
Ask HN: Next cycle - diminish
What do you think the next tech cycle be based on? In the first line put the technology in capital letters (AI
...)<p>Read this discussion.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12044872
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david927
Data.

Currently, the web is still a big collection of text documents. What is not
clear to us right now because we're knee-deep in it is is how deeply sub-
optimal that is. The number of people going to the Google homepage is
declining because people are now just going directly to the database that
represents what they're looking for. Looking to buy a home? You go to Zillow
or Trulia and query their database. People want data, not text. Text is for
novels and poetry, not for things you want to find. 95%, almost all, of the
web was posted to be found -- it wants to be data.

What will come next is the web as a database and Google will no longer be a
player there, new companies will be.

~~~
BjoernKW
The problem with that is that natural language - written or spoken - is the
natural user interface for humans.

To a certain extent we can learn how to input data in a structured manner a
machine can easily process:

\- the limited subset of human language that makes sense as search engine
input

\- GUIs

\- pretty much every input form in client software

However, for anything above a certain level of complexity this requires domain
knowledge and often even for users with experience in that domain it's still
an error-prone process.

The web as a general-purpose database is a vision that has yet to materialize.
It's not that hasn't been tried before, both in a top-down (Semantic Web) and
bottom-up (microformats, Wikis) fashion. It's not that those attempts have
been complete failures: The tools they brought about - particularly Wikis -
are a vital and highly useful part of the web.

Still, they're mostly limited to niche or domain-specific data and we still
need search engines and natural language understanding to make sense of the
largely unstructured free-form text that's stored in Wikis.

That's why I still see the need for a player such as Google that in one way or
another makes human language comprehensible to machines. This might result in
something like the web-as-a-database but it isn't all that different from what
the likes of Google and Facebook are already doing today, is it?

~~~
david927
As for natural language interfaces, you can, right now, go to Google and type
in "two-bedroom homes in Paradise, California". It won't try to answer it. It
will instead send you to a site that is a database, right? And as I mentioned,
numbers from Google's homepage are declining _specifically_ because people are
skipping that step.

 _The web as a general-purpose database is a vision that has yet to
materialize._

Yes, sure. I guess that's my point: its materialization will be the basis of
the next cycle. I have concrete grounds to believe that it's on its way and it
will be tremendously exciting because it's the beginning of the final form.
The data will get more complex, more contextual, and more refined, but it will
always be data. The astonishing thing about new paradigms is that it's like
suddenly being able to see; entire new dimensions open up; things that we
didn't even consider before become suddenly cake.

~~~
BjoernKW
> numbers from Google's homepage are declining specifically because people are
> skipping that step.

That's only if people know already which database to query. Moreover, to some
extent, Google's already trying to provide a direct answer to user queries
(flights, directions, queries for which a Wikipeda / Wiktionary abstract is
the best hit).

Doing a "SELECT * FROM restaurants ORDER BY review DESC" is simple,
discovering the database to execute that query against is still difficult.
We'd need some sort of service discovery to automate that beyond making
machines understand natural language.

------
angersock
Hype.

That's what _every_ cycle is built on.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
That and alternating between fat clients and thin clients.

------
DrNuke
Space.

Planet Earth is becoming too small for mankind and technology advancement is
making preliminary unmanned colonization of the Moon viable other than
feasible. China going first me thinks and the US will follow accordingly in
order not to lose the race.

------
anthony_franco
IoT

It went from mainframes -> desktops/laptops -> mobile. And next will be IoT.
Huge possibilities will open up when you have internet connected devices at
the sub $1 range.

~~~
jventura
I'm kind of skeptical on this one.. Why would I want an internet-connected
toaster?

~~~
anthony_franco
I'm not gonna pretend to guess what the possibilities will be. But when
computers went to costing just a few hundred dollars and fitting in your
pocket, there was an explosion of startups and ideas that no one could've
dreamt of at the time.

Likewise, when these computers go down to the size of your fingernail and
costing about $1 (like the ESP8266), suddenly a new world of possibilities
open up.

------
bbcbasic
Data and Statistical Analysis

Companies that act on facts will succeed vs. those that act on gut instincts,
egos, or something else.

------
uptown
DECENTRALIZATION

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thiago_fm
Decentralized models, blockchain(or an evolution of it), smart contracts

