Technology Is Over

fullshark

"The Internet is over" - Prince in 2010. A quote that we all laughed at but I think he maybe was right.

maxchisto

is OP the same Michael Church who's posts I may have read on Quora 10-12 years ago?

1970-01-01

The term LOL comes to mind. I'm sure this will age like a fine wine by 2040.

MadameMinty

"... 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

catigula

"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.

brotchie

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.

jvanderbot

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.

FabHK

> 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.

derektank

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.

JumpCrisscross

“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.”

sublinear

> 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?

VCFundedGenYer

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.