The world of tech needs a new killer app

[timelets]

We haven’t had a new exciting consumer technology in a while. Online meetings/education, although useful, feels imposed and buggy. To many, mRNA vaccines also feel involuntary and somewhat dangerous. ChatGPT doesn’t have any cool apps that a common person can relate to. All of that feeds into a backlash against tech in general. Musk's antics don't help either. The world wants some kind of penicillin or, at least, Angry Birds. None seems to be forthcoming.

Comments

[dmm]

I wonder if Midjourney and similar apps are not good enough in this sense?

And if so, is that because they still require too much agency and creativity from the user (unlike penicillin or Angry Birds)? (Of course, there is also a strong backlash from many artists, together with strong praise from many other artists.)

But yes, ChatGPT and similar apps are all controversial (e.g. one can build a virtual friend of various degrees of closeness, and there are services like that, but then it is perceived as detrimental to the fabric of the society).

Self-driving cars do finally work in San Francisco, and that's exciting, but also controversial, and, moreover, people are reporting being excited the first time they use it and then treating them as routine (and also they are so gradually phased into our society that they don't feel new; when they were new and super-exciting, they were too buggy, and now they work all right, but no longer all that new).

So I wonder what do we want in this sense? Something, a) non-controversial, and b) not requiring any agency or creativity from the user? We can probably build something satisfying only a), like an AI-based consumer generator of games ("generate your own game today"), or satisfying only b), like an audio-based strongly psychoactive app, but a) and b) together are a tall order.

[dmm]

Thinking more about this... perhaps this is mostly a perception problem...

Is not Semaglutide exactly what people wanted for weight loss for a long time?

That should work as "some kind of penicillin".

Of course, it's not without problems (including social perception, intermittent shortages, and pricing structures), but then penicillin biological side-effects are also quite non-trivial.

[timelets]

I wish I knew what people want :)

From what I know, Semaglutide is a bandaid, rather than a cure. Once people get off it, they start gaining weight again.

Although, I agree that perception plays a major role in the way we interact with technology. People feel that they are being used by technology, rather than the other way around. The message "you are the product" is written all over mass tech services. And there's no escape from it, really. Somehow, even video streaming, which started as a successful attempt to break free from TV, degenerated into a bazillion of narrow TikTok tunnels defined by AI. Having huge monopolies doesn't help either.

Also, money used to be cheap and startups could pour hundreds of millions into customer acquisition without having a sustainable business model. Nowadays, money is expensive and you can't give away stuff for free, hoping to discover your real business later. As a side effect, consumers got addicted to free.

At this point, B2B seems to be a lot more promising that B2C. At least businesses are more realistic about what they want and how much they are willing to pay for a good service. Nevertheless, AI ( as a broad set of related tech) is a true revolution. We just need to find the right entry points into the future.