Comment by papito
3 years ago
I don't see the connection. We have just gone through the longest bull market in history. Large tech companies were absolutely rolling in cash, hiring tens of thousands of expensive software engineers, whose purpose was unclear.
What do we have to show for it? That's right - complex ad algorithms and sophisticated content suggestions that lead to escalating extremism and teenage girl depression.
I would blame the "stakeholder value" culture more than anything. Short-term profits over long-term growth and innovation. GE and Boeing had every opportunity to do cool things, but the Jack Welch school of management drained these companies of life, with piece-by-piece sell offs and stock buybacks (which, by the way, were illegal at this scale before the early 80s).
The problem is not monopolies or lack of (although the government is effectively toothless at this point in that regard).
The problem is broken Capitalism and ass-backwards incentives.
Isn't Meta kind of doing this with VR/AR? Spending billions every year on research with speculative future value..
>What do we have to show for it?
Go, Rust, Chrome, Android, TensorFlow, PyTorch, tensor processing units, free education material, free email, free chat, data center scale computing... Upcoming there is self driving cars, ar/vr, quantum computing...
We actually have quite a lot to show.
Go and Rust - these are just languages. They do not fundamentally change the world in any way.
Free email and chat - come on. Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, ICQ, we had all that - without feeling violated from all the aggressive data collection, which leads me to... machine learning libraries. That's what they are used for.
Most of the technological "advances" since 2007 (Facebook, Twitter, mobile phones, big data) have been used to steal and monetize our focus, and hence we have half of our kids on Adderall. That's what we really have to show for it.
And notice that all these names you dropped - layman would have zero idea what those are. They mean nothing to an average person. My point is about the larger culture of innovation across all industries, not just some stuff deep inside the software world.
Ie rehashed old ideas, but “free”, as in, paid from ads.
Poor refutation.
Neither of the languages or machine learning frameworks are old ideas or directly ad supported. Tensor processing units and cloud computing are also purchased directly.
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