The law of burden elimination: How to predict technology trends coming and dying out
The Law
I was trying to figure out the pattern of new technologies emerging and being replaced over the past decades. I think I have a solution.
People don’t want a new thing or technology for what it is. They only want to eliminate the burden of the current way their needs are served.
Human needs can be generalized to the following:
- Living forever without pain in infinite joy.
- Knowing everything, starting from what appears the most important.
- Telepathy, including broadcasting.
- Teleportation, being anywhere.
- Changing the material world instantly at will.
This is likely simplified, incomplete, and lacks hierarchy, because I am not a psychologist. But this list serves the purpose of explaining the changes in technology trends.
Misconceptions
We are far from being able to serve those needs, that’s why we rarely recognize them and mostly study their seemingly unrelated manifestations like information addiction, or a child’s desire to learn new things, or video replacing other formats (all of that being manifestations of the need to know everything, starting from what is sold to a person as the most important, or urgent, or pleasing).
A common misconception is that people will want some new thing because it is cool and allows them to do a lot. This is generally not the case, but sometimes this new thing also reduces some burden, and then it gets adopted, but not for it being “cool” or functional.
Websites emerged in the 1990s. They seemed like a new awesome thing everyone should have. But they were merely eliminating paper directories and catalogs, the complicated old ways of showing and knowing. Then individual websites started to be replaced by blogging services, and then by social networks and messengers with broadcast channels as even better ways of showing and knowing.
In those decades, some designers and programmers like me got attached to the phenomenon and got to love making websites. This job served other needs from the list for us: changing the material world and broadcasting our creations. Since we don’t reflect on that deeply, we just conclude “I love making websites”.
Now add another need: living without pain. Memories of job insecurity cause pain. To avoid it, designers and programmers develop strong attachments to their current technology and are forced to believe that websites are the trend that must stay and everyone must want one. To fool themselves and to support each other in rationalizing the fear of change, they subconsciously invent and promote theories that their product is used because it’s beautiful and because of what it adds to the world. They multiply entities beyond necessity.
I was a freelancer, and this hit me hard. I saw no-code website services emerging but despised them. To me, they were cheap fake preying on the trend, like spam emails prey on regular email usage. There’s so much that no-code websites cannot do! Meanwhile, smart people were investing in the services to make them.
In 2013, I tried to launch a web agency as the next professional step to grow from individual freelancing. It was still possible back then, but not with my views of the 2000s. Not only was it a red ocean by then, but it also started shrinking. The market of “yes-code” websites was defending against the price pressure from drag-and-drop constructors by heavy automation and the economy of scale, and I could not compete with that. I lost, and it took me over a year to pay out my debts for office rent and the salaries I paid.
The root problem is attachment to a technology rather than to a need.
This also explains my second failure. In 2016, I had my own CRM. I sold a license to a customer for whom it was the best fit because other software did not fully work with his marketing funnel. This small success made me believe that’s what many want. There was a battle of hosted vs cloud solutions. I was promoting the hosted ones because that’s safer for customers. A cloud service provider can shut down, and gone is the database. Actually, both hosted and cloud solutions have their risks, and I was supporting the old model because it was familiar to me and not because it was better. Clouds won because they reduced the burden, and I was out of sales.
The pattern is much more universal than my personal story. Take a look at any innovation, and you will see that it streamlined something and not just added entities:
- Everything went mobile not because we wanted a new device, but because it reduced the span from an idea to implementation. Every failed device was oriented to “do more” instead of “do easier”.
- Application stores have largely replaced direct package installations. It seems an extra step in distribution and reduces the profits for app vendors, but it streamlines installations because people want fewer taps, and a single point of entry won.
- Your girlfriend is elated when you give her a new iPhone for Christmas. And it has new features she soon gets to like. But this new phone really just eliminates the jankiness of the old one, and each new feature is just a way to express what she wants with fewer taps and to transmit her state of mind to her followers with less friction. All animoji and filters can be traced to that need. The attachment to the concept of a phone will put many advocates out of jobs and out of business as watches, Apple Vision, and other stuff will be replacing phones.
I believe the following bias is the root cause of the misconception:
People perceive material objects way better than their functions or what they replace. So if a thing is popular, it must be for what it is or for what it introduced.
While the reality is the opposite. Fancy things make headlines but don’t stay.
When people reverse-engineer the success of something, they try to add an equal amount of innovation to a similar field, and that fails.
Think of your favorite coding framework. You love its simplicity and what you can do with it. Its tutorials focus on the beauty or the functionality of the apps made with it. The truth is, only a handful of fanatics want this framework. To the majority, it’s just less of a burden than the older way of doing the same. It will be out of fundamental factors the moment an easier solution emerges, and only inertia will be keeping it afloat.
What Will Die in the Remote Future
Do you want an exercise? Look at the things around you. For each one, think of why it exists.
I can see a mug on my table. It is there because thousands of years ago it eliminated the need to find a fountain to drink from. It will be gone when an incessant supply of water to the human body will be invented. We may enjoy a fancy mug, some will feel nostalgia towards ceramic, and it will surely stay for longer than many of the more advanced devices, but there is no long-term future for mugs.
Human names will be gone. If we cherish human identity, then having IDs is just the flip side of it. The pressure towards human IDs is enormous because half the effort in each database in the world is maintaining redundant profile information for users, matching and telling apart users with the same names, etc. As water will go downhill and not up, there is no way to stop this. Internally, emails, taxpayer numbers, and social security numbers already serve that function. Look at Instagram exposing usernames more than names. This will only increase.
Drugs and computer games serve the same need to live in infinite joy. They target different social groups but will start competing soon. They both are more direct ways of serving the need than what the world offers now, and so it’s inherently impossible to fight them without changing that. Drugs and games will only be replaced by a more direct way of enjoyment, and we should work on it. Stopping killing each other would be a good start.
Using This Law in Education
If you teach some technology, how to get your students interested? Let me tell you an example of failure.
In university in 2005, I was given an assignment on neural networks to make an auto-associative network. It’s a special kind of network that has identical input and output:
When it is trained, it can recover a distorted known input or tell that the input does not look like anything known. The most straightforward application for this is voice recognition, but we did not learn that. We just made the output match the input numerically and passed the course. I felt that the math was nice and marginally interesting, but not worth diving deeper into.
Better teachers ask their students to make a usable product that covers some need. Those students will more likely continue to study the subject.
Even better teachers ask the students to make something that beats the commercially available tools in some measurement (and it was not hard in the AI of 2005). This makes nerds happy. For instance, with the same teacher, I made a numerical integration in MATLAB that worked a bit faster than the built-in function in narrow edge cases, and I felt like the king of the jungle.
Up to this point, it was common knowledge in education. Let’s apply the law:
The very best teachers ask the students to eliminate the burden of something in general use.
For an auto-associative neural network, it could be a simple Siri prototype (6 years before Siri), which could be done in an extra month. That makes a student feel like God and changes their attitude to life and work forever.
Do you have a passion for what you teach? Pass the passion and not only the knowledge to your students. Passion comes not with beating a benchmark, but with making someone’s life better in what matters to them.
And get out of what is dying out and being replaced.
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