

Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future - chrismealy
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-jig-is-up-time-to-get-past-facebook-and-invent-a-new-future/256046/

======
rohern
This article is spot on in its thesis, though not always in its arguments.

Everyone is convinced -- because the people who work in marketing are happy
because they can sell ads -- that social media is an important thing. It is
not.

Social media is people doing what they were already doing, only more often and
anywhere. Flirting with girls, talking with friends, etc. Making these
activities digital is not changing society or improving lives. It is the same
society and the same lives, with more time spent on these activities. Never
has anyone gone to bed thinking "Gosh, I wish I had spent more time looking at
funny pictures of strangers today." People often go to bed regretting not
doing what they could have done when instead they were on Facebook and Twitter
and [insert the names of 90% of the startups you have heard of].

Every founder will go on and on about "changing the world" if you let him.
This is as if changing the world were something worth doing for its own sake.
If you see a problem that is worth fixing and you fix it, then the change
effected is important and even virtuous. But the key is that problem must be
worth solving. Just because a petulant and spoiled American wants his iced
mocha faster does not mean that speeding up sales of mocha is a worthy
problem. Can you make money doing it? Probably.

I went to school to become an engineer (I'm 24) because I thought that
computers and the internet were going to make invention and innovation
possible even for people who did not work for industrial laboratories. Maybe
the hugely reduced barriers to entry into the technology sector that resulted
from cheap computers and good programming tools would lead young and eager
people of brilliance to found ambitious companies to finally -- aren't we all
sick of being exasperated by the mediocrity of culture and politics in the
past 20 years? -- steer human life into better modes of existence and a new
frontier of boldness. Sure, the internet cannot do this all on its own, but is
such a powerful and promising tool, that maybe it would start things.

This has not happened. There are a few gems like SpaceX and Willow Garage that
seek out challenge in this way, but they are doing it independent of the
cheapness and openness that computers now allow. Worse, many of the companies
that have been founded are dedicated to aggressively ruining the internet by
making it a place for sucking up private information, showing ads, and selling
the same old useless junk.

What it seems to me this article is about is that innovation in technology
right now is about money, not about betterment. A billion dollars was just
spent on Instagram. To do what? If you are so in the bubble of the "startup
world" that you do not see the self-evident absurdity of a situation in which
that is a possible and reasonable event, you are become blinded.

Stop thinking like a marketer and think like an inventor with balls. Stop
trying to get rich unless you are getting rich by doing something that is
worth doing.

I write this as someone who honestly loves technology, hacking, the hacker
ethic, and HN, but I walk around Palo Alto every day being slowly crushed by
disappointment. The problem is not that the good hackers are being spread
across too many companies, it is that too many companies are not doing things
worthy of hackers.

~~~
unimpressive
>People often go to bed regretting not doing what they could have done when
instead they were on Facebook and Twitter and [insert the names of 90% of the
startups you have heard of].

I know I have. Many more times than I care to admit.

>it is that too many companies are not doing things worthy of hackers.

Excellent. And since I always ask this question of people who lament the
status quo:

What _did_ you have in mind?

~~~
shadowmint
Make ubiquitous computing a reality (Raspberry PI is a step in this
direction).

Make personal analytics useful (something like
[http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/09/stephen-wolfram-
reveals-t...](http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/09/stephen-wolfram-reveals-the-
personal-analytics-of-his-life/), but in a way that is actually useful to
normal people).

Link the offline and online into one seamless reality (google glass)

If I had to dream about the future and what it should be we're aiming for,
it'd be joint universal augmented network access. I want to live in a world
like this one --> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denno_Coil>

~~~
patrickk
Add Google self-driving car to that list. Reducing alcohol and speed related
deaths to zero within our lifetime, getting rid of car parks (fleets of
autonomous vehicles move onto the next customer), cheaper delivery of any
physical product currently delivered by road, reduced CO2 emissions (cars know
when they need servicing), more productive workforces- you can sleep during
your commute, the list of benefits is mind boggling. I would love a kit that I
could snap onto my car today that could do this (laws notwithstanding). It's
going to be a massive game changer for societies.

~~~
a3camero
Subways/trains do this! You don't need self-driving cars to make this world a
reality!

~~~
patrickk
Subways/trains don't collect you from the front door of your house and deliver
you to the exact spot that you want to go to.

Conceptually, I think this is similar to the last-mile broadband problem[1] -
it's not economical to lay fiber to the customer's home unless the customer
lives in an urban/reasonably densely populated area. Similarly, if you want to
go from transport hub to transport hub (bus/rail station, airport etc.) that's
no problem, but getting from the transport hub to your home ranges from
expensive and awkward to impossible, depending on how far you live from the
transport hub.

Self-driving cars solve this problem. Who cares if you have a 100 mile
commute, if you can snooze all the way? Just order the car for a set time
every morning to allow enough time for the drive and go back to sleep on the
way.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile>

~~~
eli_gottlieb
More particularly, subways drive up real-estate values, thus pushing people
out of areas served by subways -- unless you convince the government to spread
subway access universally throughout the entire sufficiently-populated area.

Compare Europe and New York's Tri-State-Area to Boston or BART.

------
moocow01
Its very difficult for me to ascertain if its just me or the following is a
growing sentiment... I'm not wowed by hardly anything that comes out of
consumer internet tech anymore.

Before anyone gets out a pitchfork I have actively contributed and worked on
products in the past that are part of the behemoth of services/apps/sites etc
that have become mundane to me so I deserve my own criticism as well.

But the majority of launches especially for the past couple years in the media
seems like the same deck chairs (mobile/social/photos/ads/etc) rearranged in a
different order. Overtime Ive just lost interest in tech blogs in that I
rarely see something that I'd consider genuinely interesting tech from a
product or engineering or consumer perspective. Maybe I'm just getting old?

On the other hand if I'm not out of touch it seems like it could be a great
time to step out of 'traditional' consumer tech and push on some of the 'new'
things like 3D printing, robotics, computer vision, etc as well as seek out
applications towards other industries (education, health, food, etc.)

~~~
AVTizzle
I'm with you, to an extent. Interestingly it was the recent excitement around
the Pebble watch that made me realize how indifferent I'd become to a lot of
new consumer WEB products.

I guess I realized Pebble was exciting because it was a new platform with new
opportunities and possibilities. I think that explains a lot of the excitement
around the upcoming "SmartTV" frontier too. Even mobile is still young enough
that new, exciting applications are still pushing boundaries and blowing minds
- though it's maturing rapidly.

But as far as classic web products - the web is a much, much more mature
canvas with much more solidified players. Of course it'll lose some of that
excitement, naturally...

------
gavinlynch
I fail to understand this article because I think there are so many different
topics the author touches on.. Innovation. Culture. Tech business and
startups..

I think the author is conflating some of these concepts or just
misunderstanding some. For instance, innovation. What does Facebook have to do
with innovation? I'm sure there are a few innovative things they have done,
but in my view the outline for the broad concept of what their social service
accomplishes had been drawn clearly before their rise to dominance. They just
did it better than most, and reached a critical mass in terms of user base.

If the author is simply bored of taking pictures on a phone and beaming them
halfway around the world because it's now commonplace... I'm sorry, I don't
know what to tell you. There will be another shiny new toy invented that will
be another great extension or augmentation of the human experience for you to
enjoy in a few years, doubtlessly. So cheer up.

One thing I know is true: All of these things that are being built on the
internet and the internet itself.. They are just different vehicles for human
expression; they are all extensions of the human thought, the human
environment; all facets of ourselves as a species.

I think the author of this article flounders about in coming up with what is
"next" because they don't really understand the reasons why the successful
products appeared in the first place:

Nobody at Facebook invented the idea that humans like to be in contact with
each other.

Nobody at Pinterest came up with the idea that humans collect things that they
find interesting. Humans have been doing that for as long as we've been
around.

Nobody at Instagram invented the idea that humans are creatures who crave
artistic expression. When we didn't have canvas or quill or a camera, we
painted on cave walls.

All of these companies just fascilitated a need that was already there,
whether people were concious of it or not. I would argue that these products
were inevitable, it was just a matter of who would get there first.

If you want to try to answer the obtuse question of "What is next", a question
that comes from a confused origin.... You only have to study human nature.
That would be my answer. If the author is soliciting advise about the next hot
startup to invest in, that's a totally different ballgame.

~~~
prostoalex
tl;dr "Outside of iPhone, Kindle and mobile applications you nerds have
invented absolutely nothing over past 10 years".

~~~
wladimir
Don't forget all the mass surveillance and control that "we nerds" made
possible.

The picture of the last 20 years is not rosy. Computer technology has advanced
a lot, sure, but when I read things from the 70's it seems that there was a
more enlightened society back then. I heartily agree with rohern's sentiment.

It's a societal problem. Even though a lot of people would love to work on
really new and bold and innovative things, it's impossible to do if society
doesn't enable it. For example if your project is immediately shot down due to
legal reasons, or not financed out of fear or conservatism.

------
thorin_2
Why can't the next area of innovation be in education? I’m not talking solely
about the transition from print to digital, but rather a complete reset on
education with technology at its core rather than at the periphery? Rethink
the status quo, with no sacred cows (teachers, buses, grades, testing, - even
classrooms all up for grabs).

Imagine tablet devices or similar technology that provide individualized,
adaptive teaching programs that exhibit techniques that allowed students to
progress each at their own pace, using highly innovative and entertaining
forms of education.

Imagine all progress (and regress) made by the student as a form of continual
testing and as gates to increasingly more complex subjects, with programs that
adapt to a student’s areas of weakness (and strengths), hitting at core
concepts from different angles and in ways that appeal to that individuals
ideal method of learning, until that student was able to progress to the next
concept, or skip and then revisit once a complementary concepts is are
understood that would augment that student’s ability to master the concept
they skipped earlier.

Imagine technological innovation that allowed us to take a less linear
approach to certain subjects, which is the only method today given the
constraints of 1:* teacher:students and the invisible “bar” which forces
certain students to move at the lowest common denominator pace, while taxing
other students to keep, such as those that have difficulty learning in the
cookie cutter way.

Imagine applications that blend multiple subjects (math, science, history),
presenting the material not using your standard “preach at you” teaching
technique, but instead using role-based or video game style interactive
learning that makes the kid WANT to study, gets excited about the subject.

Envision a system where the best teachers become the product managers that
formulate the logic and program flow for those innovative applications, and
your run-of-the-mill teacher becomes a custodian for keeping things under
control while the students interact with their devices, and of course, with
each other, as social interaction is essential for their well-being as well.

Sure there would be many hurdles, not the least of these being teachers unions
and the hurdle of changing centuries of preconceived notions of how education
should be accomplished, but hey, the author asked for what the next
revolutionary idea could be, and a transformation in education with technology
at its core has my vote.

~~~
mattquinn
I have a lot of issues with what you just posted. Perhaps the biggest is
enforcing a division between "best teachers" and "run-of-the-mill teachers"
into a corporate project management of sorts. I'm not sure where you work, but
just imagine if someone deemed you a "run-of-the-mill" employee and relegated
you to watching people interact with tablets all day.

Some areas of life require a delicate moderation of technology, and education
is one of them. Anyone who drools over education as a "start-up opportunity"
likely hasn't done their research.

~~~
heynk
>Some areas of life require a delicate moderation of technology, and education
is one of them.

Care to explain why? The GP had some valid points and your rebuttal is that he
or she 'hasn't done their research,' without making a single valid point. The
metaphor about 'watching people interact with tablets' is not at all what GP
mentioned. He suggested that teachers design what interactions take place, and
take a proactive role in ensuring that their interactions are effective, while
still injecting 'human' aspects of teaching.

~~~
mattquinn
> "He suggested that teachers design what interactions take place..."

This is exactly my point. Those who work with software/tech/etc often
trivialize the relationship between software and people who hold completely
different societal roles. No matter how intuitive you make an application, no
matter how effective you seem to think your application enhances learning,
there will always be a vast number of people (in this case, teachers) who have
not the time, nor the desire, to "design" a set of "interactions" for their
student.

Are there effective teaching aids available for tablets? Yes. Does that
translate to a need for technology-guided learning in more aspects of
education? Absolutely not.

The OP talks about "a complete reset on education with technology at its
core." I stand by my point; this is a dangerous idea. And you don't have to
believe me, most any teacher will tell you this is a bad idea. Teacher
flexibility and intuition is (usually) right; software isn't going to
magically determine a child's academic strengths and weaknesses.

Education is not some cookie-cutter problem you can fix with a well-designed
app.

~~~
ThomPete
Read Seymor Papert "mindstorms"

~~~
mattquinn
The publication date was August 4, 1993. Not to say it's irrelevant, but alot
has changed since then.

We are all going to disagree about how much tech is too much in education. On
the other hand, very few disagree that tech has no place in hospitals, the
enterprise, supply chain management, etc. That alone illustrates to me how
ridiculous it is to treat education as a space needing a "reset."

------
Casseres
Maybe I'm missing the purpose of the article, but I am responding to how I
interpreted it.

What will our future be like if we all focus our lives around little boxes in
our hands rather than the vast open spaces around us?

Perhaps we should invent a future where the technology are the tools we use to
enhance our life, not control our life. In Star Trek, people weren't addicted
to PADDs or spend every living moment in the Holo Deck. In fact the episodes
where technology controlled people, we recognized the technology as evil.

Invent something to enhance our lives, not control them.

~~~
pyre
If someone is 'addicted' to Facebook, is technology really controlling them,
or is it more that they have lost control of themselves? Are they really
addicted to technology or just addicted to hanging out with their friends
(which technology -- e.g. smartphones + Facebook -- enables to happen
anywhere, not just when you're able to schedule time to meet in person).

Also:

1\. Perhaps Star Trek is an unrealistic prediction of how man will interact
with technology in the future.

2\. Perhaps your (and the author's) view of things is skewed by selection
bias. I.e. you're around people that are more 'addicted' to technology than
others.

3\. You're forgetting that in Star Trek the human race has had a sort of
epiphany centered around first contact with an alien species.

~~~
korussian
Also remember that in Star Trek the most ubiquitous technology was the pin-on-
walkie-talkie, during use of which people would look up at the ceiling.

It was a show defined by the 80's/90's _, with several plotlines that could
have been resolved by someone having an iPhone in their pocket, or by the
Enterprise having smart drones.

There were only a couple of episodes that dealt with holodeck addiction, and
just one or two in which the holodeck was used to its full potential: as a
reconfigurable-on-the-fly work space that can tie into ship-systems, and
either show or replicate any hardware or display you describe verbally.

If the holodeck were a real thing, I would rarely come out of there. I'd just
make real friends inside other holodecks, and we'd spend our lives learning
and creating stuff. It would be an enormous social problem.

_ 60's StarTrek tech doesn't count. Although Kirk's stylus/pad for signatures
is not unlike the UPS guy's… and I'll bet Uhura's metallic ear slab was
bluetooth.

~~~
korussian
Sorry, apparently a single star makes everything after it italic… until a
later star. Can't edit/delete. My bad.

------
kylebrown
I hope the author (Alexis Madrigal - usually writes on energy issues) is
right. By now a "startup" is presumed to be more of the same first-world
social-mobile navel-gazing. The world will be better off if/when such forays
stop being the most profitable. (good sign in Bloomberg news today: US
wireless contracts "may have shrunk for the first time ever in the first
quarter.")

Its anyone's guess how much innovation the next decade will bring in energy
and biotech. But as for IT, my money is on the opportunities that will come
from bridging the digital divide (emerging markets).

The Wired article "Want to become an Internet billionaire? Move to Africa"
didn't get much interest from HN[1] though it was also covered in Forbes. The
informal economy (as written about in Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of
the Informal Economy by Robert Neuwirth) is an oft-overlooked angle which
should be particularly interesting, as it intersects more and more with an
expanding global internet.

1: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3210000>

------
dude_abides
Most revolutionary things take some time before people realize that they are
revolutionary.

\- Google launched in 1998, people realized how revolutionary it was by around
2000.

\- Facebook launched in 2004, it took till about 2007 for people to realize
how game-changing its going to be.

\- IPhone launched in 2007, and within a year (after 3G + AppStore was
launched) it was clear that this is game-changing.

My point is: It could very well be that the next game-changer is already out
there and we just don't know it yet. What could it be? Well I don't know...
Google self-driving car? Khan Academy? Square? Your guess is as good as mine.

~~~
AVTizzle
The new hardware platforms are each going to give birth to their own frontiers
of opportunity. Bezos' TED Talk on "The Next Web Innovation" alluded to how
each innovation would allow for new innovations.

I'm looking at new hardware like watches (Pebble), SmartTVs, and maybe Google
Glasses if can be accepted culturally (more so than bluetooth headsets have
been) as all potentially amazing new canvasses for creation.

Highly recommend this TED talk. It's amazingly optimistic and paints a
beautiful future for technology innovation:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_bezos_on_the_next_web_innovati...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_bezos_on_the_next_web_innovation.html)

------
srconstantin
Web apps are cheap to build, easy to learn _how_ to build, fall into a
predictable model for investors, and are equipped with lots of social
institutions (like YC) encouraging people to build web startups.

So, all things being equal, we should expect more people to be creating web
apps (compared to other kinds of technology) than their profitability or
social value would warrant.

Framing makes a big difference. If there were an established culture and set
of resources for engineering or biomedical startups, they might seem less
daunting.

------
jcc80
I think Louis CK said it best, "Everything is amazing and nobody's happy."

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk>

Sorry but Social mobile local (or as people cooler than me are calling it,
SoMoLo) is still pretty new. You're just going to have to "suffer" through a
little more.

I get the author's point that it seems like the same things are getting made
and funded over and over. But with only about 1/2 the U.S. pop. owning
smartphones, you can't blame people too much for trying to stake their claim.
Anything more innovative might be too early anyways.

------
dasil003
This guy is simply failing to see the forest for the trees.

Yes, the past 30 years have been an amazing whirlwind of development of
consumer computing technology. Yes, things won't be jumping by leaps and
bounds the way they were when the basic hardware and bandwidth were getting up
to speed. The latest social app is not going to blow you away the same way,
say, the invention of the Internet did when you first discovered it. But I'm
sure it pales in comparison to the wow-factor of the telegraph when it was
first invented.

We live in a time when computing technology has filtered out to the mass
populace. It is an interesting time to be sure. But we are just scratching the
surface of what is possible with computers. There is tons of work to be done
to refine the art of computation, which I believe ends with creating AI that
can do things we are incapable of doing as humans. That is still a very long
way off.

And assuming all goes smoothly without any major natural disasters or self-
destruction, after that, there will be a new chapter in human existence where
I believe we will have to come to grips with having automated everything and
no longer having to employee people en masse. Where will we find meaning once
the struggle to survive is pushed so far from our daily concerns?

The point is things are constantly evolving, and there is no chance that
things are about to get boring. "Web", "Social", and "Mobile" are only "done"
if you are tech pundit looking to summarize the state of the world in a tidy
800 words. The reality is that these things are just building blocks whose
novelty has worn off, but whose ultimate utility is far from being realized.

------
brownbat
| The question is, as it has always been: now what?

| Decades ago, the answer was, "Build the Internet." Fifteen years ago, it
was, "Build the Web." Five years ago, the answers were probably, "Build the
social network"

In other words, when you read near future sci fi and think, "that's a cool
piece of plausible tech that I really want right now!" what is it?

"We are prosthetic gods." That quote dates back farther than you might think.
Printing, telecom, radio, the internet, the web, the social network, the smart
phone... all of these take the sum of human knowledge/experience and inch it
slightly closer to my brain.

The next step is to have it rest right against my temple while we debate
whether or not to break out the scalpel.

Hate to jump on the bandwagon, but I'm ready for the Goggles. Google's
commercials don't scrape the surface of what it could mean to have internet-
enabled constant-on cameras on everyone's face, for better and worse. But
that's the next space I want to explore.

------
guelo
Sure there are a lot of smart people wasting away figuring out how to sell ads
more efficiently. But I think we're still fairly reliably being wowed several
times a year. Right now Kickstarter is the big wow for a lot of people,
they're doing some real revolutionary work on the future of business and work.
With Etsy being a good wow along the same lines before that. Obviously the
iPad is making explosive entries into all kinds of industries which are being
revolutionized for the 2nd or 3rd time in the last 20 years. And this guy
talks like the iPhone happened ages ago, it was only 5 years ago, 4 years
since the amazements started emanating from the app store.

I'm not too worried, change is accelerating and the wows will keep on coming.
Five years from now should look more different from today then today looks
compared to 2007. The main dangers are monopolistic predator companies, walled
gardens, and government intrusion. Other than that, we will continue being
blown away for years to come.

------
blhack
I'm really sick of hearing all of the hatred that facebook gets.

It's a useful tool that I use every day for organizing meetups and, in my
opinion, is superior to a mailing list in pretty much every single way.

My local reddit users group has almost 1000 members in it, and has no branched
into several "sub groups" [a book club, a film club, a music club, a workout
club, and a hacker club]. Just now before reading this, I found a movie to go
to tonight with somebody, committed to start reading a book with somebody
else, and got invited to an event this Friday.

Oh, and somebody who is planning an event for this _Saturday_ asked me to
RSVP.

Last weekend our group had a nearly 100-person strong "masquerade" at a bar in
Phoenix. We pretty-much took over the bar.

None of this stuff would happen if not for facebook, and I know this because
there have been active attempts within our community to push stuff back onto
reddit, all of which have failed.

Facebook is a useful tool to me, and a useful tool to a lot of other people.
If it disappeared tomorrow, it would effect me in a very negative way.

~~~
sp332
People react negatively to FB because they are abusing their usefulness. Want
to easily find someone to go to a movie with? Fine, give us your web browsing
history, your friends list, your email addresses, your phone numbers, your
social calendar, your location history, where you lived, worked, and went to
school, many full-text conversations with your close friends, and... oh yeah
any pictures of you that all your friends on FB take, plus you should tag your
friends in pictures that you take. That way we can correlate your location
retroactively even if you don't personally "check-in" with us.

Did I mention that your friends list isn't private, law enforcement can get
all this data at any time, and we're using all this data for business
purposes?

~~~
crazygringo
But they're not doing it for nefarious reasons. Having all this information
together is genuinely useful for users. That's why they do it! People _want_
it, and for good reason.

The side-effect that all this information provides an unsettlingly complete
snapshot of your life, trusted to a single entity, is an inevitable byproduct.
Facebook has certainly made a few mistakes, but the things people complain
about aren't specific to Facebook -- they're inherent to any useful, complete
social network.

Is there a consumer-friendly solution to this dilemma? I'm not sure. Privacy-
wise, you can't have your cake (super-connected with your friends) and eat it
too (keep the site from knowing about all those connections).

~~~
sp332
If this were for my benefit, they would either stop tracking me across the
web, or somehow make that data available or useful to be. It's currently
opaque, so whatever their reason is, it's not for my best interests. Also, I
think keeping my friends list more private would be nice. And being able to
pay money instead of being shown ads would benefit _both_ me and FB.

~~~
amirmc
Making the data available to you probably would be interesting but _using_ it
to 'improve' your experience probably drives more engagement.

Also, having you paying money would probably be _less_ beneficial to Facebook,
as I'm sure they can make more money from advertising.

I'm not trying to defend FB here but it _is_ worth remembering that they've
reached 800million people so they've obviously got something right. The
question people should consider is at what cost to themselves.

------
phodo
Here is one simple attempt to explain the value of many of the startups that
are otherwise dismissed by such naysayers, although coming from a heavy tech
background I am the first to admit that some of these startups are incremental
and featurettes at best.

We are in the age of sensors and A/D conversion. Many (not all) startups today
do operate at the app layer... they are web / mobile apps etc. They produce
tools that enable us to consume and produce info... at scale... we're talking
millions of people are slowly but surely doing the analog-to-digital
conversion for a future. At a mass scale, the result will be
x,y,z,t,status,interest,social,connection connections/graphs for many things
across many verticals. Privacy issues aside (they cannot be ignored, but bare
with me for a second), the end result is a real-time layer on the world that
exists in the digital domain, not the analog one. We are creating a world of
installing "sensors" through market forces.

There is a step function in innovation (a new S-curve, if you will) that will
occur at some point, that will be dependent on the world where things are
digitized (the one we are creating now) in order to unlock innovation further.
Not just technically, but from an adoption/diffusion/comfort level in society.
We are going through that now... so the outcome ain't so bleak. At the end of
this particular journey (call it a bubble, call it something else), we will
have 1 billion+ people who a) are comfortable with sensors / digitizing their
stuff and themselves b) and are doing it.

We are converging on a dominant design of what a digitized world looks like,
through market forces! And in more recent years, the big data techniques
emerging that will also be pushed by market forces. The best way to think
about that is the following: In the ABSENCE of the incremental innovation
(instagram of x, pinterest for y), I can imagine many future business and
technology plans saying: we would like to build this technology, but it is not
feasible because it requires a world where everyone is a sensor. Or even
better, our new technology can change the world, but it assumes that people /
things are digitized.

tl;dr: current crop of startups are creating sensors for big data and other
processes. This can create future innovation opps that leverage this big data
in new and profound ways. The absence of such startups is a blocker for that
future class of innovation.

Hope not too incoherent... typing this at 30,000 feet in a cramped seat.

------
lucisferre
This type of "whatever's new is old" complaining is pretty cliche. I mean, of
course people are going to try to innovate in evolutionary ways more than
revolutionary ways.

Revolutionary innovation is at least partially random and obviously much
higher risk. It often comes as a result of many people iterating many times on
the same-old-same-old.

This article really seems to do nothing other than state the obvious and
offers no real suggestions or directions for where to go or what to do next.
Oh right, biotech, cure for cancer, end hunger, solve the energy crisis, etc.
Because no one has tried or is trying to solve those, and they are clearly as
easy as figuring out how to get people to share photos of themselves.

~~~
bicknergseng
I agree... but I'd like to phrase it the way I thought of it. The evolution
the article made me think of is not really innovation but rather integration.
Things like Google Wallet, mobile apps, etc... they aren't new technologies,
they're current or old technologies applied in different ways. If the
article's author wants innovation on the scale of the electronic computer or
space flight, you've got to understand that that kind of innovation is far
more difficult to create, as you pointed out.

------
anigbrowl
From the previously-posted thread on this that got no other replies:

an astute article. One thing not addressed here is the failure of the Smantic
Web paradigm to really take off; I don't know whether this is because of a
lack of critical mass in the quantity of semantically coded data or the
immaturity of ontology frameworks or something else - my best guess being that
the browser is no more suitable to traversal of the semantic web than FTP/
Archie/ Veronica/ Gopher were suitable browsing tools for hyperterxt -
although each solved 'part of the puzzle.'

~~~
lars
The semantic web has one huge problem imo: There was/is typically zero
incentive to semantically encode data. As shown by things like IBMs Watson,
you're better off extracting sentence semantics with NLP than by hoping
someone has encoded the data for you.

Another thing is that huge ontological databases actually exist, it's just
that no one seems to be able to use them for anything useful. Knowledge bases
and formal reasoning over them used to be a big deal in AI.

This comes from someone who tried to do a startup that essentially tried to
incentivize creating semantic data. It's a hard earned lesson, but I now have
zero belief that manual formalization of data is ever going to take off. Even
if lots of cool things would be possible if it did.

~~~
anigbrowl
Largely agree. What saddens me is that the extracted semantics are not
apparently being shared or exchanged automatically, which is holding us back.
On the upside, I remember the view that mass internet usage couldn't take off
because open protocols didn't provide sufficient economic incentives for
private actors, but that turned out OK.

would be quite interested in hearing more about your startup if you want to
post to HN or correspond via gmail.

~~~
lars
No prob, I'll send you an email when I get home from work.

------
dharma1
I think it's the way evolution works. Sometimes it's slow for a while - then
things click into place and there is rapid progress.

The Khan Academy (and other free online, high quality education) is probably
the most revolutionary thing that has come out of the internet in the past few
years.

I don't know how much effect it has at the moment in the developing world -
whether resources like that are used in the classroom and by students - but
the potential for transformation is huge. There is an enormous amount of
people in the world with untapped talent because of lack of access to high
quality education.

Biotech, synthetic biology etc aside, I think the next thing to facilitate
change in computing is portable display technology - for personal use maybe it
will be Google Glass once it's a mature product. For shared use I think low
cost, lightweight high res laser/LED pico projectors will take off in the next
couple of years. The computer itself will be a tablet/mobile phone, either
with its own display or hooked up to one of these new display devices.

Battery tech is another interesting one - once we work out how to produce
cheap, high energy density, long life batteries from a natural resource that
is abundant, we'll see a lot of accelerated progress in several areas.

Of course the 1st world problems of not having enough cool gadgets and
software will be put into perspective when the Earth's limited food/energy
resources vs growing population starts playing out for real.

------
yonasb
I don't like these "where's the innovation" posts, too negative. There's lots
of exciting software being built. I will however admit that, in general, the
Glass Project was the most exciting thing I've seen in a while. So maybe this
is really about the lack of innovation in the hardware space

~~~
hkmurakami
If it _is_ the case that innovation in HW is lagging behind innovation in SW
at this time, then it would seem that _investors_ have something to do with
the phenomenon, not just the entrepreneurs. When I read the line below today,
it was alarming to me:

 _> Then he hit a roadblock. A big one. Migicovsky couldn’t raise more money.
Few investors were interested in betting on a hardware startup, or dealing
with the headaches that often come with manufacturing goods [1]_

Perhaps the bulk of entrepreneurs and investors are after the "quick money". I
know some pure finance types currently at Tristate area hedge funds
contemplating a switch to Venture Capital (I urged him to reconsider, for a
variety of reasons). If hypothetically, investors pat the entrepreneur on the
back for the quick flip web startup, and the entrepreneur pats the investor on
the back for financing his quick flip web startup, then is it any wonder that
perhaps, HW entrepreneurs get lost in the fervor?

Hypothetically.

[1][http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2012-04-17-rejected-by-
vc...](http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2012-04-17-rejected-by-vcs-pebble-
watch-raises-3-8m-on-kickstarter/)

~~~
yonasb
Totally agree. Not sure if that's the case across the board with VC's but it
does make sense.

------
hxa7241
> More money has got to change hands.

No, quite the opposite. If you really want to be bold about inventing the
future, money is one of the things that needs to be replaced.

The internet is, in a general sense, a technology for cooperation -- for
organising collective activities through shared information. Money is really
just an information channel for doing that too, but it is now comparatively
obsolete.

~~~
josh33
Money is a receipt given for value created. I think you mean to say that
dollars and pesos should be replaced, which I agree with to a point. However,
giving up money, to a government, is like giving up sovereignty. How could a
government fund wars or welfare if they couldn't print money.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
No, money is a receipt given for rivalrous, excludable property owned, and
then sold off, or for excludable services rendered.

We thus have an economic system that hugely neglects the provision of commons
and public goods.

------
sparknlaunch12
Is the new future offline?

We have grown attached to our electronic devices and online friends. Maybe we
need to step back and think about going back?

~~~
icebraining
Why?

~~~
mtts
We're so enthusiastic about the possibilities the internet offers us that we
want to do _everything_ online now, even things we're hardwired to do irl.
Inane chatter in real life causes your body to release hormones that make you
feel good. Inane chatter on facebook not so much. So maybe the future is
indeed that we learn to take the internet for what it is: a fantastic tool for
disseminating information and doing business, but nothing more. So the
challenge will be to give people meaningful ways to interact with each other
in real life now that the human component has been taken out of things like
education and shopping.

~~~
icebraining
_We're so enthusiastic about the possibilities the internet offers us that we
want to do everything online now, even things we're hardwired to do irl._

We're "hardwired" to do _everything_ IRL, simply because we couldn't have
evoved to adapt to it in such a small period of time.

But here's others technologies that we weren't "hardwired" for, and which
actually "re-wired" us: Language and Agriculture. I'm having an hard time
figuring out how doesn't your argument apply to them too.

 _Inane chatter in real life causes your body to release hormones that make
you feel good. Inane chatter on facebook not so much._

Well, I actually find inane chatter to be painful anywhere, but; the Internet
is just Facebook now? I'm not hardwired to play online games, but they do make
our bodies release dopamine and cortisol, even though we're not hardwired for
it.

 _So maybe the future is indeed that we learn to take the internet for what it
is: a fantastic tool for disseminating information and doing business, but
nothing more._

But we're not hardwired for that either. How is _that_ application good?
Shouldn't we be transmitting information in form of songs, as it's natural?

 _So the challenge will be to give people meaningful ways to interact with
each other in real life now that the human component has been taken out of
things like education and shopping._

When was the human component taken out of things like education? And did the
introduction of the web really remove a meaningful interaction, or did it just
free up time that can now be spent with e.g. your family instead of with
salespeople? Because that's my (anecdotal) experience.

------
swalsh
I think there's a new paradigm in the making, many people are talking about
it... but it's young.

The internet of stuff is next!

A lot of the building blocks are in place, personally I think Arduino is a
really big component that is driving the revolution and Kickstarter is
providing a surprisingly good platform for funding it. However there's still a
few missing components. One of the goals of LTE is to power this new network,
but existing carrier business models don't seem appropriate. As a consumer I'm
really not interested in paying $20 (or more!) a month for each my fridge, and
toaster, and television, and door to be connected. Light Squared was a
promising push in the right direction, which unfortunately failed.

Along the same lines of networking though, I think there's a lot of really
good opportunities for low end hardware. Qualcomm dominates the market in LTE
chipsets, but good luck getting access to the developer stuff as an indie
user. API's tying all these components together will be essential.

~~~
mtts
I'd love for this to be true, but I think it isn't. An internet of stuff
depends on raw materials being dirt cheap. Unfortunately, during the last five
years or so the price of raw materials has started to increase, not decrease,
and for reasons so fundamental it's unlikely this process will end soon.

So rather than an internet of stuff the new paradigm in the making will
probably have something to with scarcity. No idea what, exactly, but my bet
would definitely on a future of scarcity rather than a future of abundance.

------
stcredzero
Social media does contribute to communications and economic growth, in the
same way automobiles have. Social media also has real downsides, in much the
same way.

That said, reading about SpaceX excites me much more than reading about
Instagram.

------
superasn
There is lots of stuff happening which I hope we'll probably see integrated
soon in our mobile phones.

The top two things which I'm waiting to see in my mobile is 1) The lightfield
camera and 2) a device like the "sixth sense".

~~~
icefox
Pick up this magnetic wedding ring and you can feel electro magnetic fields.
The massive field microwave puts out is the most amusing one I have found so
far. <http://www.supermagnetman.net/index.php?cPath=61>

------
thatusertwo
An inovation incentive from consumers would probably work better then the
current system.

------
iRobot
Shame so much talent is wasted creating so much shit all with the ultimate
object of dumbing down the populous to a bunch of media consumers.

