It's odd, but I keep feeling like the pace of progress is slowing down. When was the last time you used a product and said “this is vastly better?” A PS 4 feels somewhat better than a PS3 which was release 10 years ago. Cellphones seem stuck on the black rectangle design. Cars are getting ever so slightly better cruise control every year vs. becoming self-driving. We almost have a cure for AIDS except not quite. Or i…
Innovation is a diffuse thing, though, and I often find that when I perceive innovation as stalled, the truth is that innovation is simply happening in places I don't care about.
A few weeks back, a Youtube video [1] was shared here that asked if computers are still getting faster. The video argues that they are. I don't dispute that. However, I think it's widely acknowledged that the pace of real-world performance increases—especially in CPUs—has been slow of late. The largest performance boon in the past 5 years has been the widespread use of SSDs as main storage.
I just built a powerhouse workstation for my office that replaced a 2008-era first-generation i7. While this new workstation has gobs of cores, each individual core is only modestly faster than the individual cores from 2008. To me, computing speed is one of my paramount technology desires. The ideal is for all of my computing interactions to occur in 0 milliseconds. I want all my computing devices, and especially my workstation—the device I spend 8 hours at each day—to provide the pinnacle of performance. So it is acutely disappointing to me that the computing horsepower I have available to me is broadening but not becoming faster. Innovation is happening in the low-power space, not the workstation space. Obviously, there are incremental advances, and service to enthusiasts, but I think any honest observer would realize that the market is smaller so the drive to invest R&D in high-power processor performance is diminished.
I feel the same way concerning the enormous amount of R&D investment going into centralized cloud platforms versus decentralized private/federated networks. I contend that had private networks seen as much raw brainpower invested in the past 10 years, managing a secure private network would have been made easier for laypeople, and ultimately we would have retained greater privacy and self-ownership of data. I also feel that computing devices working together over a secure private network in a peer-to-peer model would be vastly preferable to using a vendor-provided centralized cloud to provide device interop. I would prefer my phone and workstation work together directly, on the same private network, rather than using a cloud server as an intermediary.
But as I said at the beginning, it's a matter of opinion and perspective. Broadly speaking—across the whole universe of technology—innovation is happening. But often I find it's happening in areas of little appeal to me.