Exactly. And now, a possibly terrifying question: What if there just is not going to be a "next big thing"?
Population size is about to peak. Up until now, for as long as we know, it has been growing. Starting at the latest with colonisation, we've had more people, more resources, new markets advancing into buyers of new products. Once societies advance to a certain point, they begin to shrink, this is well studied.
Without these growth factors, does it seem likely we'll see something as transformative as the automobile or the internet again?
Possibly bleak and badly informed, but I find it plausible to think that the party is about to end. Most of us here have probably seen what happens to a company when they stop growing. Spoiler: It's typically not innovation.
I’m not the biggest AI fanboy, but AI is the solution to this. You’re right that the population is about to peak, and we’ll stop adding biological brains that can come up with new things, but if we crack real AGI then we’ll have many more orders of magnitude of mechanical brains that can do the same.
I think the most interesting aspect about this is that improvements in robotics could help us eliminate some truly gruesome jobs we currently rely on something bordering on slave labour for. Pricking fruits and vegetables for example is AFAIK for the most part still manual labour. And food is, as opposed to, say, ad targeting, a pretty fundamental requirement for us.
But that's not really growth, it's optimisation. That is exactly the kind of thing that a company that stopped growing does. That wouldn't necessarily make it "the next big thing" though, in the "new frontier" ways we've seen in the past.
Population size is about to peak. Up until now, for as long as we know, it has been growing. Starting at the latest with colonisation, we've had more people, more resources, new markets advancing into buyers of new products. Once societies advance to a certain point, they begin to shrink, this is well studied.
Without these growth factors, does it seem likely we'll see something as transformative as the automobile or the internet again?
Possibly bleak and badly informed, but I find it plausible to think that the party is about to end. Most of us here have probably seen what happens to a company when they stop growing. Spoiler: It's typically not innovation.