20th century improvements. Also aluminium smelting (Hall–Héroult process, 1886), and other strategic metals.
4. Coal-tar chemistry, giving rise to the first synthetic dyes and chemicals, 1840s. Closely related, film and photographic techniques.
5. Electricity and electrical apparatus: motors, dynamos, lights, phonographs, telegraphy, telephony, radio, speakers, lifts, electrified transport, and more. Generally 1870s - 1890s.
6. Petroleum and internal combustion. 1859 - 1880s. Self-contained liquid-fueled powerplants and transport with high power-to-weight ratios and rapid throttle response.
7. Petroleum-based chemistry, artificial fibres, explosives, and fertilisers. I'll add in viscose rayon (1889), though most of the synthetic plastics were created ~1920-1940. Nitrogen chemistry gave rise to explosives, with natural gas as a feedstock, but also fertilisers. Artificial rubber and tarmacadam pavements. Other general chemistry might be included, covering organic (carbon-based), carbon allotrope (buckyballs, nanotubes), semiconductor, alloys, battery tech, continuing to present.
8. Electronics: radio, television, vacuum tubes, transistors, integrated circuits, and lasers. These all involve channel creation, signal encoding and decoding, amplification, transmission, receivers, and encoding / decoding. 1896 - 1960s.
9. Radioactivity and nuclear chemistry and reactions. Applications in both power and informational domains (latter, especially: medical and industrial imaging). 1890s - 1960s.
10. Quantum effects: semiconductors, photovoltaics, and other materials/electronics applications for the most part. 1905 - 1960s.
11. Genetics. Most especially the structure, nature, and manipulation of DNA, RNA, and proteins. 1953 - present.
12. Specific vehicle design and control, most particularly of air- and space-craft.
13. Large programme- and system-organisation and control. This includes both engineering projects, and their work-product and processes. Effectively, the management of complexity at scale.
14. Awareness, mitigation, and avoidance of second-order effects: unintended consequences and hygiene factors.
I've been noodling for a few years on an ontology of techological mechanisms, with nine that seem to stand out: 1) materials, 2) fuels, 3) process knowledge, 4) structural/causal knowledge, 5) power transmission and transformation, 6) networks, 7) systems, 8) information, and 9) hygiene / consequences. There's some overlap between these and the major phases described above.
There are also the pre- 1700 technical revolutions, including moveable-type print, advanced architecture, mathematics, writing, the wheel, agriculture, and speech, among others, each with major impacts.
Most of the notable developments of the past 50 years have been in the area of information technology specifically. Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth looks at numerous areas of technological advance and finds most wanting. I'd argue that the realm of limits is underappreciated -- the environmental movement of the 1950s onward, the oil shocks of the 1970s, the ozone crisis, environmental contamination in the form of lead, tobacco, aasbestos, mercury, and other contaminants, CO2 and climate change, and though pressing awareness has dimmed somewhat, peak oil and its implications. This may become clearer in future, and represents the 9th class of my ontology above.
The problem with information technologies alone is that at best they can only focus other efforts and activities (and they often carry their own negative effects and risks).
But yeah, delivery has been ... somewhat meh for the past decade.
TCP/IP / packet-switched networks date from the early 1960s. Apple's first smart-tablet, the Newton, famously flopped. I remember seeing one at work in the early 1990s and saying "why would anyone want anything like that?" Given its capabilities, or more accurately, limitations, that was accurate.
IoT two decades ago was powering the first generation of pop-up ads as X10 home-automation systems. Blockchain is rebranded Merkel trees, dating to 1979.
Drones, as with most other aircraft-based technology, is a matter of lightweighting systems sufficiently, at a reasonable cost, to enable them to remain aloft. Even now, the popular copter-drones have only a few minutes of operating time. Further lightweighting, fixed-wing, fuel-based, or other changes are likely still required.
Self-driving cars are a problem of complex nature in which further enhancements to basic automation provide ever-increasing domains of application.
AR/VR suffers from human-machine interfaces. Simulator sickness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulator_sickness) affects professional pilots -- a device that makes a substantial portion of the population physically (and projectilely) ill will have limited uptake.
Neil Postman's Seven Questions remain highly relevant:
1. What is the problem that this new technology solves?
2. Whose problem is it?
3. What new problems do we create by solving this problem?
4. Which people and institutions will be most impacted by a technological solution?
5. What changes in language occur as the result of technological change?
6. Which shifts in economic and political power might result when this technology is adopted?
7. What alternative (and unintended) uses might be made of this technology?
The biggest adoption problem is quality VR games (Beat saber is really the only true stand out hit), followed by comfort and form factor of the hardware, followed by marketing a perception of VR. I don't think VR will ever be a smartphone or PC sized market but assuming current growth is maintained it will be a small game console sized market (10-20 million units) in a few years. This could be seen as a failure or a future that never arrived because VR won't be truly mainstream, but for all major players except Facebook (Sony, Valve) I think it will be viewed as a success.
AR hardware should be separated out as well because I think the challenges there are also applications but also technical difficulty. The mythical always on high resolution glasses or contact form factor display that could be a smartphone replacement is a lot longer away than advertised I think. If and onc technical and design challenges are reasonably solved AR hardware could take off.
The other problem with VR is that it's entirely isolating from the immediate environment (AR slightly less so). Even headphones allow visual monitoring, and for the record, I don't much care for headphones or earbuds either -- having sound in your ears is very different from it being in the space (e.g., room speakers).
The game variant doesn't matter. It's the portrayal of motion which does.
Older-school (1980s vintage) video games, with more linear movement, weren't noticeable in this regard, though I didn't play those much.
If someone said that computers were a "dead" next big thing when they were invented, they would have been considered right until the advent of integrated circuits!
To me it's similar to how engines with direct fuel injection are so much more efficient, easier to handle, more reliable than engines with a carburetor. They were so much better that no current car uses a carburetor any more. But nobody would say that better gasoline engines were the big new thing that happened in the 90ies.
Although cloud gaming could be the next big thing. Now people can play even if they cannot afford a gaming pc (I for one have not had a dedicated gpu for like 15 years)
- drones finding more and more uses
- deploying to cloud becoming more and more defined with data
- AI is in every company's toolset
- much cheaper to launch things into space
- electric cars and solar for the home
- digitization of many previously physical tools: ex: 3-d scans of teeth instead of casts, checkout, money, etc...
I use a set of chat-bot related APIs to implement CLIs for various EHR-related and clinical-related applications (Navigating kajillions of options in EHR menus requires, famously, too many damn clicks. Physicians are intelligent enough to learn simple syntax to avoid all that crap)
I'm probably using the wrong words when I describe it, but when I tell developers in the ecosystem that we have a "chatbot-like" interface, people seem to get it, so I haven't upgraded my nomenclature.
I'd love to learn more about this. Who are your customers? What are the use cases? Can you share a link where I can read more?
Thanks!
The author seems to forget that the internet existed in the 70's and 80's, and smartphones existed before 2009. Back then they were experimental and many people thought they might go away, and they might have gone away if they weren't then refined into technologies that average consumers could more easily use.