I’m something of a tech nerd – I enjoy new gadgets and technology more than the average person. As a result, I keep up with the latest news and rumors in the gadget and gizmo space. I also follow the work of various tech reviewers and bloggers. One such person, Michael Fischer (aka “MrMobile”) posted a video recently talking about upcoming products he had a chance to explore at the Consumer Electronics Show.
One of the first products he describes is the R1, made by company called Rabbit. This is a small device that uses AI to perform automated tasks on your behalf – they give the example of using a voice command to tell the R1 to order you an Uber, and it places the order itself without you needing to unlock your phone and use the Uber app.
While Michael Fischer seemed excited about this device and optimistic about its potential, I’m much more skeptical. I’m not sure why I’d pay $200 to pull one device out of my pocket and tell it to operate an app for me, rather than just pull my phone out of my pocket and just use the app myself. And this is a reaction I have at seeing a lot of things on the cutting edge of the tech space – most new ideas seem pretty ill-considered to me, and most new product innovations seem likely to fail, or at best find only niche appeal.
And this very fact – the fact that new ideas mostly seem pretty terrible – highlights something I think is great about markets.
Part of this relates to Vernon Smith’s insight about the interaction between constructivist rationality (deliberately thought out and articulated reason) and ecological rationality (emergent, evolving, and nonarticulated processes). As Smith put it in his book Rationality in Economics:
The constructivist rationality of the people who run Rabbit tells them the R1 is a good product many people will find helpful or useful. My constructivist rationality tells me this product will probably be a dud. But thanks to the market, we have a way to figure out who is right – because the ecological rationality of the market process will sort that out. I’ve certainly been wrong before, after all. I remember when the iPad was first announced, I thought it would be a flop.
All I saw when I looked at it was just an oversized iPhone that didn’t actually make phone calls. Who was going to want to drop several hundred dollars on something like that? Well, it turned out, quite a lot of people.
If I had been assigned the role of Technology Czar and given sole authority to decide what new products would be available on the market, I would have prevented a lot of flops from ever occurring. However, I would also have prevented some truly great products from arriving as well – products that I eventually came to use myself! And many things I thought would be great successes in fact turned out to be flops. The same would true for any other prospective Technology Czar, or Technology Committee. What’s great about markets is that nobody gets to be a Czar, and new ideas don’t have to be approved by committee. Markets allow a tremendous amount of variation to be generated, and markets generate selection from that variation using what Deirdre McCloskey calls market-tested betterment. So when I see a product like the Rabbit R1 on the horizon, it makes me smile. Someone has an idea for an innovation, and they are taking a chance to put it out there and see if it works. Maybe I’m wrong and it’ll be a big hit! But even if my skepticism turned out to be correct, the fact that new ideas get to be constantly tried and tested is a beautiful thing.
READER COMMENTS
Fazal Majid
Mar 27 2024 at 9:57am
It’s called Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of Science Fiction is crud because 90% of everything is crud
john hare
Mar 27 2024 at 5:26pm
That’s for sure. Isn’t it amazing what that other 10% can accomplish.
As an inventor, I think one of the most valuable skills is the ability to walk away from concepts that don’t pan out. Laser focus on one idea means that many others become invisible. OTOH, without that laser focus, many ideas don’t get the work put into them that would make them useful.
JdL
Mar 28 2024 at 9:32am
Excellent points. It’s very frustrating that so many are enamored of the idea of “experts” directing, well, pretty much everything except perhaps how many squares of bathroom tissue we use (but don’t count on them keeping their nose out of that either). The idea of experts running everything has an appeal that one would hope would max out in about the third grade, after which a person should be able to appreciate the wonderfulness of the free market, and of freedom in general. But alas, though this may happen some day, we’re not there yet.
Mike Hammock
Mar 29 2024 at 10:35am
I think this is an important point to keep in mind whenever anyone is afraid of new technology having a devastating effect on employment. Most of new tech is overhyped, and in the short run will have neither the beneficial impact that is advertised nor the harmful effect people fear.
Information technology didn’t lead to the paperless office–remember when that was an expected outcome? Remember in the early days of the internet when tech companies said we’d shortly be consuming all our media using what has come to be called streaming? Netflix streaming didn’t start until 2007, and it didn’t become the dominant way to consume media until several years after that. Remember when self-driving cars were going to destroy all driving jobs? Now it looks like fully-automated, general driving capability is a much harder problem to solve than anyone thought. We might be decades away from fully self-driving cargo vehicles that can ship goods across the country. Some of this tech will become useful eventually, and some of it never will.
It’s great that markets will sort out which of this stuff is worthwhile, and compel firms to stop wasting resources on the stuff that is not worthwhile. I do wish people wouldn’t buy into the hype cycle itself so easily. On the other hand, maybe hype is itself a consumption good.
David Seltzer
Mar 29 2024 at 12:11pm
Other terrible ideas; screen doors on submarines and using horses in water polo.
Owain Kanaway
Apr 2 2024 at 7:03pm
“the fact that new ideas get to be constantly tried and tested is a beautiful thing.”
Not really when you have copyright and patent laws. If it’s tried and tested, usually the consumer is the one testing it by wasting their money on a bad product. Also a lot of technologies that would exist and would be beneficial are never released into the market because of ip laws
The tech sector is so distorted, in the 40 last years governments have been passing these digital laws like the DMCA, subsidizing green technology, and semiconductor chips. All this does is give so much power to large tech firms like Intel, Microsoft, AMD, etc.
Then you have you have companies like Nintendo suing developers who created technologies that “enable piracy” (emulation). Apple wanted to release NES emulators on their ipad but nope that was shut down because NES games are still protected by copyright, absolutely ridiculous.
Anders
Apr 4 2024 at 3:13pm
Almost all transformative inventions I can think of were broadly dismissed as ridiculous in the beginning. Why telephones when we have letters and telegraphs? Why search algorithms when we have professional librarians? As a child, my teacher failed to convince me typing on a computer was better than a type writer.
The first tablets, ipad precursor, flopped completely for the reasons mentioned and because the silly idea people preferred to take notes by hand. The ipad succeeded mainly because it learned from those mistakes and importantly improved the user interface, as mac had done with pc a generation previous. And not even the polyannish acolytes of the first smartphones foresaw what we use them for today (instead a range of other ideas that failed to materialise).
In fact, what invention at all worked out the way we thought?
I agree that all we achieve by, say, a tough approach to data regulation is to raise costs of compliance and entrench the dominance of the likes of google. Meanwhile, google is investing in hundreds of ways to diversify aware that their model will become obsolete in ways we cannot imagine. A strategy right up vernons alley…
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