Ask HN: When were the tech skeptics right?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31260058

by abidlabs • 4 years ago

7 27 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Many times when I discuss web3/crypto with people and express skepticism about its potential, people respond along the lines of "well, that's what the skeptics said about the Internet too."

I'm wonder what are some good examples of technologies in the last ~30 years that were hyped up, but then completely fizzled out and ultimately proved the tech skeptics right? AR/VR comes to mind, but I think it's too early to make the call there

I_DRINK_KOOLAID• 4 years ago

Many people said that there was no way the Apollo program would have repaid itself.

And in fact it had to be shutdown because it was bankrupting NASA.

Same for the ISS and the LHC although the latter still has some time to make it back, but it would have to be one hell of a comeback because the discovery of the Higgs Boson and then nothing else was the nightmare scenario which promplty materialized itself.

Also fusion.

mtmail• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_television "As of 2017, most 3D TV sets and services are no longer available"

PaulHoule6• 4 years ago

How about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant

h2odragon• 4 years ago

I had a demo of an Autodesk VR system in 1992; in 30 years they've not even managed to come up with new promises to sell, let alone any actual progress towards fulfilling those promises. If that's "too early to call" then you have an unusually long time horizon for your thinking, and I salute you.

What "web3" has going for it that say, "E-gold" didn't is official neglect. People used to feel that the existence of laws against these kind of scams was sufficient reason to stay away from them; enforcement or not.

jerf2• 4 years ago

"AR/VR comes to mind, but I think it's too early to make the call there"

Are you willing to make calls for things that were so many decades early that even if they do eventually happen they aren't really the same tech anymore? People put real money into AR/VR in the late 1990s and had a real marketing push behind it. It was definitely wrong. If it happens to be right a literal human generation (~40 years generally) later, well, I don't really think it made the people pushing it in the 90s right about what they were saying then.

AI has an even bigger one, with its own name: AI Winter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter Another case of what they were promising simply wasn't possible at the time and skeptics are right. That one we're already a full human generation away from, and again, nobody at the time was going "Give me money now, and in 40 years we'll definitely have AI going!" And even now, while we have tech that does some things they wouldn't have dared to dream of, our current tech also still can't do some things they promised were just around the corner.

There's also a class of "technology failure" I'm a bit of a fan of myself, which is, the technology that fails to live up to its promises even though it doesn't die out. SQL is a failure... it is not possible for casual business people to do away with database engineers because the language is so easy to write. Obviously, SQL lives on even so, but it failed out of its original goal. In fact there's several things that started life as "we'll get rid of programmers" like that, such as COBOL.

Object orientation is a failure; the promise was that we'd end up with huge libraries of reusable components such that all programming would be just wiring them together. We have a huge number of libraries of basic "objects", we have a huge number of libraries of frameworks and other really big things, but there's a vast wasteland in the middle. You can never just go up to the Object Repository and grab a User object for your application. You also need some bespoke user model for everything. You can't just grab a permission system. You can grab a permission engine, but you have to wire a whole bunch of things up because even if you do grab a framework that tries to do this all for you the third thing the PM does is spec a permission like "The user is allowed to delegate to other users that they're allowed to see a subset of their content based on a regular expression, as long as it's authorized by their team administrator" and you're back to writing real code.

Semantic web has been around multiple iterations of the hype loop by now. It was a promise to turn the entire web into a graph database. It is reduced to claiming success when Google writes very powerful ML stuff to extract basic information about a business from their home page and presenting it as a widget on the search results, using essentially no "semantic web" technologies in the process. It isn't anything like what it was supposed to be.

the_only_law3• 4 years ago

People put real money into AR/VR in the late 1990s and had a real marketing push behind it. It was definitely wrong.

I gotta say though, early 90s helmet designs looked so much cooler than the brick-on-the-face goggles.

PaulHoule6• 4 years ago

"schema.org" is a useful play on the semantic web, both in terms of a markup language that ordinary people can stand to write.

When it first came out my thought was: great, this is something on Google can consume, but technology caught up with it. What's interesting about it is that it's not just a suitable language for marking facts but it also helps Google build a training set for something that can extract data from pages that aren't marked up.

jerf2• 4 years ago

I should say I agree and that is useful. But it is only useful to the extent that it scaled down the promises by many orders of magnitude.

This is not a criticism; this is good! It means something useful can be made. Other small, useful things exist too. But the whole glorious utopia definitely doesn't exist.

anon2020dot00• 4 years ago

The Internet Bubble and the DotCom crash. The subsequent ubiquity of the internet doesn't absolve the reality of the over-hyped internet bubble during the early years.

PaulHoule6• 4 years ago

AR/VR is a strange one.

(1) It keeps proliferating. First there was VR, then there was AR, then MR, and lately XR. Thank God there are more than 26 Unicode letters so they can keep playing this game for a very long time. Once they got to "X" I started to think: is at the point that Lundbergh from "Office Space" can ask "What's our XR Strategy?"

(2) VR has been central to our culture (realized in our imagination) since about 1990. There are so many things culturally interesting about the movie Ready Player One such as: Mark Zuckerberg seems to have never seen it, I keep wanting to conflate it with Sword Art Online, it's about the future but also about the past, it appeals to all generations whether or not you've played video games, Spielberg can get away with shameless nostalgia because he was a titan of the time period being reminisced on. It's successful being visionary precisely because it is conservative enough that everybody "gets it"

(3) VR and AR are highly successful in particular niches. (E.g. you can afford a Hololens 2 if it is going to keep you from making a million-dollar mistake building a building)

Lately I've been discovering that the AR/VR storytelling concepts actually work well if you ditch the glasses and turn the optical system inside out to use projectors to paint over the physical world and create visions that people can share.

the_only_law3• 4 years ago

AR seemed cool at first, but I haven’t really seen it go anyway. I know some VR/AR stuff has been used to replace trainings and such, but it still feels solidly embedded in the domain of games.

I’ve had people for years tell me that VR is going to birth a new revolution in UI and how we interact with software, usually with some sci-fi description of people opening AR filing cabinets to access folders and such.

edmundsauto• 4 years ago

Have you ever been traveling and used Google's instant translate feature? Sure, it's a feature, not a platform - but holy shit is that cool.

mattbrewsbytes2• 4 years ago

I feel like VR will only ever be a niche thing since my theory is people, in general, don't like wearing stuff (goggles, 3D glasses) over their eyes for long periods of time for pure entertainment.

Your last statement intrigues me though: "use projectors to paint over the physical world and create visions that people can share" I wonder if video sampling, much like audio sampling for music, could propel AR into mainstream uses in that regard.

Take video game content for example, if sampling were allowed, an indoor go-kart track properly setup (walls, projectors, go-kart mods, etc.) could have themed racing nights: Mario Kart, Pole Position, etc. It would have to be slightly different, like a banana peel could decelerate for a couple seconds safely instead of spinning off track. I suppose a helmet with goggle overlay would be much cheaper to implement though.

karmakaze2• 4 years ago

When I got the original iPhone I thought it was the coolest thing, but even then I couldn't imagine that people would be staring at a 3.5"-6" screen for hours on end for entertainment.

There will be a new platform that replaces mobile. What could be more convenient than a wireless, pocketable, hand-held device? A hands-free one. Who wants to lead/own that market? Everyone big enough to compete. I wonder if MS will miss this one too.

al2o3cr• 4 years ago

You probably know the "DivX" codec, but do you remember the "video rental" format that it was originally devised for?

the_only_law3• 4 years ago

I feel like I very faintly recall this story. Was this the “one-use” media?

PaulHoule6• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX

Mordisquitos• 4 years ago

The Segway comes to mind as something that was disproportionately hyped up compared to its end result. Quoting a TIME magazine article from 2001 [0]:

As big a deal as the PC, said Steve Jobs; maybe bigger than the Internet, said John Doerr, the venture capitalist behind Netscape, Amazon.com and now Ginger.
[Inventor Dean] Kamen's aspirations are even grander than that. He believes the Segway "will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy."

[0] http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,186660,...

PaulHoule6• 4 years ago

Since the patents expired the Segway architecture turned out to be the "standard model" for a social humanoid robot: https://www.commabody.com/

wmeredith• 4 years ago

Segway scooters come to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segway_Inc.

I remember in the early aughts when these things first came out, there was press talking about how cities were going to be rebuilt to accommodate them as a primary mode of transportation. Now, they're basically a novelty mode of transport with a few niche use-cases.

PaulHoule6• 4 years ago

The Segway is a strange case.

I grew up in Manchester, NH where those things came from, when I went there to visit in the 2000s I would see strange sights such as a Segway user driving pedestrians off the sidewalk or police officers testing them in the parking lot of Zayres, a failed discount store. (Looked like something out of Demolition Man)

Today there are numerous "hoverboard" devices that work the same as a Segway but are built somewhat differently. The Segway is also the canonical design for a self-balancing pseudo biped robot today.

The Segway is a case of patent law holding up innovation: Dean Kamen had a terrible idea about how to apply the technology that just didn't work and the patents just delayed people coming to market with products people want.

patatino• 4 years ago

One of the main problems is that crypto projects start with an absurd valuation of what they could become in 10 years. We never had something like that?

If you make everybody rich in a company from the start, very little motivation and innovation are left.

duped• 4 years ago

VST3 is up there, it "solved" a lot of problems (in doing so, made the simple stuff way harder). Bunch of hype back in 2008, and it never caught on. Ten years later they stopped licensing VST2 because still, no one was writing VST3 plugins en masse. 14 years later, people are still preferring to make VST2 where possible.

jfengel• 4 years ago

In the 90s, I was for some reason the go-to guy to evaluate new hotshot technologies for the department.

I gradually realized that I could be replaced by a 3x5 card that said "It sucks". I don't even remember all of the things I deprecated. Pretty much every single cover of Wired Magazine, for starters. I even came to a rule: if it's on the cover of Wired, it's because it's never going to work, or because it's already common knowledge. (I was very annoyed to see the replaceable-car-battery thing there, because it seemed like a good idea and the rule meant it wouldn't work. And it didn't.)

There were exactly 2 times that the 3x5 card would have disagreed with me:

1. Java 2. Web browsers

To be honest, I under-estimated #2. I knew browsers were important, but I didn't foresee them basically replacing desktops.

In general, tech skeptics are nearly always right, if only because of Sturgeon's Law. The vast majority of everything is trash. Perhaps by the time it reaches the level of notoriety merely 80% of everything that's trash.

If you want a list of tech that failed, go look at the list of Wired covers.

perilunar• 4 years ago

Flying cars?

There's been many proposed and built, but they haven't really 'taken off'.

Also "personal air vehicles" i.e. human carrying quadcopters and the like. Lots of press, still nothing commercially available after years.

Ask HN: When were the tech skeptics right?

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