That bubble formed because of inefficiencies and excessive speculation in the tech market itself after a period of extreme growth.
I'm not necessarily agreeing with the article that we have arrived at that point in the cycle again, but I'm not as sure as you that it won't happen at all. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
Nevertheless, we live in a golden age during which real innovation in software is still pretty easy. For thousands of years of history, there was no software at all. Not too long from now, computing will hit physical limits and plateau, and then for thousands of more years, we'll see about as much innovation in software as we do in dining utensils and in concrete. We're lucky to be in this odd middle zone in which innovation is still possible, and we should be grateful and enjoy it while it lasts. Who knows? This epoch of creativity might end before our bodies do.
Strongly disagree. As our abilities to store, process, and generate information about our reality advance, stagnant epochs will surely become shorter and sparser as we approach what ultimately represents the so called singularity. Innovation continues to accelerate, and humans are already developing novel computing technologies and architectures to surpass the limits of current designs.
The rates of technological and scientific development have arguably been increasing since the dawn of mankind[1]. I figure if we see any major progress in life extension in the next 50-80 years, there's a nonzero chance that some people alive today may live long enough to effectively acquire some form of immortality.
You might want to say Silicon Valley had a good run or software as a service had a good run or mobile apps had a good run.
But this is essentially saying the end of tech is here. That’s like saying everything is now invented and there is nothing new to be discovered.
That's not at all what the author is saying. He's saying that consumer attention and convenience has hit its limit. That's not the entire field of technology.
Energy clean and too cheap to measure, faster construction, new modes of manufacturing, new medicines, efficiency of engines, new modes of transportation and propulsion and so on. You can easily imagine an entire array of things that would materially improve our lives and improve productivity through the entire economy, applicable even in rural places.
What has probably reached its end is the zero-sum rent seeking enabled by platform owners and attention merchants. Maybe the Silicon Valley investors of this world will go back to the scifi of the 60s and try to come up with inventions that touch the physical world instead of continuing to pump money into the cyberpunk version of the future we've been trying to emulate for the last 20 years.
We are currently seeing more of a diffusion of technology outside of the first world and a regression to the mean across economies than the breakout productivity growth we saw in the US/Europe/Japan post WWII
So productivity growth is definitely happening globally, but generally by bringing existing tech to new geographies (usually combined with cheaper labor input and less regulation), or adapting existing technology to legacy processes in industrialized economies
Investors are not returning to scifi of the 60s, just take a look at the latest YC demo day: loan due diligence, direct to consumer B2B platform, "AirBNB for electric chargers", online sales academy, contractor onboarding software - tech is truly focused on picking some huge TAM market and taking x% of that market from legacy competitors by having a narrow focus and adding "tech" to the offering [1]
The lucrative place to be right now is private equity - there's so much money floating around for buying and selling companies right now ($2TN in uninvested "dry powder" at end of 2018). Why invent new products and companies when you could simply buy an existing business and cut costs to attain or boost profitability
> "The race isn't to maximize profits, it's to survive the inevitable deflationary spiral in prices as competitors are forced to pass along cost savings to customers to retain market share."
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay19/tech-deflationary5-19.h...
Maybe. If Uber and Lyft both ride their excellent technologies down to penny-stock share prices, because even good technology just barely keeps companies in business, then anyone who expected to profit from their success might be disappointed.
While I'm certainly no ridesharing apologist, Uber/Lyft have raised the bar significantly in terms of forcing drivers to do basic things that cabs simply failed to do in most places:
1) Actually freakin' show up.
2) Not take the lifetime of the universe showing up
3) Accept credit cards
4) Clean their car occasionally
I can go on ...
If Uber/Lyft completely flame out, I would not like to see these things go back to the way they used to be.
But they work pretty bad from their shareholders perspective since they generate loss on every ride. Even if they avoid all the legal landmines, they still might have to shut down for the simple reason of running out of money (and shareholders running out of patience).
> they still might have to shut down for the simple reason of running out of money (and shareholders running out of patience).
My prediction is that Uber and Lyft will either themselves morph into something more like traditional cab companies, or their technology will be bought out of bankruptcy to build something similar. The world will run out of suckers who want to lose money subsidizing their rides and suckers who are willing to wear out their vehicles to drive for them.
Deflation is considered bad. The only thing worse monetarily is hyperinflation.
Deflation reduces monetary velocity because consumers rightly assume that a dollar tomorrow is worth more than a dollar today, so they spend less. This reduces the effectiveness of monetary policy and various multipliers.
Deflation is great if you're a rentier since fewer people can afford financing given that the low/negative inflation rate won't monetize their debts. So there's less competition for assets.
If you think deflation is good, you should consider the 30 year malaise Japan has been in.
Deflation makes people save instead of buying shit they don't need. This preserves resources and limits pollution. It also means they only invest in new ventures when they seem like a really good idea, so less time/resources are wasted on bad ideas.
Currency deflation is bad because it causes people to hoard cash in a mattress because it will be worth more tomorrow than the returns on equally safe investments. Then you get underinvestment and economic collapse, which causes more deflation, which causes more currency hoarding. It spirals into a depression.
But that's caused by the value of the currency increasing relative to everything else. "Deflation" in the price of products in a single industry is basically the source of all growth. It's what happens when you make something more efficient. And it doesn't cause anybody to have any reason to hoard cash in a mattress, because it's not the cash that's worth more -- it still buys the same amount of wheat or land -- it's only the computer chips that lose their value. Which just causes people to not hoard manufactured computer chips as an investment, which there is no apparent benefit in anybody doing anyway. (Maybe it would ensure that we have a stock of computer chips available to rely on in a chip shortage, so then instead we get a big price spike when severe weather strikes a major manufacturing region, but that's about it.)
And the lower prices don't even necessarily hurt the industry, because they're a result of lower costs. So the companies are still moving product at a profit, but now at the lower price there is more demand and they move more product. Selling a billion of something for $1 each is more profitable than selling a thousand of them for $100,000 each with the same profit margin percentage. Apple today makes a whole lot more money than IBM did in 1970.
Lot's of the big tech is just user interfaces (Uber, Airbnb, even Netflix). There is some utility in better interfaces - but overall their market power comes from squeezing the suppliers (see https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/ and my assimilation of it: https://hackernoon.com/aggregators-bffd36063a72). This is a market inefficiency and it will be eventually fixed somehow.
But it is not everything - because we can automate more and more stuff beside user interfaces, this will grow.
I agree that they do unlock some economic potential - but still they are just user interfaces. They don't own any of the physical facilities and they don't do any sophisticated computations - all they do is matching offers and that is just user interface.
User interface is not rocket science. They did unlock some economic potential and they have been rewarded for this - but the equilibrium state is when return on investing in Uber and investing in a physical facility (a car used as taxi or for Uber) is the same. An app (Uber market cap $40B) cannot be worth more than a factory (Ford market cap $9B) forever, because app is easier to produce and if it is worth more now - then this attract competition that will drive this down.
Yes, because clearly technology consists solely of only web services and mobile apps. No other technical advancements and inventions exist or will ever be built. This is quite literally the peak of humanity folks.
We've done everything possible and there's absolutely nothing left for us to imagine, discover, or create. /s
That's not what the author is arguing, he's simply stating that a main driver of this tech cycle - matching platforms for the sharing of private assets such as Uber and AirBnB - is running into problems, with appetite decreasing in public markets for companies that show (slowing) user growth with no clear path to profitability. A valid point.
What remains to be seen is the second claim - "the fantasy that AI and machine learning will generate trillions in profits"
While I tend to agree that ML/AI are generally deployed to save costs rather than increase revenue and create totally new categories of products, there are definitely still a lot of brownfield opportunities in legacy tech for data scientists to tackle and automate
This also ignores the huge opportunity for cloud service providers to take compute-as-a-service business from legacy on-prem/datacenter biz as well
But I would challenge you to think outside the sarcastic box and propose what you see as a few of the main technological drivers of productivity growth that are currently popping up in tech
What really needs to be answered here is why you suddenly stopped putting periods at the end of your sentences after your first paragraph.
On a more serious note, if you're genuinely interested, just take a look at my historical posts/comments on HN. I post all the interesting articles I see from my personal feed on here.
I think AMD figured it out with chiplets actually... most software isn't even written yet to take advantage of cheap massive parallelism. That is an entire direction to grow after single thread performance flatlines.
Smith is not that good a prognosticator. He's better than Howard Kunstler, who, despite having his finger on the pulse of certain recent trends, has completely misunderstood the underlying factors causing those trends. Smith is much the same way--a Boomer who has a Boomer world view. To be true visionary, you have to be able to effectively set aside your own biases, something which we are all guilty of having difficulty with. You have to let the clues take you to conclusions that you aren't comfortable with--something that today's liberals are exceedingly bad at doing. Their indoctrination does not allow them to chart a different course, they end up headed straight for the rocks.
I think the smartphone fad is going to die down. The uptake rate of purchased apps has got to be kind of dismal right now. It had novelty, now it doesn't. Frankly, these phones are nothing but a pain. My 9-year old son has a phone, he doesn't care. My teenage daughter uses some social media but the kids are very wary of all of it having heard the horror stories and lived a few of them. Telemarketers have utterly wrecked voice to the point where I never hardly answer my phone anymore. Their bullshit has cut us off from each other instead of bringing us together. Either it dies or we die.
His other point, financialization, is correct. But the issue there is that all these companies were created to chew up money, not to better humanity. Our priorities are what are all out of whack here. We could have spent all the capital far more wisely, but it got allocated to sexy "disruptive" ideas like Uber and Airbnb instead. Meanwhile, air travel sucks, traffic jams are way up, and honestly, the US is headed to a 3rd World nation status because we haven't invested in the things that really matter. Thus, in the midst of this extravagant tech expansion, we have very little to show for it. Just money down a hole. A kind of Keynesian money-sink situation.
Uber does stand out as terrible disruption. Cab companies had it coming, but every day now I drive amongst these asinine Uber/Lyft stickered vehicles and it just seems so...amateur. It's amateur hour. The tech behind it was cool, but the actual, rubbe-meets-the-road aspect looks so completely idiotic to me. For people who drive so much, they sure as hell aren't very good at it, either!
> The uptake rate of purchased apps has got to be kind of dismal right now.
On the contrary, all indicators point to big YoY increases. As an example, "during the week starting on Christmas Eve, a record number of customers made purchases or downloaded apps from the App Store, spending over $890 million in that seven-day period." Other sources are talking about overall 25%+ revenue increases for both Apple's and Google's stores.
I would consider them Tech companies (now, in 2019), although I see your point. They operate in non-tech industries, but their product is a technological one. Uber is not a taxi company, they are a taxi-calling company (as they would want to you believe), and AirBnB is a short-term-rental-finding company. And their solutions are technical ones.
As software eats into other industries, it will eventually normalize so AirBnB is "actually" a hospitality company, and Uber will be "just" a taxi company (as you suggest) ...since every other company will have products/solutions that are equally technical.
IMO, any bubble bursting will simply be the market adjusting to this normalization.
Uber or AirBnB apps are not some revolutionary tech, they are something CS undergraduate could write, that's why it is inaccurate to put them in the same category as Google (which does some serious ML research) or SpaceX (doing actual rocket science).
Uber's advantage lies in their brand, and early capturing of dominant market share, but their "tech" can be easily replicated.
I'm sorry, but this is a really naive statement. They literally teach Page Rank in basic Linear Algebra classes. Does that mean a CS undergrad can recreate Google?
Operating a service with real-time requirements at scale is a completely different beast than writing a proof-of-concept prototype.
Understanding the concept is a very different thing than inventing it. When Google was built, Page Rank wasn't taught ANYWHERE because nobody thought of modeling web page relevance using a Markov chain yet (well, HITS came pretty close, but you get my point).
These aren’t algorithms, they are just hand waving intuition that is “on the right track” but not quite there. You see similar “prior art” to Newtonian physics, for example, but there is still a huge leap from “oh, there might be something in these linkages” to “if we compute the stationary distribution of the Markov chain over the graph, we know the relative importance of each node.” Kleinberg was the first to algorithmically and rigorously codify this intuition.
My understanding is that Google hasn't relied on Page Rank in a very long time. Depending on who you ask, they use 100-300+ factors to rank pages. Or they switched to an artificial brain that uses its own magic that no one really understands.
I haven't kept up. All I know is Google is useless for all but the most obvious queries now.
PageRank, although deceptively simplistic now (much like the concept of gravity), was much more difficult to invent than to understand. Starting your own Google 20 years ago would have been out of reach of your everyday CS student at the time, even though PageRank is the only thing you would have to “invent” per se (and even though today it is simple enough of a concept to be taught in undergrad).
Today, starting a Google is even harder because of Google’s moat and the advancements such as the deep learning infrastructure used for ranking pages (which still can be replicated if you throw a few Stanford grads at the problem — they don’t even have to be budding Larry Pages in aptitude — but a working replica isn’t nearly enough to compete with Google’s foothold in the market).
It is not even about technology being revolutionary, it's about where they competitive advantage lies. To put it bluntly: SpaceX and likes are technology companies. Uber and AirBnB are "law-bypassing as a service" companies.
> As indicated by the terrible stock performance after the IPOs of Uber and Lyft.
The Lyft price is down but it looks like Uber has kept pace with the overall market since their IPO. I think we'd struggle to find many people who would define "keeping pace with the market" as "terrible stock performance".
You can get up to date stock quotes for free. Search for the symbol UBER. Uber being near it's listing valuation around $70 billion is hardly "a bubble bursting".
That's an entirely different conversation... I do think Uber in particular was great at creating hype and glossing over the fact that their pricing/model isn't sustainable without the substantial rider/driver subsidies and worker exploitation that let them consistently undercut traditional taxi pricing.
What I meant is that any poor market performance for Uber/Lyft could simply be a function of investors waking up to the aforementioned realities, it doesn't necessarily indicate the bursting of some broader bubble.
Furthermore, I don't even view Uber/Lyft as "tech" companies. Sure, they make software, but they're not in the software business.
