[mempko]

While he is wrong about the impact of the internet economically. He isn't wrong that technology progress has been disappointing. When you grow up believing you will be driving flying cars and seeing robots help you around the house, how else are you supposed to feel? It is only now that computing power has started to enable old AI techniques such as neural nets, which were once impractical are now starting to be reasonable.

I am also disappointed in how closed and centralized the applications that run on the internet have become since the internet was privatized. Where we used to have decentralized systems in the 80s to late 90s, we now have huge star (wheel and spoke) networks.

The days you get your internet from the weird guy down the street running a rack of servers in his closet are long gone.

We have also re-created old medium and I seriously doubt people like Alan Kay are impressed with that. We have invented the most important tool in the history of humanity and it's being used by billions of people to look at Facebook instead of say, solving real problems like climate change. As Alan Kay said "The computer revolution hasn't happened yet".

[wmeredith]

> When you grow up believing you will be driving flying cars and seeing robots help you around the house

I feel like this is more a failure of critical thinking than anything else. There has been nonsense about flying cars on the cover of Popular Science since I was in diapers (early 1980's). I am 36 and I think the the progression of technology during my lifetime has been amazing. If you could travel back 20 years and show someone a Google search on an iPhone they would be gobsmacked. (Or maybe they'd just say, but "what about my flying car?")

[snrplfth]

One of the big problems with people's expectations was, perhaps, a sense that technological progress would involve ever-greater energies, sizes, velocities. This certainly would have made sense in 1967, but what's been done since then has so much to do with using less energy to do more. There's so much to do in computation, biosciences, materials science, and so on - it doesn't look big and impressive necessarily, but it's still major progress.

[mempko]

I think this is definitely something easily forgotten. And it's still a huge problem for both the data center and the computer in your pocket. Makes you wonder if we got off fossil fuels like two decades ago what the progress here would look like here.

[erikpukinskis]

We'll get there. We're very close actually. We took a huge hit in the 1990s when Bill Gates use chilling effects to try to own the software industry.

The web finally recovered with things like Chrome that got browser competition going again, and Facebook Apps that reminded us we can make our own stores and ecosystems of import.

The next big hit setback was the cloud transition. Servers are just super useful and they are orders of magnitude harder to administer than a PC. This consolidated power amongst sysadmins (and away from users and coders). That has driven the slide back towards proprietary web apps.

But we have been slowly chipping away at the complexity differential between administering a server and using a laptop. See Heroku, etc. We're not there but we're very close to the world where you can spin up a server as easily as you download apps.

Then of course the most recent hit is Apple and the App Store. We eealized there is some value to having a trusted third party curate a collection of software.

And again, we don't have tools to allow people to do that in a decentralized way, but we'll get there.

The question to me is: will free software always be playing catch up? Is this a forever thing?

I think no: it's a disruptive technology with an inherent differentiating factor (access by default, vs paywall by default). I think we're still getting to feature parity with the proprietary development culture, but when we do I think the fortunes of centralized/decentralized will reverse.

But we'll see! 2043 at the latest, if anyone wants to wager.

[rplst8]

> We have invented the most important tool in the history of humanity and it's being used by billions of people to look at Facebook instead of say, solving real problems like climate change.

I think this is a mis-characterization. The Internet is used for all sorts of "good" causes. I think we just take for granted the ease with which it allows teams of scientists and researchers to connect, communicate, and share research.

[xj9]

you, my friend, are taking the 21st century for granted. we already live in the future.

When you grow up believing you will be driving flying cars and seeing robots help you around the house, how else are you supposed to feel?

we have flying cars. they're called private jets, but most people can't afford them. we have to take the flying bus! we've had robots in our homes for a while. do they have to be anthropomorphic to count, or what?

I am also disappointed in how closed and centralized the applications that run on the internet have become since the internet was privatized. Where we used to have decentralized systems in the 80s to late 90s, we now have huge star (wheel and spoke) networks.

internet applications may be closed and centralized, but i think you are forgetting about the mountains of free/open software that those systems are built upon. life-changing mountains of software. foss is the foundation that a lot of careers (including my own) are built upon.

obviously it would be better if we were all on an open source distributed net, but its not like it isn't a solvable problem. we just have to be more creative.

We have invented the most important tool in the history of humanity and it's being used by billions of people to look at Facebook instead of say, solving real problems like climate change.

the internet is a communication network that people use for a lot of different things, including working to solve climate change.

i don't think we've figured out social networking quite yet. or the internet for that matter. i think its all quite exciting! so much new shit happening all of the time. not only that, but i have the opportunity to be a part of it. i may not be the person that ends up in the history books, but i'm here at ground zero.