Is the tech industry unable to keep its promise?
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Over the weekend, I read this interesting article from Cade Metz on Silicon Valley’s next big thing. As someone who works in technology where there is immense pressure to “shorten” tech cycles, the article was interesting. Why at a time when Web3.0 products go from concept to launch in a few months do we not see faster product cycles across the board?
What are the expectations from technology and tech founders? Why is there this gap between tech insiders who see a stream of new products in places such as Hackernews and ProductHunt and everyone else?
From Cade Metz:
Silicon Valley’s hype machine has long been accused of churning ahead of reality. But in recent years, the tech industry’s critics have noticed that its biggest promises — the ideas that really could change the world — seem further and further on the horizon. The great wealth generated by the industry in recent years has generally been thanks to ideas, like the iPhone and mobile apps, that arrived years ago.
Have the big thinkers of tech lost their mojo?
Needless to say we’ve all heard of the driverless cars, quantum mechanics, self flying air taxis, AR/VR, AI, Brain implants etc becoming mainstream products but where is the mass adoption? Where is my self driving taxi that promised me that I’ll never have to drive again? My AR/VR glasses that will allow me to overlay or tune out the world as I see fit? Of course all these things exist but not in a very practical form today.
Mass adoption requires products that meet a need of an overwhelming majority of human beings and I think this might be where we tech goes wrong .. There are several things that contribute to this happening:
Inflated expectations
Firstly, there are inflated expectations. Being a CEO requires you to be an extreme visionary in a lot of ways, especially for the aforementioned products. However CEO’s like anyone else have to estimate how long it will take to bring a new technology to life. By nature, being optimists or just narcissists or for the sake of hauling in billions in venture capital they openly commit and promise that the technology will be ready for “mass consumption” before the “end of the decade”
Let's take a couple of examples of how this has played out. Everyone talks about Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field
The RDF was said by Andy Hertzfeld to be Steve Jobs' ability to convince himself, and others around him, to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement and persistence. It was said to distort his co-workers' sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and to make them believe that whatever impossible task he had at hand was possible. Jobs could also use the reality distortion field to appropriate others' ideas as his own, sometimes proposing an idea back to its originator, only a week after dismissing it.
The thing with Jobs’ of course was that none of the products were announced or easily known to the public so expectations were less. Consider the Apple Car. It's an “open secret” that Apple is building an Apple Car but minus key hires which is one way of figuring out what Apple is doing, there has really been no announcement from Apple. All we know are rumors:
Apple is reportedly working on a fully autonomous self-driving car. While that's nothing new, the Apple Car is said to be one you can buy and keep in your garage rather than something you would summon from an app. It'll be a huge deal if Apple can pull it off.
Details are still pretty scarce right now, but the prospect of getting the Apple Car within a few years has plenty of people excited. If you're one of them, and want to learn more, you're in the right place. Here's everything we know about the Apple Car, including leaks, rumors, and that all-important release date.
And how the car might look …….
Or
Now this is funny but doesn’t set expectations. The end result, if true with a rumored 2024 launch will shock and surprise every Apple Fan Boy.
Let's take the extreme opposite examples with two companies recently in the news : Nikola and Theranos. There are many others such as Magic Leap and my favorite “Silicon Valley Tech” company in Juicero. LOL now but back then I was like “man, cool!” and I am someone who is very aware of the market.
There was more press, more noise, more venture capital thrown at these companies without a working product. For example Nikola’s downhill roll of a truck made to look like an actual working proto. LOL. Have we become so dumb that we buy into the hype? Or have we become so busy that we buy into boisterous and larger than life founders? Or is there just too much FOMO capital flowing around thanks to Robinhood iAddiction?
Of course there are two types of founders, ones that truly believe that their vision and technology can come to life and ones that posture to raise money. I’ve placed these on a 2x2 Matrix but really was hard pressed to find companies in the bottom quadrants probably because we never hear of these companies or they die a slow death.
Low hanging fruit and the real world
Perhaps another reason that this happens is that the “easier to solve” problems are solved. This is not to say that creating an iPhone is an easy problem, but perhaps it's much easier than getting self-driving tech or quantum mechanics to work outside of a lab (perhaps a solution in search of a problem?). More so when these things interact with the real world there are real problems that give companies a pause from trying to solve the problem or that companies are not well suited to solving these problems because of a quarterly stock/report. The easier problems are solved, now its the hard stuff:
The answer, those big thinkers are quick to respond, is absolutely not. But the projects they are tackling are far more difficult than building a new app or disrupting another aging industry. And if you look around, the tools that have helped you cope with almost two years of a pandemic — the home computers, the videoconferencing services and Wi-Fi, even the technology that aided researchers in the development of vaccines — have shown the industry hasn’t exactly lost a step.
Consider this:
As for the next big thing, the big thinkers say, give it time. Take quantum computing. Jake Taylor, who oversaw quantum computing efforts for the White House and is now chief science officer at the quantum start-up Riverlane, said building a quantum computer might be the most difficult task ever undertaken. This is a machine that defies the physics of everyday life.
A quantum computer relies on the strange ways that some objects behave at the subatomic level or when exposed to extreme cold, like metal chilled to nearly 460 degrees below zero. If scientists merely try to read information from these quantum systems, they tend to break.
Capital and companies
Companies attract capital which results in these companies being able to attract the smartest talent. But what is all the talent out there building the next thing to get you to click on something and render an ad? Furthermore, some of these fields require advanced degrees which takes years to learn; after all, with no disrespect to all my super smart engineers, sometimes it can be rocket science. If we don’t have the smartest people working on the projects that push forward humanity and technology; it will take us many more years than originally promised. Furthermore there are only a few companies suited to making such large and risky investments at the cost to perhaps an already hard business, such as Uber that could not continue to invest in risky technology
Milking existing products
The companies that have a lot of capital also have to consider their stakeholders - stockholders and are they doing the best by the stockholders by investing is expensive and hugely risky technology, which is more suited for government and venture investment
Regulation
Of course as we know Big Tech (the companies that can truly invest at scale) have regulators hounding them; which is a necessary distraction, but a distraction nevertheless. Companies are cautious to invest when regulation could change the trajectory of the company. Human intelligence, driving for example, seems so .. simple .. and …ordinary as a human being, but teaching a machine to do the same thing is fraught with challenges. Take an example of a self-driving car and the Trolley Problem. Imagine the trolley problem in which, you the driver, control the car and you have the option of injuring or killing 5 people (who are not related to you) versus one person (whom you are related to). Ethically, how do you choose? Now imagine a self-driving car making that same decision? How does a self-driving car decide whether it's better to run into five people versus one? Who is responsible if you are behind the wheel and you “truly believed” the hype that the car can “drive itself”? The driver? The company? The software engineer that built it? I mean who will want to claim responsibility?
Ultimately, this is not a question of if can tech deliver, which of course is one of the largest questions irrespective of the time it takes (and I expect certain ideas will fade out as fast as the hype). These are not just tech problems, these are real world problems which require legal and ethical oversight, and regulation. After all, some of these are not situations in which your app will “crash” and you lose out the snarky comment you were writing. Advanced technologies will take time and it's best if we take the constant news cycles with a pinch of salt and give technology founders the room to create; some of the blame lies in the RDF created by founders as well.
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