111–120 of 138 posts
Tesla electric cars and electric car infrastructure
The sharing economy where we rent instead of buy things hopefully will stop or at least slow our rabid consumption
These are huge changes in the way we will live our lives.
The problem is a lot of these world-changing technologies seem inevitable only in hindsight. Read decades of science fiction before the '90s, and nobody predicted the idea of everyone carrying a personal phone with them at all times. Much less connecting it to a global data network. These things always look inevitable in hindsight. But it takes some real cleverness to get them in foresight.
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No worries, soon enough we'll be rid of the horror that is "human interaction". I'm sure that this will have 0 widspread social implications.
Calling on the phone to reserve a table is not a meaningful or valuable human interaction to me. I doubt it is for the person whose job it is to take that call.
Of course, like raking leaves in your lawn, you’re going to run into a kind of diminishing returns situation. So I agree, albeit with an obvious point, My only qualm (beyond the banality of the thesis) is that this dude is forgetting about some other cool advances, such as the sharing economy (Uber/Lyft and airbnb) which kind of changed the world a little, messenger apps (which made day to day life a little more conv…
Unlicensed minicabs and illegal sublets had already been invented. Putting an app on them is not exactly innovative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No worries, soon enough we'll be rid of the horror that is "human interaction". I'm sure that this will have 0 widspread social implications.
Calling on the phone to reserve a table is not a meaningful or valuable human interaction to me. I doubt it is for the person whose job it is to take that call.
The comments here seem to focus on the specific examples, but this misses the point of the article, which I take to be that _every_ new product or feature, no matter how minor or how incremental, is treated as the second coming of the 100x engineer and the cheering crowds hand-picked to promote whatever they see aren't helping by covering it rabidly. He's not wrong, but I've heard that complaint about the tech press…
Domain-mismatch is a common problem: something is expanding rapidly, but in the end doesn't work on many or most niches. One size does NOT fit all.
An example is the no-sql movement. People started writing ALL new applications with it, thinking "it's the future". Turns out the regular RDBMS are still the better option 98%+ of the time. "Microservices" are a similar boondoggle. Make sure you really need it.
Wait, is that article simply ignoring that self-driving car are now commercially available in Phoenix? That’s probably a bigger revolution than the steam engine, and someone’s take on this is “That’s it?” Let’s ignore the shattering impact of incredibly convenient video streaming, content filtering via image tagging, electric cars, transportation or food on demand, having contactless payment available to anyone for p…
> Wait, is that article simply ignoring that self-driving car are now commercially available in Phoenix? That’s probably a bigger revolution than the steam engine, and someone’s take on this is “That’s it? Are you being ironic? The steam engine literally reshaped the world. I think you express exactly what the author is talking about: Acting as if just by announcing it, it has already succeeded.
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Calling on the phone to reserve a table is not a meaningful or valuable human interaction to me. I doubt it is for the person whose job it is to take that call.
It is valuable for that person, that's how they're generating their income...
Even if a person's job is entirely replaced by a machine, the historical economic impact of automation has not been a reduction in employment nor an increase in inequality as the luddites feared.
Well... I don't particularly agree with everything this guy is saying, but he is right about the internet of things. In my experience, it is quite useless, and it is a danger to privacy. One of the my friends constantly uses Amazon Alexa and Siri for even the most basic questions like, "What is x + y?" which could be easily done faster on a desk calculator. Either I am a person who likes to make things more inconveni…
I can agree on the privacy concerns front, but for what it's worth, I've found my Google Home to be quite helpful. So if we're solely talking about how it can be helpful: - When I'm cooking and my hands are dirty and I want to set a timer - When I'm cooking and my hands are dirty and I want to change music/lower volume/raise volume/call someone (or do a measurement conversion) - Turning off all the lights in my house…
But, I see how useful it can be when your hands are busy! My home has an ancient early 2000 smart home installed, which can be updated at a pretty big price, so I don't bother. I guess I am just used to my "inconvenience."
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> Wait, is that article simply ignoring that self-driving car are now commercially available in Phoenix? That’s probably a bigger revolution than the steam engine, and someone’s take on this is “That’s it? Are you being ironic? The steam engine literally reshaped the world. I think you express exactly what the author is talking about: Acting as if just by announcing it, it has already succeeded.
The cars work. It’s not a stretch to understand what will happen as Waymo scales operation -- and it’s not ironic that not just replacing the vast majority of working class job, but making transport virtually free will have a bigger impact that the steam engine had. There is a lot that happens in history with understanding, threats and promisses.