Tuesday, November 17, 2020

The value of greater convenience at scale in technological developments

When thinking about and judging technological developments, we tend to place too much emphasis on new kinds of features, and too little value on greater convenience.

This post is talking about is an instance of how it's important to be able to consider broader details than specific cases in isolation, though it is stand-alone and you don't have to have read that post to understand it. I wrote this post to clarify my understanding of its topic, and to get a 'starting point' out there that I can later build on and refine.

Our focus here is on ways technological developments can provide benefits, and how people judge the value of those developments based on those ways. It is worth noting in passing that, of course, not all new technologies actually provide benefits. Not all of them provide benefits over what already exists. And people also judge the value of new technologies based on more than their features and added convenience. How different they seem, and how "cool" they are, play a role, for example.

New kinds of features are valued.

A new phone might have a new kind of sensor (lidar), or a new kind of camera lens (wide-angle). It might now have stereo speakers, and be waterproof.

Or a new technology's new feature might be a new category, like VR headsets.

These new technologies can do things that their predecessors couldn't do, or things that no prior technologies could do.

Often, people will evaluate a new piece of technology pretty much in terms of the number of new features it has.

Then there are technologies that don't provide any new kinds of features, they just provide greater convenience. Perhaps they can do the same kinds of things, but faster, in a lighter package, a smaller package, with greater efficiency, or easier to use, and so on.

When the iPod was first released, it was seen in such terms. It didn't have any particular features that other players didn't already have. "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." (If you're not familiar with the iPod products, they were massively successful).

Same with the release of the iPad. There wasn't any particular new features to it. Many saw it as "just a bigger iPhone".


To dig a bit deeper, we need to switch from talking about features to talking about the ends that can be achieved with the technology. We don't think of all technologies as having "features" (what features does a plow have?), but we do think of them in terms of what they can be used to do -- what sorts of ends can be achieved with them.

When a new technology is developed, we compare the ends that can be achieved with it to those that can be achieved with existing technologies.

When evaluating new technology, people put too much emphasis on whether it can be used to achieve new kinds of ends, and too little on whether it provides greater convenience in achieving ends.

Note also that when I talk how people value new technologies, I am not talking about the value they may assign the technology for their own personal use of it. I mean the value they see in that technology itself -- the value it can provide in general ("to society").


What is perhaps surprising is that a lot of technology that, now that we're familiar with it, seems obviously to be a new category compared to what came before it, would have been seen by many when it was new as merely providing greater convenience, and not as something that enabled new kinds of ends to be achieved.

Consider when mobile (cellular) phones were first introduced. What do they let you do? They let you talk to people across physical distance. But they let you talk to people while you're outside of your home or office (or less likely, since mobile phones weren't ubiquitous, talk to someone else while they're out). This can be seen as just providing a greater convenience for talking to people. And that's likely how people would have seen it then -- they were used to talking to someone while at home or at the office. To them, that's what a phone call was. If they needed to talk to someone they could always do it when they're home or at the office. Being able to do so at other times is a convenience (for some people this was an important convenience).

Or consider when the car was first introduced. It lets you get from A to B. But you can already do that with a horse, and horses were more reliable than early cars.


There's two points here. First, it is actually true that these technologies like mobile phones or cars were "merely" providing greater convenience (in certain ways) for achieving ends that could already be done by existing means. But second, people underestimate the value of providing greater convenience, because they are considering the new technology in terms that are far too narrow.

They consider the technology by considering, what value one of those items, considered in isolation, has. They don't go much beyond this to considering the new technology in broader terms, in terms of what it would mean for there to be many of these items out there, over a period of time. For that is the actual potential (or reality) for new technology. In these broader terms greater convenience can be transformative, and can enable new things that would not have been possible without that greater convenience existing at scale.


Consider the printing press through this lens. What kinds of ends can be achieved with a printing press? A printing press can produce books. But that could already be done. And hand-made books could be more aesthetically pleasing, too. Its benefits were conveniences: producing more uniform copies, quicker and cheaper (I don't know whether it could do so when it was first developed, but if not presumably it didn't take too long before it could). 

But if we shift from thinking about what an individual printing press can be used to achieve, considered in isolation, to a broader perspective of multiple printing presses and what happens if they're operating over a period of time, we can see that the greater convenience is more significant.

More books can be produced, books can become cheaper, more people can have access to books. Over time this will help enable greater literacy and education within the populace. It enables ideas to spread and intermingle more freely. 

From this broader perspective we can see that convenience at scale can enable all sorts of things that aren't possible without it. It can enables uses that require scale, speed, lower cost etc.

For another example, consider YouTube. We are familiar with it now, and what such sharing of videos enables. But if we were not familiar or the internet and tried to consider what sorts of ends such a thing could be used for, considering those things in isolation, we would note that it does not actually enable any new kinds of ends.

Prior to the internet and YouTube, it was still possible to share video with other people. You could mail copies of VHS tapes to people. Someone could have built a company that would let users browse and view other people's videos. It could have been a catalogue company where people mail the company VHS tapes of short videos and the company would send out a catalogue with thumbnail images and short descriptions of each video. Users could mark down which videos they wanted copies of and mail that information to the company, which would then send out tapes containing those videos.

Users could even mail back information on which videos they "liked" and "disliked" videos, and the company could use that to adjust the content of future catalogues. Users could similarly write comments on videos.

This was all technically possible back then, and if you'd provided a description of the internet and YouTube to a person back then, they might have realised that the same ends could have been achieved with existing technology and wondered what the point of this YouTube was supposed to be.

If you think that such a company is fanciful because of its impracticality, that's exactly the point. The difference is that the internet and YouTube provides a greater level of convenience, and that greater convenience enables applications like YouTube to exist in practice.

Once the new technology has become commonplace, we are aware of the broader impact of its greater convenience, and we just see that impact as part of the technology itself. We thus see the new technology as obviously different (and usually, better than) the older technologies. We forget that we once saw it as basically the same but just with some quantitative tweaks.

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The ideas in this post are related to the notion that technological development is removing constraints. Providing greater convenience is a large part of 'removing constraints'.

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