Kurzweil predicts accelerating paradigm shifts (I’m specifically revisiting Singularity is Real)

But I’m seeing stubbornness in that rate of technological acceleration. The stalling of VR/AR is a good example.

2007-2010 shattered existing computing paradigms with iPhone/Android

This was convergence along a few points: miniaturization of powerful computers into the pocket, maturation of wireless telecom infrastructure, better software

It caused a rupture in computing, commerce and culture. The whole gig economy, for example, was built in its wake

There has not been an analogous paradigm shift in the decade since.

If you look for the shift previous to modern mobile technology, you’d find the popular adoption of the web, desktop computing, optical media roughly a decade prior.

So the clock runs around 12-15 years so far

Go 15 or so years before the explosion of the web, you have the proliferation of crude, isolated personal computers in the early 80’s.

So that’s three shifts along that same broad schedule.

Maybe we’re not getting faster. But surely we can’t be slowing down either, right?

Let’s assume we’re not.

We should be right on the edge of the next technological paradigm shift. 2023 is 15 years after the iPhone introduction.

So there’s the timing. But shifts are built on technological convergence, not just timing.

For the iPhone to work, it needed not just the hardware miniaturization, but maturation of software to present a ~desktop class~ experience. Blackberry and PalmOS were busted as hell, designed for a much more meager age of portable computing.

iPhone also needed cellular coverage

In the 90’s, the proliferation of desktop PC’s collided with consumer dialup technology. The basics of the internet were there, but services like AOL delivered the last mile of both telecom infrastructure AND user experience. Making email and data lookup accessible to newbies

So what’s going to be the convergence that triggers the next shift?

What didn’t exist before, that’s possible now?

Let’s go back to VR/AR. I’d say the modern age of VR/AR was triggered by Oculus & Vive. They could be analogous for this shift what Treo and Hiptop were to mobile

That is, clunky, niche products that were too crude to spur mass adoption. Proofs of concept that never quite blew the doors open.

Part of what made Oculus and Vive so clunky is the hardware they require. Massive bulk on your face tethered to an even more massive gaming PC.

VR needs a device that can churn through a LOT of pixels every 1/60 of a second. Anything less and you’ll either lose your lunch or get a terrible headache.

Your eyes need a LOT of persuasion, they need it consistently, and if you fail, the result is meaningful discomfort.

So this is already bad enough

But what’s worse is that the early VR headsets had this terrible pixel density. Nothing persuasive about it at all. It looked like perceiving everything through a screen door.

Even so, we’re right at the edge of what computing can do.

Because your computer needs to generate TWO IMAGES AT ONCE

One for each eye. The differing images create a sense of depth.

So this is all very demanding. You need a powerful computer at one end, you need a display that sits right in front of the eyes that is well miniaturized

Given all this, you can imagine my interest, then, at all this news about the M1-based Macs.

Apple’s silicon prowess has been impressive for years, of course, but seeing it in the desktop context really puts it into perspective.

Within the narrow, specific scope of non-mobile (laptop and desktop) computers, a paradigm shift is already here. The Old Way has been ruptured.

The Old Way was: you could have as much computing as you wanted but it was going to run hot and use a LOT of juice.

The new rules are:

You can have a LOT of computing power, it can be delivered with an efficient use of energy, and without thermal waste.

That’s kind of a big deal. Gaming PCs are bulky, in part, to accommodate all the cooling technology needed to keep them from melting down.

That’s just one component. We know that paradigm shifts are built on convergence.

What is going to converge with the new race for energy-efficient, high-performance, post-x86 computing?

If we look at the last shifts, networking was a big deal. Do we have anything in the wings?

It turns out we do.

American internet, in particular, is a shambles. Just dogshit. Inequality all over the place, and even well-served neighborhoods get crummy, asymmetrical connections. Slow upstream.

But Covid is placing pressure on existing network infrastructure.

Covid is breaking the collocation yoke for knowledge workers. For better or worse, we’re seeing every job that can tolerate remote work adopting it.

That’s taxing our crummy residential networking in ways we haven’t seen before.

But if there’s money in it, someone will solve it

What if I told you Comcast could deliver symmetrical gigabit service to the home on existing infrastructure?

The future is already here, just not evenly distributed. They just ran a successful test in Jacksonville, FL.

https://www.engadget.com/comcast-1-gb-upload-trial-035904628.html

So we’ve got:

Dramatically miniaturizable, low-energy, high-efficiency, ultra high performance computing, with significant graphics prowess.

The POTENTIAL, and the DEMAND, for a phase-change, exponential improvement in residential broadband.

We’re on the cusp of a paradigm shift.

What’s on the other side of it is a level of location-independent community and communication unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Imagine a party with friends from around the world. And no one hops on a single airplane.

Imagine a team of collaborators in five different cities, who all sit next to each other and work on the same whiteboard when needed.

I’d be lying if I told you I knew exactly how the implementation details will shake out.

But the power of recent paradigm shifts was simple:

People flocked to America Online because they could talk to people.

People bought iPhones because they could talk to people.

We love talking to people. That’s what we DO more than anything else, what we love more than anything else. Our reason for being is social interaction.

What Covid has exposed is just how challenging it is for us to meet our social needs with existing technology.

Forced to stay home, our best option is ZOOM meetings, which are exhausting and unsatisfying. You feel tethered to a machine, not connected to other humans.

My career started 16 years ago, in Second Life.

I went there because I could tell it was the future.

It just happened to be too early. Crummy broadband connections made its 3D UGC unpleasant and untenable for most folks. The interface was clunky, and PC-bound.

But even within its limits, Second Life’s attempt at creating the metaverse was REALLY compelling.

The sense of space was real. You could interact with people in a shared digital location no matter where they were.

Nothing popular has come close in the years since.

We’ve got the raw materials, now, to build the metaverse. The real version, not the experiment we saw in Second Life.

We have social pressures to create that metaverse as well. The Covid diaspora is permanent, and will have impact on loads of businesses. On how work works.

So if you want to put your money on a paradigm shift in the coming years, that’s the one I’d bet on.

We’ve all the converging forces to demand it. Will it be goggles on the face? Enormous wall screens that simulate collocation? Something else?

It could well be a blend of these

Apple is definitely going to ship AR. They’ve done all the platform and developer tools investments in it. The leaks say they’ll ship in… 2023. Right on schedule!

But no one wants to work in goggles all day. There are other options, too.

Today you can buy what’s called an “ultra-short throw projector.” These projectors can be sited right in front of the wall you’re using to view the image, instead of across the room.

A 4K model isn’t too expensive, either, now down to around $3500.

High density LED tiles are also maturing, making wall-sized displays practical.

So tech like Tonari, which creates a simulated portal between two physical locations, feels on the cusp of satisfying some of these demands using technology already here. https://tonari.no 

We want connection. We crave it.

Expect the next big thing to address the gnawing, desperate loneliness this pandemic has exposed.

The ingredients are all… nearly… ready.

We’ll wonder how we ever lived without it.

*Singularity is Near https://twitter.com/_danilo/status/1335428686863081474

Yeah, the more I think of it, the more it feels like upstream bandwidth is the hinge point on the next technological paradigm shift

All of our network infrastructure in the US is designed for one-way consumption. It is hampering anything we would do to project ourselves back out

The last time I read Kurzweil (ten years ago) I didn’t have the same structural analysis that I do today

I wonder if a blindspot to this mode of futurism is how economic concentration limits technological acceleration, since incumbents prefer collecting rents over ~innovating~

Comcast would much rather milk people for its aging infrastructure than roll out continuous improvements. The nature of the business lets them get away with it

But imagine if we saw even half the improvement to residential cable that we’ve seen in mobile hardware, for example

Kurzweil’s “accelerating returns” probably holds either way, on a wide enough zoom

But try to get too granular, predict things like the rates at which paradigm shifts accelerate, and you’ll come out wrong because you’re not accounting for economic incentives acting as brakes

Regardless of the specific shape it takes, when telecoms decide we should be able to express ourselves at the same rates we consume expression from Big Media companies, that represents a phase change in our relationship to communication.

a cultural as much as technological event