Ask HN: What Happened to Tech? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Happened to Tech?

9 pointsdkracing11 comments

I live in the Silicon Valley so maybe this is just my warped perception of things, but where is all the actual life changing technology?

My dad is in his 60’s and talks about all of the unbelievable things he saw during his life: watching the first member of our species walk on the moon live on television, the invention of computers and seeing them go from the size of a house down to being able to fit into your pocket, the internet allowing people to communicate almost instantly across the planet at any time, the list goes on…

I’m 35 now and I don’t feel like my list of incredible technological achievements I’ve witnessed will ever be close to his. Yes I’ve seen the internet get much faster, yes I’ve benefitted from computers and chips getting way smaller, yes I’ve ridden in a self driving car even, these are great achievements but these don’t seem to equate to the level of human achievement that has come before them.

I’m not sure if everyone is just greedy now and only wants to cash out instead of work on hard problems, but I’m thinking of companies who are really trying to innovate and do new, big things that would improve the world around us and I can’t really think of more than a handful…

What am I missing here? Should I just shut up and start my own LLM wrapper company so hopefully I can dump it on someone else after getting rich? Where are the people who are working on real, meaningful problems?

Peter Thiel has a bit on this:

In the 1920s-1970 the WORLD OF ATOMS™ had insane innovations, to the point where it was a different world at the end. Every single appliance in your kitchen got invented and became ubiquitous.

Since the 1970s, the only innovations have come from the WORLD OF BITS™ (drastically increasing transistor count, network speed, etc). But atoms have stagnated.

Real meaningful problems in the world of atoms abound, but they don't result in creating unicorn startups. Using the word "tech" when it only refers to digitally processed information is an extreme form of tunnel vision.

Real tech would fix our water supply problem, our food supply problems, our recovery from extreme weather events, reduce our CO2 emission, help working class people make a decent living, address the opoid crisis, the mental health crisis, etc.

But our VCs, private equity firms, startup bros are all just focused on getting rich ... fast.

Can I turn the question around and ask (rhetorically) what happened to make all those innovations happen in the first place?

I think the answer is the WW2, and then the Cold War. Those have us miniaturisation, ICs, sensors, crypto (the old kind) and software tools and techniques to drive them and design their next generations. All the big money corporations making flavours of search and social networking are by products of that impetus.

The overlap of meaningful problems and those where you can get rich on is getting smaller and smaller, I think this is what you are seeing. For me, this was always Accessibility. There is so much we could achieve, so many people we could help. But its simply not a market to get rich, so most ideas never get off the ground because they are likely not self-sustaining or lucrative in any way.

The pattern of digital technology development seems to be decades-long stagnation under olipolistic dominance followed by bursts of change when the stranglehold is briefly broken.

It does feel as the current stagnating adtech era is drawing to a slow and ignominious end but which of the many collective challenges we are facing will be at the epicenter of the next transition is not clear.

> What am I missing here?

When you reach your 60's you'll talk about the unbelievable things you saw during your life. It's just about being in the moment vs thinking back.

Some theories:

1. It's easier to land someone on the moon than to do something long-term like a base. The switch from impressive one offs to less impressive slow, big projects is going to lead to an impression of stagnation.

2. They do exist! Just look at the COVID vaccine. We went from disease to vaccine in under a year.

3. We've had a lot more monopolies, and monopolies make there be less of an incentive to innovate. When there are multiple companies, they spur innovation.

4. You might be interested in this read from Aeon: https://aeon.co/essays/has-progress-in-science-and-technolog....

It'd be interesting to actually try to make some objective assessment because I feel there's a combo of two things:

- There was a moment of explosive growth where low hanging fruit came in reach and we're at the top of the S-curve for a lot of major technology changes. We're still seeing innovation but it's in efficiency and smaller scale improvements.

- Technological progress was a large part of propaganda in the Cold War. Now in an era of globalization that's significantly less important. Which is to say that breakthroughs are still happening but they're not tied to national identity and defeat of an existential threat.

I think the idea that VC funding (aka Silicon Valley) will result in technological innovation is also flawed. It's always seemed far more focused on exploiting prior innovation and really about funding business model innovation.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

The easy problems have all been solved. All that’s left is fixing the science-mistakes that were made along the way.

huh? you don't appreciate the stock market liquidity from market makers? your orders can now get filled in 1/100 ms and with 1/32 cents cheaper on a dollar that market clearing price.

also your ads are much better and now follow and listen to you everywhere.

thats a whole lot of innovation right there

Reply on news.ycombinator.com