Autonomous cars and fusion are very different creatures than the growth of the internet or computers in general. The latter was widely distributed and had low hanging fruit that just about everyone in society could pluck and have fun with, the former is something a handful of companies and a few hundred researchers will get to develop while the rest of us will have to have our creativity satisfied with the fulfilling act of paying for it. (Even ML to an extent, since it's so data and compute expensive - generally far from a low hanging fruit -, though less so.)
Re:Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?
by kenjackson on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @10:43AM
(#31003405)
The internet took decades to evolve and was heavily funded early on by government. It only became low hanging fruit once it achieved a high level of maturity -- largely until the WWW had a graphical browser.
Also, remember, people in 2005 had same thoughts as you're having right now! Throughout my entire life, people have been saying that tech and science is basically done. They've always been wrong, and I don't see an end in sight.
It's the nature of exponentials. They seem slow and then suddenly the world changes. Only a handful of people actually can see that it is going to happen. We're just linear creatures with no intuition for exponential growth.
Imagine sitting in a dark room and someone about to turn on a switch - up until the switch is flicked, it doesn't seem like anything is going to happen, and then suddenly you are reeling at the brightness. That's how tech innovation happens now. I bet in a decade you'll be looking back saying, holy shit, I did not see that coming about something! "Remember when we used to drive gas vehicles?" or "Remember when we thought fusion was impossible?" or "Remember when nobody owned a robot?" Who knows what it is, but there will be something!
In 2014, almost nobody thought about having an app on their phone to summon a car to take them somewhere. Now it is everywhere (and struggling!). In 2014, speech recognition was awful. Now we have an automated robot lady that will answer spam calls for you!