
The Next Wave - chermanowicz
http://edge.org/conversation/john_markoff-the-next-wave
======
mcshicks
I really enjoy John Markoff's writing and happened to read that article before
this was posted. If you really want to understand more of where he is coming
from with respect to this article I would recommend reading his book "What the
dormouse said". If you look at some of his comments in the article, like this
one

"What worries me about the future of Silicon Valley, is that one-
dimensionality, that it's not a Renaissance culture, it's an engineering
culture. It's an engineering culture that believes that it's revolutionary,
but it's actually not that revolutionary. The Valley has, for a long time,
mined a couple of big ideas."

You can really see how he is referring to the some of the earlier generation
that was more influenced by the 60's counterculture movement. For myself I'm
not so sure, because I think there is a danger in being nostalgic when
comparing the accomplishments of the past with today. But again I think he's a
great writer and I loved the quote from Kahneman about "the robots are going
to come just in time"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said)

~~~
api
I've thought this for years. Basically SV is still just mining the stuff that
came out of SRI/Engelbart and PARC. There has been very little fundamental
innovation (a.k.a. _invention_ ) since then, and we don't have a fundamental
innovation culture. We have an incremental advance culture -- basically just
massaging and refining old stuff.

~~~
qwtel
Any businessperson would estranged by the negative attitude towards making
"the stuff that came out of SRI/Engelbart and PARC" available to millions if
not billions of people, which, one could argue, is the more difficult part.

~~~
api
That's not what I mean. What I mean is: where is the creative stuff now?

------
InclinedPlane
A big "problem" is that things are too easy actually. Slap together an MVP
based on an obvious idea, execute it half-assedly on the ragged edge of
competence, expand with VC money, make tens of millions at the lower end,
maybe billions. Because so much of industry, the economy, etc. still hasn't
been hit fully by the disruption of 21st century technology. Uber being the
perfect example, disrupting an industry that had barely changed much in a
century. There are countless similar examples. In SV you can snowclone your
way to success because there's just so damned much low hanging fruit that
hasn't been executed on hardly at all. The same's been true in the mobile
space for years as well. Hardware wise, just rev the display and the proc. and
you're golden, as long as the device wasn't garbage you could demand a huge
profit margin (amplified further by the "subsidized" handset purchase model).

Easy money makes for laziness. When google hit big they entered a tight market
during an economic downturn. That's also when amazon started hitting its
stride. But there is so much potential right now for easy money in tech that I
suspect it'll be a long time, if ever, before economic pressures force a
serious drive for innovation.

But there's also a huge need for real innovation. Mobile devices are still
largely consumption rather than creation devices, for example, though they
have no shortage of capability. And there's a huge need for fundamental
research into programming languages, operating systems, and especially
software development as an activity (what works, what doesn't, in which
situations and circumstances, and why, etc.) Consider, for example, how
utterly lacking in universally acknowledge best practices is the development
of firmware with potential safety implications.

------
dmritard96
A few reactions:

Engineering cultures can be revolutionary even if the core ideas are the
revolution. The startup community knows this well as it is repeated ad naseum
- ideas are worthless (mostly), and its largely about the execution. Calling a
cab from a phone is not new or original. Uber didn't think of it nor did they
execute it first or probably even technically best. But their combination of
technical execution and business acumen allowed them to raise shit tons of
money, aggressive loss lead into users and grow internationally rapidly. And
Taxis drivers in France are lighting cars on fire. Engineering itself can be
revolutionary.

Second, and more pedestrian I suppose - It seems odd in the time of
intelligence being move to the cloud, Waze and autonomous cars, to predict
that the 101 will be a parking lot and investing in yesteryears mass transit
is the right move. It would seem that autonomous fleets will be optimized to
move people with less resources including energy, roadways, and vehicles. If
anything one could argue that we should be pumping money and engineering into
vehicle autonomy as its likely a better long term (something he should be able
to get behind) investment than more lanes and asphalt. Sure we need to
maintain roadways, but I would rather plan for more efficient and safer
transport.

~~~
fscherer
even if autonomous cars will be cheaper than having your own car, it may still
not be affordable for the people who rely on public transportation and which
could not afford a car anyway. (for example in my hometown an uber is still
about 4 times the price of taking the bus or subway).

the problem is that autonomous driving and services like the high class busses
will still take a lot of money out of the public transportation system, and if
then they need to raise their prices, some people would loose their only means
of transportation

~~~
netcan
Public transportation is not necessarily all that "cheap," it's often
subsidized directly or indirectly. Cars are increasingly taxed (inc. fuel
tax).

It's hard to legitimately say which is cheaper. Buses don't need their own
infrastructure, but they do need roads and these are often funded by various
car taxes. Still, they often need subsidies to run. Many also have subsidized
rates for poorer people on top of that.

Transport is generally expensive. I don't think it can be taken as plain fact
that driving cars is the most expensive method, especially outside of dense
urban areas. If you gave those same subsidies to poor drivers, many _would_ be
able to afford to drive.

Excluding taxes, driving a low cost vehicle has a fairly decent cost per-km. A
litter of petrol can take you 15-20 km in an efficient, small car. Untaxed,
that's <$1. If you travel 500km per month, that's about $30. Add $110 for
purchase and repairs (cheap car), $40 for insurance and we are at $170 per
month. $5.50 per day. Pretty close to the price of public transport in many
European cities, maybe less.

This is driving relatively little, but most car owners just consume more
transport (travel more/farther) that public transport users. Also, more than
one person can ride.

It also doesn't take into account for infrastructure costs though, but public
transport's purchase price often doesn't' either.

I'm not saying cars are better/cheaper, just that it's not a clear win for
either mode. Transport is expensive. If you have no money, you can't afford
much of it. We subsidize public transport for poor people and could do the
same with cars.

~~~
fscherer
hmm I have not thought about it that way, but don't we subsidise public
transport not only to make it affordable but also too use less energy for the
same amount of people? Wouldn't fuel consumption per passenger be much higher
if we subsidise cars?

Also most cities would not have the road-space to replace subways and busses
by individual cars

------
ThomPete
I am not so convinced about his claims and ironically see them as equality
living inside the bubble.

The thing about robots is that even though very few of them even made it
through the challenges some of them did and the ones that did now serves as
the baseline for every other robot.

And so contrary to human where each individual have to learn a skill in the
time it takes them to learn it, once one robot get it right this is instantly
transferable to all other robots.

This is the big insight with robotics and not so much how good humans are at
making robots do what they want them to. The steps they do take in the right
direction is instantly applicable to all other robots.

~~~
alan-crowe
Yes! Training costs for humans are _per employee_. Training costs for robots
are _per job function_. Also robots are very stupid and very expensive to
train. Automation will take over the job functions that each employ larger
numbers of persons. So that will have a big economic impact, because lots of
jobs are involved. But will lots of job functions be involved?

Automation could impact a few lots-of-employees job functions (such as driving
cars, receptionist, and, err, my crystal ball has gone cloudy) and then stall.
Researchers will have good ideas for how to automate job functions, but be
unable to get the funding because only a few thousand humans do that
particular job and it is cheaper to pay to train humans (times a few thousand)
than it is to fund AI research (once).

There are precedents for stalls. Think about garments. The sewing machine
automates the process of passing the needle through the cloth. That is a big
deal and causes a dramatic step change in productivity. Then what? Not much.
For a hundred years and perhaps a little longer yet garment making remains at
the same level of automation, with huge numbers of persons working in
factories using the same old tool.

That is why my crystal ball is cloudy. The penetration of robots into job
functions that have non-huge numbers of employees depends on coming up with
clever hacks analogous to the invention of the sewing machine. Without a
clever trick, AI researchers might still be able to brute force things
(imagine an industrial robot programmed to hold a manual needle, sewing
needle-and-thread human style) but it will be too expensive and not replace
human workers.

I imagine the clever tricks trickling in a few per decade, dragging out the
automation of the economy over a century or two (or three).

~~~
ThomPete
It's not per job function though but per human function (image recognition for
instance)

Keep in mind that once image recognition is done properly it's applicable to
all jobs that require image recognition. Ex. a radiologist AND a quality
control function.

So it's much much worse for humans ability to compete in the long and short
run.

------
flashman
> When the conversation turns to Uber for "x," you can tell there we're out of
> ideas, that people are basically just trying to iterate and get lucky. I
> suppose some of them will be lucky.

This is true - but then where do you think ideas come from? They aren't woven
from thin air, they come from experimenting with existing ideas. I see it as a
positive that so many people are experimenting with dumb-on-the-face-of-it
apps... maybe instead of the latest messaging app one of them will make a real
innovation.

------
eli_gottlieb
>This is against the background of a technological culture in America during
the middle of the last century, which was based on industry monopolies that
could afford to create giant research laboratories—places like IBM, the Bell
Labs—and fund researchers to do things that would take place over years.
That's gone away. In Silicon Valley, Xerox PARC was started as an effort to
get Xerox—the copier company—into the computer industry. They failed to make
Xerox a computer company, but it had this wonderful spinoff effect. That is
possible, that some of these efforts may still have serendipitous
consequences, but nobody is willing to place the long bet anymore. That period
of America, that type of technological economy in America is just gone. I
don't know if it's any place else in the world either. > >There's been a
dramatic shift in corporate America, and the time horizons have shortened.
Even DARPA, which was created in the 1950s to prevent America from suffering
from technological surprise, in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq war DARPA
shifted its focus and has become focused on much shorter term results. Clearly
something has been lost.

Oh bugger.

~~~
cma
PARC didn't just have an external spinoff effect, with the laser printer
invention alone they supposedly made enough profits to cover all the PARC
costs.

------
klunger
I enjoyed the anecdotes in here about the history of Silicon Valley. But, it
read like 3 or 4 essays mixed up and crammed into one. What was the point?

~~~
mmatants
I think it's a transcript of the interview-style video at the beginning of the
article, so it kind of flows topic to topic.

~~~
klunger
Wow! This turns my perception of the piece on its head. He is such an eloquent
speaker that I mistook his ad hoc answers as a somewhat ramble-y but
nonetheless interesting essay.

------
michaelochurch
The faster-than-exponential growth phenomenon (I prefer to avoid the term
"singularity", which makes no physical or mathematical sense) goes back
billions of years. It took 2.5 billion years for life to get to sexual
reproduction, another 700 million to the Cambrian explosion, and so on with
each phase getting shorter and the growth rate getting much faster. In human
history, we've seen typical economic growth go from less than 0.001% per year
(paleolithic) to 0.1% per year (urbanization, agrarian life) to 1% (early to
mid-industrial) to ~6% per year in the 1960s. (We've slowed down to about
4-5%, globally, and the developed world is stagnant. That's another topic.) I
don't know what will happen in the next 10 years regarding Moore's Law, but I
don't see any reason to doubt that the faster-than-exponential growth _can_
carry on for a while. It would surprise me not to see 10% world economic
growth by the end of my life.

The OP does a great job of explaining why Silicon Valley won't be involved in
much of a meaningful way. I think that the biggest problem is that the balance
of power between connections guys and talent has fallen into a state of
irreversible moral calamity. In their time, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were
approximate equals. The business partner wasn't innately taken to be superior
to the engineering partner. That changed somewhere between 1995 and 2005. Now,
the connections guys are the only people who really matter and engineers (even
up to the CTO level) are largely viewed as interchangeable. And they probably
_are_ interchangeable given that these businesses are all built to be dumped
on a buyer inside of 3 years, and the consequences of mediocre engineering
generally don't have business-macroscopic effects (beyond "throw more money at
it" problems) until 5 or 6 years have passed.

I don't know where, when, or how the positive-sum mentality of the old Silicon
Valley will reconstitute itself. I do think that it will be at least 500 miles
away from the current one, because the current tech hub has "Future Detroit,
But With Less Architectural Character" written all over it.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I believe that two things will happen in the 21st century that will have
outsized impacts on the economy, both of which are software related.

One is that we'll finally get a leg up on software development. This is more
likely to be the result of lots of incremental improvements. We've made huge
strides since the '60s, we have tons and tons of tools that we've built and
use, but still at the end of the day software development is a crude endeavor.
More often than not projects end up with "big ball of mud" architectures. And
we lack the fundamental models and terminology to even talk about software
design and architecture at a reasonable level most of the time. We have all
these tools like TDD, static analysis, and so on, all of which is more or less
bolted on to our other tools. And I can't help but be reminded of both the
pre-structured programming era and the pre-OOP era, when there was a
transition from a kludgy mess of useful components bolted on to existing
paradigms that congealed into a cohesive design that became a universal
standard. In, say, 30 years programmers will not only have better tools
they'll have better techniques, better standards, and better models. They'd be
able to look at the software projects of today and go "oh, well, here you have
a classic example of X common architecture design anti-pattern, which you can
fix using techniques U, V, W, and Z" and so forth. I think that alone will
unleash a tremendous amount of potential in the use of computing systems and
result in an inflection point in the effectiveness of software development
projects.

The other is fully automated and configurable manufacturing. We have almost
all of the necessary components in place for that today, but nobody's put them
all together yet, but it'll be transformative. Imagine being able to upload a
handful of files to some service somewhere and then those files would be used
to produce PCBs; mechanical components and structures built from various
materials (plastics, metals, composites, etc.) using 3D printing, injection
molding, CNC milling, etc; and then having all of that assembled into a final
device then shipped off to you. Imagine how that changes the economy we have
today, how much it could accelerate innovation, how it could result in un-
serviced economic niches finding satisfaction, and so on. Think about how many
thousands of kickstarter projects would translate into simply designing
something then making use of such a service. Also imagine how much things
change if you can have a completely automated factory pumping out parts and
goods 24/7\. Imagine if you could bootstrap an industrial economy anywhere on
Earth, or off, with a few shipping containers of machine tools set up the
right way. And then you get into idea like self-replicating factories. Think
about how all of this changes the economy into something that we would
scarcely recognize today? What if manufacturing an automobile in 2100 was
economically equivalent to manufacturing a diecast hot wheels toy today?

~~~
mrqwerty
I disagree wrt software engineering. I have been a dev for 10 years, so still
new. But. I don't think the problem can be solved with better techniques. I
think the problem is humans just aren't smart enough to do the work. There is
a fundamental limit to how much you can compress certain things. It's called
the algorithmic complexity of the thing. Some things are just complicated.
Some things are just large and hairy which ever way you turn them, whichever
basis you construct. This is why we are spinning our wheels, why the next big
architectural technique never lives up to the hype. There comes a point where
the complexity of the thing you are trying to construct exceeds the capacity
of any network of human beings to construct. I think there is a way to go with
tooling, freeing people from the overhead of mundane work, which fractures
people thinking time and reduces the complexity of the things that they can
hold in their head at any one point in time. But the fundamental limit
remains. I think ML is going to be the next big tool set. It will allow us to
add layers of perception over the code and allow us to perceive the code and
problems in different ways, freeing us to think at a higher level. But the
fundamental limit remains. What we need is the ability to not just apply the
human mind, with it's 20watts of power, but to open up a multi megawatt power
station on the problems. We need genuine AI and I think this should be our
main focus, not pissing around with little problems around the edge, not
building the next phone app. Every other programmer and scientist in the
entire fucking world should be working on AI.

~~~
technomancy
> I think the problem is humans just aren't smart enough to do the work.

I think this is true if you define "the work" as building on top of the
infrastructure we have today. I believe we're capable of building conceptually
clean, non-ball-of-mud architectures, but the need to interoperate with piles
and piles of legacy systems forces compromises into the design. Just look at a
typical web application stack; you've got layers and layers of cruft, and
nobody is able to pull off a bold move that tears layers off; the best we can
do is add more layers on the top.

~~~
verbin217
Using express in nodejs versus php jerry-rigged into apache is sort of an
instance of what you're describing.

~~~
technomancy
Technically yes, but in a way that's so trivial so as to be basically
meaningless.

~~~
verbin217
The amount I have to think about is considerably less. All the complexity just
melts into Functions and Objects. There's similar stuff happening in React
with inline styles. Mixins, variables, custom-properties, state-dependence,
automatic-prefixes, and more are available without language extension when
styles are expressed as Objects of css properties. Whether or not they're
satisfactory, there are occasional efforts to derive more functionality from
fewer abstractions.

