Having said that, I wonder what idea of technological progress the people who criticize AVP or driverless cars etc. have. Do they look forward to an even more powerful gasoline engine with manual gears? Do they dream of an even bigger, faster smartphone that takes photos with more megapixels?
Well, it
is my fault for bringing up driverless cars as a solution in search for a problem, and I know your reaction to that was of anger (see your reaction to my post earlier). But “more powerful gasoline engine with manual gears” is a paradigm stuck inside a box of thinking I reject and not where I was going with that.
Rather, a tested, tried solution to a problem in this case starts with robust funding for public transit infrastructure. It continues with (re)-developing for proximal (nearby) access to the everyday go-tos (like groceries, dining, work, your kids’ schools). Silicon Valley technologists thinking they’re doing an end-run around trained, specialized experts in urban planning by pouring billions into R&D and testing for driverless cars as an answer to human-operated cars is a marque of hubris wrought by a surprising case of the Dunning-Kruger. It’s also an Occam’s razor scenario: the best answer is probably the most straightforward and obvious. Here, the self-driving car is a Rube Goldberg machine.
This goes for other technology, as well,
including the Apple VP. It is a contraption in search for a problem which, widely, doesn’t exist. Is there a purpose for AR goggles? Probably, but only in very specialized, already established applications, such as flight testing or, grimly, piloting a drone with weaponry to strike a target far away from where its goggles-wearing operator is located. Property developers may be one novel area where this tech might be useful, but again, to what end, other than to enrich the property developer’s ends — not to solve extant problems around shortages in housing.
There are, indeed and absolutely, countless innovations yet to be laid down to paper, to patent application, to prototype, and to deployment.
But many, if not most of these innovations don’t come — and won’t be coming — from the minds of folks who cluster in a self-ensconced area like Silicon Valley, whose ideas come principally from a steady diet of stale sci-fi television, cinema, gaming, and lit from forty years ago. This is why dreaming up technological solutions in mad searches for problems is a very cart-before-the-horse approach to coming up with innovation. Put another way, to that bubble: “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. ‘Fetch’ is never going to happen.”
But please, then, let's not complain that by now the "same boring" iPhone is released every year etc. Technological progress has always been made by more or less successful attempts and has always been slowed down by people with little imagination (sometimes, sure, even naive). PS. The AVP price certainly isn't low, but an handbag from some well-known brand can cost much, much more and yet the downtown stores are crowded...
Try not to mistake
bona fide innovation borne out of necessity with the psychology around consumer (and consumption) culture in an aggressively capitalist society.
Moreover, smartphone/glassphone/slabphone makers, to be truly innovative, need to be thinking well beyond a one-year fiscal horizon or the quarterly earnings statement horizon and instead at the generational horizon beyond of the one now filling their coffers with cold, hard cash, as that nascent generation is already signalling, quite loudly in some cases, how they’re less moved or dazzled by all this data-harvesting tech than their elders have been. That’s something tech companies ought to be paying especial notice to right now if they should hope to stay atop the business heap in a decade or more.
Luxury designer like Chanel has basically kept up with inflation and even outperformed. They raise price every year to account for increase in both labor and material cost, and it is a much better 'investment' than any technology item, which follows by a complete inverse curve.
Indeed. And luxury brands like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Rolex, and so on produce products which were designed, from the outset, to last for a very long time and to maintain their value and demand. The same cannot be said of Vision Pro or even early series Apple Watches no longer being supported by Apple.
