My grandma loved to remind my dad about how he didn't think CDs would become a thing, and to not invest in Philips (as i recall)

And he was tech savy, building circuits, computers etc, he just didn't think it would be reliable or better than what existed... definitely a vinyl guy.

Conversely I sold thousands of bitcoins years ago once I learned the technology and recognized how stupid/useless it was.

Didn't pan out well for me.

Yup, I had bought a few thousand bitcoin at about 2 or 3 cents each and sold them at 50 cents. Still "made money", but uhhh....

that's curious, what was the alternative to the CD at the time?

Most cars had cassette players, many still had 8-tracks; vinyl or or tape at home.

Not that they were great options, but there was alot of existing media available, and hardware was common, so an expensive bulky device to play fragile media at lower quality than vinyl, was how it was viewed by many initially.

Edit: just checking, the Sony Walkman came out in 1979, CDs in 1982, but the Walkman dominated the 80s & 90s, so its easy to see why CDs were dismissed

Data cassette tapes look like they could have held up to max 600 MB[0], but CDs came out at out of the gate in 1980s with 650 MB.

I guess in terms of storage I can't quite grasp why he thought that CD wouldn't take on. (Hindsight 50/50, of course.)

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape#Data_recording

If someone comes up with a new port that had 10% more throughput than USB, do you think that will be enough to make it a viable competitor, or do you think it won't be worth the hassle of replacing your peripherals (cassettes) and computers (cassette players)?

Good point

There's even more money to be made off the backs of those who can't.

I don't think there is appetite for this, in big tech especially. People are looking for glamorous next big things, everyone wants to be the first in some green field thing instead of digging into "the boring stuff we've been hearing about since forever". Imagine, even Apple completely enshittified their OSes just so they're on the bandwagon of AI with zero added value.

Exactly. And now, a possibly terrifying question: What if there just is not going to be a "next big thing"?

Population size is about to peak. Up until now, for as long as we know, it has been growing. Starting at the latest with colonisation, we've had more people, more resources, new markets advancing into buyers of new products. Once societies advance to a certain point, they begin to shrink, this is well studied.

Without these growth factors, does it seem likely we'll see something as transformative as the automobile or the internet again?

Possibly bleak and badly informed, but I find it plausible to think that the party is about to end. Most of us here have probably seen what happens to a company when they stop growing. Spoiler: It's typically not innovation.

I’m not the biggest AI fanboy, but AI is the solution to this. You’re right that the population is about to peak, and we’ll stop adding biological brains that can come up with new things, but if we crack real AGI then we’ll have many more orders of magnitude of mechanical brains that can do the same.

I think the most interesting aspect about this is that improvements in robotics could help us eliminate some truly gruesome jobs we currently rely on something bordering on slave labour for. Pricking fruits and vegetables for example is AFAIK for the most part still manual labour. And food is, as opposed to, say, ad targeting, a pretty fundamental requirement for us.

But that's not really growth, it's optimisation. That is exactly the kind of thing that a company that stopped growing does. That wouldn't necessarily make it "the next big thing" though, in the "new frontier" ways we've seen in the past.