July 29, 2022 • 37 mins
What exactly is a disruptive technology? Jonathan explains the term and gives examples of how technology can really shake things up.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and how the tech area. You know, it's time for
a tech Stuff classic episode, folks, and this episode originally
(00:25):
published on July twenty second, two thousand and fifteen. It
is called disruptive technologies. Disruptive is an adjective that lots
of folks like to use for businesses that often have
no business plan. That at least has been my experience.
But let's take a listen to the classic episode. The
(00:47):
concept of disruptive technology. You hear it a lot, but
often it is not very well explained and sometimes, in fact,
often it is misused, uh just eruptive technology. Sometimes is
being used just to mean something that has a lot
of buzz around it, but doesn't necessarily mean it's going
to be disruptive. The term itself is actually pretty specific.
(01:12):
It was originally coined by Clayton M. Christensen in a
book titled The Innovator's Dilemma, and specifically was talking about
disruptive innovation, not just technology, but innovation in general. Because
it doesn't have to be a physical thing. It could
be a new way of going about doing something. And
(01:34):
Christensen was saying that disruptive innovation was something that in
business meant adopting techniques or developing technology that eventually completely
surpasses or replaces previous approaches, possibly harming whatever business back
the other older and in the long run, wrong technology.
(01:56):
So I'd say a type of technology that disrupt an industry,
sometimes completely changing the way stuff is done, sometimes completely
invalidating long standing UH industries or business practices. So it's
it's meant to be signify something that is really going
(02:16):
to be transformative, not necessarily for the better. It doesn't
mean that the disruptive technology is more powerful or more
effective or more efficient. It might just be cheaper or
easier to produce than the previous version. So here's an example.
You might look at a ah, you know, something that
(02:39):
was made by hand, like a handmade article of clothing
versus a machine made article article of clothing. One is
not necessarily better than the other just because it happens
to be made in a different way. You could have
handmade clothing that is superior to machine made clothing, but
because the speed and the expense of using a machine
(03:03):
can be much lower, or the speed is faster, but
the expense is lower than if you were to rely
on a human being to produce that piece of clothing.
The sewing machine and other automated ways of creating garments
end up pushing the the handmade version to a niche market. Now,
(03:24):
you could argue that in cases like that, a person
could still make a pretty decent living working by hand.
It's just that the nature of the business has changed.
In fact, you could argue that by marketing it as handmade,
you could charge more for your product and thus make
more money on a per product basis, and that could
(03:46):
be very helpful. But the industry overall, the giant umbrella industry,
has changed significantly. So I'm going to look at several
different disruptive technologies. I'm pulling a lot of these from
an r iCal that we have on how stuff Works
dot com. If you don't remember how stuff works dot
Com is my employer, Tech Stuff is part of how
(04:07):
Stuff Works, and the article is ten disruptive technologies you
use every day. Now, there's one that's not on the
list that you certainly use frequently. You have to if
you're listening to this podcast that I think merits special mention,
and that is the Internet. The Internet is incredibly disruptive
(04:29):
and that it has changed the way we do lots
of stuff. It has enabled platforms to exist on top
of it that have completely shaken up the way things
used to work. Here's a you know, a simple example
is shopping. You know, back in the day, you had
to do one of two things. You ordered from a catalog,
in which case you would go through a catalog, you'd
(04:51):
fill out your order, you'd send it in, and then
you would wait for stuff to be delivered to you,
or you would have to go to an actual physical
store and purchase things. I guess theoretically you could have
a door to door salesman, so maybe there's three, but
that that was pretty much your only choices, and then
you were limited by the inventory of the physical space
you went to. Uh you were you know, you had
(05:14):
to actually make time out of your day to travel there. Uh.
You had to expend a lot of energy just to
get from point A to point being. These days, we
can do a ton of our shopping online, never leave
the comfort of our chair. Uh. The inventory is enormous
because there are a lot of companies out there that
either keep huge inventories or they can create on demand,
(05:37):
depending upon whatever the thing is you're trying to buy.
And so the Internet has really disrupted the shopping industry.
You've got a lot of stores out there that are
struggling to continue to make their numbers so that they
can remain open. We've seen lots of different chains close
over the last few years, bookstores being a big one.
(05:58):
A lot of electronics store has have been having problems.
That's indicative of the disruption we have seen from the Internet.
And that's just one thing that the Internet has disrupted.
Another could be long distance communications in general. The first
one on our list in the on the side is email,
and clearly email has been disruptive. It is changed the
(06:21):
way we communicate with one another. We have this immediacy now.
We no longer have the long delay between writing something
and someone else receiving it and then responding because back
in the old days, we would write letters and send
those through the mail, and then we have to wait
for the postal service to deliver our note. We have
(06:44):
to wait for the person to read it, then write
their own response, send it, and we have to wait
to receive it. So communication was very different by its
very nature. It had to be I mean, you couldn't
be asking a question that you needed an answer, you know,
within hours. That was not going to happen. But email
has changed things dramatically. It's also kind of changed the
(07:05):
nature of how we communicate. And you will hear people
occasionally talk about how letter writing is now a lost
art that people no longer know or bother to write
letters in a way that they used to because email
has supplanted. That has really changed the nature of communication.
But emails cheaper, it's easier than handwriting a letter. There's
(07:28):
no postage, there's no paper, there's no ink. Really, all
you need is an internet connection. So whether you are
paying for internet service or you're going someplace like the library,
even to send a message, uh, you know, that's all
you need really, and uh, of course it'll get to
where it's going in moments, so if the other person
(07:51):
is online, you could end up getting a response before
you have a chance to navigate away from the email window.
So it's very different. It has completely changed the nature
of the postal service. Um, things like greeting cards and invitations,
even those have started to decline. According to a two
thousand eleven p Internet survey of adults in the US
(08:15):
who got online used email them used it on a
typical day of all Americans used email to some extent.
That might even mean that we're communicating more. It may
not be the same quality of communication, but the quantity
certainly has gone up. And of course there's tons of
other stuff that we send through email. So that's a
(08:36):
good example of how the Internet has disrupted things. Beyond
the shopping aspect, there are others as well. Social media,
which is number nine on the list, also applies. Obviously,
they are allowing us to have interactions with our friends
and family, no matter how far apart they may be
from us. Um you can share in for nation, not
(09:00):
just through text, but you can share links, you can
share videos or music, you can share photographs. You have
this opportunity to have these interactions that before would have
been limited to whenever you were with one another, or
perhaps you had to rely on something like the snail
mail service. So again, incredibly disruptive, and we've even seen
(09:26):
this this pocket get shaken up multiple times as new
players have incorporated different strategies and disrupted social media. So
while social media has disrupted larger industries, social media itself
has experienced disruption. A great example of that is my Space,
(09:48):
which used to dominate the social media area, and then
Facebook comes along and ends up becoming incredibly disruptive because
of its appeal to a large young user base and
grew from there, and my Space eventually collapsed in on
itself and had to redefine itself and still is struggling
(10:09):
to define itself as something relevant in today's social media landscape.
We'll be back with more of this classic episode of
tech stuff after this quick break. As of early more
than half of the people who use the Internet also
(10:30):
regularly used social media, not a big surprise. In the
US that tends to be on the high end of
the scale, so about as of January, and other nations
it may be lower, but it shows that people are
really you know, they've incorporated this into their lives. It's
not just something that is occasionally used. I mean, I
(10:53):
don't know about you, but I have Facebook open pretty
much the entire time I'm sitting at any computer. And
it may not be that I'm on Facebook the entire
time solely, but it's always got a tab dedicated to
it because this is how I tend to interact with
my friends these days. We all are very busy, we
all have schedules that pretty much prevent us from getting
(11:16):
together on a regular basis. But this is a way
I can maintain contact without having to, you know, put
anyone to any trouble, which is nice now. It also,
you could argue, is less satisfying than other means of interaction,
like an actual physical get together where you can hang
out and spend time with one another. And I don't
(11:38):
argue that at all. Again, the disruption doesn't necessarily mean
it's better. Sometimes just means it's easier or more effective
in a way. So, uh, you know that, depending on
your view of social media, you might see it as
helpful disruption or very harmful disruption. There are a lot
of other examples of disruptive technologies that have utilized the Internet,
(12:02):
streaming media being a huge one. This is enormous. A
few years ago I talked about how people would be
increasingly moving away from cable and using the Internet to
get access to various forms of entertainment. At the time,
you know, it was it was an obvious move. Even
(12:24):
when I I said it, but it was still something
that was only occasionally talked about because I think, well,
for one thing, the big media companies were a little
worried about where things were going because they relied on
old forms of media delivery to get their message across.
So it's kind of scary to report on the potential
decline of the industry you currently are in, But that
(12:46):
is exactly what we've seen happen. We've seen cable subscriptions
for cable television decline as we've seen people start to
use other services online more frequently, things like Amazon or
Hulu or Netflix to get their their their entertainment. We've
also seen the growth of new forms of entertainment, things
(13:07):
like YouTube, where people who are not part of a
larger network are creating their own content and finding an audience.
Uh that has become an incredibly powerful story where people
who normally would not have had an opportunity to communicate
through the Internet suddenly have this outlet. And not only
(13:30):
do they have an outlet, but people find what they're
saying to be valuable, whether that's entertainment or it's news
or just personal opinion or whatever it may be. There's
now this outlet that that did not exist before, and
it's actually starting to take a big chunk out of
the traditional media. Now, there's still a long way to go.
(13:51):
You're gonna hear a lot of people talk about how
this stuff is going to force the traditional media companies
out of business, and in the long run, maybe that's
going to be the case. I think it will probably
even out where we're going to have a balance across
multiple platforms. That's my own personal guests, but it certainly
has proven itself to be a valuable way of getting
(14:15):
to an audience. It's been effective and it's just going
to continue to grow. The big challenge moving forward, I
think for content creators is getting noticed because this space
is getting more and more crowded. So it may turn
out that until something else comes along and shakes up
this industry, the streaming media industry, that you're going to
(14:38):
have a few really big players in the space and
then a whole bunch of little guys. And as someone
who creates videos and uh and podcasts that are not
part of how stuff works, I can tell you being
one of those little guys, it's tough. I mean, it's
tough to get noticed, but uh, Ultimately, it all depends
(15:01):
on why you're doing it. If you're doing it for fun,
like I do for my outside projects, it's not as
big a deal because you just do it until it's
no longer fun and then you stopped doing it. If
you're doing it to make a living, then it's a
much bigger deal. Obviously, you have to figure out how
to reach that audience so that you can get paid.
However that may be, whether it's through sponsorships or direct
(15:22):
contributions through Patreon or something along those lines. But these
streaming services have really created a new story that didn't
exist just a few years ago. Back then, I mean,
the only way you could end up getting on television
if you didn't already have a job there was through
like a public access station, or maybe if you went
(15:44):
to college and they had a college television station, that
was a way you could break into the industry. But
otherwise it was pretty tough. So it's been amazing to
watch this particular transition. Next on the list is e
readers and e reader apps. Obviously one of the hallmark
disruptive technologies to come along over the last decade. So
(16:06):
e readers have been around for a while but it's
only been you know, a few years since the first
e paper uh devices really became affordable to the average
person and paired with the right you know service like Amazon,
And by right, I mean it makes it really super
(16:27):
easy to get stuff onto that book. They've become powerful tools.
So whether you like Amazon's business approach or not, it's
impossible to deny their effectiveness Because you go out and
buy a kindle, it is incredibly easy to purchase content
for your kindle through the kindle. You know, you're buying
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it through Amazon, and that was their business model that
makes incredible sense, the idea of selling this piece of
hardware that makes it really easy for you to get
intent and people are able to grab books and movies
and music through Amazon and experience it through their various devices.
(17:08):
It has been a huge blow not just too brick
and mortar book companies, but publishers as well as music
companies and film Honestly, home video clearly has taken a
huge hit. Whether it's the brick and mortar retail stores
where you would go and buy a DVD or Blu ray,
(17:30):
or it's uh, you know, rental places. There are very
few of those left around you've got Red Box and
a couple of others. And here in Atlanta, we've got
some independent companies that are still around that are really
charming and have very eclectic collections. Video Drome in Atlanta.
If you were ever in Atlanta and you want to
see a real quirky, weird video rental place, go to
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Video Drome. UM. It's at the corner of Highland and
North Avenue, and it is amazing. They have a lot
of character. But obviously that business model, which used to
be enormous, I mean, Blockbuster Video and other companies like
it dominated various strip malls across the United States. You
could not go very far without seeing another one, and
(18:19):
these days they're long forgotten. Well, e readers UH and
e readers and other devices, streaming devices and streaming media,
as well as the shopping I was talking about earlier,
have all contributed to seeing those kind of fade away.
Smart mobile devices similar approach. It's also something that has
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really been disruptive. It's number six on the list. Uh.
It was just a few years ago that everyone assumed
that cell phones were just going to continue to get
smaller and smaller in the future, because that was what
was considered to be sexy, you would get a phone.
The next model would be even smaller and more compact.
There were lots of UH sketches on television, particularly starting
(19:06):
that Live of characters who had comically tiny phones because
it was a status symbol supposed to show how important
that character was, or how important that character wanted to
seem to be. And that was the joke, was that
it was just going to continuously get smaller and smaller. UH.
Smartphones turned that all around. So smartphones disrupted the phone,
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the mobile phone market because once the iPhone came out
and showed that there was a compelling way to access
things like the Internet through your phone, it meant that
you wanted to have a screen that was of a
large enough size for you to be able to read
things and interact with it. And then we saw the
(19:46):
trend start to reverse until now we're at the point
where you start seeing the comically large phones, the fablets.
I own one of those. I have a next to six.
It's enormous, So that trend ended up reversing. We've also
seen the they these devices have disrupted other industries, including
e readers and tablets, and we've seen them disrupt some
(20:08):
gaming industry too, because of the way that apps have
reshaped the gaming landscape. You have gamers who are truly
dedicated to specific consoles or two computers to PCs, and
then you have others who are happy to play whatever
on whichever platform. And mobile devices are incredibly handy because
(20:31):
you almost always have one with you, and the experiences
can be really satisfying depending upon the design of the app. Obviously,
not all apps are created equal, but we've also seen
smartphones replace other stuff, things like uh, day planners, which
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you might think, well, that's not that big a deal,
but there are companies that just made day planners, or
they made day planners as part of their business us,
and there's less and less reason to go out and
buy one of those. Or digital cameras. Back in the day,
we used to have digital cameras as standalone devices because
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they took much better photos than our phones could. Phone
images would be really low resolution, very grainy. But today
we're seeing better and better sensors incorporated into phones, and
I rarely carry around an extra camera. Sometimes I do
in very specific circumstances, but most of the time I'm
happy to just carry my phone. Same thing is true
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with MP three players. I used to be the person
who wanted to have a n MP three player dedicated
solely to MP three playing and that's it. But as
phone uh storage got larger and larger, and as cloud
storage began to become a thing, I stopped doing that.
Cloud storage would be another great example not on the
(21:56):
list here, but I'll talk about for a second. Cloud
computing and cloud story in general, has been incredibly disruptive
because by offloading the processing and storage requirements from a
localized area to the cloud, you disrupt all the businesses
that used to provide the machines that either processed information
or stored it. So more and more companies are moving
(22:18):
to cloud based services. It decreases the demand they have
for powerful machinery on the front end, and it means
they can make a lower investment. So in other words,
the employees at a business might end up with cheaper laptops,
but in the end it doesn't matter because the laptops
aren't really doing all the work. A lot of the
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work is being offloaded to the cloud. So very disruptive.
It also means it creates new opportunities if you're the
one making those inexpensive laptops. You've got a powerful business
now because of these other companies that have created these
powerful cloud services. We've got more to say in this
classic episod sort of tech stuff after these quick messages.
(23:10):
Next on the list, we have mobile payment options. There's
so many of these, Apple Pay being one that's in
the news quite a bit, but there are other ones
as well, things that end up taking the the the
sting out of having to, you know, keep track of
all your various cards, reward systems, things like that, all
(23:31):
of that being wrapped up into an app that can
keep track of everything for you. Very powerful, also extremely disruptive,
really good example in this list. So there are a
lot of different options here. I mean there's the Google Wallet,
there's Apple Pay, there's into it go payment, There's lots
of stuff out there. And this applies both on the
(23:54):
user side and on the vendor side. You've got companies
that are are using this stuff in order to be
their point of sale, and it's really a great tool
for them because they can end up offloading that and
they don't have to invest in, you know, larger technologies
like cashiers and things like that, or cash registers. I
(24:16):
should say not cashiers, and uh, you know, we're seeing
more of this sort of approach where you can do
the tap and pay, and that ends up decreasing the
need for sales personnel. Thus, this is a disruptive. It
means that people who would normally be able to get
a job doing that, being a sales representative at a
(24:38):
retail establishment, they might find it harder to get that
kind of job because there's less need for it. So
sometimes disruptive can mean pretty tough consequences for people, at
least in the short term, until you figure out some
other place where you have a need that people can
go and work at and fill that need. Plus they
(24:58):
can go and you know, get pay aid for the
work they do. So disruptive does not always mean great.
It might mean great things for that whatever technology is
just doing the disrupting, but it could have other consequences
that roll out to lots of other people. Self checkout
stations is similar in that way. It's also on the list.
It's at number four. Very disruptive. Obviously, if you go
(25:21):
to a grocery store and you see that there are
only three lanes open, there's twenty lanes there three of
them are open with with cashiers and the rest are
are empty. And it's because these self service lanes have
taken a lot of the load off. You don't need
to employ as many people to handle the shopping requirements
(25:42):
of your customers. I mean that's powerful, and again, just
as I was saying with the other one, it means
that it might put some folks out of a job.
That's tough. Number three in the list is wearable fitness devices.
This is interesting to me. Um, We're still kind of
casting about for the perfect one. There are a lot
(26:03):
on the market, and a lot of people have been
testing out different ones, and companies keep coming out with
new ones. And whether it's something simple like a fitbit,
which is what I'm wearing right now, or it's more
complicated like a smart watch that also has uh step
(26:23):
tracking and maybe a heart monitor and other items that
are related to fitness apps. Uh. They're everywhere and they
are disruptive. Uh. They are also you know, really powerful
in the sense of they raise awareness at least of fitness.
Whether they actually drive fitness is still a matter of debate.
(26:47):
I've seen studies that suggest that if you are already motivated,
then you are likely to use these properly, but in
that case, you're using it to help keep track of
what you are already going to do. It's not like
the fitness device encouraged you to do, you know, to
be fit, but rather that it enabled you to keep
(27:07):
better track of it. So it may be that these
devices really just replace more simple devices like your standard pedometer,
but still pretty disruptive. Uh. The last two on the
list of I've actually already covered because there's cloud computing
in the Internet. They are, uh, the number one and
number two. Um, but I already mentioned though, so I'm
(27:27):
not going to go through that again. There are a
couple of others that are not on the list that
I wanted to mention that I think have been that
are either incredibly disruptive or have the potential to be
really disruptive. One is the Internet of things. Obviously, the
Internet of things, we've talked about it so many times,
but just in case you're new to the program, you
haven't heard about it, or or you're kind of confused,
(27:49):
what does the Internet of things really mean? Internet of
things ultimately refers to a world in which you have
Internet connected sensors and actuators, things that can either take
information from the environment or interact with the environment in
some way, and they're all connected to the internet, uh
(28:10):
in order to process information or send information. So here's
an example. Let's use a house as our model, and
you have you walk into your house, and you've got
motion sensors that are connected to the internet. UM. They
activate your lights and a sound system. When you walk in,
the sound system plays from a playlist that you have selected,
(28:34):
or maybe it even interacts by checking the information from
a wearable you have on that detects your heart rate,
and based on your heart rate, the house selects music
that should complement your current mood based upon just the
limited information it has. UH. Maybe it has information about
what you had for dinner last night and has suggestions
(28:56):
on things to eat tonight that might be interesting to you.
These are all based on simple things that end up
monitoring information, sending it to some other source where it
gets processed, and then the processed information comes back to
affect you in a meaningful way. Another great example would
(29:17):
be traffic infrastructure. So let's say we have real time
sensors out along the various roads of a busy city
like Atlanta. It's a great example, and those sensors are
picking up traffic patterns and sending it to a centralized
processing station which is able to monitor the information and
make useful conclusions such as, maybe it needs to adjust
(29:41):
the timing on certain intersections so that traffic can flow
more freely through there to alleviate some traffic congestion. It's
of being a smart traffic system. Well, the Internet of
things is like that, but imagine that with everything. So
you might have an experience where when you step outside,
the are very much tailored to your preferences or your
(30:03):
current state of being, and so you it ideally would
have a very wonderful experience wherever you went all the time,
it was always going to be catered to you. The
reality will probably be a little less science fiction Ee
and Disney than that is. But we're already seeing examples
of this, and so the Internet of things is going
(30:25):
to be really disruptive as it makes regular tasks more efficient,
more effortless, where we don't have to have middlemen to
kind of negotiate things on our behalf, you know, we
were able to have that stuff happen kind of automatically. Uh,
(30:47):
that's going to be really disruptive. Um, it doesn't necessarily
mean it's going to put lots of people out of work,
although I imagined that first at least some things, that
will be the case. But it definitely means that it's
going to change things. And again, it may not necessarily
be better. It may just be that that's the easiest
way to do things, and so it might not be better,
(31:07):
it might be the way things are. The last one
I would pick to talk about is autonomous cars. Autonomous
cars are definitely going to be disruptive. They've already started
to be disruptive, and they're not even something that consumers
can get their hands on yet. Autonomous cars will be
disruptive for multiple reasons. One of the big ones is
that it will open up the potential for people to
(31:30):
no longer own a personal vehicle. The idea here is
that you could have a fleet of autonomous cars in
a city. Let's say this would really only apply to
folks who are living in urban environments for the most part.
So imagine that you get a fleet of autonomous cars
and they're on the street, driving very safely because they're
(31:53):
relying upon high tech sensors that allow them to react
in a tract and of the time it would take
a human to react. So we've got these safe autonomous
cars roving around. When you need to go somewhere, you
use an app and say, hey, I need a ride,
and one of these autonomous vehicles pulls up and you
(32:14):
get in and it drives off. When an autonomous car
needs to rest, like it needs to refuel or probably recharge,
because I imagine that this is going to be largely
an electric vehicle fleet, then it'll just take itself off
the grid and another car would come online to replace it.
And this would mean that you would travel whenever you
(32:36):
needed it. But otherwise you know you did, you wouldn't
need a vehicle, So people would not have to spend
the money on a personal car. They could just rely
on this service. Uh. You know. It's one of those
things that has actually been bandied about as a possible
business model. Uber is looking into it. There have been
(32:58):
studies that have owned that such a model could potentially
reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from cars by n Now
keep in mind that car greenhouse gas emissions, that's a problem,
but it's a tiny fraction of the overall greenhouse gas
emissions that we see so clearly. If all of those cars,
(33:19):
those electric vehicles are being powered by coal fired coal
fired power plants, really you haven't you haven't really addressed
the underlying problem, which is that you need to find
some other means of generating electricity that does not dump
out that many greenhouse gases in the process. It's always
one of those issues where you gotta look at the
(33:40):
bigger picture. But that autonomous approach could end up disrupting
the automotive industry. If people don't need personal vehicles, then
that's going to be a huge hit to multiple companies.
Of course, any company that is the one that's actually
supplying those autonomous fleets, they're gonna make it killing, but
(34:00):
everyone else is going to have a real hard time
of it. On top of that, things like taxi companies,
they'll have a real hard time. I mean, it'll be
a lot harder to get employment as a taxi driver
if you have all these robot cars that are available
and are really efficient, and you don't have to worry
about a robot car having a weird conversation with you
because it's just gonna take you to where you want
(34:22):
to go, as opposed to you know, talking about some
weird thing in the news or an odd personal problem
that sometimes you get with taxi drivers. So it could
be incredibly disruptive. Now, this is just a selection of
disruptive technologies. There are tons of other ones that we
could talk about. VR and a R, virtor reality and
(34:42):
augmented reality. Another potentially disruptive technology, hollow lens in particular
Microsoft's approach and Magic Leap being another could really disrupt
things like if you can turn any surface into a monitor,
you don't need to buy a monitor anymore. You just
need the headset, and so there's a possibility that you
could change these. You also could have a new means
(35:04):
of interacting with your computer using voice and just your controls.
If it's compelling enough and easy enough and versatile enough,
that could be incredibly disruptive. We have seen the model
of the PC to be largely unchanged since the early
nineteen eighties. You know, you've got your keyboard and mouse,
and that's the chief way you interact with computers these days.
(35:27):
But it's possible that if you created a system that
is easy enough to use and does what you needed
to do, we could finally see that model fade away.
Or at least end up competing with a different model. Uh.
I don't know if that's necessarily going to happen. I
haven't had my hands on a hollow lens yet, and
(35:47):
there are probably going to be plenty of applications where
you're going to think, no, I want a computer with
a keyboard and a mouse to do this. It doesn't
make sense for me to do it using this other model.
But they're might be enough cases where the hollow lens
could be truly disruptive and be the next or you know,
(36:08):
not just the hollow lens, but augmented reality in general
be truly disruptive and be the next step in how
we interact with information. So that's another great example. There's
tons of other ones obviously that have been in the
news on and off, and I'm curious to hear what
you guys think. I want to know what you think
is the most interesting disruptive technology. And keep in mind,
(36:32):
disruptive technologies are not a new thing. There have been
disruptive technologies for as long as there's been technology. Great
example is the printing press, very disruptive technology. It ended
up disrupting all those monks who are illuminating scripts. Um so,
this is something that has been around pretty much as
long as technology has been around. I hope you enjoyed
(36:55):
that classic episode about disruptive technologies. If you have suggestions
for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech Stuff,
reach out to me. You can let me know on Twitter.
The handle for the show is text Stuff H s
W and I'll talk to you again really soon Y.
(37:18):
Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and how the tech area. You know, it's time for
a tech Stuff classic episode, folks, and this episode originally
(00:25):
published on July twenty second, two thousand and fifteen. It
is called disruptive technologies. Disruptive is an adjective that lots
of folks like to use for businesses that often have
no business plan. That at least has been my experience.
But let's take a listen to the classic episode. The
(00:47):
concept of disruptive technology. You hear it a lot, but
often it is not very well explained and sometimes, in fact,
often it is misused, uh just eruptive technology. Sometimes is
being used just to mean something that has a lot
of buzz around it, but doesn't necessarily mean it's going
to be disruptive. The term itself is actually pretty specific.
(01:12):
It was originally coined by Clayton M. Christensen in a
book titled The Innovator's Dilemma, and specifically was talking about
disruptive innovation, not just technology, but innovation in general. Because
it doesn't have to be a physical thing. It could
be a new way of going about doing something. And
(01:34):
Christensen was saying that disruptive innovation was something that in
business meant adopting techniques or developing technology that eventually completely
surpasses or replaces previous approaches, possibly harming whatever business back
the other older and in the long run, wrong technology.
(01:56):
So I'd say a type of technology that disrupt an industry,
sometimes completely changing the way stuff is done, sometimes completely
invalidating long standing UH industries or business practices. So it's
it's meant to be signify something that is really going
(02:16):
to be transformative, not necessarily for the better. It doesn't
mean that the disruptive technology is more powerful or more
effective or more efficient. It might just be cheaper or
easier to produce than the previous version. So here's an example.
You might look at a ah, you know, something that
(02:39):
was made by hand, like a handmade article of clothing
versus a machine made article article of clothing. One is
not necessarily better than the other just because it happens
to be made in a different way. You could have
handmade clothing that is superior to machine made clothing, but
because the speed and the expense of using a machine
(03:03):
can be much lower, or the speed is faster, but
the expense is lower than if you were to rely
on a human being to produce that piece of clothing.
The sewing machine and other automated ways of creating garments
end up pushing the the handmade version to a niche market. Now,
(03:24):
you could argue that in cases like that, a person
could still make a pretty decent living working by hand.
It's just that the nature of the business has changed.
In fact, you could argue that by marketing it as handmade,
you could charge more for your product and thus make
more money on a per product basis, and that could
(03:46):
be very helpful. But the industry overall, the giant umbrella industry,
has changed significantly. So I'm going to look at several
different disruptive technologies. I'm pulling a lot of these from
an r iCal that we have on how stuff Works
dot com. If you don't remember how stuff works dot
Com is my employer, Tech Stuff is part of how
(04:07):
Stuff Works, and the article is ten disruptive technologies you
use every day. Now, there's one that's not on the
list that you certainly use frequently. You have to if
you're listening to this podcast that I think merits special mention,
and that is the Internet. The Internet is incredibly disruptive
(04:29):
and that it has changed the way we do lots
of stuff. It has enabled platforms to exist on top
of it that have completely shaken up the way things
used to work. Here's a you know, a simple example
is shopping. You know, back in the day, you had
to do one of two things. You ordered from a catalog,
in which case you would go through a catalog, you'd
(04:51):
fill out your order, you'd send it in, and then
you would wait for stuff to be delivered to you,
or you would have to go to an actual physical
store and purchase things. I guess theoretically you could have
a door to door salesman, so maybe there's three, but
that that was pretty much your only choices, and then
you were limited by the inventory of the physical space
you went to. Uh you were you know, you had
(05:14):
to actually make time out of your day to travel there. Uh.
You had to expend a lot of energy just to
get from point A to point being. These days, we
can do a ton of our shopping online, never leave
the comfort of our chair. Uh. The inventory is enormous
because there are a lot of companies out there that
either keep huge inventories or they can create on demand,
(05:37):
depending upon whatever the thing is you're trying to buy.
And so the Internet has really disrupted the shopping industry.
You've got a lot of stores out there that are
struggling to continue to make their numbers so that they
can remain open. We've seen lots of different chains close
over the last few years, bookstores being a big one.
(05:58):
A lot of electronics store has have been having problems.
That's indicative of the disruption we have seen from the Internet.
And that's just one thing that the Internet has disrupted.
Another could be long distance communications in general. The first
one on our list in the on the side is email,
and clearly email has been disruptive. It is changed the
(06:21):
way we communicate with one another. We have this immediacy now.
We no longer have the long delay between writing something
and someone else receiving it and then responding because back
in the old days, we would write letters and send
those through the mail, and then we have to wait
for the postal service to deliver our note. We have
(06:44):
to wait for the person to read it, then write
their own response, send it, and we have to wait
to receive it. So communication was very different by its
very nature. It had to be I mean, you couldn't
be asking a question that you needed an answer, you know,
within hours. That was not going to happen. But email
has changed things dramatically. It's also kind of changed the
(07:05):
nature of how we communicate. And you will hear people
occasionally talk about how letter writing is now a lost
art that people no longer know or bother to write
letters in a way that they used to because email
has supplanted. That has really changed the nature of communication.
But emails cheaper, it's easier than handwriting a letter. There's
(07:28):
no postage, there's no paper, there's no ink. Really, all
you need is an internet connection. So whether you are
paying for internet service or you're going someplace like the library,
even to send a message, uh, you know, that's all
you need really, and uh, of course it'll get to
where it's going in moments, so if the other person
(07:51):
is online, you could end up getting a response before
you have a chance to navigate away from the email window.
So it's very different. It has completely changed the nature
of the postal service. Um, things like greeting cards and invitations,
even those have started to decline. According to a two
thousand eleven p Internet survey of adults in the US
(08:15):
who got online used email them used it on a
typical day of all Americans used email to some extent.
That might even mean that we're communicating more. It may
not be the same quality of communication, but the quantity
certainly has gone up. And of course there's tons of
other stuff that we send through email. So that's a
(08:36):
good example of how the Internet has disrupted things. Beyond
the shopping aspect, there are others as well. Social media,
which is number nine on the list, also applies. Obviously,
they are allowing us to have interactions with our friends
and family, no matter how far apart they may be
from us. Um you can share in for nation, not
(09:00):
just through text, but you can share links, you can
share videos or music, you can share photographs. You have
this opportunity to have these interactions that before would have
been limited to whenever you were with one another, or
perhaps you had to rely on something like the snail
mail service. So again, incredibly disruptive, and we've even seen
(09:26):
this this pocket get shaken up multiple times as new
players have incorporated different strategies and disrupted social media. So
while social media has disrupted larger industries, social media itself
has experienced disruption. A great example of that is my Space,
(09:48):
which used to dominate the social media area, and then
Facebook comes along and ends up becoming incredibly disruptive because
of its appeal to a large young user base and
grew from there, and my Space eventually collapsed in on
itself and had to redefine itself and still is struggling
(10:09):
to define itself as something relevant in today's social media landscape.
We'll be back with more of this classic episode of
tech stuff after this quick break. As of early more
than half of the people who use the Internet also
(10:30):
regularly used social media, not a big surprise. In the
US that tends to be on the high end of
the scale, so about as of January, and other nations
it may be lower, but it shows that people are
really you know, they've incorporated this into their lives. It's
not just something that is occasionally used. I mean, I
(10:53):
don't know about you, but I have Facebook open pretty
much the entire time I'm sitting at any computer. And
it may not be that I'm on Facebook the entire
time solely, but it's always got a tab dedicated to
it because this is how I tend to interact with
my friends these days. We all are very busy, we
all have schedules that pretty much prevent us from getting
(11:16):
together on a regular basis. But this is a way
I can maintain contact without having to, you know, put
anyone to any trouble, which is nice now. It also,
you could argue, is less satisfying than other means of interaction,
like an actual physical get together where you can hang
out and spend time with one another. And I don't
(11:38):
argue that at all. Again, the disruption doesn't necessarily mean
it's better. Sometimes just means it's easier or more effective
in a way. So, uh, you know that, depending on
your view of social media, you might see it as
helpful disruption or very harmful disruption. There are a lot
of other examples of disruptive technologies that have utilized the Internet,
(12:02):
streaming media being a huge one. This is enormous. A
few years ago I talked about how people would be
increasingly moving away from cable and using the Internet to
get access to various forms of entertainment. At the time,
you know, it was it was an obvious move. Even
(12:24):
when I I said it, but it was still something
that was only occasionally talked about because I think, well,
for one thing, the big media companies were a little
worried about where things were going because they relied on
old forms of media delivery to get their message across.
So it's kind of scary to report on the potential
decline of the industry you currently are in, But that
(12:46):
is exactly what we've seen happen. We've seen cable subscriptions
for cable television decline as we've seen people start to
use other services online more frequently, things like Amazon or
Hulu or Netflix to get their their their entertainment. We've
also seen the growth of new forms of entertainment, things
(13:07):
like YouTube, where people who are not part of a
larger network are creating their own content and finding an audience.
Uh that has become an incredibly powerful story where people
who normally would not have had an opportunity to communicate
through the Internet suddenly have this outlet. And not only
(13:30):
do they have an outlet, but people find what they're
saying to be valuable, whether that's entertainment or it's news
or just personal opinion or whatever it may be. There's
now this outlet that that did not exist before, and
it's actually starting to take a big chunk out of
the traditional media. Now, there's still a long way to go.
(13:51):
You're gonna hear a lot of people talk about how
this stuff is going to force the traditional media companies
out of business, and in the long run, maybe that's
going to be the case. I think it will probably
even out where we're going to have a balance across
multiple platforms. That's my own personal guests, but it certainly
has proven itself to be a valuable way of getting
(14:15):
to an audience. It's been effective and it's just going
to continue to grow. The big challenge moving forward, I
think for content creators is getting noticed because this space
is getting more and more crowded. So it may turn
out that until something else comes along and shakes up
this industry, the streaming media industry, that you're going to
(14:38):
have a few really big players in the space and
then a whole bunch of little guys. And as someone
who creates videos and uh and podcasts that are not
part of how stuff works, I can tell you being
one of those little guys, it's tough. I mean, it's
tough to get noticed, but uh, Ultimately, it all depends
(15:01):
on why you're doing it. If you're doing it for fun,
like I do for my outside projects, it's not as
big a deal because you just do it until it's
no longer fun and then you stopped doing it. If
you're doing it to make a living, then it's a
much bigger deal. Obviously, you have to figure out how
to reach that audience so that you can get paid.
However that may be, whether it's through sponsorships or direct
(15:22):
contributions through Patreon or something along those lines. But these
streaming services have really created a new story that didn't
exist just a few years ago. Back then, I mean,
the only way you could end up getting on television
if you didn't already have a job there was through
like a public access station, or maybe if you went
(15:44):
to college and they had a college television station, that
was a way you could break into the industry. But
otherwise it was pretty tough. So it's been amazing to
watch this particular transition. Next on the list is e
readers and e reader apps. Obviously one of the hallmark
disruptive technologies to come along over the last decade. So
(16:06):
e readers have been around for a while but it's
only been you know, a few years since the first
e paper uh devices really became affordable to the average
person and paired with the right you know service like Amazon,
And by right, I mean it makes it really super
(16:27):
easy to get stuff onto that book. They've become powerful tools.
So whether you like Amazon's business approach or not, it's
impossible to deny their effectiveness Because you go out and
buy a kindle, it is incredibly easy to purchase content
for your kindle through the kindle. You know, you're buying
(16:48):
it through Amazon, and that was their business model that
makes incredible sense, the idea of selling this piece of
hardware that makes it really easy for you to get
intent and people are able to grab books and movies
and music through Amazon and experience it through their various devices.
(17:08):
It has been a huge blow not just too brick
and mortar book companies, but publishers as well as music
companies and film Honestly, home video clearly has taken a
huge hit. Whether it's the brick and mortar retail stores
where you would go and buy a DVD or Blu ray,
(17:30):
or it's uh, you know, rental places. There are very
few of those left around you've got Red Box and
a couple of others. And here in Atlanta, we've got
some independent companies that are still around that are really
charming and have very eclectic collections. Video Drome in Atlanta.
If you were ever in Atlanta and you want to
see a real quirky, weird video rental place, go to
(17:56):
Video Drome. UM. It's at the corner of Highland and
North Avenue, and it is amazing. They have a lot
of character. But obviously that business model, which used to
be enormous, I mean, Blockbuster Video and other companies like
it dominated various strip malls across the United States. You
could not go very far without seeing another one, and
(18:19):
these days they're long forgotten. Well, e readers UH and
e readers and other devices, streaming devices and streaming media,
as well as the shopping I was talking about earlier,
have all contributed to seeing those kind of fade away.
Smart mobile devices similar approach. It's also something that has
(18:41):
really been disruptive. It's number six on the list. Uh.
It was just a few years ago that everyone assumed
that cell phones were just going to continue to get
smaller and smaller in the future, because that was what
was considered to be sexy, you would get a phone.
The next model would be even smaller and more compact.
There were lots of UH sketches on television, particularly starting
(19:06):
that Live of characters who had comically tiny phones because
it was a status symbol supposed to show how important
that character was, or how important that character wanted to
seem to be. And that was the joke, was that
it was just going to continuously get smaller and smaller. UH.
Smartphones turned that all around. So smartphones disrupted the phone,
(19:26):
the mobile phone market because once the iPhone came out
and showed that there was a compelling way to access
things like the Internet through your phone, it meant that
you wanted to have a screen that was of a
large enough size for you to be able to read
things and interact with it. And then we saw the
(19:46):
trend start to reverse until now we're at the point
where you start seeing the comically large phones, the fablets.
I own one of those. I have a next to six.
It's enormous, So that trend ended up reversing. We've also
seen the they these devices have disrupted other industries, including
e readers and tablets, and we've seen them disrupt some
(20:08):
gaming industry too, because of the way that apps have
reshaped the gaming landscape. You have gamers who are truly
dedicated to specific consoles or two computers to PCs, and
then you have others who are happy to play whatever
on whichever platform. And mobile devices are incredibly handy because
(20:31):
you almost always have one with you, and the experiences
can be really satisfying depending upon the design of the app. Obviously,
not all apps are created equal, but we've also seen
smartphones replace other stuff, things like uh, day planners, which
(20:51):
you might think, well, that's not that big a deal,
but there are companies that just made day planners, or
they made day planners as part of their business us,
and there's less and less reason to go out and
buy one of those. Or digital cameras. Back in the day,
we used to have digital cameras as standalone devices because
(21:12):
they took much better photos than our phones could. Phone
images would be really low resolution, very grainy. But today
we're seeing better and better sensors incorporated into phones, and
I rarely carry around an extra camera. Sometimes I do
in very specific circumstances, but most of the time I'm
happy to just carry my phone. Same thing is true
(21:33):
with MP three players. I used to be the person
who wanted to have a n MP three player dedicated
solely to MP three playing and that's it. But as
phone uh storage got larger and larger, and as cloud
storage began to become a thing, I stopped doing that.
Cloud storage would be another great example not on the
(21:56):
list here, but I'll talk about for a second. Cloud
computing and cloud story in general, has been incredibly disruptive
because by offloading the processing and storage requirements from a
localized area to the cloud, you disrupt all the businesses
that used to provide the machines that either processed information
or stored it. So more and more companies are moving
(22:18):
to cloud based services. It decreases the demand they have
for powerful machinery on the front end, and it means
they can make a lower investment. So in other words,
the employees at a business might end up with cheaper laptops,
but in the end it doesn't matter because the laptops
aren't really doing all the work. A lot of the
(22:40):
work is being offloaded to the cloud. So very disruptive.
It also means it creates new opportunities if you're the
one making those inexpensive laptops. You've got a powerful business
now because of these other companies that have created these
powerful cloud services. We've got more to say in this
classic episod sort of tech stuff after these quick messages.
(23:10):
Next on the list, we have mobile payment options. There's
so many of these, Apple Pay being one that's in
the news quite a bit, but there are other ones
as well, things that end up taking the the the
sting out of having to, you know, keep track of
all your various cards, reward systems, things like that, all
(23:31):
of that being wrapped up into an app that can
keep track of everything for you. Very powerful, also extremely disruptive,
really good example in this list. So there are a
lot of different options here. I mean there's the Google Wallet,
there's Apple Pay, there's into it go payment, There's lots
of stuff out there. And this applies both on the
(23:54):
user side and on the vendor side. You've got companies
that are are using this stuff in order to be
their point of sale, and it's really a great tool
for them because they can end up offloading that and
they don't have to invest in, you know, larger technologies
like cashiers and things like that, or cash registers. I
(24:16):
should say not cashiers, and uh, you know, we're seeing
more of this sort of approach where you can do
the tap and pay, and that ends up decreasing the
need for sales personnel. Thus, this is a disruptive. It
means that people who would normally be able to get
a job doing that, being a sales representative at a
(24:38):
retail establishment, they might find it harder to get that
kind of job because there's less need for it. So
sometimes disruptive can mean pretty tough consequences for people, at
least in the short term, until you figure out some
other place where you have a need that people can
go and work at and fill that need. Plus they
(24:58):
can go and you know, get pay aid for the
work they do. So disruptive does not always mean great.
It might mean great things for that whatever technology is
just doing the disrupting, but it could have other consequences
that roll out to lots of other people. Self checkout
stations is similar in that way. It's also on the list.
It's at number four. Very disruptive. Obviously, if you go
(25:21):
to a grocery store and you see that there are
only three lanes open, there's twenty lanes there three of
them are open with with cashiers and the rest are
are empty. And it's because these self service lanes have
taken a lot of the load off. You don't need
to employ as many people to handle the shopping requirements
(25:42):
of your customers. I mean that's powerful, and again, just
as I was saying with the other one, it means
that it might put some folks out of a job.
That's tough. Number three in the list is wearable fitness devices.
This is interesting to me. Um, We're still kind of
casting about for the perfect one. There are a lot
(26:03):
on the market, and a lot of people have been
testing out different ones, and companies keep coming out with
new ones. And whether it's something simple like a fitbit,
which is what I'm wearing right now, or it's more
complicated like a smart watch that also has uh step
(26:23):
tracking and maybe a heart monitor and other items that
are related to fitness apps. Uh. They're everywhere and they
are disruptive. Uh. They are also you know, really powerful
in the sense of they raise awareness at least of fitness.
Whether they actually drive fitness is still a matter of debate.
(26:47):
I've seen studies that suggest that if you are already motivated,
then you are likely to use these properly, but in
that case, you're using it to help keep track of
what you are already going to do. It's not like
the fitness device encouraged you to do, you know, to
be fit, but rather that it enabled you to keep
(27:07):
better track of it. So it may be that these
devices really just replace more simple devices like your standard pedometer,
but still pretty disruptive. Uh. The last two on the
list of I've actually already covered because there's cloud computing
in the Internet. They are, uh, the number one and
number two. Um, but I already mentioned though, so I'm
(27:27):
not going to go through that again. There are a
couple of others that are not on the list that
I wanted to mention that I think have been that
are either incredibly disruptive or have the potential to be
really disruptive. One is the Internet of things. Obviously, the
Internet of things, we've talked about it so many times,
but just in case you're new to the program, you
haven't heard about it, or or you're kind of confused,
(27:49):
what does the Internet of things really mean? Internet of
things ultimately refers to a world in which you have
Internet connected sensors and actuators, things that can either take
information from the environment or interact with the environment in
some way, and they're all connected to the internet, uh
(28:10):
in order to process information or send information. So here's
an example. Let's use a house as our model, and
you have you walk into your house, and you've got
motion sensors that are connected to the internet. UM. They
activate your lights and a sound system. When you walk in,
the sound system plays from a playlist that you have selected,
(28:34):
or maybe it even interacts by checking the information from
a wearable you have on that detects your heart rate,
and based on your heart rate, the house selects music
that should complement your current mood based upon just the
limited information it has. UH. Maybe it has information about
what you had for dinner last night and has suggestions
(28:56):
on things to eat tonight that might be interesting to you.
These are all based on simple things that end up
monitoring information, sending it to some other source where it
gets processed, and then the processed information comes back to
affect you in a meaningful way. Another great example would
(29:17):
be traffic infrastructure. So let's say we have real time
sensors out along the various roads of a busy city
like Atlanta. It's a great example, and those sensors are
picking up traffic patterns and sending it to a centralized
processing station which is able to monitor the information and
make useful conclusions such as, maybe it needs to adjust
(29:41):
the timing on certain intersections so that traffic can flow
more freely through there to alleviate some traffic congestion. It's
of being a smart traffic system. Well, the Internet of
things is like that, but imagine that with everything. So
you might have an experience where when you step outside,
the are very much tailored to your preferences or your
(30:03):
current state of being, and so you it ideally would
have a very wonderful experience wherever you went all the time,
it was always going to be catered to you. The
reality will probably be a little less science fiction Ee
and Disney than that is. But we're already seeing examples
of this, and so the Internet of things is going
(30:25):
to be really disruptive as it makes regular tasks more efficient,
more effortless, where we don't have to have middlemen to
kind of negotiate things on our behalf, you know, we
were able to have that stuff happen kind of automatically. Uh,
(30:47):
that's going to be really disruptive. Um, it doesn't necessarily
mean it's going to put lots of people out of work,
although I imagined that first at least some things, that
will be the case. But it definitely means that it's
going to change things. And again, it may not necessarily
be better. It may just be that that's the easiest
way to do things, and so it might not be better,
(31:07):
it might be the way things are. The last one
I would pick to talk about is autonomous cars. Autonomous
cars are definitely going to be disruptive. They've already started
to be disruptive, and they're not even something that consumers
can get their hands on yet. Autonomous cars will be
disruptive for multiple reasons. One of the big ones is
that it will open up the potential for people to
(31:30):
no longer own a personal vehicle. The idea here is
that you could have a fleet of autonomous cars in
a city. Let's say this would really only apply to
folks who are living in urban environments for the most part.
So imagine that you get a fleet of autonomous cars
and they're on the street, driving very safely because they're
(31:53):
relying upon high tech sensors that allow them to react
in a tract and of the time it would take
a human to react. So we've got these safe autonomous
cars roving around. When you need to go somewhere, you
use an app and say, hey, I need a ride,
and one of these autonomous vehicles pulls up and you
(32:14):
get in and it drives off. When an autonomous car
needs to rest, like it needs to refuel or probably recharge,
because I imagine that this is going to be largely
an electric vehicle fleet, then it'll just take itself off
the grid and another car would come online to replace it.
And this would mean that you would travel whenever you
(32:36):
needed it. But otherwise you know you did, you wouldn't
need a vehicle, So people would not have to spend
the money on a personal car. They could just rely
on this service. Uh. You know. It's one of those
things that has actually been bandied about as a possible
business model. Uber is looking into it. There have been
(32:58):
studies that have owned that such a model could potentially
reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from cars by n Now
keep in mind that car greenhouse gas emissions, that's a problem,
but it's a tiny fraction of the overall greenhouse gas
emissions that we see so clearly. If all of those cars,
(33:19):
those electric vehicles are being powered by coal fired coal
fired power plants, really you haven't you haven't really addressed
the underlying problem, which is that you need to find
some other means of generating electricity that does not dump
out that many greenhouse gases in the process. It's always
one of those issues where you gotta look at the
(33:40):
bigger picture. But that autonomous approach could end up disrupting
the automotive industry. If people don't need personal vehicles, then
that's going to be a huge hit to multiple companies.
Of course, any company that is the one that's actually
supplying those autonomous fleets, they're gonna make it killing, but
(34:00):
everyone else is going to have a real hard time
of it. On top of that, things like taxi companies,
they'll have a real hard time. I mean, it'll be
a lot harder to get employment as a taxi driver
if you have all these robot cars that are available
and are really efficient, and you don't have to worry
about a robot car having a weird conversation with you
because it's just gonna take you to where you want
(34:22):
to go, as opposed to you know, talking about some
weird thing in the news or an odd personal problem
that sometimes you get with taxi drivers. So it could
be incredibly disruptive. Now, this is just a selection of
disruptive technologies. There are tons of other ones that we
could talk about. VR and a R, virtor reality and
(34:42):
augmented reality. Another potentially disruptive technology, hollow lens in particular
Microsoft's approach and Magic Leap being another could really disrupt
things like if you can turn any surface into a monitor,
you don't need to buy a monitor anymore. You just
need the headset, and so there's a possibility that you
could change these. You also could have a new means
(35:04):
of interacting with your computer using voice and just your controls.
If it's compelling enough and easy enough and versatile enough,
that could be incredibly disruptive. We have seen the model
of the PC to be largely unchanged since the early
nineteen eighties. You know, you've got your keyboard and mouse,
and that's the chief way you interact with computers these days.
(35:27):
But it's possible that if you created a system that
is easy enough to use and does what you needed
to do, we could finally see that model fade away.
Or at least end up competing with a different model. Uh.
I don't know if that's necessarily going to happen. I
haven't had my hands on a hollow lens yet, and
(35:47):
there are probably going to be plenty of applications where
you're going to think, no, I want a computer with
a keyboard and a mouse to do this. It doesn't
make sense for me to do it using this other model.
But they're might be enough cases where the hollow lens
could be truly disruptive and be the next or you know,
(36:08):
not just the hollow lens, but augmented reality in general
be truly disruptive and be the next step in how
we interact with information. So that's another great example. There's
tons of other ones obviously that have been in the
news on and off, and I'm curious to hear what
you guys think. I want to know what you think
is the most interesting disruptive technology. And keep in mind,
(36:32):
disruptive technologies are not a new thing. There have been
disruptive technologies for as long as there's been technology. Great
example is the printing press, very disruptive technology. It ended
up disrupting all those monks who are illuminating scripts. Um so,
this is something that has been around pretty much as
long as technology has been around. I hope you enjoyed
(36:55):
that classic episode about disruptive technologies. If you have suggestions
for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech Stuff,
reach out to me. You can let me know on Twitter.
The handle for the show is text Stuff H s
W and I'll talk to you again really soon Y.
(37:18):
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Karah Preiss
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