Ask HN: Are paradigm shifting breakthroughs rarer or is it a bias in my eyes?
I&#x27;m guessing it&#x27;s a combination of bias, realism, and a change in how things come to market.<p>On Realism. Looking back on my thinking about &quot;breakthroughs&quot;, a lot of the things that were presented with a lot of hype turned out to be duds. The media played up a lot of things as amazing that just never made much of an impact. Now I have a more realistic view of things because I have the experience of seeing &quot;breakthroughs&quot; that were just not breakthroughs. I have more of an &quot;I&#x27;ll believe it when it&#x27;s real&quot; mentality which means that the number of breakthroughs I see is lower since I only see the real ones and not the stuff that gets hyped up and never really happens.<p>On coming to market. I think that today, something goes from idea to market very quickly. The iPhone&#x27;s 6-months from introduction to market is positively slow by today&#x27;s standards. By the time something can get hype, you&#x27;re already using it so it doesn&#x27;t feel like a breakthrough. It&#x27;s just a part of life.<p>&gt; exponential tech that takes us to something like &#x27;singularity&#x27; does not seem to come up any more<p>Just as flying cars doesn&#x27;t come up so much anymore. Sometimes we have ideas that simply remain as ideas (for the most part). Sure, flying cars do come up, but it&#x27;s rare. Likewise, we also have plenty of movies about The Singularity.<p>&gt; Any specific tech or breakthrough you are personally waiting for coming to fruition?<p>mRNA tech. Seriously, in the past two years we&#x27;ve seen a huge revolution in what we&#x27;re going to be able to do. The vaccines are wonderful, but they&#x27;re the tip of the iceberg. But if mRNA tech comes out with an HIV vaccine, treatments for lots of diseases, etc. over the next 5-10 years, we&#x27;ll probably react with &quot;yea, but that&#x27;s old-hat. I had their Covid vaccine 5-10 years ago.&quot;<p>A really great Apple Watch. They&#x27;re very good now, but I would love a watch that would make me ditch my phone. The problem is that it&#x27;ll never feel like a breakthrough because it&#x27;ll just be a decade or two of refining the idea as more and more people buy smartwatches. It won&#x27;t feel like a breakthrough because there are too many people working on it already and because it&#x27;s already a profitable idea.<p>The iPhone felt like a breakthrough because all the big money had ignored the space. They were content to just keep offering the same old stuff with minor tweaks.<p><i>I think one of the big shifts is in how money is approaching tech investment.</i><p>No one wants to get scooped on the Next Big Thing and so lots of money is chasing it, even before the tech is ready (and often finding ways to monetize things along the way). I think that decades ago, companies would ignore things that they thought would have lower margins or eat into established businesses. Xerox decided against computers, IBM thought that software was a crappy business so they let Microsoft be their OS, every car company decided that LiIon batteries were too expensive for cars, etc. Today, companies will keep dumping products on the market in the hope that they won&#x27;t get scooped - and VCs are willing to fund small companies.<p>For example, Amazon never wants to be scooped. When Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, it really hurt their CD business. So they brought the Kindle to market fast so that they could become the e-book store. They brought the Echo&#x2F;Alexa to market fast and have pushed it in all sorts of places - from car add-ons to glasses - even if it isn&#x27;t profitable yet because they want to own the space. But it also means that by the time something becomes ubiquitous, it seems old. 15 years from now, you could be walking down the street and say &quot;Alexa, take a picture&quot; and some barely-noticeable device on you takes a picture of what you&#x27;re seeing. But that isn&#x27;t transformative. You&#x27;ve had Alexa for 20 years.<p>Breakthrough is a feeling and I think that the way things are coming to market impacts that a lot. If a company is able to put out a crappy first-gen product and then enhance it over a decade because the investor money is there to support that, then it won&#x27;t seem like a breakthrough tech when it actually is great.<p>&gt; 10+ years back there used to be a lot of talk of a lot of technologies that would change the world<p>Yea, there&#x27;s still talk. I don&#x27;t know what age you are, but if you were a teen 10+ years ago, you might just be interpreting the talk differently. There&#x27;s plenty of talk about how blockchain will change the world. You might just be rolling your eyes at it. There&#x27;s plenty of talk from Elon Musk about colonizing Mars. You might just have an &quot;I&#x27;ll believe it when I see it&quot; attitude. Literally, people are talking about human life on another planet - literally tech that would change the solar system, not just the planet! But you might be thinking, &quot;sure, but Musk&#x27;s timeline seems unrealistic and it probably won&#x27;t happen&quot; in a way that 10+ years ago you might have thought &quot;omg, that&#x27;s going to happen! I&#x27;m going to sign up!&quot;