I Recently, I bought an iPhone 15 to replace my 5-year-old iPhone 11. The phone has the new A17 Pro chip, a terabyte of data storage, and is accordingly eye-poppingly expensive. Of course, I have carefully considered my reasons for sparing money on such a scale. For example, I have always had a policy of only writing about devices I bought with my own money (no freebies from tech companies). The fancy A17 processor is necessary to run the new “AI” features that Apple promises to launch soon. The phone also has a significantly better camera than my old phone, which is important (to me).
My Substack Blog It comes out three times a week and I post new photos in each issue. Finally, a friend whose old iPhone is nearing the end of its lifespan might be happy to have an iPhone 11 in good condition.
But these are more rationalizations than evidence. In fact, my old iPhone was fine for what it did. Sure, it would eventually need a new battery, but otherwise it lasted for years. And if you look objectively at the evolution of the iPhone line, it’s just been a steady series of incremental improvements since the iPhone 4 in 2010. What was so special about that model? Mainly this.
Front cameraThe iPhone 11 opened up a world of selfies, video chat, social media, and all the other accoutrements of a networked world. But what followed was only incremental change and rising prices.
This doesn’t just apply to the iPhone, but to smartphones in general; manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei, and Google have all followed the same path. The advent of smartphones, which began with the release of the first iPhone in 2007, marked a major break in the evolution of mobile phone technology (just ask Nokia or BlackBerry if you doubt that). A decade of significant growth followed, but the technology (and market) matured and incremental changes became the norm.
Mathematicians have a name for this process: they call it a sigmoid function, and they depict it as an S-shaped curve. If you apply this to consumer electronics, the curve looks like a slightly flattened “S,” with slow progress on the bottom, then a steep upward curve, and finally a flat line on the top. And smartphones are on that part of the curve right now.
If we look at the history of the technology industry over the past 50 years or so, we see a pattern: first there’s a technological breakthrough: silicon chips, the Internet, the Web, mobile phones, cloud computing, smartphones. Each breakthrough is followed by a period of intense development (often accompanied by an investment bubble) that pushes the technology towards the middle of the “S”. Then, eventually, things settle down as the market becomes saturated and it becomes increasingly difficult to fundamentally improve the technology.
You can probably see where this is going.
So-called “AI” Early breakthroughs have already occurred: first, the emergence of “big data” generated by the web, social media and surveillance capitalism, then the rediscovery of powerful algorithms (neural networks), followed in 2017 by the invention of the “Transformer” deep learning architecture, followed by the development of large-scale language models (LLMs) and other generative AI, of which ChatGPT is a prime example.
Now that we’ve passed the period of frenzy of development and huge amounts of corporate investment (with unclear returns on that investment) that has pushed the technology up into the middle of the sigmoid curve, an interesting question arises: how far up the sigmoid curve has the industry climbed, and when will smartphone technology reach the plateau where it is currently stagnating?
In recent weeks, we are starting to see signs that this moment is approaching. The technology is becoming commoditized. AI companies are starting to release smaller and (allegedly) cheaper LLMs. Of course, they won’t admit this, but it’s because the energy costs of the technology are increasing.
Swelling Irrational promotion of the industry
It’s not much talked about among economists. Millions of people have tried ChatGPT and its ilk, but most of them never showed up.
Lasting Interest Nearly every large company on the planet has run an AI “pilot” project or two, but very few have made any real deployments.
Today’s Sensation Is it starting to get boring? In fact, it’s a bit like the latest shiny smartphone.
Source: www.theguardian.com
