Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

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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

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).

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.

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