Earlier quoted context omitted.
So much this. It's time to go Ma Bell on Google et. al.
How would you split up Google?
The US Govt is currently suing Google to make them divest their ad exchanges. That would be a good start.
Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
71–80 of 118 posts
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Airplanes are a relatively poor anecdote. They have advanced in small but steady changes over time. The prevalence of the single aisle, 6 abreast seating of the 737 and A320 came about because airlines could reliably fill short to medium haul flight and were cost effective in other ways. We have more efficient engines, systems have gotten safer, etc. There is a lot of work behind the scenes with aircraft.
Wright's brother's first flight happened in 1903. Within 15 years there were dogfights in WW1. In 31 years the first commercial service over the Atlantic started (cargo) and 5 years later (1939) the first commercial passenger transatlantic line was opened. Three decades later, the man got to the Moon. A few years later Concorde started regular supersonic commercial transatlantic flights. After that we got what? Less…
I can’t tell if you’re serious or not, but airline flights seem incredibly cheap to me and substantially safer than 40 years ago. It’s true that most of the safety in US scheduled aviation had been achieved by 2000.
In the 60s, 70s and 80s, flights were expensive and rarely taken by regular people. Now, they’re readily accessible to most everyone. (I can recall calling to book a “bereavement fare” to attend a family funeral and having to be prepared to send proof of death because a regular fare from BOS to PIT would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. I don’t know if those even exist anymore because the economy fares are so cheap.)
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#73Seems like a weirdly timed article given the new S curve is about to start with ML finding numerous real world applications.
It’s funny you say “about to start” - I feel like I’m in a minority here but I’m kind of suspicious that we’re at the end of the S-curve of ML, and the real-world applications are well-known:
- A/B testing for UI design - Ml modeling for ad targeting and optimization - fraud detection - image classification, object recognition and segmentation (lots of neat Snap filters, many niche CV apps with drones, industrial sensors, medical diagnostic tools, self-driving cars???) - text classification (sentiment analysis) - text generation (translation, document summaries, writing assistants) - niche academic/scientific applications (simulation acceleration)
Empirical modeling has been around for more than a century, there’s just been an explosion of image and text data that have demanded a new generation of empirical models (ML) - it’s resulted in a vast array of decision-acceleration applications, but aside from ChatGPT it feels like the boundaries are starting to be felt more concretely these days.
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the real world applications you’re referring to?
Not the gp, but… - medical diagnosis - assistant-systems for everything - noise reduction in industrial settings (via mechanical design) - basically anything language related - interpretation of image data - essentially anything involving a pair of interacting sequences (thanks, transformers) Contrary to many cynic takes, deep learning, CNNs, transformers are massive . It’s hard to realize the scope of these developm…
I agree with this perspective. There are certainly more step changes to come in the theoretical domain (arbitrary tensor 2 tensor of any dimensionality / variable input output size?), but the application space seems largely known, and now just requires lots and lots of implementation in the real word - which isn’t necessarily going to be from wildly successful software platforms but more from applied AI practitioners building niche tools everywhere
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Airplanes are a relatively poor anecdote. They have advanced in small but steady changes over time. The prevalence of the single aisle, 6 abreast seating of the 737 and A320 came about because airlines could reliably fill short to medium haul flight and were cost effective in other ways. We have more efficient engines, systems have gotten safer, etc. There is a lot of work behind the scenes with aircraft.
Wright's brother's first flight happened in 1903. Within 15 years there were dogfights in WW1. In 31 years the first commercial service over the Atlantic started (cargo) and 5 years later (1939) the first commercial passenger transatlantic line was opened. Three decades later, the man got to the Moon. A few years later Concorde started regular supersonic commercial transatlantic flights. After that we got what? Less…
To be fair, every single one of your complaints can be attributed to innovations of capitalism. You’re experiencing fewer innovations not because they’re not happening, but because they’re serving an insatiable demand for profits for centers or capital.
That’s not to say it isn’t disappointing! Just that your marginally-the-same flight experience is that way because improvements in flight are designed to enhance the lives of executives and investors rather than passengers. If anything, they’ve made the flight experience worse for you and me as much as we'll bear, while improving flight objectively at the same time… because profits demand ever more growth.
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wright's brother's first flight happened in 1903. Within 15 years there were dogfights in WW1. In 31 years the first commercial service over the Atlantic started (cargo) and 5 years later (1939) the first commercial passenger transatlantic line was opened. Three decades later, the man got to the Moon. A few years later Concorde started regular supersonic commercial transatlantic flights. After that we got what? Less…
To be fair, every single one of your complaints can be attributed to innovations of capitalism. You’re experiencing fewer innovations not because they’re not happening, but because they’re serving an insatiable demand for profits for centers or capital. That’s not to say it isn’t disappointing! Just that your marginally-the-same flight experience is that way because improvements in flight are designed to enhance the…
Looking at the DoT’s stats on financials of 24 US airlines, I dunno if this critique is rooted in reality. I think domestic airlines aren’t doing a great job for their investors, either. Can’t comment on executives.
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#77When zoomed in growth is not linear – it never was, it never is going to be.
What is more telling than the ups and downs in growth is how much stuff is obviously unsolved that will obviously be solved, but where it's not obvious yet how it's going to be solved. One such example is human (and then super human) natural language recognition and processing.
Right now it's worse than human, who are not even particularly good at it, giving language barriers and also hearing impediments. It fails all the time. It is slow. The input needs to be clear and slow.
But why should would any of that be? Why would a computer not eventually be better at recognising signal through horrible noise, better than the best human even could be? There will be instruments in every consumer electronic device that can beat every humans at audio input (that might already be true). Then, clearly, a connected device will be able to understand/translate/process the input better than any single human. And lastly, that device will then be able to offer more context and action for that information, and quicker, than any human.
This is an example for something already obvious. I don't need to know how it's going to happen. It will happen 100%, because it's obviously useful and there is hard technical or physical limitation to any of this. At some point all the required tech will have progressed enough that you are going to mumble an arbitrary request be able to say "book me x at y and also inform x to tell her i am running and an AI is making it happen and you thinking absolutely nothing off it.
As long as we are not there, as long as the obvious and obviously doable stuff is not done, tech progress is not slowing down. It's just not linear.
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you read the article? Tech progress in the areas the article talked about slowed down like 70 years ago.
I read up until the paywall
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34849488>
Archive.Is (https://archive.today>) defeats most paywalls these days. There are other options such as https://12ft.io>.
It's generally presumed that HN readers will be aware of this.
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, every single one of your complaints can be attributed to innovations of capitalism. You’re experiencing fewer innovations not because they’re not happening, but because they’re serving an insatiable demand for profits for centers or capital. That’s not to say it isn’t disappointing! Just that your marginally-the-same flight experience is that way because improvements in flight are designed to enhance the…
Looking at the DoT’s stats on financials of 24 US airlines, I dunno if this critique is rooted in reality. I think domestic airlines aren’t doing a great job for their investors, either. Can’t comment on executives.
Being bad at capitalism doesn’t mean capitalism is not their MO. I don’t mean this argumentatively, just so that point is clear: I’d apply the same logic to the various banking and investment shenanigans which lead to the housing market crash in the aughts, despite the fact that those services to capital ultimately proved highly counterproductive in many cases.
Re: Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
#80None noticed yet that it is written by Vaclav Smil.
... and?
(I'm a fan of his, for what it's worth. Your meaning / intent however is unclear.)