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Big tech products are mostly useless

theguardian.com

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Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#81

Post by Eridrus »

dexen wrote: post #79
Eridrus wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why is Elon Musk wasting his time getting us to Mars when there are problems on Earth that need fixing?!?"

You jest, but it's worth referencing the "Why explore space?"[1] letter. Penned back during the Space Race, as a response to a nun concerned with apparently wasteful spending, contrasted to poverty suffered by the people she was working with. On a lighter note: we've put people on the Moon before we've put wheels on the luggage[2]. Exploration before comforts. [1] http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-spac…

I'm joking, but only because people are still writing these articles, e.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/02/elon-mu...

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#82

Post by beat »

ilkan wrote: post #62
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

Star Trek communicators seem a lot more like walkie-talkies than phones.

edit: Note that only active duty Starfleet personnel seem to carry communicators. Civilians do not.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#83

Post by ForHackernews »

Eridrus wrote: post #58
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…

"Why is Elon Musk wasting his time getting us to Mars when there are problems on Earth that need fixing?!?"

Elon Musk should probably focus his immediate efforts on saving Tesla from bankruptcy.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#84

Post by ken »

tarunkotia wrote: post #71
Eridrus wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why is Elon Musk wasting his time getting us to Mars when there are problems on Earth that need fixing?!?"

Same thing can be said about lunar exploration project which in hindsight brought the personal computing revolution.

I hear that a lot, but I confess I don't understand.

With Apollo, the government (NASA and DOD) had specific hard requirements, and went to private contractors to build them. Those private contractors created such things as the integrated circuit, and then later sold them to other markets. Everybody wins.

With SpaceX, they're using (AFAICT) mostly standard parts, like computers running Linux. They're not developing any new computer technology, and they're one private company so they're not marketing it beyond space flight.

(They are doing great new things with systems integration, but it's not clear how that would benefit anyone outside that space program, and they're not publishing much information, anyway.)

I always thought the major benefit of Project Apollo was that it was public spending on R&D. How will private spaceflight companies like SpaceX benefit non-spaceflight-related endeavors?

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#85

Post by jeffreyrogers »

redial wrote: post #46
galieos_ghost wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "tec…

> crime- Is strongly correlated with poverty, which has been rapidly reduced globally thanks to technological innovation Small scale crime might be. White collar crime is adversely correlated, strongly, with poverty. And it sinks entire nations.

What nation has been sunk by white collar crime? I'm not disagreeing that it's bad, but I don't think it's that bad.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#86

Post by akvadrako »

arca_vorago wrote: post #44
icebraining wrote: post #2

Unfortunately, this article seems as empty and uninteresting as the products it's criticizing. The Guardian should ask idlewords to write one for them instead.

I'm not surprised since the day I got into an argument with the guardians senior tech editor and he tried to argue Foss didn't matter and Linux was a fanboy fad... The senior editor...

Well from a desktop perspective that's kinda true.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#87

Post by Noos »

I don't know about this. I think they can be useless, useful, and terrifying all at the same time. I walked into my local petco one day and saw these:

https://www.glofish.com

Useless, all that technology expressing itself in making glowing fish. The tech behind it however is incredibly useful. But wow, the existential dread watching them swim around under a black light was considerable.

Or on the other shelves, looking and seeing dog or cat "calming collars" that use pheromones tailored specifically for individual species. I mean, its funny at how useless and useful it is at the same time. Is your dog a worrywart? Use pheromones to make him stress free! But you wonder some day if some bright tech baron will start to make human calming collars, or bracelets, or what have you...

Maybe not big tech per se, but the writer of this article might have a failure of imagination if they only see the uselessness.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#88

Post by jeffreyrogers »

Regardless of whether big tech is doing anything useful it's obvious that we have fewer important innovations now than in the period around the late 19th, early 20th century when we got: electricity, electric motors, dynamite, phones, cars, concrete, planes, tractors, radio, plastic, assembly lines and modern forms of business organization. If we go a little further into the 20th century we get nuclear power and the transistor.

I don't think we'll see another time period like that. But that's not really a bad thing. You can only discover really important things once and then they eventually become part of everyday life. A more interesting question is how to sustain our standard of living when we can no longer expect high economic growth from new innovations.

Re: Big tech products are mostly useless

#89

Post by acdha »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #70
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 n…

> Neither Siri nor Alexa truly pass a conversational Turing test

Even with the constrained grammar, neither of them passes the test of reliably producing the same result for the same phrase under good conditions. If the error rate is well into the double digits for simple structured queries using a constrained vocabulary it seems like the Turing test is still pretty far off.

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