I was thinking recently about the nature of fallow periods in tech and wondering if they're actually tied up with emotional cycling in the general public. It's impossible for millions of people to remain excited forever. Instead, we get bubble years where new innovations are coming out fast and furious, sentiment is rising, people are happy and excited, prosperity will go on forever; hype years, where the public unconsciously knows the innovations being hyped aren't useful but companies still have money to burn; and then we get bust years where everyone gets disillusioned, there are predictions that everything useful has already been invented, much teeth-gnashing about the decline of innovation, and an increased focus on politics, social ills, and gaming or other distractions (none of which ever get solved or go away, we just forget about them during bubble years).

Thinking about tech cycles in my own lifetime, we had bubble (1981-1987, driven by the PC & GUI), hype (1987-1991, driven by AI, 3D graphics, CD-ROMs, speech recognition), bust (1991-1995), bubble (1995-1998, Internet), hype (1998-2001, dot-coms), bust (2001-2004), bubble (2004-2007, Web 2.0), hype (2007-2008, when everybody and their mother had a social network), bust (2009-2010), bubble (2011-2014, mobile), hype (2014-2015: AR/VR, AI, smartwatches, self-driving cars, Theranos, Juicero), bust (2016-present). Bust cycles seem to last 3-4 years, so we're probably nearing the end of this one, but it's still unclear what round of innovations will kick off the next bubble.

I've thought about this before and honestly I can't come up with many things. Telemedicine in terms of speaking to a doctor over video is already very possible over the connections we have today. Bringing that to a wider audience (say, third world countries) is an interesting possibility, but it also requires bringing 5G to third world countries, so I don't think that's going to happen too quickly.

Aside from that, what does 5G really bring us? The same stuff, only faster. I mean, good, sure. But it's not that inspiring.

https://www.cnet.com/news/5g-could-make-self-driving-cars-sm...

There's also the possibility of much faster speeds even in areas without 5g, since the competition will make 3g speeds a really bad look.

They are great, but some use cases quickly hit their limits

The question is this: if the bandwidth of the pipe is expanded to infinity, does the intelligence inhered in the personal owned device remain, or does it wither away... into a rented, datamined, and preternaturally infrastructurally fragile "the cloud"?

Thus far the evidence seems to suggest that "another wave of smartphone and IoT innovation" will fully and finally turn personal devices into dumb terminals administered according to the whim of the Great IBM in the Sky.

The obvious problem is that it's not a glamorous or technically impressive thing to be working on, and isn't going to be remotely interesting to the people who'd be working on it because, well, they already know how to use their smartphones.