I have a different theory. You need access to users/customers of problems you're trying to solve. I guess the first couple of rounds of tech boom happened in the valley because of the access to chip makers, early internet adopters etc.
What this probably means is just that valley doesn't matter anymore to every industry/market. Probably also explains why we're starting to see more international startups at YC.
This. We tend to underestimate the cost of switching. A new service doing the exact same thing as another (and not just software - the support, help, documentation, community etc) is still not good enough to get someone to switch, in spite of price. It might be easier to get new customers though, but remember, your competitor probably has an upper hand in marketing, and in general acquiring new customers.
If it follows other tech trends(eg: cell phones bypassing land lines), India and other developing countries will see self-driving cars before freeways and owned cars. Well, I'm an optimist.
Cell phones bypassing land lines makes sense because you can cover more customers with less cost. Self-driving cars may eventually be less costly than human driven cars, but for the near future, the costs you add (sensors, software, actuators, etc) are way more expensive than the costs you save (driver's attention, optimistically damage to persons and property reduced through collision avoidance), particularly in developing countries where a person's attention has less monetary value, but the raw materials for the car have similar costs. It's unlikely that you'd get much of the ancillary benefits of usability by unlicensed drivers either -- few people will be able to afford a driverless car to cart their kid around to school or wherever, anyway those people could just hire a driver and a normal car.
Maybe. But I'm not sure it's as easy as putting things in a scale from more modern to less modern. The places where India has leapfrogged has been on stuff that needs new infrastructure development since there was never any good old infrastructure to take up resources or incumbent players to choke out new players.
Self driving cars don't need new infrastructure, its functionally an application that runs on existing infrastructure. If you have decent roads it'll work the same way whether you're in India or anywhere else.
Although I guess you could argue that Indians are less prissy about what they're willing to tolerate. A self-driving auto-rickshaw wouldn't fly in America, but it would be just fine for just about any Indian, and it's a much more useful application of self-driving tech than expecting everyone to have their own robo-chauffeured luxury cars.
> I feel like universal basic income will only work in progressive societies that have gotten used to various social programs before. They might go bankrupt long before any of it's population actually receive money due to corruption.
I actually think it is the opposite. UBI might work better precisely because corruption prevents other welfare schemes reaching the target population.
At least in theory, the direct cash transfer should help pull out a lot of people from abject poverty. The article quotes a jump from 22% absolute poverty to 0.5% - if it does that, it would go a long way in accelerating growth in India.
The bigger question is how they will fund this. India is know for the capital flight. Rich people aren't paying taxes in India so the government doesn't have much money to spend on social welfare. Unless I'm wrong here? I'm not too familiar with India so please excuse any cultural ignorances.
The argument for direct cash transfers (not really UBI, but a predecessor of sorts) was that, there are already millions being spent on subsidies and other welfare schemes, and only a small percentage of them actually reach the needy.
I wonder if the plan here is to create a market by creating consumers. If enough consumers are present and the govt requires companies to invest money in building industries in India, in order to serve those consumers, they can probably speed up development. Where do they get money? "Quantitative easing"
They simply redirect funding from existing welfare scheme to this type of scheme, particularly the least enforced, most corrupt and inefficient scheme.
A UBI would be much easier to audit. Your problem might be identity theft or the creation of entirely fictitious person.
But as the article outlines, the schemes that India needs to cut to fund it comprise half of India's annual budget - which means less spending on things India desperately lacks like infrastructure - and each recipient gets $113 per annum, which is a undoubtedly a real boon to some of them but really doesn't go that far towards accelerating growth in India. And the corrupt are not going to find it any harder to siphon funds from unworldly, unbanked and often illiterate people living (or better still, recently deceased) in remote villages than they are to siphon off funds spent in other ways. Unless and until India gets dumbphone-based banking, the sheer logistics of dispensing money to a billion people is pretty mindboggling.
Not sure if you are from India or not, but it looks like you are not aware of how banking has improved in India.
Dumbphone banking is possible for more than a billion people (as long as they can afford a dumbphone service and have Aadhar - biometric ID). I say billion and not all Indians, because there's < 300 million Indians who are yet to get their Aadhar ID cards. With UBI even the poorest should be able to afford a dumb phone and a phone service.
India has all the needed infra to dispense money to a billion people. All it needs to ensure is, if UBI is implemented, remove every single subsidy thats currently given.
What would be worse, is to have a haphazard implementation of UBI without removing subsidies, and people revolting at removal of either of these schemes.
Wow, this is a great post. It feels like it is getting harder to have a rational argument/discussion online and social media. The default mode is silence for most rational people - and we need to fix this.
I don't think it's a tech problem so much as it is a design/culture problem.
If you look at the most popular forms of social media and what is considered popular, you see that low effort content is what draws the most views and reactions. Low effort content being images, 140 character quips, so on and so forth. The most popular social media sites are either geared specifically around these forms of communication (instagram, twitter, imgur, etc), or are dominated by such forms of content (reddit). The reasons why these forms of content are so popular are well understood so I won't waste time on it.
The issue that arises when these forms of low effort content dominate is that they start changing the way people think and act. The mind will adapt to the space that it lives in. In other words, if you talk in 140 characters frequently, you are going to start thinking in 140 characters. That being said, this is not to say social media has somehow created a problem that didn't exist before. People are rationalizing animals not rational animals. I'm saying that social media is making the problem worse and creating a dominant meta where low effort content succeeds and reinforces its own success by creating patterns of thought through the designs they are built around. The fact that Twitter has become a dominant form of political discourse should speak volumes about the mess things are right now.
My feeling on this is that the current landscape is akin to us discovering alcohol for the first time: we haven't adapted the right cultural norms to deal with this sort of technology yet. The current situation can be thought of as us trying to figure out the rules of the road. I think the best path forward is to not speak out against groups, but against behaviors that are muddying the water in all groups right now.
I think part of the problem is that many online discussion places (e.g. twitter, facebook, reddit, HN) implicitly reward people who 'react quickly' and who 'lead' (make 'root comments') over those that 'participate' (make a 'third-level comment', just for a random example).
On reacting quickly: in my experience, if you're among the first few to either make a 'root comment' to some post (on a medium like reddit or HN) you're much more likely to receive a large number of votes, positive or negative. And if you have even a slight preference for social validation, you'll play to the crowd by posting an agreeable meme or some variation. And the same goes for those who can quickly post the popular counter-meme as a second-level comment if all the first-level slots are taken. And bam, same old meme-based conversation plays out for the millionth time.
On participating: If you nest any further down than second-level comments, you tend to receive no reaction. No votes and often no replies, so it feels like you're talking to no-one (and you've just wasted a bunch of effort). And it's not that you care about chasing imaginary internet points; you care about receiving feedback that your comment has at least been read by a large audience. I suspect people who don't care about the latter are more likely to write in their diary. Consequently, the discussion can often lack depth.
So: rewards for 'quick reactors' + no incentive to add depth == shallow, pandering to the crowd comments.
I think it's something to do with the time-sensitive nature of these forms of discussion. Perhaps one solution would be to somehow mess with the interval between hitting the 'reply' button and when that reply actually appears.
I don't think that private communities provide the solution. They seem like a good idea.
But I think they would just turn into self agreeing echo chambers.
Google's voice recognition works extremely well, at least with certain accents. I'm from India, and it gets me right almost always. Not just that, it recognizes some ridiculously hard to pronounce names of places in India.
> That's what bothers me about this movement: it should be about giving poor people free access to the Net (which would just render Facebook's toy platform irrelevant - no need to ban it).
You are assuming that Free Basics is the only way poor people are getting connected. There are several more initiatives, funded both by the public and private. Banning Free Basics ensures that we don't differentiate internet based on an individual's affordability.
You are assuming that Free Basics is the only way poor people are getting connected. There are several more initiatives, funded both by the public and private.
No, I'm saying that the campaign has been against-Free-Basics and not pro-free-Internet. If there are such initiatives, good! Then nobody will have a reason to subscribe to Free Basics, and it'll fail anyway.
Banning Free Basics ensures that we don't differentiate internet based on an individual's affordability.
But if there are free plans with full Internet access, why is that important?
My guess is that India will likely leapfrog from cash to mobile payments - so in the long run that shouldn't pose as much of a problem to Amazon or any other vendor. There is already a lot of startups and established companies offering mobile wallets, and I believe many of then are setting good traction too.
What this probably means is just that valley doesn't matter anymore to every industry/market. Probably also explains why we're starting to see more international startups at YC.