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chpmrc

I can order a comfy car anywhere I am with the tap of a button.

I can order food from hundreds of restaurants and have it delivered in less than 30 mins with the tap of a button.

I can book flights and hotels with the tap of a button.

I can play with friends in virtual reality and actually sweat.

I can watch a live stream of SpaceX launching reusable rockets in space.

I could buy a car that is almost fully "self driving".

I can exchange value with anyone in the world anonymously and with no delays or censorship thanks to cryptocurrencies.

I can land in a completely foreign city and get step by step directions to wherever I need to go.

I can translate almost any language in real time, be it in writing, spoken or taken from an image.

And so on...You can (and most of the time do) get paid to build interesting things. It's just that most of us are unable to look at the big picture and not realize that the combined effort of a team is more valuable than the sum of the individual efforts. And if you do actually work on stuff you don't find interesting there is enough demand that switching is not that hard.

And if you want to solve puzzles for the sake of solving puzzles then there are plenty of resources for that.

Plenty of choice in my honest opinion.

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So we've mostly solved trivial non-problems if/not regressions?

People lived in 1990 and didn't feel that bad to have to call a travel agency to get a ticket, or, god forbid, to actually meet friends and not in VR space...

I'll give you "self driving cars" -- well, I would if they could work today, which they don't...

> or, god forbid, to actually meet friends and not in VR space...

These technologies really do solve problems for some people. Ignoring the temporary problem it’s solving for most-everyone right now, VR lets quadriplegics and house-bound invalids go places that aren’t accessible, e.g. the middle of the jungle. And VR is also useful for assisted visualization in the treatment of PTSD and other associated disorders.

This is also the thing that everyone who makes fun of those “as seen on TV” products needs to be reminded of: they’re not really for you. For many products, there’s a smaller core of people who actually need the product, and then a much larger halo of people who might want the product if you sell it the right way. For the As-seen-on-TV products, the core market is usually “old people who don’t move around well, or have the grip strength/dexterity necessary to operate hand tools.”

But even the core market doesn’t like being advertised to in a way that points out their problems. They’d rather that you wrote your pitch to target the larger halo market, and then they will see that ad, and notice the particular benefits to themselves as a core-market member.

So in the end, you get things like the ad for the Snuggie (whose real point, IIRC, is that it’s a robe that someone can put on an infirm person without having to lift them to get it around them) that instead markets it as a sort of weird throw-blanket with arms; or ads for VR headsets that market them as being for Beat Saber. In both cases, the advertising is ignoring the core market with a need for the product, knowing that they’ll discover it on their own once they see the advertising aimed at the larger market.

>These technologies really do solve problems for some people. Ignoring the temporary problem it’s solving for most-everyone right now, VR lets quadriplegics and house-bound invalids go places that aren’t accessible, e.g. the middle of the jungle. And VR is also useful for assisted visualization in the treatment of PTSD and other associated disorders.

Yeah, that's a valid market. But they're touted as some ultimate revolution / need, to everybody, when they're trivial in utility (outside that niche), few asked for them or would care about them without heavy marketing, and all at the same time basic needs (like health, a job, housing, education) get increasingly shitty...

The thing nobody likes to mention in casual conversation about the benefits of VR, is that there’s a whole industry working on VR sex simulation games, with big FOSS extension ecosystems, control of modern sex toys through open-standard teledildonics APIs, etc. There’s Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 levels of effort and detail put into these.

(And the further thing that nobody likes to mention in casual conversation, is that many people—men, almost always—have an addiction to visiting prostitutes, that can be as costly as a drug habit; and that a good VR rig, coupled with this extensible, customizable VR sex-sim software, can manage—much more-so than regular porn—to mostly sate the same psychological needs that made them retain the services of escorts in the first place; and thus save such people a lot of money over the long term. These people tend to become big proponents of VR.)

Anyone who is into this sort of thing, but doesn’t want to [or can’t] mention it by name in the social milieu that pertains, will just say they’re “really impressed by VR” and “think you should give it a try, too.” You can differentiate this sort of person, because they struggle to come up with any examples of the VR games/experiences that so impress them.

> have an addiction to visiting prostitutes, that can be as costly as a drug habit; and that a good VR rig, coupled with this extensible, customizable VR sex-sim software, can manage—much more-so than regular porn—to mostly sate the same psychological needs that made them retain the services of escorts in the first place

Two thoughts:

1- Are men really replacing flesh & bone prostitutes with VR sex sims?

2- Is this really a "good" development? At least with prostitutes there are two human beings involved. With VR sims, aren't we going to a Brave New World kind of situation, and would this be a good thing at all?

> Are men really replacing flesh & bone prostitutes with VR sex sims?

Considering people are already buying Realdolls. I don't doubt it.

> Is this really a "good" development?

Maybe in some niche cases. But I'd say it wouldn't be good considering how damaging porn/sex addiction can be.

How do you define "good"? One criterion that comes to my mind is: prostitution is illegal in plenty of places, so reducing the need for it reduces crime. If by "good" we think "good things are the ones where no-one gets hurt", it can also be seen as an improvement - black market for sex is probably not always a safe space (w/o even considering cases of human trafficking).

I'm not sure how I define "good", but consider this: not all prostitution results in somebody getting hurt -- if it does, that's definitely a serious thing to be addressed -- and when it's consensual, it's about two people connecting (money involved, of course). I know a cliché is to consider every customer/prostitute relationship as predatory in nature, but I'm not convinced this is always the case.

People sating their urges with some VR simulation doesn't seem like an improvement to me. It feels alienating, out of a work of dystopian scifi: people no longer even need to touch other people, they engage with simulations. I don't know, it feels terrifying to me.

Someone else mentioned Real Dolls. It made me think of the pretty good and touching movie "Lars and the Real Girl". We like and pity Lars in his delusion that his Real Doll is a real woman, but the character definitely has issues.

The main problem is that since it is illegal, there's no easy way to address abuse (victims will not want to talk because they are potentially at risk of being punished). So if VR can reduce the amount of sex workers (less demand -> less supply), it may (?) lead to less cases of abuse. That sounds to me like something Better, but maybe not as Good as some other alternatives.

It's also interesting: why is human connection considered good? People connect because it makes them feel something, but if you could achieve the same result w/o human connection, would it be that much worse? It feels worse to me, but not sure why. :-)

Yes, it feels worse to me as well, but I can't say why, except that it seems fundamentally alienating. But this is subjective. It seems to me connecting to other human beings is part of being human.

I can't comment on 1.

About point 2 though, prostitution and even just hookup culture is actually more BNWish than sex sims are. If you are using a sex sim, the taboo is still very much present. And that opens up having actual relationships whereas having systematic, mindless sex with random people will give you the illusion of that being all there is to it.

Everyone belongs to everyone else is the primary difference between the world of Huxley and our own, not that we don't have sex chewing-gum.

Fair enough. Though I can't see how VR sex simulations can bring us closer to the real thing. They seem more alienating to me. Prostitutes are real human beings with actual feelings and needs, at least.

BNW == brave new world?

I'm definitely in that crowd and I suspect you are too, because as you said this doesn't come up in organic conversation. However I can also say I'm a big fan of Beat Saber, clocking around 20 minutes every day on average. And then obviously VR with racing games.

Most of that VR and AR stuff, which while being eminently more suitable for people with real accessibility issues (either due to physical disabilities or environmental constraints), is locked up behind almost entirely unaccessible interfaces in a gamers' world. Why? Because you can sell more that way. The technology and the people who can build it certainly exist; the desire to do something useful with it rather than something cool and highly profitable isn't.

Frustrating in the short term, sure; but it might be the optimal strategy for getting VR out to precisely those people, in the long term. Selling more VR headsets means more revenue plowed into R&D, more consumer demand for sanding off sharp edges, and a larger industry-wide push toward gradual commodification of the technology.

The cheaper, more reliable, and easier-to-build VR is, the more likely you’ll see stodgy old companies (of the kind that build and go through FDA-certification for accessibility aids) becoming interested in working with it.

Sort of the same idea as Tesla: sell people a Veblen good (fancy EV cars), to fund the development of a technology (batteries) to drive the commodification of the EV industry, such that everyone non-fancy EV vehicles will become affordable, and such that EV technology will become something “obvious” to even the stodgiest auto-maker.

Or, to put that another way: you’d never have seen a direct evolution from mainframe computers to the modern PC, because the grass-roots demand for doing what a mainframe does on your desktop just wasn’t there (until it was.) The industry needed to start with calculators, evolve those chips up into microcomputers and kit them out to play games, and sell those as whiz-bang consumer electronics. Progress in that game-playing microcomputer space then carried PC technology along for the ride, until they just-so-happened to become able to do what mainframes could do.

I agree, I've always gotten frustrated when people say "but it's mostly used for games so it's not useful", acting like games don't have huge R&D potential.

Games give a relatively straightforward "pass-fail" criteria to test out new tech. Instead of a nebulous "does this tech directly help people", it's much easier (and more objective) to say "can I get this graphics API to push N fps to make the gameplay more pleasant?". Virtually any time I learn a new programming language or toolkit, the one of the first projects I do to get my grips with it is usually a simple 2D platformer just to stress out edge cases. Is this 'useful'? Not immediately, but it is useful for me to have learned how to code well enough to make a game perform well.

It's not like these optimizations and tools can't be useful for other things after they're developed for games; Unity was primarily made for games but I have friends who use it for developing "useful" iPhone apps now.

If the technology for VR gets good enough (and cheap enough) to get into the hands of the average gamer, I cannot see how that won't be a net win for people with disabilities in the long-run.

Yeah, that argument gets used any time new technology arrises. Sure it wasn't hard, doesn't mean you need to stop working on making it even simpler.

> So we've mostly solved trivial non-problems if/not regressions?

While I agree some developments have worsened the experience of particular things. What developments would you rather have seen?

By the way. VR was already a thing in the 80's. It's hardly new, only improved as the tech came available. And popularity of sci-fi also shows the common dream for many of these technological improvements.

As a fun reference. When the mobile phone got introduced in the 90's here in the Netherlands they did surveys in the street[1]. Everybody was brushing it off as unnecessary.

- "I don't need one"

- "Oh, then you get called while riding a bike haha"

- "I have one at home, and if I'm stranded there's always a landline somewhere"

- "They can send me a letter, and if they need me urgently they can call me on my landline"

[1] => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNwhIHqM60g

Two thoughts.

For one, advances in VR have come from hardware advances, not software.

For two - cell phones are not so much useful because they're phones, but because they're miniature computers with (near) worldwide connectivity to the internet.

>Yeah, that argument gets used any time new technology arrises. Sure it wasn't hard, doesn't mean you need to stop working on making it even simpler.

Why not? Technology has opportunity costs. Usuless "easier" technology makes us slaves to it and to increased infrastructure.

Opportunity costs, diminishing results -- all those are good questions to ask.

Considering the amounts of flights, I'd say that being able to book your travels without calling elimited the costs of needing phone operators. And allows me, as a user, to also easily book outside of office hours.

I agree that there's a lot of useless tech around. Especially in this startup world where it seems to be all "Uber but for x".

You also haven't answered my question. What would've been a non-useless tech that should've been developed on in the meanwhile?

And just because some commercial companie (travel agencies) spent their profits streaminglining their booking process doesn't mean it's all been useless these last 30 years.

> So we've mostly solved trivial non-problems if/not regressions?

This. I get called a Luddite because I rant about the vastness of useless tech, but I love tech. I simply think most of what people focus on is useless and that "the immediacy to which I can do anything" now is actually very psychologically harmful.

This seems like an awfully reductionist take, and is demonstrably wrong.

> to actually meet friends and not in VR space

Nintendo released the Virtual Boy in the 90s, a (somewhat unsuccessful) attempt at a semi-VR thing; they were (and are) a pretty big business, and I don't think that they were just doing it because they thought it was cool; there was demand for something like virtual reality at the time.

> People lived in 1990 and didn't feel that bad to have to call a travel agency to get a ticket

This is also wrong; anecdata, but at least one person (my dad) hated having to call up travel agencies in the 90s to book a plane ticket. I remember as a kid him yelling at the travel agent because he (having done a lot of business travel in the past) knew how much they were marking up the ticket and they wouldn't meet him halfway. Eventually he started calling the airlines directly to purchase tickets, and he complained a lot that there was not an easy way to compare prices between airlines. To stress, this was in roughly 1995.

Obviously this is just one person, but I seriously doubt that this was a unique experience.

>This is also wrong; anecdata, but at least one person (my dad) hated having to call up travel agencies in the 90s to book a plane ticket.

Yeah, and I hate scratching my head when itchy. Doesn't mean an "automatic head stratcher" is the best use of our innovation, or adds anything significant to humanity...

innovation doesn't always look like a steam engine or a polio vaccine, with immediate and obvious impact on society.

sometimes innovation looks like 1000 small improvements that only save us 30 seconds of our day, but once they're all built we suddenly have whole hours freed up that used to be taken up by things like spending an hour on the phone with a travel agent

For every 30 seconds the average person saves on misc. Tasks, there are whole minutes spent doom scrolling on social media apps.

So? If I get to pick how I waste my time, then that time is not really wasted.

So, I wonder how much social media use is a real choice. A lot of it feels more analogous the sort of false choice people make when they smoke or self-medicate with over-consumption alcohol.

So your argument is as follows:

1. People didn’t mind meeting with travel agencies.

2. Actually people hated meeting with travel agencies. Never mind number 1.

3. Automatic head scratchers are a waste of time.

4. Therefore online travel websites are a waste of time.

Why does everything have to "add something significant to humanity"?

It's not like "innovation" exists in a vacuum; if I figure out, I dunno, a new motor design for an automatic head scratcher, there's no reason that it can't later be used for something you deem to "add something significant to humanity".

Also, who gets to determine what actually adds to humanity? If you really didn't like scratching your head, or it took you a really long time to scratch your head in the morning, then wouldn't having something automatically do that for you be useful?

Travel websites are an example of something that did solve a problem; despite what you said before, people didn't like having to deal with travel agents (I googled around); they didn't like having to book tickets during office hours, they didn't like how hard it was to compare prices, they didn't like how much of a cut the agents took, etc. Buying tickets online save consumers time, money, and probably helped businesses book flights more easily. Businesses that "add significantly to humanity".

I know you didn't say this, and I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but I think that the binary mentality that you either are working on "useless" or "revolutionary" things is really harmful. I think it puts a lot of pressure on newbies with the thought that they have to change the world, and they might withdraw from STEM stuff because they don't feel like they're making significant enough contributions.

>Why does everything have to "add something significant to humanity"?

Everything doesn't have to.

A lot should have, though. Most, if possible.

And the reason is opportunity cost.

Ok. I stand by my points; innovation isn't in a vacuum. Plenty of things seem useless initially, or are just built for fun, and turn out to later be incredibly valuable later.

Wow, "demonstrably wrong" are incredibly strong words given the lacking counter arguments you provided.

I remember when the virtual boy came out. It was a disaster. From wikipedia: "The Virtual Boy was panned by critics and was a commercial failure, even after repeated price drops."

And the second one, bringing up that one time your dad was annoyed to book a plane ticket. Not much more needs to be said.

What exactly did you demonstrate was wrong with his original take?

I agree, the Virtual Boy was a disaster, but maybe I didn't illustrate my point very well, and that is my fault; I'll give you an upvote to help counteract the downvotes because I probably didn't explain myself correctly.

What I was trying to say that clearly the was some demand for the virtual reality of some kind; I'm sure Nintendo did some level of market research; concurrently, Atari and Sega was also working on VR projects, these demos were pretty popular in expos, so my point was that it's not a recent thing to want to VR in the home.

I disclaimed that me using my dad as an example was anecdata, but (assuming I'm not lying), it does prove the existence of at least one person's demand for such a product. The post I was responding to said specifically "People lived in 1990 and didn't feel that bad to have to call a travel agency to get a ticket", and I was giving a counter-claim to that. The last time I checked, my dad was a person, and did feel "that bad" calling a travel agency. Also, it wasn't "one time", it was throughout most of the 90's, though I mostly remember this from 1995-1997 because I was previously a bit too young to pay much attention to this stuff.

Now, fair enough, I didn't link to studies proving my point, so I probably used the word "demonstrably" incorrectly, and I apologize for any confusion that might have resulted from that.

I actually had a Virtual Boy. My father thought it was so cool that it's the only piece of tech, let alone video games, that he ever gave me without my requesting it.

We returned it, because it sucked. It was more than somewhat unsuccessful; it is the paradigm case of overpromising and underdelivering.

The only sweat you'd work up with a Virtual Boy would be after puking because of the induced motion sickness. It was impossible to move around, wasn't designed for that, instead you'd hunch over a table and it would force you to take breaks every fifteen minutes in a futile attempt to prevent waves of nausea from ruining your experience.

VR is also not just about recreating irl situations so you can sit at home. There is something deeply satisfying about shit talking with friends in Pavlov and then blowing their brains out with a shotgun only for them to come back 10 seconds later.

Anyone remember spending hours at AAA getting TripTiks and a highlighted route on a vague map for a (now) simple road trip? And the ensuing argument about the passenger's navigation obligations when you inevitably miss an exit halfway into the trip? And spending significant time preparing the (unreliable 80s domestic) car for a road trip?

I recently did a ~1000 mile trip that I used to do as a kid in the 90s. Back then it was literally a weeks worth of preparation. In 2020, I did the same trip on 1 hour notice with no concerns about my transportation, navigation, food, or lodging.

Sure, we made do with what we had in the 90s, but stuff is just incredibly more convenient and accessible now.

Even the improvements over the last 15 years have been immense. Remember using printed directions from Mapquest?

These wouldn't have been so bad if they were accurate. More than once I'd have to drive across multiple states to somewhere that wasn't a giant metropolis, and it would take me through a random field and tell me to turn left at a street that definitely did not exist.

I remember doing pretty good with a decent map book. I'm not sure traveling these days is really that much simpler. I did some pretty big trips before the age of always on and it worked just fine. Also me and my wife still argue navigation in the Tesla with its futuristic built-in navigation (that's not always perfect). My "reliable" not-80's Subaru Outback broke down on me in my last big road trip (which indirectly led to getting the Tesla, so far so good).

Not to knock down all the real progress, but things were fine 20+ years ago as well...

> I'm not sure traveling these days is really that much simpler.

I arrive in a foreign country.

My phone works as soon as I turn it off airplane mode.

I already have lodging, which didn't involve any long-distance calling or navigating foreign accents over a scratchy submarine cable.

I don't know how to get there. Is public transit an option? One short map query later, I determine that it is, but that would involve more hauling luggage than I'd like, besides, that 20 minute wait for the bus at the end looks dodgy.

Rideshare it is. They pick me up at the airport and I get where I'm going.

vs.

I arrive in a foreign country. I have the Lonely Planet guide. I circled a hotel that sounds good. A hawker comes up to me and hassles me about staying at their hotel instead; I pass.

The guide has some instructions for how to take public transit, but it doesn't sound easy, and I don't speak the language.

First, I convert some currency, and get enough change to make a local call, and call the hotel. I think I just got a reservation? I definitely have enough left over to pay for a taxi, so down to the taxi stand it is.

The first few taxi hawkers strike me as excessively aggressive, eventually I find someone calmer. Time to negotiate a rate; Lonely Planet helpfully informs me that it's one of those countries where this is how it works. Once that's done, I get my ride to the destination, and the cabbie asks for twice what we agreed on. I calmly insist on the original price, which he agrees to after a couple passes; I tip anyway, because I'm an American.

Now I'm at the hotel. I'm in luck! I either do have a reservation, or the room and price that I agreed on over the phone is the same as it was then. Not like last time...

Yes. Traveling these days is really that much simpler.

> Traveling these days is really that much simpler.

Maybe, but I'm not totally convinced the "simplicity" has really made my life any better?

I have personal experience of travelling both pre and post smartphone era. I've spent reasonable or large amounts of time in San Francisco, New York, London, Bangkok, and Singapore (from Sydney), and a day or a few days in many more places. None of the "pre smart phone era" travel I did was onerously difficult without a smartphone, and I don't seem to have started doing additional travel since smartphones "slowed" all those problems you list.

I was comfortable enough travelling using taxis, printed maps, travellers cheques, and travel agents. I would happily enough fall back on those (well, these days I take advantage of credit card/maestro ATM availability and don't even know if travellers cheques are still a thing.) I will admit the stress levels travelling in Thailand, where I don't speak the language or even read the alphabet, are lower with a globally networked supercomputer in my pocket, but I never avoided going there (or anywhere else) because "It's too hard".

(And given current climate, I'm quite likely to arrive in the US next time I visit without a phone, or perhaps with a minimal burner. Sure, my phone makes a bunch of stuff "simpler", but it also carries a fuckton of intimate personal information, and it makes for a very tempting target for badly behaved or overly invasive border control staff...)

> I have personal experience of travelling both pre and post smartphone era.

Neither of those stories were made up...

Never argued that it's better, only that it's simpler.

Hard to tell if it's better since I'm older now. You only get to be a twentysomething on his first trip to Asia once.

Heh. that's all the fun in traveling... Even in the good olden days a travel agent would book you accommodations no problem. You'd book a car if you wanted one. I've done lots of trips without being online ... the world was aligned to support that.

I did spent a little bit of time in SFO trying to figure out where the rideshare pickup area was last time I was there, more time than I spent finding the train the previous time... But it did get me exactly where I wanted to go which was nice...

There are still plenty of places where the phone doesn't really give you much today. Lots of places without ride sharing...

> Anyone remember spending hours at AAA getting TripTiks

I'm glad to see someone else mention TripTiks. I went on long road trips with my family when I was a kid and TripTiks were the coolest thing. A TripTik was a custom-made flip-book assembled from pages that were map segments with everything of interest noted along the way. Your route was marked with a highlighter. It was bit like turn-by-turn guidance in handheld paper form.

>> People lived in 1990 and didn't feel that bad to have to call a travel agency to get a ticket

Travel agencies were awful; people don't realize how good they have it with online tickets. The way they worked is you'd ask for a flight from X to Y. They'd spend a whole minute typing some cryptic database query into their terminal and come up $1000 leaving at 6:45 am. You'd ask if there's a better price and they'd spend another minute typing a slightly different query before coming up with something slightly better. Repeat for 10 minutes, and you feel guilty every time you ask a question because they're doing you a favor with so much typing. Then ask if there's anything better if you leave Wednesday and the whole process repeats. Finally they obtain a semi-decent flight after a huge effort, but you're left with the feeling that you probably could have saved a bunch more if you'd known the right question to ask.

> to actually meet friends and not in VR space...

This comment is being made in the middle of a pandemic. Does anyone believe that video chat hasn't made modern life better? You have a plan to do remote learning with 1990's technology? Talk to my parents about that, or anyone who has children that live more than an hour or two away. Talk to anyone who's wheelchair bound or who lives in a rural community.

> I'll give you "self driving cars" -- well, I would if they could work today, which they don't...

Fully autonomous cars don't work now, but the extra warning systems, backup cameras, lane shift systems, etc... are saving lives every single day. I like that my car helps me monitor my blind spot when I put my turn signal on. And if anybody ever figures out how to get self driving cars to actually work, they will save a massive number of lives in the process.

> I can land in a completely foreign city and get step by step directions to wherever I need to go.

This was such a common problem that there were entire movies based on people getting lost in tourist destinations and road trips. I grew up reading paper maps inside a car. Nobody would ever want to go back to that. I can think of at least one instance over the past couple of years where having a cell phone with almost universal reception potentially saved my life.

> ...

Netflix didn't exist until 1997, Youtube didn't exist until 2005. Imagine wanting to replace a laptop keyboard, or change an obscure car part, and not being able to find a video that explained how to do it. Ask my parents whether or not they like being able to find videos demonstrating new crochet patterns or woodworking techniques. Ask my parents whether or not they'd prefer to go back to a time when they couldn't realistically pick up any new hobbies or interests unless there was a local community that already existed in our rural town to teach them.

The parent comment here is inscrutable to me, how can anyone be this nostalgic for the early 90s? I grew up in the 90s, it wasn't good. We wanted better technology. There are a lot of problems to solve with modern technology, and a few regressions to address as well, but talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater...

Wow, Netflix existed in 1997?

In 1997, you were avant garde if you listened to MP3s.

Apparently, Netflix was an online DVD rental operation then, haha.

I mean people were also "fine" with washing clothes by hand until the washing machine came out. Just because it was done one way that was accepted, doesn't mean there isn't a better way.

Having navigation on my little device I can fit into my pocket and work pretty much everywhere is a huge convenience. I no longer have to plan trips carefully, drive around hoping I get to the right place or stop 3 times to ask for directions.

"Trivial non-problems"...What does it remind me of? Oh yeah: Dropbox is just a nice UI on top of rsync.

"Everything that has ever been invented has already been invented", said in 1899.

It's very hard to think of future inventions at large. We are absolutely not done and programming + Computer Science has just started.

Imagine civil engineers giving up their craft in ancient Rome because everything that will ever need engineering has already been engineered.

The “trivial problems” you mention have taken hundreds of thousands of engineers three decades to solve.

As other people have mentioned, it’s awfully reductive to classify these problems as trivial. You think they are trivial because the solutions have been done well. You do not see the millions of man-hours that have gone into fixing these problems because you are not supposed to.

Life today is radically different than the 90s, and for the better. The power of the individual has significantly increased with the last three decades of technological progress.

Aren't most of the examples you list kind of orthogonal to the issue at hand? They seem more related to living in a world where software exists than to actually being the one who builds it.

I think you may have missed the point that someone had to build all that stuff, and the universe of software in the business world (where people are employed to write software) is large.

Did I miss the point, or did you? Someone has to clean out the sewers too. Somebody does, and maybe they make good money to make up for the unpleasantness - I certainly hope so - but that doesn't make it a fun job. If software development has become sewer cleaning, isn't that something worth talking about?

Yes, you can get paid to build interesting things. But the work you will be doing is not going to be interesting. Working as part of a team with the 1000s of engineers on Uber or Office or Alexa is going to be tedious no matter how valuable you think the product is.

That wasn't what I meant with "interesting" though. Useful and polished products often involve tedious work. What I mean when I say "interesting" is that the programming involves something new and different. Messing around with unconventional and weird data structures, trying out new niche languages and paradigms, etc.

To be fair we could do nearly all of that before without much of an issue.

Now we inherit the overhead of the software, demand pricing, apps that are made of shit and string (uber eats I'm looking at you) and zero customer service...

Uhh. Before I didn’t even have Internet, much less a screen on which I could tap on a button.

I think the implication is that ride hailing, delivery ordering, and flight/hotel booking were possible to do by calling the company on the telephone. Which—if you already know precisely what you want—has almost as little friction as opening an app and tapping a button. (And to make that apply more often, these companies used to distribute fliers containing their “browsable UI.”)

“Live streams” of rocket launches were on TV :)

And driving, step-by-step directions, and translation were services provided by human beings. For the richer of us, they still mostly are services provided by humans, because the machine versions still aren’t quite as good.

There have been VR systems at arcades since the 80s. The main difference today is that they’re consumer electronics you can bring home. (Not that that’s necessarily better for everyone; not every home has the room.)

Cryptocurrency is fairly novel in the universality of the access it provides to such services. Before, you and your counterparty had to both have fancy Swiss bank accounts or Bahamian shell companies to exchange the funds through. Still possible, but you couldn’t just send the money to anybody, so it limited what you could do with dirty money. Now dirty money is almost as useful as clean money! :P

We had even Uber without having to phone someone in the 1980s. It was called black taxi market and you really just hailed a car in the street.

Calling has absolutely not the same friction as using an app. It's orders of magnitudes less efficient, more expensive and sometimes just impossible (good luck calling radio taxi in some countries where you don't speak the language). I think comparing what we could do 20+ years ago with what we can do now and saying "meh" is outright absurd. But, hey, everyone is entitled to their opinion.

Not to mention the experience of calling a cab as a foreigner and having the driver take advantage of you by price gouging you or taking you on unnecessary detours.

You might be overestimating the gap in efficiency. For example, last night, I ordered a pizza for pick-up, and the phone call took exactly 31 seconds. Even apps aren't instantaneous, but if they were, you're only talking about saving less than 1-2 minutes per day. In exchange for those time savings, apps introduce a lot of complexity and overhead: service fees, app updates, device storage, logins, behavioral tracking, etc.

Now, that being said, there are a few unique advantages to apps, like being able to order taxis in a foreign country (as you said), or being able to share your GPS coordinates with the taxi.

For people that don't embody crippling social anxiety, calling is less friction and more effective.

I say this as one of those people, and still struggle to phone people when I know it will bring better results :)

Not my experience.

I used to buy the new Thomas Guide (the 1 inch thick paper map book to find my way around Los Angeles). Having Google Maps on my phone has massively changed that. In the middle we had Nav systems but even then I now live somewhere where public transportation is the norm and being able to ask Google Maps how to get somewhere as been a life changing experience. As one concrete example, from 2000-2010 I pretty much never took the bus except for the one that went by my house. Now, since Google Maps will tell me which bus to take it's so trivial just to take whatever it tells me.

As for VR in arcades in the 80s they were remotely as good as 4 yr old VR today. not even in the same league. That's like comparing a 1970s calculator to a smartphone.

Like I said, “getting directions” used to be a service. Specifically, back then—and still today, in many places!—you’d be expected to retain the services of a guide when you were in a foreign city/country. Who would often double as your translator, and potentially as your driver as well.

Machine directions are still not as good as the service a good guide provides in navigating an unfamiliar city. Especially, no navigation app I’m aware of has an inbuilt intuition for avoiding the “bad parts of town” in its routing, that differentiates between what’s safe to drive through vs. walk through, and differentiates between safety levels at different times of day.

The value add is not that the machine guide is better than the human, it’s that the machine guide is available to everyone, at all times.

One might describe technology in general as the way to take the scarce resource of manpower/hired help, and make it plentiful through a narrowing of scope, formalization of the narrowed scope, and then automation of that formalization.

But this misses the finer point of how much is lost in the process of scope-narrowing, formalization, and automation. Or rather, of how losslessly you can truly make such a conversion.

For each well-established technology, it’s interesting to ask this question: given an unlimited budget, is the technology still used? Or is raw manpower used instead? Or some combination of the two?

Truly useful technologies, to me, are the ones that are still used in some capacity even by the ultra-rich, either directly, or because the manpower they hire will themselves use the technology to make their job easier.

A good example of a truly-useful technology is a washing machine. Nobody is hand-washing (cotton) clothes any more, no matter how rich you are. Even if you have a professional laundry service, they’re putting your clothes into a washing machine.

Navigation isn’t quite at that level yet. Your Uber driver uses a GPS auto-nav, but a city guide usually doesn’t, because a city guide is asking a different question — not “how to get there” but rather “which well-known route would the client favour, if I took a few hours to lay out the differences in fine detail.” Which is a question both of subjective inference of the client’s tastes, in a way that would require learned personalization in an automated equivalent; and of a bunch of context factors unique to every city, in a way that makes it hard to reproduce in a narrowed-scope app (rather requiring individual city-by-city coverage, the way only a monopolistic behemoth can achieve.)

So, theoretically possible, but not likely something we’ll see done for a long while, at least until we see some other meta-technological advance (e.g. GPT-4) that makes one or the other part dead simple.

> Like I said, “getting directions” used to be a service. Specifically, back then—and still today, in many places!—you’d be expected to retain the services of a guide when you were in a foreign city/country. Who would often double as your translator, and potentially as your driver as well.

So previously, travel to foreign destinations was something few could afford, since it required sourcing and hiring a local guide. It would seem our current solutions scale much better and at a lower unit cost, opening up the world to more people than could have experienced it before.

Yes, correct. But that’s moving the goal-posts, kind of: “making something available to a wider audience” isn’t the same thing as making something possible. The original claim was that we’re now in a world where these things are possible. But really, we’re “merely” in a world where they’re more widely-available. They’ve been possible for a long time.

What I wanted to highlight, was that technology making something possible, that was previously impossible, is actually quite rare.

There really aren’t all that many innovations that come along and change the world in such a way that a time-traveller from the past, would need to learn an entirely new conceptual framework to understand how we do things now. Almost always, what we do now, maps in an obvious 1:1 way to what we used to do. Hailing a cab? You could hail a cab in Ancient Greece!

In fact, it’s pretty hard to think of genuinely-novel things humans only started doing in the last 100 years, due to some technological enabler. Playing single-player interactive story-games, maybe — even the progenitor of the medium, the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, is AFAIK a 20th-century innovation.

The super rich framing isn't useful IMO, much of the advances in technology function to make things possible for people for whom that function was impossible for before.

> You could hail a cab in Ancient Greece!

Depends on who the "you" is. And choosing a super rich person as your point of reference is a pretty arbitrary choice (with underlying assumptions about society that are worth examining, I might add).

There used to be telephones (with buttons). You could order all of the above through it, given a credit card.

This is not something you can order:

> I can land in a completely foreign city and get step by step directions to wherever I need to go.

All these apps/etc work fine in, large top tier urban cities across the world. They fail miserably everywhere else, there are huge swaths of the US, where you don't be able to hail an uber. In those cases your falling back on the same methods used in the past.

So, its still fairly common to see people hawking guiding/etc services inside or just outside of airports in central/south America, Africa, etc.

If your going to places where the cell phone service is spotty, or your going outside the the main urban areas hiring a guide/translator might be the only way to get around.

> To be fair we could do nearly all of that before without much of an issue.

Only if you were born fairly recently.

Reading this litany of technologically-enabled consumer achievements, I thought of David Graeber who visited the disappointment we sometimes feel for how things actually went from mid-century to now.

"[...]Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?" (https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declini...)

Kinda makes your list seem like an indictment. Today's world is the world capital wants to make. When you do open your awareness to the scale of effort and the broadest results, technological optimism in the future is deflated.

I think its nonsensical to condemn the rate of progress because we didn't achieve a vision of science fantasy grounded in what people thought in the 1950s. A lot of those ideas are "thing that exists, but more magic." We have helicopters, but it turns out zoom calls work just as good to meet people, without the air traffic control nightmare. We have the internet at our fingers, an advance so monumental that its nearly impossible to imagine life before this. Teleportation and antigravity - I mean - at a point- thats just plain magic. I will grant the space stuff though, we should have been way further along there. But this willfully ignores the mind bending amount of technological progress that we've made in the most rapidly technologically changing period in human history in computation, biotech, nanotechnology, etc etc just because we didn't achieve some of the magic that soft sci-fi or science fantasy writers envisioned.

> its nonsensical to condemn the rate of progress because we didn't achieve a vision of science fantasy grounded in what people thought in the 1950s

That wasn't really the claim. The idea is that the ends of technology have been chosen by corporations, rather than what would have been most generally useful to humankind. Hardly an earth-shattering observation.

Sure, but those examples that you gave seriously undercut that. Antigravity, teleportation, those would be wildly profitable. And we've got an entire anti-aging industry investing billions into immortality drugs. In fact, the investments into immortality drugs right now is a perfect example of your statement that the ends of technology are chosen by corporations instead of what is most useful to mankind. Curing neglected tropical diseases and investing in equitable healthcare availability is what would have one of the (if not the) biggest impacts on humankind's health. Right now, what is most generally useful to humankind isn't science fantasy, we've got a few rungs to go up the hierarchy of needs before we get there. In fact, something like flying cars would absolutely be a net negative - more pollution, a new type of congestion, more types of accidents, all to solve a problem that would be solved better by functioning public transit. And in terms of usefulness to humankind - since when are innovations that are profitable orthogonal to human benefit? There are cases where its either or, but does it really make sense to go and tell someone with a disease that the treatment for the disease can't help them because it was developed by profit motives? Setting aside questions of logistics/funding models/regulations (since if we started bringing in those real world aspects then all of those sci-fi technologies fall apart) - looking purely at the technology, commercial motives developed things that are a net good for the world. There is overlap, and an overly cynical view ends up making no sense. We have it so much better than people did 100 years ago because of technology.

Read the Graeber article I linked earlier in case you haven't and are interested. Bio-tech is one of the industries he specifically mentions as being somewhat a degenerate case with regard to this argument.

In his essay, the the particulars of technological achievement (e.g. flying cars) are rhetorical. If it isn't our current economic system with for-profit corporations driving the direction of technological evolution, what is? The question that interests me, however, is how should we, as a society, make those kinds of decisions?

I don’t really see it as an indictment that we don’t yet have a short list of things from science fiction. The reason authors wrote about those things is because the are so beyond our technological capabilities—that’s why they make for interesting science fiction!

>Might the cultural sensibility that came to be referred to as postmodernism best be seen as a prolonged meditation on all the technological changes that never happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.”

>That last word—simulate—is key. The technologies that have advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or information technologies—largely, technologies of simulation. They are technologies of what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the “hyper-real,” the ability to make imitations that are more realistic than originals. The postmodern sensibility, the feeling that we had somehow broken into an unprecedented new historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation, and pastiche—all this makes sense in a technological environment in which the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things that either already existed, or, we came to realize, never would. Surely, if we were vacationing in geodesic domes on Mars or toting about pocket-size nuclear fusion plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices no one would ever have been talking like this. The postmodern moment was a desperate way to take what could otherwise only be felt as a bitter disappointment and to dress it up as something epochal, exciting, and new.

This occasionally strikes me as true when reading some of the comments in this thread about how it's easier than ever to deploy because of a new tool, easier to create a website or app because of a new framework, easier to order a car, easier to buy an airplane ticket..

I can't help but consider that we expected so, so much more.

I think a lot of HN in general is made up of programmers at big tech companies working on what seem like small problems, but from the perspective of someone working in the biotech sector, let me assure you there's a lot going on outside of silicon valley's open offices. I mean first, lets appreciate that tech companies have actually majorly impacted the world in ways sci-fi authors couldn't have imagined, and for all the negatives, there's a reason the tech sector was (prior to recent times) so widely loved - the fact that I can reconnect through facebook with a friend I haven't seen in a decade that I may never have meet again otherwise is straight up magic and that matters. And google search and smartphones - don't underestimate them! But yeah, the valley seems to have this "hardware is hard" mentality (even though it's built off of the semiconductor industry...), but just look around. We've got for the first time ever a potentially sustainable spaceflight industry blossoming, biotech is making strides like you wouldn't believe in tackling some of the most complex diseases, your inkjet printer is a marvel of microfluidics, green energy sources are becoming cost competitive to the fuels that have fueled our entire development as a species from an agrarian to an industrialized civilization, we've got vaccines that might be ready to defeat a global pandemic within a couple years of the first case recorded. I do work in the printing and inks space. There, just recently, there's been a transition away from using UV cured or dried inks that release volatile organic compounds into new inks that are cured with electron beams - i mean, the amount of technological complexity and innovation that goes into making the packaged product you pick off the shelf have the color that it does! And these have real impacts - eliminating huge sources of pollutants and improving health and the planet. There could and should be more, especially more investment into R&D, but don't underestimate what's happening outside the Silicon Valley bubble, and don't underestimate what's happening inside the bubble either.

Half of those things are simply impossible, as far as our model of physics is concerned.

The other half mostly exist in a century after the 21st, in most Sci Fi.

The nonexistence of tractor beams is no cause for pessimism about immortality drugs, since even when the trope of tractor beams was invented, we knew that physics as we know it allows for no such animal. By the same token, we know of no hard reason why effective immortality isn't in reach.

I don't expect to see it before entropy takes me. But that's just realism, not pessimism.

How about a counterexample? Drones? Human flying (Zapata Flyboard Air, Gravity's jetpack)? Life expectancy increasing steadily? And we do have cryogenics.

The answer to "what happened to them" is the same as "what happened to curing cancer?": those things are hard. And assuming that we would have solved them by now if people had spent their valuable time on those problems instead of making ads better is just wishful thinking. Throwing more brains at a problem won't solve it more quickly, especially if those brains weren't interested in solving that particular problem in the first place (if they were they would be working on it).

>I can order food from hundreds of restaurants and have it delivered in less than 30 mins with the tap of a button.

Where do you live? I would say the same but in under an hour. Is this a little hyperbolic?

Shit I live in the #3 housing cost city in the USA and after 8pm I can get precisely zero decent restaurants to deliver in any amount of time. Domino's will deliver at 9, but the same is true in the boonies.

You should watch the Cube and it's sequels.

Not if you dont have enough money

We can do all this amazing stuff but we can't allocate cloud resources by simply calling a constructor. Wild times.

All this, yet the world is unquestionably getting worse.

Crazy times.

Is the world really getting worse or is the amount of negative information we digest daily affecting our perception of how good or bad things actually are?

Except it's not. Books like Factfulness show it quite clearly. We have our fair share of problems but quality of life has been steadily improving almost everywhere and almost exponentially in some areas.

Quality of life is improving, but condition on the planet are rapidly decreasing/

No, it's not. Life has been much better overall. What things are you seeing that is getting worse? I would say things are getting exposed and change is taking place. And you are just being introduced to the harsh reality that exists outside your initial bubble.

I'm not entirely sure the world is getting worse, but I am certain that it's becoming more complex.

And when the finite cognitive capacity of every human being must manage that complexity just to survive (let along propser), it sure feels like it's getting worse.

- Global Warming - Loss of topsoil - Extinction of species - Thawing permafrost - Rise of far right in many countries - Reinstated nuclear arms race - Corrupted government and financial institutions ...

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