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...
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.
Not to knock down all the real progress, but things were fine 20+ years ago as well...
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.
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...)
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.
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...
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
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
Everything doesn't have to.
A lot should have, though. Most, if possible.
And the reason is opportunity cost.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
(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.
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?
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.
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.
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
> 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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
In 1997, you were avant garde if you listened to MP3s.
Apparently, Netflix was an online DVD rental operation then, haha.
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.