The tech press is depressing too

Note: The post originally appeared on jonknowles.win

I read the news compulsively and pretty much constantly, but since political developments in the US (and the West more generally) have become so depressing lately, I’ve had trouble stomaching it. So I switched some of my reading to technology-focused outlets, rather than my standard political and economic fare. It’s just less emotionally draining to read about processor architecture than how everyone’s dying of opioid use. As a fierce critic of Whig history in all its forms, it’s always been hard for me to read tech blogs about how everything is great and getting better, but I’ve been more open to it recently, looking for an escape from reality. Unfortunately, it seems like we’re living in pretty boring and increasingly stagnant times in terms of consumer technology.

This is new. From my earliest childhood on, I’ve experienced a steady stream of increasingly shiny, light, and powerful consumer electronics. The first game system I remember was the NES (Duck Hunt, baby), but the first that my family bought was the Nintendo 64, a machine leaps and bounds ahead in terms of graphics. Ten years after the N64, the iPhone fit a much more powerful processor into the palm of your hand. Having been born in the late ‘80s, my life has encompassed the glory years of Moore’s Law: from the standpoint of the consumer, we’ve always expected electronics to become stunningly smaller, cheaper, and more powerful every few years.

This is why I was so shocked when I looked into buying a new laptop. Mine’s a Toshiba Portege from 2011. I bought it for $650 during a big cyber Monday sale. It’s a great laptop. And you can buy another great laptop for $700-$900 right now, one that’s a little faster and with a nicer display. But it won’t be lighter (my old laptop weights 2.5lbs). It won’t be cheaper. And, while it will be somewhat more powerful, it won’t be capable of anything fundamentally new in terms of performance. Even after more than five years, a new laptop at the same price point will not be significantly better for 95% of the tasks I use my laptop for. I find this shocking, but it seems to be in line with a trend of advances in processor technology slowing down.

It’s true that we’re still finding ways to fit more transistors on to chips, but not as fast as before. While Moore’s Law might be technically feasible for the near future, it’s no longer economical, and the important ancillary benefits that we once got from shrinking transistors, reduced power use and heat production, are getting smaller. Quantum computing, one of the possible ways to return to our prior rate of development, might not actually have many applications for the types of computing normal people do every day. In recent years, Intel, the leader in chip design, has officially slowed down its pattern of releasing new processors, changing its tick-tock release cycle, to a more drawn-out tick-tock-tock.

But on a more practical level, what’s more depressing for me is the lack of exciting new consumer technologies. There’s nothing happening right now as revolutionary as the PC, or the smart phone, or 3D video games. They tried to push wearables on us, but no one cared. They’re trying to do the same with VR right now too, and I don’t see that becoming very popular outside of the niche market of people who currently buy high-end gaming systems. The internet of things is already the internet of shit. No one needs a home voice assistant. But what about self-driving cars, you ask. Unfortunately, I’m a pessimist about that too. While there are currently cars capable of driving themselves down a highway without human interaction, I think we’re a long way off from cars that can be truly autonomous in all environments and weather conditions. Humans will have to be in the driver’s seat for all but the simplest applications for decades yet.

It’s definitely possible I’m being too pessimistic here. Everything’s still getting better, just not as fast as it used to. But I really think the current forms of consumer electronics will be pretty static for a while to come. I think the cellphone, laptop, PC, and game console will look about the same in 10 years as they do now. This raises fascinating questions for many industries. What happens to the industry leaders when competition revolves around price and durability instead of high performance or novelty (you can already see this happening in the cellphone market)? Will highly-skilled programmers become more valuable when the exponential growth of computing power can no longer be assumed? Will people start keeping their devices for significantly longer? How long will it take for it to dawn on the average consumer that the new sexy fast phone isn’t really much faster or sexier than the last?