Ask HN: Progress through Technology: Accelerating or Decelerating?
My question to HN: is technological innovation and its impact still booming as it's been from the beginnings of Silicon Valley post-WWII? Or are we slowing down in a sense, and picking all the low-hanging fruit we can, as a result focusing more on finance and short-term 'app lotteries' that we build on top of the mobile duopoly?
Here's an interesting thought: the emergence of the 'sharing economy' (AirBnB, Lyft, etc) as a way to provide value and earn profits through efficiency, probably came about because there was little innovation happening in the fundamental fields in which they were born (housing and automobiles, respectively). To be clear, this is not necessarily a bad thing - in fact, it's definitely a net positive. But you might imagine being a bit worried when we start doing this with our computer devices (say, perhaps, some scheme in which we share processing cycles on devices not being used) because it means our compute devices are fundamentally not getting better as they've been.