Don't agree, comparing histories is not a reliable way to predict the future, I think we'll see the growth of governance level disruption, a pushback that will encourage home grown solutions for countries that are not necessarily aligned with US interests. That field is wide open and growing!
The End of the Beginning
31–40 of 119 posts
Re: The End of the Beginning
#32I'm not exactly sure where I fall on this. Ben is a really smart guy (way smarter than me), but I feel like this could be a classic case of hindsight. Now, looking back, it makes sense that the next logical step after PCs was the Internet. But from each era looking forward, it's not as easy to see the next "horizon". So, if each next "horizon" is hard to see, and the paradigm it subsequently unlocks is also difficult…
Was it really that hard to predict the Internet? SF authors picked up on it almost immediately.
Re: The End of the Beginning
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is Ray Kurzweil's hypothesis particularly important to contrast other hypotheses against? What sets it apart in relevance and/or authority?
Because it's evidence is pretty straightforward: you can take wikipedia's list of important inventions and plot their frequency on a chart. Of course, there are debates around which inventions count as significant. And there is recency bias. Never underestimate the power in something easy to communicate.
I think population growth also factors in. Population is leveling off. In the past century, the global population has quadrupled, so there are four times as many people to invent things in raw numbers alone. But global population will increase no more than 50% in the next century, which means we aren't creating a lot more inventors than we are now.
Re: The End of the Beginning
#34I'm not exactly sure where I fall on this. Ben is a really smart guy (way smarter than me), but I feel like this could be a classic case of hindsight. Now, looking back, it makes sense that the next logical step after PCs was the Internet. But from each era looking forward, it's not as easy to see the next "horizon". So, if each next "horizon" is hard to see, and the paradigm it subsequently unlocks is also difficult…
> it seems it is getting harder and harder to disrupt the Big Four
Microsoft, IBM, Oracle... What is the other one?
Or, right, wrong decade.
(My point is, it completely not obvious if it is getting harder to disrupt the incumbents.)
Re: The End of the Beginning
#35This is wrong on merit, and I am not sure why it is presented this way. The difference between a car company and a software company is economy of scale. I.e. economy of scale dominate the physical world but does not exist in the software world since I can replicate software at zero cost. In addition, new tools and new processes for software has increased the productivity times fold, which means that you need fewer de…
It really doesn't make a lot of sense to do AI at the edge (in terms of the various edge providers).
But then a lot of edge cases don't make a lot of sense. The best edge use cases are fan-in (aggregation and data reduction), fan-out (replication and amplification - broadcasting, conferencing, video streaming, etc.) and caching (which is just a variant of fan-out).
The rest of the cases are IMHO largely fictional - magical latency improvements talked about in the same context as applications that are grossly un-optimized in every way imaginable, AR/VR, etc. Especially the AR/VR thing.
Beyond that the only thing left is cost arbitrage - selling bandwidth (mostly) cheaper than AWS.
What's the use case for moving inference to the edge? Most of the inference will in fact be at the edge - in the device, which has plenty of capacity - but that's not the case you're describing.
Re: The End of the Beginning
#36I'm not exactly sure where I fall on this. Ben is a really smart guy (way smarter than me), but I feel like this could be a classic case of hindsight. Now, looking back, it makes sense that the next logical step after PCs was the Internet. But from each era looking forward, it's not as easy to see the next "horizon". So, if each next "horizon" is hard to see, and the paradigm it subsequently unlocks is also difficult…
Until I have something resembling Iron Man's Jarvis with at least a subvocal interface, I think there's still a long way to go for "continuous" computing. I currently still have to pull out a discrete device and remove myself from other interactions to deal with it. If I'm not on that device all the time, then I don't have continuous computing. Maybe continuously available computing is more accurate?
Right -- today you need to remember to charge your phone, you don't take it everywhere (and don't have signal everywhere, especially internationally), and you need to take it out of your pocket to use it, and type into it with your thumbs (though voice "assistants" are here, and some people get use out of them.)
The end-goal is being able to talk to anyone at any time, remember anything you've seen before, and know the answer to any question you can phrase that someone has already answered.
(Now, you might say that parts of it sound less than ideal, but I think we'll get there by gradient descent, though may be with some legal or counter-cultural hiccups.)
Re: The End of the Beginning
#37I'm not exactly sure where I fall on this. Ben is a really smart guy (way smarter than me), but I feel like this could be a classic case of hindsight. Now, looking back, it makes sense that the next logical step after PCs was the Internet. But from each era looking forward, it's not as easy to see the next "horizon". So, if each next "horizon" is hard to see, and the paradigm it subsequently unlocks is also difficult…
Isn’t that kind of his conclusion too though? It matters in as much as we’re less likely to see new general purpose public clouds come into play, but he didn’t seem to predict there was no more room for change in the industry, just that were unlikely to see those incumbents toppled from certain foundational positions in the ecosystem.
Much of Ben's writing recently has been on the topic of regulation and anti-trust, specifically in relation to tech companies. If I had to summarize his thesis, I'd say it's something along the lines of: "Previous antitrust regulation prioritized price. Tech allows for better products by nature of aggregation and network effects, and to promote competition, we need a new prioritization in our regulation".
So, I see this article as being a part of that thread. The conclusion is that the Big Four are not going to get disrupted, which is bad, and drawing some conclusions we need a new framework of antitrust to allow for it. I might be putting words in his mouth, but I don't think it is really that much of a jump if you read his body of work, especially recently.
Re: The End of the Beginning
#38I'm not exactly sure where I fall on this. Ben is a really smart guy (way smarter than me), but I feel like this could be a classic case of hindsight. Now, looking back, it makes sense that the next logical step after PCs was the Internet. But from each era looking forward, it's not as easy to see the next "horizon". So, if each next "horizon" is hard to see, and the paradigm it subsequently unlocks is also difficult…
> it seems it is getting harder and harder to disrupt the Big Four Microsoft, IBM, Oracle... What is the other one? Or, right, wrong decade. (My point is, it completely not obvious if it is getting harder to disrupt the incumbents.)
> Microsoft, IBM, Oracle... What is the other one?
Cisco, of course.
Re: The End of the Beginning
#39I'm not exactly sure where I fall on this. Ben is a really smart guy (way smarter than me), but I feel like this could be a classic case of hindsight. Now, looking back, it makes sense that the next logical step after PCs was the Internet. But from each era looking forward, it's not as easy to see the next "horizon". So, if each next "horizon" is hard to see, and the paradigm it subsequently unlocks is also difficult…
Was it really that hard to predict the Internet? SF authors picked up on it almost immediately.
I'd say networking was not incredibly difficult to predict, but the businesses and products it allowed for (and how we use them) was very difficult.
Re: The End of the Beginning
#40I'm not exactly sure where I fall on this. Ben is a really smart guy (way smarter than me), but I feel like this could be a classic case of hindsight. Now, looking back, it makes sense that the next logical step after PCs was the Internet. But from each era looking forward, it's not as easy to see the next "horizon". So, if each next "horizon" is hard to see, and the paradigm it subsequently unlocks is also difficult…
> it seems it is getting harder and harder to disrupt the Big Four Microsoft, IBM, Oracle... What is the other one? Or, right, wrong decade. (My point is, it completely not obvious if it is getting harder to disrupt the incumbents.)
The conclusion of the article is that it is getting harder to disrupt the incumbents. I'm saying that regardless of whether it is or isn't, there are still lots of new companies to come that can take advantage of technology to disrupt other, old-guard incumbents.
That, I think is where the metaphor Ben uses breaks down. The automobile is a single idea (move people around with an ICE). Tech is more like the ICE than the car. So, there might not be much disruption to consumer hardware (Apple) companies, or search (Google) companies, or cloud computing (Amazon, Microsoft) companies. But there will still be lots of disruption to come as tech (just like the ICE) gets applied to new features.