Big tech products are mostly useless • Hacker News Board

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#61

Post by Eridrus » Mon, May 21, 2018, 2:35 PM UTC

thisisit wrote: post #43

loblollyboy wrote: post #29

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…

His point is most , not all, tech innovations don't really pan out. Sure there are examples of great products but there also examples of big duds. For example, according to an EPI paper sharing economy accounts for less than 0.1% of total economy: https://www.epi.org/press/uber-drivers-earn-the-equivalent-o... So, not a win really. At least not right now.

Almost all innovation in general doesn't pan out.

Look at all the money we spend on medical/pharma research. Most of it doesn't pan out, but we're basically ok with that since the rewards are pretty large when it does.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#62

Post by ilkan » Mon, May 21, 2018, 2:37 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #36

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.

Dick Tracy in the 40's Edit: Star Trek communicators, 1960's

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#63

Post by amelius » Mon, May 21, 2018, 2:38 PM UTC

Zak wrote: post #47

Now, when was the last time you came to book a haircut or restaurant table and concluded that the task was so onerous that you would ideally delegate it to a machine? And even if you can easily think of a scenario, would there not be something ethically questionable about doing so, if the person at the other end had no idea who or what they were talking to? I hate talking on the phone. If I can't fill out a web form…

Yeah, but I guess the bigger question is: is this convenience so large that it justifies that a single company puts a wall around a market with a gate with their name on it?

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#64

Post by imgabe » Mon, May 21, 2018, 2:38 PM UTC

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #59

imgabe wrote: post #55

And even if you can easily think of a scenario, would there not be something ethically questionable about doing so, if the person at the other end had no idea who or what they were talking to? Generally I consider something ethically questionable when a person is harmed in some way. Can someone explain how a receptionist might be harmed by unknowingly booking an appointment with a robot instead of a person? The real…

Deception is a form of harm.

So children are harmed by believing in Santa Claus? If you politely tell someone you enjoyed their cooking even if it wasn't to your taste, you've harmed them?

Context matters. Deception, in and of itself, is not inherently harmful.

It makes literally 0 difference in the life of the person booking the appointment if it's a robot or a human telling them the desired time and date.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#65

Post by M_Bakhtiari » Mon, May 21, 2018, 2:39 PM UTC

>I thought about a vision of the near future in which half the human race will converse in preordained cliches.

Maybe that's how the "Darmok and Jalad" language came about.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#66

Post by chengiz » Mon, May 21, 2018, 2:40 PM UTC

mLuby wrote: post #45

"It’s years since Silicon Valley gave us a game-changer. Instead, from curing disease to colonies on Mars, we’re fed overblown promises" Come on. "We don't have a colony on Mars yet" doesn't mean there isn't crazy innovation going on with extremely tangible benefits. Any of the following is a game-changer. 1. Dec'15 SpaceX performs first ever orbital-class rocket landing on land. 2. Apr'16 SpaceX performs first ever…

Sounds like a list of things pulled from a SpaceX brochure, not sure how exactly they are game changers.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#67

Post by romaniv » Mon, May 21, 2018, 2:42 PM UTC

swalsh wrote: post #42

This is dense, I think there are a few threads of reason though. The exaggeration in marketing common in tech is quite tumultuous. The AI behind duplex is a staggering technical achievement, and really is a small whistle at how AI is going to start to change some fundamental aspects of society. To say AI is not going to be a fundamental change to our literal society in the very near future is naive. But I can underst…

> I do think though that AI is the last "fundamental" change information technologies will bring though.

There are wast continents of mostly unexplored or abandoned territory in IT. Moreover, some of them are well documented. Some of them were documented in 1970s. The fact that IT professionals today don't know about them and can't imagine anything more significant than "AI" for pizza ordering, is unsettling. Just to name a few things Alan Kay often talks about:

- Automated system integration or tools for generalized interconnection of applications available to end users.

- WYSIWYG for the Web.

- Constraint-based problem-solvers accessible to mere mortals.

- Agent oriented programming with UI simple enough for normal people to use.

- Dynamic simulations in "normal" software (not CADs)

I am absolutely sickened by the fact that the most common response to this list is "nobody needs this". As far as I'm concerned, each of those things is needed orders of magnitude more than a haircut-scheduling AI.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#68

Post by mLuby » Mon, May 21, 2018, 2:42 PM UTC

notable_user wrote: post #51

mLuby wrote: post #45

"It’s years since Silicon Valley gave us a game-changer. Instead, from curing disease to colonies on Mars, we’re fed overblown promises" Come on. "We don't have a colony on Mars yet" doesn't mean there isn't crazy innovation going on with extremely tangible benefits. Any of the following is a game-changer. 1. Dec'15 SpaceX performs first ever orbital-class rocket landing on land. 2. Apr'16 SpaceX performs first ever…

SpaceX is a Los Angeles based company, and Elon Musk also lives in Los Angeles. I’m not sure if that counts as Silicon Valley.

Agreed, but TFA targets SpaceX directly from the subtitle on.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#69

Post by swalsh » Mon, May 21, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

romaniv wrote: post #67

swalsh wrote: post #42

This is dense, I think there are a few threads of reason though. The exaggeration in marketing common in tech is quite tumultuous. The AI behind duplex is a staggering technical achievement, and really is a small whistle at how AI is going to start to change some fundamental aspects of society. To say AI is not going to be a fundamental change to our literal society in the very near future is naive. But I can underst…

> I do think though that AI is the last "fundamental" change information technologies will bring though. There are wast continents of mostly unexplored or abandoned territory in IT. Moreover, some of them are well documented. Some of them were documented in 1970s. The fact that IT professionals today don't know about them and can't imagine anything more significant than "AI" for pizza ordering, is unsettling. Just to…

You misunderstand what I mean then. I view "AI" as a series of technologies which can be applied to a problem space. You're right in that there is a lot of open problem space, and there's definately a lot of additional technologies which can be discovered in the indivudal categories of technologies. I just don't know what the next "major" category of technology is.

For your example, automated system integration is the combination of existing technologies. That's mostly what I'm implying. We have breadth, now the work is on the depth.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#70

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, May 21, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

philipodonnell wrote: post #11

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…

I don't think the messianic cheering is the real problem.

Here's a short and not very complete list of unsolved meta-problems:

Even when products and systems are revolutionary, there are unexpected negative consequences (e.g. FB and Cambridge Analytica)

All systems can be trolled and abused, and if they can be, they will be (e.g. fake reviews on Amazon etc.)

AI doesn't actually work all that well yet. (Neither Siri nor Alexa truly pass a conversational Turing test, which means there's a lot of guessing about whether or not any novel request will generate a useful response.)

IT systems and products of all kinds are brittle, unreliable, and often downright stupid. Users don't trust updates and feature changes, and often they're right to do so. Given that, why would AI "products" be any better or more reliable?