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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Does that really add up? If the people who rely on public transportation are not the ones who will be able to afford the new services, how would the new services move money out of public transportation? Are you talking about the people who are currently spending their money on public transportation, but could in fact afford to spend it on some other, more luxurious transportation mode if they so chose? If so, isn't it likely that if they still choose public transportation, out of ideological concerns presumably, they will continue to do so in the future?
I'm not qualified, but I'm guessing that the money will mainly be moved from private car transportation to these new transportation services.
I kind of mixed up two arguments. My main argument was that there is definitely a need to invest into "yesteryears" public transport systems, because the new services are not affordable for anybody.
and the other argument is that new "high class" bus services take money out of public transportation, which is badly needed there, but as you said, this may not add up to much. (However I could see myself switching from public transport to self driving cars, so they can also be included in this argument)
But both arguments go in the same direction - that public transport is definitely necessary and will remain necessary in the future but is often neglected and in a really bad condition.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
To put words in your mouth, what you're saying is basically that we've reached the pinnacle of theory and practice in software engineering, aside from hiring AIs to do the job for us. That, to me, doesn't seem to be a tenable position. We haven't even reached the limit of application for known best practices, for example. And to say that we've reached the limit of understanding after only a few decades of practice seems equally unlikely.
Software is a complex subject, but is it so much different than chemistry, physics, mathematics? Each of which took hundreds of years to progress through multiple stages of advancement. Is functional flavored OOP with bolted on TDD the grand unified theory of programming? That seems unlikely to me. I suspect there are further conceptual breakthroughs on the horizon. And there is still a tremendous amount of improvement available just in getting everyone up to the level of adhering to known best-practices.
I think the problem is humans just aren't smart enough to do the work.
Every other programmer and scientist in the entire fucking world should be working on AI.
Or we can work on techniques to improve our ability. Our collective IQ improved a lot when we dropped roman numerals in favor of arabic/hindi numerals.
In programming we have know of better techniques for a long time[1]. Sadly, as a community we just haven't put understanding as a priority. We follow "Move fast and break things." instead of "Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.".
"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