Tag: GPS

Truly valuable technology trends toward free and ubiquitous (another Kevin Kelly read)

This one’s also going in the personal bible archives…

Original source: https://kk.org/thetechnium/technology-want/

Some excerpts:

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“there has been a downward trend in real commodity prices of about 1 percent per year over the last 140 years.” For a century and half prices have been headed toward zero.

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GPS was a novelty luxury only a few years ago. It was expensive. As its technical standards spread into mapping services and hand helds, it becomes essential, and the basic service (where am I?) will become a commodity and free. But as it drops toward the free, hundreds of additional advance GPS functions will be added to the fixed function so that more people will pay ever more for location services than anyone pays now. Where-am-I information will be free and ubiquitous, but new services will be expensive at first.

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As crackpot as it sounds, in the distant future nearly everything we make will (at least for a short while) be given away free—refrigerators, skis, laser projectors, clothes, you name it. This will only make sense when these items are pumped full of chips and network nodes, and thus capable of delivering network value.

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Automobiles, like air travel, are headed in direction where all software and digital devices are headed: toward the free. Imagine, I said, if you could give away a very basic no-frills car for free

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A car will move you from A to B, but it also offers privacy, immediacy of travel, a portable office, an entertainment center, status, and design joy

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Google has the same opportunities with them that all producers have. They offer free commodities and charge for premium services. Search is free; yet they charge enterprises for custom Google search. Or they shift their customer from reader to advertiser; in Google’s eyes the chief audience for search is advertising companies, whom they charge

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Technology wants to be free, as in free beer, because as it become free it also increases freedom. The inherent talents, capabilities and benefits of a technology cannot be released until it is almost free. The drive toward the free unleashes the constraints on each species in the technium, allowing it to interact with as many other species of technology as is possible, engendering new hybrids and deeper ecologies of tools, and permitting human users more choices and freedoms of use

An exhaustive and beautiful reminder of how good we got it (from Gwern)

I couldn’t help but feel waves of gratitude and nostalgia going through Gwern’s exhaustive list of all the ways that “many hassles have simply disappeared from my life, and nice new things appeared” since the mid 90s, which is around when I became a teenager, that is to say, semi-conscious and painfully self-aware.

Sharing a few of my favorites here.

Source: https://gwern.net/improvement

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hotels and restaurants provide Public Internet Access by default, without nickel-and-diming customers or travelers; this access is usually via WiFi

Hygienic Mice: no longer needing to clean computer mice weekly thanks to laser mice

GPS: not getting lost while frantically driving down a freeway7⁠; or anywhere else, for that matter

Universal Storage: we no longer need to strategize which emails or photos or documents to delete to save space

having Fansubs available for all anime (no longer do anime clubs watch raw anime and have to debate afterwards what the plot was)

all cars have electrified Power Windows; I don’t remember the last time I had to physically crank down a car window

Clothing has become almost “too cheap to meter”, as the Industrial Revolution in textiles never stopped

the Shipping Speeds have dramatically improved, especially for low-cost tiers: consider Christmas shopping from a mail-order company or website in 1999 vs 2019—you used to have to order in early December to hope to get something by Christmas (25 December)

safe McDonald’s coffee which doesn’t explode in one’s lap while trapped in a car & causing disfiguring third-degree burns requiring skin grafts

even Mass-Market Grocery Stores like Walmart increasingly routinely stock an enormous variety of foods, from sushi to goat cheese to kefir

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