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Big tech products are mostly useless

theguardian.com

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Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#21

Post by Yetanfou »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #12
lmm wrote: post #7

The big picture innovations take longer and arrive slower, but the small, life-enhancing improvements deliver so smoothly and consistently that you don't notice until they're taken away. It's only when you have to use a 5-year-old phone or application that you realise how much worse things were back then.

Five years ago I had a phone with buttons and rarely had to stop the impulse of trowing it into a wall because google kept installing updates to apps I don't want and can't do more than factory reset. Sure, I didn't have a fancy app to look at the timetable for the bus, but there was a wap-page I could use and frankly the apps are about as frustrating but now because touch interactions so often go wrong without real…

Swap out the stock distribution - I'm assuming Android here - for something like AOSP, leave off the Google-specific bits (i.e. do not install 'gapps' or anything which depends on it, install the mock-google-bits instead if you want to run something which depends on Google play services. Use F-Droid instead of the Google play store. Voila, a phone which does not do silly updates behind your back, does not install apps you do not want and which should last for years and years - mine is about 7.5 years old now.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#22

Post by redial »

jaimebuelta wrote: post #9

The main point of this article is mostly misguided, IMO. The real one is that you don't know which tech innovation will have a great impact before hand. Most of the things that has big impacts are actually things we skip through. For example, we have a pretty decent camera in our pockets at all times. We take pictures constantly. The "selfie" revolution, one that has big impacts in how we perceive ourselves and want…

Most revolutions have been silent revolutions. The only one that was an instant world event was the iPhone launch. All the technologies named in the article; Wifi, Google Search, Facebook, Twitter, even YouTube and Wikipedia were not introduced to millions of people at once in a Silicon Valley event. AI will change the world, but it'll be slow, like how the internet changed the world little by little replacing retail, letters, phone calls, and now maybe 40 years later, TV. AI is a process revolution, not a product revolution. So he's right, big tech products have been mostly useless, specially compared to their promises.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#23

Post by QueensGambit »

Its a good thing and that's how i should be. Startups have 1% chance of success and probably less when it reaches IPO. If big tech with deep pockets have far better shot (say 50%), then the level playing field would slip further and further away from startups. Innovation would stop and we will go back to the era of Microsoft/Oracle killing companies like Netscape.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#24

Post by bmans94 »

My problem with the innovations mentioned in the article lie mainly in the ‘predictive text’ emails from the google presentation. Such a small, minutely helpful feature, and yet like the author mentions could lead to an even more technologically led “groupthink” society, where machines determine our current cliches, which no one will break from. Anyways, I get that big innovations really come as several small innovations, but who out there is imagining the future of this technology, as some were imagining the smartphone or tablet a decade before it’s advent? I have yet to read anything by anyone who has a vision for the next big AI innovation, no matter how moonshot-y

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#25

Post by Drakim »

mrob wrote: post #14
lmm wrote: post #7

The big picture innovations take longer and arrive slower, but the small, life-enhancing improvements deliver so smoothly and consistently that you don't notice until they're taken away. It's only when you have to use a 5-year-old phone or application that you realise how much worse things were back then.

I use a 6 year old phone. It has a third party extra thick battery and a microSD card slot. It does the core functions of a phone just as well as a modern one (voice call, SMS, clock, calculator, flashlight, music player). The camera is worse, but if I cared about quality I'd use a standalone camera. As for apps/Internet, it's roughly the same as modern phones: a whole lot of barely usable garbage only suitable for e…

I saw a funny cloud today, I took a picture of it. I usually don't carry an extra standalone camera with me all day just for moments like that.

I can also google up information about light-bulbs when I'm standing at the store wondering if I should get X or Y. Or if some product doesn't specify if it's gluten free or not and the ingredients look a little iffy.

There are plenty of tiny improvements. It doesn't revolutionize my life, but having my old Nokia would definitely be a downgrade.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#26

Post by Larrikin »

jannes wrote: post #6

I predict that AI has 5-10 more years of "mostly useless" ahead until it suddenly becomes interesting. Another thing he criticised was the Internet of Things and other gadgets: I agree with the author on that one. I hope it dies a quick death. If there's a tradeoff between an internet-connected device that lasts 1-2 years and a not-connected device lasting 20 years, I would always chose the longer-lasting one.

The crowd on here seems to have a valid complaint against the IoTs while being very short sighted on what actually can be done.

Currently most companies want to be Facebook or Google and collect all the data they possibly can while putting out a mediocre/bad product with no security that only works when there is an internet. No consumer actually wants this.

Instead of killing the industry, we need a new generation of companies that put out products that function the same or ideally better than their analog competitors. Data collection, such as usage information, and internet connectivity will be what sets these products apart from their traditional competitors. However, the emphasis should be on sending that data to the owner of the product, instead of sending it to the cloud for the companies benefit. Optimizing energy usage, learning usage patterns, etc will be great differentiators. My products working together will be an even bigger differentiator

Aggregation of that data can be useful, and could be opt in. I'd love to know that I seem to use way more energy than other people around me. Perhaps I have a bad AC, or my insulation is particularly bad.

The biggest issue right now is that companies are putting out insecure products that are completely broken if the parent company of the product are left out of the loop. The products need to work locally, with no reliance on the parent company, and only rely on a company server for true enhancements that can not be calculated locally.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#27

Post by philipov »

Larrikin wrote: post #26
jannes wrote: post #6

I predict that AI has 5-10 more years of "mostly useless" ahead until it suddenly becomes interesting. Another thing he criticised was the Internet of Things and other gadgets: I agree with the author on that one. I hope it dies a quick death. If there's a tradeoff between an internet-connected device that lasts 1-2 years and a not-connected device lasting 20 years, I would always chose the longer-lasting one.

The crowd on here seems to have a valid complaint against the IoTs while being very short sighted on what actually can be done. Currently most companies want to be Facebook or Google and collect all the data they possibly can while putting out a mediocre/bad product with no security that only works when there is an internet. No consumer actually wants this. Instead of killing the industry, we need a new generation of…

If the established players are all interested in siphoning that data, who will fund the development of such technology?

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#28

Post by 013a »

This is only one small part of the article, but: I think the revolution in Duplex isn't about letting customers use it to schedule appointments and stuff. I think its much more significant from the perspective of using it as a way to improve Google's data for themselves. They mentioned they're going to use it soon to improve the accuracy of their business open/close times. Imagine other applications; asking businesses how busy it is right now, confirming road closures with municipal governments, etc.

Also imagine it opened up on Google Cloud, in a product similar to AWS Connect.

Finally, imagine this: They've always had a huge amount of data for human voices to train their AI models. Here's one more; being able to call anyone on the planet and get them talking in a way that is natural, then using the data on the other end of the phone to further train the accuracy of the voices they use. Kind of like ReCaptcha, but for voices.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#29

Post by loblollyboy »

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 convenient for many and also played a role in some big geopolitical events). Also just b/c google launched its search engine in 99 or whatever doesn’t mean that they stopped innovating - incremental improvements in search have made it 1000x what it was then, and if you showed google maps to someone from 2000, they would think it is magic. The tools for making tech have gotten a lot better too, even if most of the use cases have already been covered. AI and blockchain can be revolutionary. The problem is how we structure society, where we’re all either just trying to make our daily bread or get rich, and this leads to a lot of misdirected effort.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#30

Post by galieos_ghost »

philipov wrote: post #19
redleggedfrog wrote: post #17

Let's remember this, from the last few years, written by numerous major media editorial pages (paraphrasing, of course): "Silicon Valley never tackles the big issues. They just invent frivolous new gadgets which no on really needs, or some new app that shares pictures of cute kittens or is the next social network. They should focus on big picture issues - hunger, housing, crime, etc." Those are harder to approach and…

Hunger, crime, these are not technological issues solvable by tech companies, unless your idea of a solution involves building a more effective police state. These are political issues our leadership has neither the will nor incentive to solve. For example, Housing isn't a problem, it's an investment opportunity. The people donating to your campaign wouldn't like it if their investments were pushed down in value. An…

hunger- Has been mostly solved thanks to GMO increasing crop yields.

crime- Is strongly correlated with poverty, which has been rapidly reduced globally thanks to technological innovation

Housing- Will be solved by tech making remote work viable and thus reducing demand in cities. Automation and some form of income stipend could also allow people to live in more affordable places rather than cities.

Your view of "tech" is pretty stunted if you only think web apps.

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