Everyone seems to be attacking this as a statement about the obviousness of technological limits.
That is exactly what the article is not.
The article seems (at least to me) to be about the uses of technology, and how deeply that interacts with both a) what people want and b) what people are willing to tolerate to get what they want.
The examples here are not architectures or benchmarks, they are stories about the slow change of real life, even if the rate of technological change blurs and accelerates to some degree. It's about the flattening curve of demand and deployment (markets), not of capability.
Yes, the internet, cpu speeds, etc etc, and now LLMs, but the water heater example is an analogy for how "We only want so much of this stuff, and eventually we'll figure out how much is enough". Steve Jobs quotes pin this to consumer tech even more: You don't want the prettiest thing, you want what solves people's real problems in a way that works for them.
TFA is trying to show that you can make a better widget, but its impact might fade into the background, countering the "technoptimist" "singularity" "exponentionaly blah blah", or whatever narrative.
Right. I don’t full agree with the title, but I think it’s quite plausible that technology as we know it is going sigmoidal. We still use trains, and we’d rather have Shinkansen as our national system than Amtrak, but the railroad industry stopped being where all the talent wanted to be 100+ years ago, and what makes a good or bad train system no longer comes down to steam engines, but resources and politics. Software is in that transition now. Uber didn’t take over the world because of software, but regulatory arbitrage.
If the future of software development is more collaborative with the end user, that sounds like the beginning not the end.
Nobody liked the steel tycoon era of railroads either.
We were already almost there decades ago with plugin architecture. LLMs slot very well into that kind of customization. It doesn't change the social order, nor kill software though.
Technology is stacked sigmoids. There's a lot more to unlock.
What's becoming more important in human's relationship with technology is restraint. Dopamine comes from the journey, not the destination, and for a journey to be meaningful, there needs to be some amount of challenge / struggle. The increasingly important skill to lead a fulfilled existence is learning how to optimally balance ease vs. challenge.
This is a valid article that was 100% incorrectly flagged. Just throwing that out there.
I agree with it too - something changed around the early 2020s where tech stopped being fun. Nowadays it's especially unfun due to AI ruining the internet along with a bunch of other various things.
Although I still like to make the distinction between the internet(the hardware - servers, routers, fibre, satellites) vs social media(what most people mean when they say the internet).
The internet will chug along long after the hype cycles move on.
The author I think made a very apt comparison to hot water heaters. I expect in days gone past, there were probably amateur plumbers and HVA/C specialists that were just as obsessed with novel developments in water heating and cooling technology as the author was obsessed with the RAM on their Gateway desktop and the bandwidth of their internet connection. Certainly, you saw this dynamic with motor vehicles back in the 50s and 60s when engine displacement was increasing every year, alongside other new features like fuel injectors and 12V electrical systems. Each model year was a genuine upgrade over the last.
And so too, I feel confident that there will be new technologies which will attract the same kind of fervor even as computers and information technology become commodities as previous technologies did. You can sort of see the development of that culture right now in bioscience, as people share tips on their “supplement stacks,” and their skincare regimens, and track which drugs are passing through the the FDA clinical trial pipeline.
Kinda right in terms of what? That we're still upgrading servers to push bits even faster? That we're staring at a screen for half the day? That we're days into fixing bugs that we thought would only take an hour? All of that has been true since the 80s.
"... it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established ... An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." - Albert A. Michelson, 1894
“The techno-optimists, as they’ve so conveniently named themselves, have bet their lives on an infinite exponential. An exponential curve going on infinitely is necessarily a singularity. To them, the “singularity” actually means that all the sacrificing they did of their ability to be normal in the real world will never have to be paid for. A lot of them semi-religiously believe they’ll get to live forever in some abstract super-world where they never pay the cost of being weird at parties. Maybe. But that’s a suspiciously convenient thing for them to think.”
Ironically, those tecno-optimists have already created their own world, bouncing from lavish conferences to sex parties. Maybe belief in the Techno afterlife provides them ticket to a better today instead of a cost
> Intelligence will at some point become a utility, like hot water, that we use when necessary and shut off when we’re playing in the yard. When that happens, you’ll be better off if you know how to play in the yard than if you know how to code.
This blunder of a statement summed it up for me. The author doesn't seem to understand that a significant part of "intelligence" is creativity.
Nothing is ever "over". The culture is just burned out and needs time to digest what it has.
Then somehow magically, every time the economy recovers, a few $positive_adjective people have a ton of creative ideas that take off again. Think about it. Who are those people developing all those ideas quietly while everyone else whines that we're out of ideas? Are you one of them or will you continue to merely react and join the chorus of whiners?
It's simply been subsumed by a model of technology that actively hurts people, i.e. a16z type projects.
That's why we're sick of it. We know that it involves pain and extraction from us of our social circles, sanity, productivity, resources, etc.
Compare surveys on AI optimism (tech proxy) for countries where antisocial billionaires are black bagged and sent to an underground prison in Xinjiang and you'll understand where the tech optimism went.
Yeah it's the notion of what is "technology" that's the issue. I'm pretty happy that I can just plug my car (and my lawnmower!) in now instead of going to the gas station every few days. Solar panels and batteries have dropped off a cliff in price over the last few years, so it seems pretty obvious that we'll have ubiquitous clean energy coming simply because it's so cheap. My daily driver computer is now a silent minipc that I paid like $180 for, uses <10 W, and it gives me a perfectly smooth and snappy 240Hz desktop Linux that does everything I need. I can literally talk to my computer and ask it to build educational games for my kids, with them as the main character! Or I can do a quick phone scan of stories I'm going to read with my kids tonight and ask the computer to point out new phonics patterns or irregular words we should go over ahead of time for smoother reading practice (maintaining a list of what we've seen before for me). Since the OP brings up video game consoles, you can now run upscaled GameCube and PS2, everything older, and some things newer on cheap handhelds.
"Big tech" has been trash somewhere between 15 years and always depending on the company. They're all just advertising companies, not tech companies. Mainstream culture has been full of trash too basically always (for similar reasons). You've always needed to be discerning. Blocks ads and ignore their noise. I've never even known when the new apple gadget is coming out.
Everyone seems to be attacking this as a statement about the obviousness of technological limits.
That is exactly what the article is not.
The article seems (at least to me) to be about the uses of technology, and how deeply that interacts with both a) what people want and b) what people are willing to tolerate to get what they want.
The examples here are not architectures or benchmarks, they are stories about the slow change of real life, even if the rate of technological change blurs and accelerates to some degree. It's about the flattening curve of demand and deployment (markets), not of capability.
Yes, the internet, cpu speeds, etc etc, and now LLMs, but the water heater example is an analogy for how "We only want so much of this stuff, and eventually we'll figure out how much is enough". Steve Jobs quotes pin this to consumer tech even more: You don't want the prettiest thing, you want what solves people's real problems in a way that works for them.
TFA is trying to show that you can make a better widget, but its impact might fade into the background, countering the "technoptimist" "singularity" "exponentionaly blah blah", or whatever narrative.
Right. I don’t full agree with the title, but I think it’s quite plausible that technology as we know it is going sigmoidal. We still use trains, and we’d rather have Shinkansen as our national system than Amtrak, but the railroad industry stopped being where all the talent wanted to be 100+ years ago, and what makes a good or bad train system no longer comes down to steam engines, but resources and politics. Software is in that transition now. Uber didn’t take over the world because of software, but regulatory arbitrage.
If the future of software development is more collaborative with the end user, that sounds like the beginning not the end.
Nobody liked the steel tycoon era of railroads either.
We were already almost there decades ago with plugin architecture. LLMs slot very well into that kind of customization. It doesn't change the social order, nor kill software though.
And now it's flagged. Someone got mad about the silicon valley tropes brought up, when this was actually quite a thoughtful article.
Technology is stacked sigmoids. There's a lot more to unlock.
What's becoming more important in human's relationship with technology is restraint. Dopamine comes from the journey, not the destination, and for a journey to be meaningful, there needs to be some amount of challenge / struggle. The increasingly important skill to lead a fulfilled existence is learning how to optimally balance ease vs. challenge.
> Technology is stacked sigmoids. There's a lot more to unlock
Sure. But the point of the stacking analogy is the winners from one stack don’t naturally translate to the next one.
This is a valid article that was 100% incorrectly flagged. Just throwing that out there.
I agree with it too - something changed around the early 2020s where tech stopped being fun. Nowadays it's especially unfun due to AI ruining the internet along with a bunch of other various things.
"The Internet is over" - Prince in 2010.
A quote that we all laughed at but I think he maybe was right.
It definitely is more prescient in hindsight.
Although I still like to make the distinction between the internet(the hardware - servers, routers, fibre, satellites) vs social media(what most people mean when they say the internet).
The internet will chug along long after the hype cycles move on.
My question is simply, “Which technology?”
The author I think made a very apt comparison to hot water heaters. I expect in days gone past, there were probably amateur plumbers and HVA/C specialists that were just as obsessed with novel developments in water heating and cooling technology as the author was obsessed with the RAM on their Gateway desktop and the bandwidth of their internet connection. Certainly, you saw this dynamic with motor vehicles back in the 50s and 60s when engine displacement was increasing every year, alongside other new features like fuel injectors and 12V electrical systems. Each model year was a genuine upgrade over the last.
And so too, I feel confident that there will be new technologies which will attract the same kind of fervor even as computers and information technology become commodities as previous technologies did. You can sort of see the development of that culture right now in bioscience, as people share tips on their “supplement stacks,” and their skincare regimens, and track which drugs are passing through the the FDA clinical trial pipeline.
> My question is simply, “Which technology?”
America in 2026 has one technology: AI. We’ve gone culturally, financially and educationally all in on it.
The term LOL comes to mind.
I'm sure this will age like a fine wine by 2040.
Maybe, but it will be a bitter laugh tempered by two aspects:
1) he was kinda right
2) he had no way of knowing how good we had it in 2026 by comparison with what was to come after
Kinda right in terms of what? That we're still upgrading servers to push bits even faster? That we're staring at a screen for half the day? That we're days into fixing bugs that we thought would only take an hour? All of that has been true since the 80s.
"... it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established ... An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." - Albert A. Michelson, 1894
is OP the same Michael Church who's posts I may have read on Quora 10-12 years ago?
No. I just thought it was a funny username. It’s not yet 22.3 years but… those who know will know.
“The techno-optimists, as they’ve so conveniently named themselves, have bet their lives on an infinite exponential. An exponential curve going on infinitely is necessarily a singularity. To them, the “singularity” actually means that all the sacrificing they did of their ability to be normal in the real world will never have to be paid for. A lot of them semi-religiously believe they’ll get to live forever in some abstract super-world where they never pay the cost of being weird at parties. Maybe. But that’s a suspiciously convenient thing for them to think.”
Ironically, those tecno-optimists have already created their own world, bouncing from lavish conferences to sex parties. Maybe belief in the Techno afterlife provides them ticket to a better today instead of a cost
> An exponential curve going on infinitely is necessarily a singularity.
Nope. It goes higher and higher faster and faster, but that's not what a singularity is.
> Intelligence will at some point become a utility, like hot water, that we use when necessary and shut off when we’re playing in the yard. When that happens, you’ll be better off if you know how to play in the yard than if you know how to code.
This blunder of a statement summed it up for me. The author doesn't seem to understand that a significant part of "intelligence" is creativity.
Nothing is ever "over". The culture is just burned out and needs time to digest what it has.
Then somehow magically, every time the economy recovers, a few $positive_adjective people have a ton of creative ideas that take off again. Think about it. Who are those people developing all those ideas quietly while everyone else whines that we're out of ideas? Are you one of them or will you continue to merely react and join the chorus of whiners?
"Technology" isn't just one thing.
It's simply been subsumed by a model of technology that actively hurts people, i.e. a16z type projects.
That's why we're sick of it. We know that it involves pain and extraction from us of our social circles, sanity, productivity, resources, etc.
Compare surveys on AI optimism (tech proxy) for countries where antisocial billionaires are black bagged and sent to an underground prison in Xinjiang and you'll understand where the tech optimism went.
Yeah it's the notion of what is "technology" that's the issue. I'm pretty happy that I can just plug my car (and my lawnmower!) in now instead of going to the gas station every few days. Solar panels and batteries have dropped off a cliff in price over the last few years, so it seems pretty obvious that we'll have ubiquitous clean energy coming simply because it's so cheap. My daily driver computer is now a silent minipc that I paid like $180 for, uses <10 W, and it gives me a perfectly smooth and snappy 240Hz desktop Linux that does everything I need. I can literally talk to my computer and ask it to build educational games for my kids, with them as the main character! Or I can do a quick phone scan of stories I'm going to read with my kids tonight and ask the computer to point out new phonics patterns or irregular words we should go over ahead of time for smoother reading practice (maintaining a list of what we've seen before for me). Since the OP brings up video game consoles, you can now run upscaled GameCube and PS2, everything older, and some things newer on cheap handhelds.
If you want games that create "fun at parties" skills, there's e.g. https://got-feedback.org/ (formerly slopsmith) or https://yarg.in/.
"Big tech" has been trash somewhere between 15 years and always depending on the company. They're all just advertising companies, not tech companies. Mainstream culture has been full of trash too basically always (for similar reasons). You've always needed to be discerning. Blocks ads and ignore their noise. I've never even known when the new apple gadget is coming out.
[flagged]
[dead]