Amazing how much everything has changed in 20 years as to make nearly every single sentence of this article wrong to a hilarious extent.
Thank you for sharing this. It didn't tickle my intellectual curiosity, but it's a nice reminder of how bad humans can be at predicting even short-term changes. :)
In aggregate, I'd say the predictions in this article were only half wrong. For as much as we use the Web today, the fundamental interactions discussed here have not changed much.
Right, I was a bit surprised myself even with your warning. The guy is not always wrong in this piece, but seems to really miss the point, even for '95.
Things never ever get totally replaced, but technology and automation tends to take over the default case. His examples of newspapers and salespeople have not completely gone away, but certain have been significantly impacted by online alternatives.
Whilst it was spectacularly wrong on ecommerce[1], the description of Usenet and the "fawning techno-burble about virtual communities" still sounds suspiciously like the gap between the reality and the fantasy of social today, notwithstanding the greater participation and the decent stab at contextualising the "cacophony" in ways specific to the needs of advertisers and brand-monitors.
But apparently he also wrote a book-length version including further predictions about the unlikelihood of computers becoming merged with his telephone, the universal nature of fax machines making them far more practical than email and the practical unlikelihood of Big Brother scenarios. They should probably rerelease it as one of those eBooks he predicted wouldn't take off.
[1]even the author now sells stuff over the internet, though I'm willing to bet there's not much of a market for "one sided bottles"
He was right about at least once major thing: tele-presence is largely a failure. It's 2015 and most of the Internet industry is concentrated within the Bay Area because people need to be near one another to interact richly. This is a direct demonstration of the failure of the Internet to permit truly rich long range human communication; the very people who build it can't use it to escape their local rent bubble despite strong economic incentive to do so.
I don't think it's a failure, it's just not ubiquitous. We have huge tele-presense units in most of our offices to facilitate meetings that used to require plane rides and hotels.
It's a failure in the sense that it's not generally available or in general use. I've also used tele-presence rooms before and they're not that great. Better than Skype or Google Hangouts, but not by much.
I'm not so sure. I think most of what the article says about education is spot on. We have more efficient replacements for lecturers and (maybe?) textbooks, but not teachers.
My viewpoint is that things like Bitcoin are little more than cryptographically engineered Monopoly Money. That said, I do believe that eventually, paper money will go away (if for no other reason than to track every purpose for government surveillance).
It's not a next step because the US dollar is monopoly money forced on you by the government. Also it's supply is controlled to keep the value steady.
Bitcoin has nobody forcing you into using it and nobody controls the price. Bitcoins are just bits on a ledger that maybe someone will buy from you tomorrow, maybe.
Even in the niche roles where bitcoin is superior to bank accounts, credit cards, and cash, there is nothing beyond momentum keeping people from switching to another type of cyptocurrency. That's why it's monopoly money.
I wouldn't discount network effects. I think a lot of people are going to build more and more services on top of the bitcoin blockchain rather than creating their own blockchain, just because it's convenient in terms of adoption and development and so on. And once those services are there, it's going to be hard to migrate them off. And that will eventually create some sustainable value to the coins.
As to what that value will be, I have no fucking idea. I don't imagine that it will be a major currency. But it'll always have some use cases, imo.
I mean your argument is essentially like saying: TCP/IP is just a protocol and anybody can switch to a different protocol any time. Well, sure. But they haven't. And they won't unless it breaks completely.
Switching from bitcoin to litecoin seems trivial. I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin, especially since the current number of big users is pretty small. It seems like 99% of businesses who actually accept it are just using a payment processor, which could migrate to a new system overnight.
You can point to TCP/IP, but we've seen other protocols come and go. Back in the late 90/early 2000s's AOL messenger was dominate. Now nobody uses it. And that had very strong network effects, it was a messenger system.
> there is nothing beyond momentum keeping people from switching to another type of cyptocurrency. That's why it's monopoly money.
That statement demonstrates you don't understand cyptocurrency at all. You're absolutely wrong, the difference between them is security, and that's something people value. And no, you can't trivially just substitute another crypto in place of bitcoin, other cryptos have neither the liquidity nor the security (which comes from the size of the network) to effectively move around the amount of money bitcoin can move around.
> I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin
Which means flatly you don't understand how cryptos work; no one who does would make that statement.
It's not the next step because it's anti-democratic. It's a step away from democratic government engagement in the money of a country.
Bitcoin encodes a lot of economic assumptions and values into its design, but there's no practical way for the people affected by those decisions to work to change them, unlike money backed by a democratic government.
I don't need to know how to code to vote in the regular elections that decide how the Fed operates, all I need is to be a registered voter.
The next thing after USD and other first world currencies will be something that gives more power to the people, not less.
Bitcoin is absolutely anti-democratic. There's no way for users to engage with the policy decisions implied in the design.
No bitcoin advocate has ever said anything about my point other than "Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history, and doesn't even make sense in the context of democratic governance.
I'll just note that you didn't even say that, you just said "yes it is! yes it is so democratic!" ... which, of course, it isn't, at all.
Bitcoin is a consensus network, to call that anti-democratic is just absolutely absurd. It is the very definition of a simple democracy, whoever controls 51% of the network wins.
> Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history
Nonsense, winning in any democracy requires gaining the support of the majority. If your idea has merit, it'll be adopted when the majority of of the network agrees it has merit by adopting it.
"You have to code, and then you have to get your changes distributed to more than half the world" fits no definition of democratic governance ever. The two are so far removed, I'm having trouble really understanding how you can conflate the two.
But I'll be charitable, and try and make sense of it, because you seem genuine (and genuinely confused).... I guess if you take a concept like "majority rules" and interpret it to its most shallow, then you can bend what you just described up there into a kind of democracy, but democracy isn't actually that shallow an idea.
It's about the distribution of political power to the people, not just "majority rules". That's why people get to vote on things that influence them, even where they're not subject-matter experts. Your typical bitcoin user is affected by Bitcoin design decisions, but has no say in them and no means to change them.
No, "just code it and get it adopted by 51% of the network" doesn't count. That's a far, far, far higher barrier to participation than a poll tax or a literacy test, and those have been dismissed long ago as crude methods of taking democratic power away from the people.
> "You have to code, and then you have to get your changes distributed to more than half the world" fits no definition of democratic governance ever.
You don't have to code. You have to have an idea worth being coded and make enough people care that someone does it, this is no different than implementing any other idea in any kind of democracy. It's called lobbying and getting support and under no democracy is getting change into place free of effort.
It doesn't look like democracy to you because you don't want it to, nothing more nothing less, your mind is closed and you're only looking for excuses to dismiss it.
And yes, it is democracy, as a decentralized ledger, it only changes when the network by a majority agrees the change is acceptable. Choosing which split of a network to follow is voting, if your personal definition of democracy claims this isn't democracy, then your definition is wrong. It is democratic to the core, there is by definition no central authority, change happens only by mass approval.
This viewpoint comes up a lot on HN, but it's missing the point. Don't think about bitcoin as an alternate currency, think of of it as a distributed protocol, like TCP/IP or bittorrent, which supports arbitrary value transfer. The media tends to focus a lot on the price of bitcoin, but in the long run the price is irrelevant.
I still hear and read people dismissing Facebook and Twitter as fads, as well as implying or saying outright that they have no actual value.
I think that their enormous popularity has demonstrated that even if these two particular services eventually die, online social networks are here to stay. We're social creatures, and in retrospect, it's obvious we would use the internet to socialize.
They both don't age well with younger or long time users. Worse, there monetization strategy is to annoy users. So, long term I expect there going to be replaced with much leaner organizations that need less revenue to make quarterly projections or just shrink.
So sure, social networks may be around, but message boards for example have evolved into some small, but reasonably profitable companies like Reddit.
PS: Long term Facebook might try the MS route of buying enough companies that something sticks. EX: MS Access. But, that says more about Money than Social Networks.
Passing the Turing Test. Understanding consciousness.[1] Communicating human values to a computer so that it doesn't produce absurd judgments. VR simulations indistinguishable from reality.
[1] Edit: people have different standards for this, of course, but something like, "where have a global, working model of a large domain in which predictions of consciousness aren't a special case, and in which people who study it feel like it makes sense and is less mysterious".
Sure computers can make such decisions, be it with /dev/random or some sophisticated classifier. But we'd want justifications, and it's difficult to define what that entails. Moreover, what does it mean for a computer to be "better" at this than humans? The whole problem is ill defined.
Yes, it is ill defined right now. Are you willing to bet that it can't be properly defined? Or even that is currently is properly defined, and you just haven't been exposed to the definition?
I have personally made some headway on this problem, and I wouldn't be saying it was possible if I hadn't. Your inability to find a workable framework is more evidence to me of your lack of imagination than it is that the problem is fundamentally unsolvable. There's a finite number of consistent models to explore, and one of them will give us what we want.
It doesn't matter if you want to call that a technological problem or a social problem; the world isn't actually divided in those terms. So saying "social problems" strikes me as starting with a shitty model of what we are capable of. It's also just corporate-talk and there's no reason to expect it to be valid in this domain. The best that distinction has ever done is prime somebody to employ an actual problem solving technique.
Are we talking about the same thing? You have made a definition of morality that philosophers and other people will all agree on? Where do you get this "finite number of consistent models" from?
>You have made a definition of morality that philosophers and other people will all agree on?
No, I have one that works. I really don't care what any philosophers have to say about it. And if you think everyone has to agree to something before it can be useful, then I can see why you'd think this is a social problem.
>Where do you get this "finite number of consistent models" from?
There's a finite number of people, a finite number of configurations their brains have been in, and thus a finite number of models provided by those configurations.
Again, I could hand-wavingly claim that /dev/random "works". What does "one that works" mean? You may not care for philosophers, but making claims about morality is definitely within their territory, plus it's a philosophical claim in itself to state that philosophy is not relevant.
The argument about finite brain configurations is not compelling. There's no reason why only brain states that have occurred would be relevant. Morality deals with hypotheticals and counterfactuals: what would be the moral judgment in this or that situation. I think it would be uncontroversial to claim that there are an infinity of such hypothetical situations, and each model of morality can deal with them differently, ergo you get an infinity of possible models.
I wouldn't claim that philosophy is not relevant, I would claim that our current batch of philosophers are. I'm a philosopher in as much a sense as it matters to this question, and I don't need others' approval to reach a conclusion. I'm not trying to run a popularity contest, after all.
>What does "one that works" mean?
It means it is both consistent with reality and useful.
>There's no reason why only brain states that have occurred would be relevant.
The reason those ones are relevant is because those are the only ones available for analysis. Those are the brains that determine what "human" currently means. We could evolve into toads in 100B years, but you'd hardly aspire to create a toad brain and call it a good human brain.
>I think it would be uncontroversial to claim that there are an infinity of such hypothetical situations, and each model of morality can deal with them differently, ergo you get an infinity of possible models.
You are confusing the multitude of possible moralities with the multitude of counterfactuals they model. More importantly, you or forgetting that we are only concerned with relevant moralities and relevant counterfactuals, and that we have to make our developments incrementally, and in finite time, which massively constrains the possibilities.
There are an infinite number of ways to skin a cat, but that doesn't mean we can't have a useful notion of the "right way" to do it.
I'm not sure anyone is saying we'll never have self-driving cars (in the sense of summon a car from an app). The debate is whether it's 10 years or 50+ years.
Alas, this Cliff Stoll's essay doesn't hold up well.
If you haven't read Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg, you really should. It recounts online life in the 1980's and Stoll's own real involvement in uncovering an online espionage ring.
I welcome these kind of bold predictions, and unfortunately we see this less and less nowadays. Perhaps it's because it's easier to get called out than before with all the claims you make online nowadays being pretty much be set in stone.
Anyways, I would enjoy reading bold predictions about the future that's falsifiable rather than wishy-washy useless articles titled "7 reasons why Uber is winning." or "Why less users are joining Twitter."
Priceless! Cliff would not doubt have a good laugh at what he got wrong.
I was involved in a discussion this weekend that had a similar tone around people becoming too future aware. Specifically when you know a lot about the underlying technology (as Cliff does (and did) about networking) you tend to extrapolate what you know, but when you don't know anything about the underlying technology you tend to extrapolate your imagination.
People can imagine wondrous things. And when they tell an engineer to go build it, that engineer starts working backward from what would have to be true in order to have that amazing capability, and starts working on the pre-cursors.
Of all the things he got wrong I think there is a lot of resonance in the online education thing. I've done a few Coursera and MIT-X courses and while it could be my previous experience clouding my expectation, I personally learn better when the teacher is in the room and I can ask questions as they arise. Too often I start trying to answer a question to get clarity and get distracted into a whole new train of thought. That makes the learning process much slower and less satisfying for me.
Agreed on education, in that what we currently have is not a replacement for a human teacher. But I think he still missed how valuable the internet now is for research of all levels, from the kind of research that gets published in academic journals, to the kind a 10-year-old does to learn about dinosaurs.
Agree on education - it's not just the teacher, it's also about being part of an actual class - the social dimension if you will - you learn as much from your classmates as you do from your teachers and indeed as many opportunities arise through the network you develop there too. Another benefit is that being part of a herd forces you to keep moving briskly through the material without getting to stuck on any one thing. There is a lot to be said too for the social support that is available when you have direct access to teachers and classmates. Doing any challenging course of learning is sufficiently taxing in this regard. I do see many online and distance learning approaches trying to tackle some of these confounding "emotional" aspects to education but I don't think they're quite there yet.
Semi-OT: Kind of an odd metaphor to use, the year after the band Nirvana "ended" with the death of the lead. The web won't end with a shock to its head?
I see this problem a lot: even if you know what a metaphor refers to, it can be unclear how its use is intended:
arms-length transaction: so wait, within arms length, or beyond arms length? (The term is used for the latter.)
sanguine: sang ... blood? So you feel bloody about this? What does that have to do with optimism? (I know, the four humors thing, but it's still weird.)
> arms-length transaction: so wait, within arms length, or beyond arms length? (The term is used for the latter.)
Actually, its usually used to mean at arms-length, neither closer nor farther: maintaining a distance that is close enough for the contact necessary to perform the transaction, but no closer.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 89.7 ms ] threadThank you for sharing this. It didn't tickle my intellectual curiosity, but it's a nice reminder of how bad humans can be at predicting even short-term changes. :)
Things never ever get totally replaced, but technology and automation tends to take over the default case. His examples of newspapers and salespeople have not completely gone away, but certain have been significantly impacted by online alternatives.
But apparently he also wrote a book-length version including further predictions about the unlikelihood of computers becoming merged with his telephone, the universal nature of fax machines making them far more practical than email and the practical unlikelihood of Big Brother scenarios. They should probably rerelease it as one of those eBooks he predicted wouldn't take off.
[1]even the author now sells stuff over the internet, though I'm willing to bet there's not much of a market for "one sided bottles"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
It's a failure in the sense that it's not generally available or in general use. I've also used tele-presence rooms before and they're not that great. Better than Skype or Google Hangouts, but not by much.
Whether society will view that as good enough to replace business trips remains to be seen.
Though email and VPN do allow more telework than has ever occurred before.
Link to "Get Newsweek on your iPad" directly below the article. I love it.
Exactly like USD and all other first world currencies. Bitcoin is simply the next step in money.
Bitcoin has nobody forcing you into using it and nobody controls the price. Bitcoins are just bits on a ledger that maybe someone will buy from you tomorrow, maybe.
Even in the niche roles where bitcoin is superior to bank accounts, credit cards, and cash, there is nothing beyond momentum keeping people from switching to another type of cyptocurrency. That's why it's monopoly money.
As to what that value will be, I have no fucking idea. I don't imagine that it will be a major currency. But it'll always have some use cases, imo.
I mean your argument is essentially like saying: TCP/IP is just a protocol and anybody can switch to a different protocol any time. Well, sure. But they haven't. And they won't unless it breaks completely.
You can point to TCP/IP, but we've seen other protocols come and go. Back in the late 90/early 2000s's AOL messenger was dominate. Now nobody uses it. And that had very strong network effects, it was a messenger system.
That statement demonstrates you don't understand cyptocurrency at all. You're absolutely wrong, the difference between them is security, and that's something people value. And no, you can't trivially just substitute another crypto in place of bitcoin, other cryptos have neither the liquidity nor the security (which comes from the size of the network) to effectively move around the amount of money bitcoin can move around.
> I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin
Which means flatly you don't understand how cryptos work; no one who does would make that statement.
Bitcoin encodes a lot of economic assumptions and values into its design, but there's no practical way for the people affected by those decisions to work to change them, unlike money backed by a democratic government.
I don't need to know how to code to vote in the regular elections that decide how the Fed operates, all I need is to be a registered voter.
The next thing after USD and other first world currencies will be something that gives more power to the people, not less.
As that statement is wrong, so is everything else that follows. Democracy is built into the protocol, it is the very core of how bitcoin works.
No bitcoin advocate has ever said anything about my point other than "Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history, and doesn't even make sense in the context of democratic governance.
I'll just note that you didn't even say that, you just said "yes it is! yes it is so democratic!" ... which, of course, it isn't, at all.
> Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history
Nonsense, winning in any democracy requires gaining the support of the majority. If your idea has merit, it'll be adopted when the majority of of the network agrees it has merit by adopting it.
"You have to code, and then you have to get your changes distributed to more than half the world" fits no definition of democratic governance ever. The two are so far removed, I'm having trouble really understanding how you can conflate the two.
But I'll be charitable, and try and make sense of it, because you seem genuine (and genuinely confused).... I guess if you take a concept like "majority rules" and interpret it to its most shallow, then you can bend what you just described up there into a kind of democracy, but democracy isn't actually that shallow an idea.
It's about the distribution of political power to the people, not just "majority rules". That's why people get to vote on things that influence them, even where they're not subject-matter experts. Your typical bitcoin user is affected by Bitcoin design decisions, but has no say in them and no means to change them.
No, "just code it and get it adopted by 51% of the network" doesn't count. That's a far, far, far higher barrier to participation than a poll tax or a literacy test, and those have been dismissed long ago as crude methods of taking democratic power away from the people.
You don't have to code. You have to have an idea worth being coded and make enough people care that someone does it, this is no different than implementing any other idea in any kind of democracy. It's called lobbying and getting support and under no democracy is getting change into place free of effort.
It doesn't look like democracy to you because you don't want it to, nothing more nothing less, your mind is closed and you're only looking for excuses to dismiss it.
And yes, it is democracy, as a decentralized ledger, it only changes when the network by a majority agrees the change is acceptable. Choosing which split of a network to follow is voting, if your personal definition of democracy claims this isn't democracy, then your definition is wrong. It is democratic to the core, there is by definition no central authority, change happens only by mass approval.
I think that their enormous popularity has demonstrated that even if these two particular services eventually die, online social networks are here to stay. We're social creatures, and in retrospect, it's obvious we would use the internet to socialize.
They both don't age well with younger or long time users. Worse, there monetization strategy is to annoy users. So, long term I expect there going to be replaced with much leaner organizations that need less revenue to make quarterly projections or just shrink.
So sure, social networks may be around, but message boards for example have evolved into some small, but reasonably profitable companies like Reddit.
PS: Long term Facebook might try the MS route of buying enough companies that something sticks. EX: MS Access. But, that says more about Money than Social Networks.
[1] Edit: people have different standards for this, of course, but something like, "where have a global, working model of a large domain in which predictions of consciousness aren't a special case, and in which people who study it feel like it makes sense and is less mysterious".
I have personally made some headway on this problem, and I wouldn't be saying it was possible if I hadn't. Your inability to find a workable framework is more evidence to me of your lack of imagination than it is that the problem is fundamentally unsolvable. There's a finite number of consistent models to explore, and one of them will give us what we want.
It doesn't matter if you want to call that a technological problem or a social problem; the world isn't actually divided in those terms. So saying "social problems" strikes me as starting with a shitty model of what we are capable of. It's also just corporate-talk and there's no reason to expect it to be valid in this domain. The best that distinction has ever done is prime somebody to employ an actual problem solving technique.
No, I have one that works. I really don't care what any philosophers have to say about it. And if you think everyone has to agree to something before it can be useful, then I can see why you'd think this is a social problem.
>Where do you get this "finite number of consistent models" from?
There's a finite number of people, a finite number of configurations their brains have been in, and thus a finite number of models provided by those configurations.
The argument about finite brain configurations is not compelling. There's no reason why only brain states that have occurred would be relevant. Morality deals with hypotheticals and counterfactuals: what would be the moral judgment in this or that situation. I think it would be uncontroversial to claim that there are an infinity of such hypothetical situations, and each model of morality can deal with them differently, ergo you get an infinity of possible models.
>What does "one that works" mean?
It means it is both consistent with reality and useful.
>There's no reason why only brain states that have occurred would be relevant.
The reason those ones are relevant is because those are the only ones available for analysis. Those are the brains that determine what "human" currently means. We could evolve into toads in 100B years, but you'd hardly aspire to create a toad brain and call it a good human brain.
>I think it would be uncontroversial to claim that there are an infinity of such hypothetical situations, and each model of morality can deal with them differently, ergo you get an infinity of possible models.
You are confusing the multitude of possible moralities with the multitude of counterfactuals they model. More importantly, you or forgetting that we are only concerned with relevant moralities and relevant counterfactuals, and that we have to make our developments incrementally, and in finite time, which massively constrains the possibilities.
There are an infinite number of ways to skin a cat, but that doesn't mean we can't have a useful notion of the "right way" to do it.
If you haven't read Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg, you really should. It recounts online life in the 1980's and Stoll's own real involvement in uncovering an online espionage ring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg
Anyways, I would enjoy reading bold predictions about the future that's falsifiable rather than wishy-washy useless articles titled "7 reasons why Uber is winning." or "Why less users are joining Twitter."
I was involved in a discussion this weekend that had a similar tone around people becoming too future aware. Specifically when you know a lot about the underlying technology (as Cliff does (and did) about networking) you tend to extrapolate what you know, but when you don't know anything about the underlying technology you tend to extrapolate your imagination.
People can imagine wondrous things. And when they tell an engineer to go build it, that engineer starts working backward from what would have to be true in order to have that amazing capability, and starts working on the pre-cursors.
Of all the things he got wrong I think there is a lot of resonance in the online education thing. I've done a few Coursera and MIT-X courses and while it could be my previous experience clouding my expectation, I personally learn better when the teacher is in the room and I can ask questions as they arise. Too often I start trying to answer a question to get clarity and get distracted into a whole new train of thought. That makes the learning process much slower and less satisfying for me.
I see this problem a lot: even if you know what a metaphor refers to, it can be unclear how its use is intended:
arms-length transaction: so wait, within arms length, or beyond arms length? (The term is used for the latter.)
sanguine: sang ... blood? So you feel bloody about this? What does that have to do with optimism? (I know, the four humors thing, but it's still weird.)
Actually, its usually used to mean at arms-length, neither closer nor farther: maintaining a distance that is close enough for the contact necessary to perform the transaction, but no closer.