Comment by autokad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by autokad | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article, but I disagree with the author on a lot of points.

it largely revolves around: "But people can’t spend more than 100% of their time or money on the Internet."

first off, although the internet is baked into everything, its not just about the internet. self driving cars, 3d printing, fake meats, and lots of other things I can't imagine.

2ndly, while you can't always take more time/money from a person, you can always add more people. there are something like 2 billion people living on 2$ a day. Its not inconceivable that the market/economy today is .1% of what it will be in 30 years.

even before covid19, businesses that were not taking advantage of the internet and tech was dying such as Macys... Businesses that dont invest like crazy into tech and R&D will go extinct.

I dont think the internet is maturing, its just getting started.

also: "The Silicon Valley of tomorrow will not look like that of today"

The SV of 1999 looked not much like 2004, which looked not much like 2009, which looked not much like 2014, which looks very different from 2020. Its not stating much, everyone knows that. It also furthers the point, there is a lot of growth in the future.

Was about to say the same, in particular this:

> also: "The Silicon Valley of tomorrow will not look like that of today"

I came to live in Silicon Valley in the 80's. At the time, the technical press was bemoaning that the glory days were gone, making chips had become a race to the bottom, engineers were being laid off, and there wouldn't be enough jobs for the people who were already in the valley, much less the people in school who would graduate in 1 to 5 years with engineering degrees.

It bummed me out because I was at Intel, which seemed like a good company when I joined them out of school, but they were laying off people and it was "clear" that the semiconductor houses were going to consolidate down to nothing.

At the time I took a "big risk" and left an established company and joined a startup that seemed to be doing okay. At least they weren't losing money. It was called Sun Microsystems, they had just gone public (the Friday before I joined), and were less than 2,000 people. They were building these things called "Workstations" which everyone figured would fail because as soon as the "Big" companies (HP, IBM, and DEC) decided to get serious about this space it would squash them like a bug. They were doing some crazy things, like telling you all of their APIs and letting anyone copy them. They were using computer chips they bought from Motorola and running a University's version of the UNIX operating system on them. Their marketing message was simple, "We're open, we may not be here next month but don't worry because everyone has the information they need to make compatible stuff for our systems so even if we're dead, you can still use our gear."

It was a very different message than what the "big boys" were saying.

10 years later they were the "gorilla" and DEC, HP, and IBM were having a hard time keeping up. Then the Internet caught on an suddenly they were in a maelstrom of innovation and change and couldn't change with it. Ex-sun folks like to joke they became the dot "." in Oracle.com.

When the dot com crash hit I was older and had gone through the semi-conductor crash so I wasn't sure that this was "the end" as everyone was predicting. There would never be another VC who would be willing to risk giving you money. There would never be another retail investor that would buy and IPO for a company that wasn't making money. There was no "moat" or anyway to protect your market share so the only companies that would survive would be the distilled and conglomerated husks of the old dot com dinosaurs.

Then Google and Facebook exploded.

So what does it all mean?

It means that if this is the first time you've seen the phoenix burst into flames you will just know that its dead and there isn't any left to do but sweep up the ashes. But if this is your second, or third, or fourth, trip around the block you know that the last trip found a match between value and technologies ability to deliver it with enough margin to support building a company. And you know that people are going to spend what they earn and there will be new things to do and new ways to spend. If you can see the things that made gave the market wings over the last 10 years, often there are hints about the next thing that will generate the excitement.

And if you can't, that is okay because the person that can? They are going to need talented engineers to help them bring it to market and make it work. There is something magical about taking $0.02 cents of electricity and turning it into something someone will buy for $1. People that can internalize the value of information will understand how to capture value while building new products. And that in turn will fund an entirely new ecosystem of businesses, large and small.

There is nothing more creative, and innovative, than a group of engineering friends with too much time on their hands.

This is a great take, and really puts things into perspective. Thanks for taking the time to write it.

I’m with you. Every generation seems to have a time when the “it’s all been invented” meme takes off. There’s plenty of innovation in our future. It just takes imagination to envision it. When I hear people saying otherwise, I see it as an indictment on their powers of imagination.

Thank you for sharing your experience, that was insightful.

The long view of history, rising and falling waves of innovation, funding, market demands, new ideas and shifts in technology.. After each winter, a new cycle begins with a search for:

> a match between value and [technology's] ability to deliver it with enough margin to support building a company

Which sounds like "product-market fit".

That makes me think, what may seem like a downturn in the industry or saturation in a market segment, could be a sign that fresh pastures are needed, with new opportunities for those who can see where things will go, the next big ideas (which often start small and look like a toy to the established/entrenched players).

> If you can see the things that gave the market wings over the last 10 years, often there are hints about the next thing that will generate the excitement.

This is what I love about the world of computers and technology. The people who inhabit it, who push it forward, are driven by imagination and a kind of undying hope, to see the blue skies beyond the weather of today.

I remember in the early 70's being told that with the end of the space race, there was not going to be jobs for electrical/electronic engineers!

> Its not inconceivable that the market/economy today is .1% of what it will be in 30 years.

I kind of followed the argument until this part. You seem to be saying that a 1000x increase in market/economy is possible in 30 years, mostly as a result of the number of people being around and productive. This doesn't hold up, IMHO, unless some other (massively more dominant) multiplier is factored in.

If we can make 2 billion people 10x richer than they are today, market/economic growth is not necessarily capped at 10x. Systems don't have to be linear.

As a contrived example, I would imagine that folks living on $2/day probably buy on average effectively 0 iPhones/year. If somehow they had 10x the wealth they do now, they wouldn't buy 10x the number of iPhones they could previously buy... they would buy almost-infinity-x the number of iPhones they previously could buy, thanks to division by almost-zero.

BTW, my point is not that this is some kind of arithmetic trick, but that 1000x growth just depends on how low the starting baseline is (which is very low, by almost all measures of baseline economic activity/wealth of the $2/day demographic).

I agree that systems don't have to be linear, but for it to be non-linear, it'd have to feed back somehow. Simply buying X times as many iPhones doesn't do it, unless e.g. those iPhones allow them to be Y times more productive, etc.

My point of view goes something like this: some parts of the world _are_ developed, and these already have the various additional productivity multipliers we theorised about above. These can be the baseline productivity level for our calculation. So if the rest of the world were to be brought to this level, the end result is indeed linear, and more or less depends on where we drew the line for "developed". However, it is not 1/1000th of the world population. We could be talking about a 10, or maybe 20x multiplier if we're very generous.

I also don't think historical precedent favours such optimistic numbers, though we could be living in interesting times. However OP's point was, again, a simple introduction / upliftment of more people, not technological multipliers.

Also economic growth is still tied to finite resource consumption, so 1000x the economy would devastate the earth. Sure, humanity's economy may become decoupled from finite resource consumption, but that would be a profound change in life on earth.

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