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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

What a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. This isn't some Marxist struggle between the owners of the means of production and the smartphoneliteriat. The reason we don't realize the value is because we haven't concocted applications. Supercomputers crunch data & perform math. That's what they are good at, and their value (as I know it) is primarily rooted in their ability to advance math & science (& defense, as it relates to math & science). But nobody has really figured out what sort of massive scientific computation we should be doing with our pocket computers.

Some of it is there- for example, I wrote an app that performs geodetic math that was supercomputer-only in the 60's- but in general, folding proteins and simulating physics in your pocket is not useful to Joe Smartphone.

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It's the idea that the content available on our devices is shaped by the economic framework that supports it.

When the economic model is advertising and data tracking, the types of apps/services that are available are the ones that work best with advertising and data tracking. And it turns out that consumer-oriented social sharing services fit that model pretty well. So that's mostly what we have.

Those services do have value. But I think it's limited. When I walk into a cafe with a beautiful view and everyone is on their phones, or when people awkwardly scroll through Twitter at a group event instead of enjoying the world around them or interacting with strangers....I dont see people gaining value. Especially when it's children doing it. I see compulsive addictive behaviour that erodes human value for the benefit of advertising companies.

The economic model follows consumer desires, not vice versa. It's a lot easier for a startup to change their business model to fit what people will actually pay them money for than for them to convince people who aren't willing to pay to ante up.

If people would pay for value, startups would spring up to capture that. That's actually what we see in the SaaS business. Consumer entertainment has always been a hard sell, which is why the radio and TV businesses were also ad-supported.

You don't have to take it as far as science. Previously ,Google had a web search engine that searched discussion groups - a great tool, and an important one from the democratic point of view. Now it's gone. Why ?

One guess would be that no company wants to slap ads near a vibrant discussion - not a good place to sell lies. So in a sense this do fit the theme OP raised.

BTW, with connectivity - the distinction between smartphone and server is little. Even weak phones have supercomputers at their disposal.

One guess would be that no company wants to slap ads near a vibrant discussion - not a good place to sell lies.

Really? Is there any large discussion forum that doesn't have ads? Reddit, SomethingAwful, they all make their income slapping ads near discussions.

reddit just proves the point , huge traffic , bad monetization.

You can still search discussion google groups. They removed it because most people didn't want it.

So information has no value? Why do we say that information is power? I suppose that idea could be just as wrong as saying we have a supercomputer in our pocket, but the idea that information is power is much, much older.

Information isn't being hoovered up at the cost of billions of dollars without a very good reason for doing so.

Still, it seems a matter imagination. If our personal computers have tremendous (and accelerating) power, there's few actual limits to where we can take them. The deck even has a slide that talks about pulling components off the shelf and playing lego with them.

I think it's prudent to consider whether the average person is, all things considered, empowered by our Internet-connected computers. If so, great. If not, or not enough, then how?

You're trying to tie together unrelated ideas. Beneficial utilization of a phone's incredible raw computational muscle is basically unrelated to the harvesting of your personal data, in which the phone is merely acting as a networked array of sensors. There is virtually nothing stopping you from harnessing the full computational power of your phone supercomputer-style to do whatever data crunching you might imagine. The challenge is the imagining (and implementing)

I'm speaking of value, which I view as the balance of risk vs reward. Your view may differ. On one side, it seems to me that the reward or benefit we're receiving isn't anywhere near proportional to the power increases we've seen. On the other side, what are the risks of exposing so much personal information?

Receiving information seems much more valuable than giving it. After all, information has a price. If giving is not so great, shouldn't we be a little concerned about the consequences of trading away so much of it? Information asymmetry strikes me as the root of many power imbalances.

So, if we want more _value_ out of our "pocket supercomputers", it seems we have to consider the overall value proposition. Then perhaps we can figure out how to do better.

Who's the "we" here? It's already possible to write your own smartphone apps that basically do what supercomputers do. If you work in the field that supercomputers were designed to help (scientists, basically), I'd imagine that they could be very handy, since you could plug your cell phone into a workbench and get results immediately rather than needing to do laborious data entry.

The problem with information is that it's only valuable in context. Scientific computing has given us wonderful breakthroughs, but it needs lab equipment, it needs data collection, it needs trained scientists, it needs theories and hypotheses to test. Computing was developed to break Nazi codes; the Enigma machine may have been the star of the show, but it also depended upon radio intercepts, field operatives, dispatch runners, generals, soldiers in the trenches, people who built fighter planes, etc. - and it obviously wouldn't have been useful had we not been at war. Similarly, most of the consumer data that's vacuumed up is only useful in the context of a task that millions of consumers want to do.

You're right that there's a power imbalance in the distribution of this information. The problem is that this power imbalance doesn't exist because of the information, it exists because of the context in which the information is collected and applied. Find a context where information can let you deliver a better product than competitors, and it's easily worth billions of dollars. But the information on its own - minus the product design, minus everybody else's information, minus the brand name and distribution channel and user adoption - is worth zero. It's already possible to siphon off and redirect all data that is being sent to Facebook & Google's servers on your behalf and save it to use on your own personal behalf. The problem is - it's useless. Without everyone else's data, there's nothing you can do with it.

If that information is useless to us, it's due to inadequate tools: software, hardware, algorithms, and philosophy. Facebook and Google are both able to extract value from an individual's information (even isolated) because they have both the software and incentive. Both can look at word frequencies and activity over time to develop behavioral prediction models that are then used to target ads at you.

I'd say the ability to make relevant predictions is a form of power.

Why is it a forgone impossibility for an individual to possess tools to capture similar value from their own information? Does self-knowledge hold no value? In my experience, changes in behavior (such as to better align with your own goals/interests) are often triggered by a clear and quantified message from a trusted source. Why not make this source your own information and your own computer?

Sure, what Facebook has is lower quality and harder to process than we might prefer, but there's nothing stopping us from collecting and structuring our own information in more appropriate ways, then layering on interfaces and algorithms, and then simply doing better than anyone else can. Because it's ours.

So the We is We hackers, who can design and build new information-contexts with different value propositions and power dynamics. And it's also We thinkers who can put together the reasoning behind such efforts. And We as regular people, who want more joy and less pain, with less effort.

To the extent that smartphones are "supercomputers", they're mostly super at games and video. Otherwise they're more like dumb terminals than PCs.

As used today, yes. And that's kind of the point of the original observation. Smartphones are not true supercomputers. But they still smoke a Cray-1, and yet we use them as dumb terminals. What can we use that power for, that filled a room twenty years ago?

Their existing roles have value! But there is a sense of leaving something untapped, when you use them only as dumb terminals. A sense of, what am I missing?

It doesn't make sense to have a supercomputer as your phone. In your phone you value excellent long battery life. Better to offload the supercomputer part to central processing and pipe down a "viewport". Economics always wins.

But you already have the performance of a 1980s supercomputer in your phone. It doesn't have to make sense.

But you have a limited power supply.

I can easily carry a power brick. Or a hydrogen fuel cell like they use for power tools.

But most people either can't or don't want to.

"Phone" isn't really a term that makes sense for the future. It's just a somewhat anachronistic bundling of microphone/speaker/digital radio/battery (and the tiny bit of logic needed for that to work together).

It does make sense to carry the things that comprise a "smart phone" (as above, +powerful cpu that can scale down to conserve power, gpu, screen/hud/display, camera(s), low-power local-area digital radio (eg: bluetooth), touchscreen (or drawing surface/digitizer), text-input (keyboard), gps, interface for connecting 4k+ display, possibly direct-attached storage), along with a headset, preferably wireless.

I just don't see why this should all be forced into one unit. I'm not sure how much power miracast would require -- but could it really be more than what the led-lit touch-screen uses? Because surely it'd be easier to have big battery+wlan/miracast/bluetooth/cpu stuffed in your pocket, and a small display+touch+bluetooth device on your wrist, with the option to pull out a phablet-sized hi-res touch-screen with it's own battery, but only miracast+bluetooth (maybe a gpu)?

The "smart stick" (the smarphone less the camera/screen/mic) could probably be made to fit more nicely in a pocket if there was no need for a display.

Shape it like a rod, add a powerful vibrator and the thing would even be dual-use ;-) (seriously, though - if it's intended to be kept in a pocket, a vibrator might make sense, as well as a couple of status leds).

The screen is going to be a bit clunky anyway (unless it folds/rolls up) - so no real issue to add a dedicated battery for it.

Maybe I should file a patent for "smart rod".

I've always wanted an on-body cluster ;)

But how come heads-up displays have never come to market in a serious way? I'm not counting Glass, by the way, given the focus on sharing rather than using.

Beats me. I also wonder why OLED screens only seemed to be used for military HUD/goggles -- and not for the civilian market.

I recall one pioneer from MIT bashed glass, pointing to his experience with having a single image in a different focus area/off-center as being uncomfortable for prolonged used (or maybe even harmful).

So that might be one reason (similar to how everyone realized in the 90s that VR made people throw up -- no market).

As for a smart-rod -- I really liked Canonical's push towards a viable use-as-phone-use-as-computer OS. It's an obvious idea that I think is already "proven" by stick-pcs and chromebooks. The cpu of a previous-generation smart-phone is enough for many tasks.

Another "proof" is what's happening with Samsung's Gear VR IMNHO, eg: http://vrjam.challengepost.com/updates/3462-meet-your-mobile...

Not sure if VR might not actually be an area where going wireless might break down though -- Oculus has spent a lot of effort getting the latency down. Still it seems it should be possible to do a lot of the 3d stuff along with head tracking in the head-set, and do more complicated physics modelling on a more powerful device.

Either way, I'm hopeful that we'll see more meaningful separation of devices as bluetooth (as I understand it) keeps getting support for lower power in one end, and higher bandwidth in the other.

Because the truth is a HUD is useless most of the time. What are you gonna put on it? Walking speed? Time to lunch? Random Tweets?

I'd want the same stuff on it as I have on other PCs. Tools or access to tools. And yes, mobile-specific stuff too. Why work in/on wherever using a tablet, when you could instead have a full virtual work environment?

Maybe not walking speed, but perhaps biking speed? Text messages? Caller id (for screening calls)?

Noooooo. Mobile bandwidth is far more constrained that mobile CPU power. Furthermore, radios are the most power hungry components after the screen, another reason to try to avoid them. Data connections are not truly ubiquitous either, so what do you do when you don't have a connection? Lastly, from a data security point of view, if you don't want to hand all of your unencrypted data to a 3rd party, you would have to host the server yourself (in this model the server needs to be able to manipulate your data, which means that it must be able to decrypt any encryption you had on the data connection itself).

So no, I don't see that as ever being a desirable model for mobile computing. Maybe for some specialised tasks, but for general pocket computing, the power is better placed locally, not remotely.

> In your phone you value excellent long battery life.

No. You and I might want a long battery life, but 'the market' has decided that battery life is way down the list, below 'look like an latest iphone'.

The market has standardized on shiny glass brick, as thick as a pancake, and tiny batteries to match. Batteries that are less than 3,000 mAh and that barely last a day, two days, tops.

If the market thought an excellent battery life were important, there would be phones an inch thick, with a 10,000 mAh battery that lasted a week instead of the latest generation featuring 8-core, 64-bit, gigahertz+ processors.

Economics always wins. Unfortunately, economics is not always on your side.

For me, they're mostly missing privacy. That is, they're not securable from supposedly trusted providers. So for me, a precondition would be full control of the baseband, and running open-source software. Or maybe for now, using Android kernel to load Debian, and nuking the radio.

I'm sure that lots of cool distributed computing stuff is doable. But I'm not much interested until it's securable.

For those who think I'm crazy, consider what company would accept smartphone-like security for its servers. And OK, upon reflection, some apparently do. But my point stands.

For most people, computation isn't nearly as valuable as communication. Raw computation isn't useful to non-scientists; the smartphone computation power is put there to render games and web pages.

Unless I'm mistaken, a Cray supercomputer generally had a dedicated and consistent power supply, i.e. they're plugged in. Most phones aren't, and battery technology is still not at the point where you could achieve constant performance if you were using the phone all day.

Well one of those games is playing world championship level chess. Pretty cool for something that fits in your pocket.

Not at all. Even IBM Deep Blue chess computer relied heavily on opening and ending chess databases. It's a common thing.

Also does the app rely on a server to do the processing? As many F2P and online games do.

> The reason we don't realize the value is because we haven't concocted applications.

Some of us realize the value. I just think it's impossible for most people to not take it for granted. If you're under 30, you inherently take it for granted because you know of nothing else, you simply cannot appreciate the technology as much as someone who lived a good chunk of their lives without it. You can "know" and imagine what life was like before our current internet culture, maybe even empathize, but there are still things that are unknowable and can't be experienced by just going off the grid. One such example is culture. The culture of society was different because of the technology (or lack of) at the time. Everything from how you interacted with your friends, to how you received and consumed media, to banking and your place of employment. Everything was different before our current technology.

The people who grew up with supercomputers in their pockets don't know of a world where 3-way calling was something magical and you'd get giddy when you used it (or horrified when it was used as a tool to trick you into admitting you liked someone and they were on the phone silently listening). Or a world where if you wanted to find an address or phone number, you had to go find a phone book. Wanted to go on a vacation and look up cool places to see while there? You were heading to the library. If you were on the road driving, and wanted to call someone, you had to stop off and find a payphone (and pay a fortune if you were out of the area). Good luck if you blew a tire. But back then, more people were inclined to stop off and help because of this very problem. Again, society was very different back then.

People take for granted the fact that you now have all the world's information and entertainment at your fingertips. I know because I take it for granted myself and I know what the world was like before our current technology. I'm in my late 30s. If I take it for granted from time to time, how can someone who never knew a life without internet & cell phones appreciate what they have?

I know this sounds a bit preachy, and I didn't really mean for it to come across that way, but I find myself echoing Louis CK sentiment on technology and today's youth. His bit here really struck a chord with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E

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