Tech Made Fun | Tech Podcast By SK NEXUS
Pakistan’s numero uno podcast for your upkeep on tech. Tune in every ‘whenever I want to upload’ to catch up to the latest content on ever evolving tech.
Hosted by Saqib Tahir: https://bio.saqibtahir.com/
Site link: https://sknexus.com/tmf
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Tech Made Fun | Tech Podcast By SK NEXUS
TMF 022 - What Counts as Innovation - Progressive vs Disruptive Tech
What makes any tech product an innovation? A question that requires basic understanding of how progress is made with tech around us. In this episode I go over why you should care about progressive vs disruptive tech, how it impacts your daily life, and what to look out for when considering which tech is in fact innovative.
Hosted by Saqib Tahir
Support the show: https://support.sknexus.com/
Read full show notes here: https://sknexus.com/ep22/
Read companion article here: https://sknexus.com/progressive-vs-disruptive-tech/
Further learning and references
https://sknexus.com/tag/tech-blog/
https://www.britishcouncil.pk/library/digital-library
How the Internet of Things will explode in 5-10 years
IoT Devices - ARM
What Are Self-Driving Cars? The Technology Explained
The path to Autonomous Driving
Understanding Blockchain Technology
Web3 and NFTs Explained
NFTs, explained
Blockchain, explained
What Is a Transformer Model?
How Big Tech Coopts Disruption–and What to Do About It
Coopting Disruption - Stanford
As always -
Thank you for listening, please send any questions or feedback to podcast@sknexus.com
See you next time.
Subscribe to the newsletter: https://sknexus.com/subscribe/
Keep the show running: https://buymeacoffee.com/sknexuspk
Welcome to another episode of Tech Made Fun, the way I want to figure out what is a common man and how we can explain it about technology. Anyway, today's topic is inspired from me just getting tired of listing certain trends and terms again and again. Basically, we have already talked in many episodes that it's really hard to say that something is non-technical these days, in the sense that everything has Uptech involved. Your food, living, working, even consuming entertainment like this, everything has Uptech involved. And that's why it happens that time and time again, there are a lot of terms that are thrown around that this is the next big thing or the world will change because of it. And for a very long time as someone who grew through like, there was a time when it used to happen that no one appreciates this tech, then came a time where it was like, okay, this tech is getting a lot of appreciation and now I think it's a time where every technological breakthrough or every technological advancement is overhyped. So that's why I wanted to record this episode to kind of define how technology progresses and then disrupts, what things you should pay attention to and what things you should simply ignore. And my hope is that if you're listening to this episode, you build that lens, that filter, which if something is spreading in another hype tomorrow, you can do your own research and understand better that, okay, do I have to take this thing seriously or not? So as the name of the episode suggests, what we're trying to figure out is that, okay, when we talk about technology, what counts as an innovation? What is it that we think is good? This thing is innovative. It changed the whole world. When it wasn't there, the world was working in a completely different way. And now after it's existence, the world has gone in a completely different direction. And in order to do that, first of all, we need to define two very basic concepts, which I'm not sure if I coined or not, but I think it makes it easy to explain everything, which is basically progressive versus disruptive technology. I like to define that the progressive technology is a roadmap that is going on. It is defined for the next 4-5 years. Time over time, the technology keeps improving and along with improvements, its capabilities and functionalities keep adding on. Okay. And then. There is disruptive technology. After a certain amount of time, when a technology progresses a lot, there comes a point in time where a company or a brand or an existing company's department figure out a new revolutionary way that, okay, because we've made this progress for so long, now we can finally use all that progress to make this unique new thing which will change the world. So the purpose of saying this is basically most technology you see around you that was developed in those cycles. For a very long time, it's progressive. I didn't hear anything, I wasn't getting any news, I wasn't getting any appreciation. And then one day it turns into a disruptive technology and the label of it is being used in every news headline and every TikTok short. So I guess that's easy to understand. But here's the issue. The issue is, ever since tech has become so mainstream, there has been so much money being thrown around into technology, right? A lot of companies, a lot of R&D facilities, a lot of countries are in progression. And as a result of that, what is happening is that every next year, something like this is being released which is... the world changes, but nothing like that happens. And that's where the issue becomes because of that disruption. There is a lot of people who get hurt as a result, who thought that they could take advantage of the technology or if they were involved in it, they could earn money or if they switched to it, it would be very bad. But at the end of the day, it turns out that it was a failed technology and they have wasted millions of dollars of funding. So on and so forth. What happens is that the half-life of this disruption has become so small that a lot of our bubbles and fats have started to be created. damage to an average person. So you listen to this and you're like, okay, I understand, there is progression and then disruption, but what can be some examples of this? So there are many examples of this, but if I quote some of my favorite ones, they will be like, see, we talked about chips in an episode. Now, every year, the computer processor chips, your mobile chips, their transistor size is getting smaller. There is a law called Moore's law, you can go and read it, and it dictates that every year your transistor counter will start getting more dense. You'll be able to pack more performance and punch in the same package. So now that's a roadmap. Look, these companies like Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, and all these chipsets they don't take out chips overnight. They have a 5-10 year roadmap. They know that after 2 years, we'll release this, after 4 years, we'll release this, we'll release this, you'll get this capability, we'll release that. It's all progressive to a certain extent. Similarly, when the smartphone came, in that, camera became a really important use case, I think, in the 3rd or 4th year. Common convention became that, see, the best camera you have is the one you carry in your pocket. And people started making their purchase decisions based on how good the camera of the phone is. And if you go and look back to like phone's launch events, you will see that year over year, the launch event, the time of camera presentation is increasing. In the initial events, we would talk on the camera for 5 minutes, now if it's an 1 hour smartphone event, then we would talk on the camera for 40 minutes. Because camera became such an important point in purchase decision. What happened then? Lens technology had to improve. We have a physical limitation. We can't insert such a big lens in the phone as big as it is in your traditional cameras. So how can we improve it? How can the lens capture the most light as much as possible? And then along with that, what's going on with software optimization and backend? That the photo can be digitally processed and a good image can be taken out on the smartphone. This again was also to some extent a very progressive tech, right? Everyone knows that what are good cameras? What they need to be good? And the constraints are predefined. And what did the companies do? here. If you want to give a couple of quick examples, then look at the display it's a example of brightness. Even though for a long time people thought that resolution and frame rate is better but now the thing is that HDR is all it's about. And if you want to perceive true colors or true depth, you need good brightness. And now all the new TVs and Oled and Showled, we are doing an episode on that. We are focusing on brightness. Same thing with storage. In the old days, I used to go for the hard disk drive. It used to be very expensive and very little storage. And now you get a 1TB flash drive too. Because over time it progressed. more cheaper and then it hit a point where it stopped advancing so rapidly. Basically the common theme you can see with progressive technologies like this is that you know what you need to do in order to achieve the next stage. Okay. Like I said in the example of the camera, everyone knows what a good camera is and they know the constraints. So they have a kind of rough roadmap. What to do in order to advance. Same thing with processors. Everyone knows that if we keep packing more power in the same package or we can... more efficient, so there is a kind of trajectory defined. That's what makes progressive tech progressive, that your next 5-10 years roadmap is loosely defined. But then there comes a time when disruption happens. Where something that was not on the roadmap, that no one even thought of, a company came, or a person came, or a company's department came, can be whatever, and they're like... Bro, this progressive technology was happening in 4-5 fields. These things have progressed from 4-5 years and reached a point. Now I am combining these 4-5 things and launching a new disruption. And my favorite example of this, as lame as it is, it is the iPhone or the smartphone revolution. Right? Because see, what was there? We had phones for years, we had internet for years, we had web browsing for years, we were using applications on computers for years. And then, a couple of smarts came, they thought in a couple of different companies, why not do all this in our hands? And if you remember the first iPhone event also. And here I am not giving credit to iPhone because it is the first or the biggest thing, even though they do deserve it. I'm just saying that the way they presented it made sense. They took those four, five different progressive technologies that were happening. Internet, phone, touch screen technology has improved and they put it in a complete holistic package, which was the iPhone. And along with that, Android was also doing it, but they failed to market it that well. So that is why iPhone became the officially first. popular mass consumer smartphone, even though it was $600 when it came at the time and it was a very expensive technology. So that example explains what disruptive tech is. Basically, as I said, your progression is going on in 4-5 fields. A person came. combined 4-5 things and made a new disruption or disruptive tech. But the important thing to note down is that every disruption does not succeed. The technology could be disruptive, the enthusiasts could be very happy and yada yada. But unfortunately, most disruptive technologies by far go to grave. And now we will discuss some examples of them. So in my opinion, the most recent, if seen in the last 10 years, I will consider failure in disruption. Again, as I said, the technology itself might be disruptive, but it failed to disrupt the market. Those three examples are 5G, autonomous driving, and your Web3 engine. So why did 5G fail first? Again, as I said, talking about mobile technology, there was 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE, it was progressing very fast. 5G came in as a thing that combined the progress of all those technologies and infrastructure. See, instead of you going to the whole place and installing a tower, these small boxes, install this, they are going to give you much more speed, much more bandwidth and they're going to be very easy to install also. So the idea was good. And telecom companies in theory liked the idea that 5G will be fully automated and easy to install. Our installations will be so easy, implementation will be so easy. But it happened that when it came to the real life situation or real life scenario, the 5G boxes, their waves without going into too much depth, they got easily blocked by the common infrastructure all around. Basically 5G, even though the tech was good, it just failed in the application. Right? And it happened because the tech was good and people thought that tech is good. All smartphones started branding. For two or three years, I thought that the selling feature of smartphones is 5G. You can't get 5G in your home. It's a different thing. In Pakistan, 4G doesn't come properly. But because the tech was so good, In theory, it will start getting hype, so many marketing dollars have started throwing in it. Everything is 5G, your seamless integration will happen, your bandwidth will be good, your processing doesn't have lag, you can use your computer by using remote control. The idea that was sold was very grand. But when it was time to implement 5G, companies took their hands off. Because when they found out that the technology up to 4G was installed in towers, but the 5G system with the DBI was only practical in cities where you have big buildings, your infrastructure allows you to install DBI's anywhere. But the moment you move out of city or suburban or rural areas, its feasibility is completely destroyed. And when it came to countries like Pakistan, where 4G was not fully adopted, Hey me. So when you hear all about this and you're like, okay, it's fine, 5G failed, the device has put it in, what harm does it do to me? So maybe you don't have any individual harm, but I can assure you, there is a loss of a billion dollars in terms of products that were marked and sold as 5G capable. Because that 5G is not being used. In fact, there was a time in between, I don't know which iPhone was the first with 5G. I forget it was 8 or 10, whatever it was. And its major selling point was that this iPhone has 5G. And I was like, look, there is no 5G in Pakistan. So you're literally paying $200 or something like that of the cost of the device. for a feature that you will never be able to use here. And it's okay that everyone doesn't want to buy an iPhone and the person who is buying an iPhone doesn't care about that. The issue was when the iPhone did this, then what happens? On the Android side, Snapdragon said that now all our chipsets must have 5G. So if your mid-tier phone, your low-tier phone, your high-tier phone, our chipsets have 5G and that chipset will be 10-15 dollars more expensive. Let's say for example. So what happened to that? All the rando phones in which 5G was not a problem, 5G started to come in them too. And 5G is happening in marketing. 5G ads are going on in Pakistan, although there is no 5G in Pakistan. And the average consumer, the average person, is suffering from this loss. And I am not joking, it has suffered a loss of a billion dollars. And to this day, people are eating of a feature that no one uses in most of the world. But now this thing seems a little less because the cost has come down of having a 5G chip. But that 2-3 years period in between, literally phones were expensive just because they have 5G in them. A feature that is of no use to anyone. And that's why to me, especially someone who has the most common query here, which smartphone to buy, which mobile to buy, I was very impressed by this thing. I think 5G was one of the biggest failure of disruption in the last 10 years. But as I said, it was disruptive technology and it has some benefits in some areas. Don't get me wrong. But it failed to disrupt at a mass scale for the average person. And that happened, the 2-3 year booming period is over now. And now 5G is in every device and no one cares about it. Everyone has moved on with their life. But the hit of billions of dollars, the common people had to endure it. Like open your smartphone right now, the network, I'm sure you can't turn on the 5G option. See for yourself, the phone you have bought right now, with your hard earned money, cost which is going into a feature that you are not using at all. And not using it is fine. You can't use it if you want to. That is what is not fine about it. Okay. My second most favorite example is autonomous driving. Now, the failure of this, I don't think Pakistan has had such an impact on our people. thankfully, because we are not that rich, we could have bought a Tesla. But it is a very important case study to understand and learn from. See, it happens when there is a problem of approach in a technology. So there is a theory, like I talked about progressive tech, that you have a technology, you have made a trajectory of its progression. And in the next 5 years, 10 years, it has to progress like this. Sometimes there are certain technologies where that progression goes to a point where it absolutely fails. And you have to change your approach from zero. That is, go back to five years ago and change your approach from a different angle. And this is exactly what happened to autonomous driving. When Tesla launched, eight to ten years ago, obviously it was one of the best. electric vehicles on the market and it got a lot of popularity. Elon Musk, everyone knows him because of that car. If we have to discount the fact that nowadays they are more on Twitter. But the fact is that one of the major selling points of Tesla was that buy this car and because this is an electric digital future car over software updates, you will eventually start self-driving it. And people asked, what is self-driving? Tesla was like, look, self-driving will be that you don't have to touch the car, the car will drive itself and take you. And that was a bold promise. And as I said, it was a disruptive tech. and did a lot of research on it and a lot of work was done on it. And for years and years and years, Tesla sold this promise that never got fulfilled. But because Tesla had already got so much hype from this promise, the rest of the companies said that we have also got money to waste, let's get into this too. Most famous example being, if you know, or you didn't know, even Apple tried getting into this space and they had a project, I think, Project Titan or something like that, in which they invested 10 billion dollars. And the conclusion came out last year that this is not possible. And for good reason. They did. Progress on the technology, level two self-driving, level three, predetermined routes, self-driving, so on and so forth. So, there was a progression, but there was a hard stop. There is no way that we can predict human randomness with the current technology, with the current tech stack. And companies like Apple simply gave up. 10 billion dollars are gone. Do you know how much 10 billion dollars are? In this, 1,000 companies can open. And they have an R&D project that they have put aside. And I am giving this Apple example because I think it is the biggest and most apparent example. But there are thousands more companies and departments and other automakers' subdivisions that were shut down in this process. And I think in between, even Tesla knew this wasn't possible. So what they did was, they came to their model, took out their lighter sensors and put normal camera sensors in between. And they said that the cameras are better for this work. Like there's nothing like that. And I think their most recent attempt to... again, self driving is coming, that was that many of your celebrities, I'm not sure who they are, but let's say Marcus Brownlee made a video that he was going to his office by self driving his car. So we came to know that what Tesla has done, the most popular people who post a lot on Instagram or Facebook or YouTube, they have provided more training data for their routes and it is more optimized so that when their cars are self driving and making content about it, they look better performing. And later it turned out that all that data was skewed for their specific routes. But the main purpose of this is that autonomous driving and its promise, it started as a good disruption in tech. Now see, we have a lot of advancement in machine learning. We are getting electric vehicles, which basically has a very powerful computer sitting to process all this. We have such a good mapping technology. We have such a good LIDAR and radar sensing technology. We have combined all that. Why can't we make autonomous driving? So that was the whole idea behind this disruptive tech. But as I said, there was an approach failure here. It went on for a decade, more than a decade. Billions of dollars spent on this also to no avail. Now, here also the same thing, people suffered losses. Yes, there was no loss in Pakistan, but the people in America who bought a car on Tesla's promise, who took 10,000-10,000 dollars for self-driving, because it was an upgrade from a normal car, a software upgrade. Like the car was the same, you just had to pay 10,000 dollars to buy that feature or something stupid like that. All of them suffered losses. And eventually at the end of the day, all the companies pushed this agenda and people who bought into it, they lost a lot of money. As a result of this disruption failing, Apple has exited from this market. Many companies have exited. Electric vehicles in America have literally depreciated 40% in the last two years. And I know the price of car buyers has depreciated very quickly, but electric vehicles have depreciated a lot because of the simple fact that the cars that they said are going towards autonomous driving, they are not going. That plus obviously a lot of other reasons, which is why electric vehicles have a lot of issues. And tomorrow, we can also suffer the loss of electric vehicles, to be honest. I am looking here to take autonomous driving a little parallel, how much the agenda of the political party is pushed as a political thing. Because the thing is, there is no electricity here, so what will you do with an electric vehicle? And maybe we can do a detailed episode, let me know. But the simple fact is, if you really want to be environment friendly, drive the car you have the maximum amount of time you can. That is the best way to be environment friendly. And these people who really understand this thing, believe that if I drive my car for 15 years, that's still gonna be more environment friendly than me selling my car and then buying a new electric vehicle and creating a lot of e-waste. So I am happy in this sense that there is a lot of demand for the used market in Pakistan and the used market is very good. Because that is the most sustainable way, as silly as it sounds. to be environment friendly when it comes in the current solution space. Because electric vehicle is not fully the answer right now. And there are many reasons for that. I can do the whole episode on that. Lastly, if I talk about another disruptive technology failure which may be a problem for some people because it has been an issue in Pakistan. That is all the crap about Web3. And what's in it? Crypto, NFT, etc. Blockchain based technology, I guess. Now I don't want to get into the specifics of it because we have literally covered two episodes on Web3, blockchain and crypto. everyone lost their mind over it. But I think it also has the same concept that you had progressive technology, there are advancements in your cryptography, there are advancements in your digital, there are advancements in your processing and then some guy decided to combine all of these and create a disruption. the innovation of blockchain but it has not had any good use case till date and all it's done is proven that unregulated finance maybe is not the right way forward maybe it is, you never know but to this date, which is mostly seen, NFT crypto just came as a fad and then it went away as a fad and yes, there are some people who will claim that we have used a lot of money and we trade and good for you but as a disruption, I think it failed and it was one of the biggest failures in the 10 to 15 years and time will tell, tomorrow maybe a good application will come that I'm actually really interested about blockchain and I'm not saying this in a way I really do think will be for the net good is if some way you can figure out how to help people invest in real assets and by real assets I mean your land or your companies so on and so forth, not digital assets like NFT. I think when that time comes and there is a reliable way to do it and it's regulated because I don't want it to be unregulated. Then maybe blockchain technology is a good benefit. But as it stands, NFT and crypto came. There was too much environmental impact, too much complexity. Ordinary people didn't understand that. Ordinary people just thought that if I put 10,000, I will get 1 lakh rupees. And it happened that they spent 1 lakh rupees at the end of the day. And then obviously there were like massive regulation issues because you can't have an unregulated thing in a regulated system because you know, they can't exist together. As I said, the first 5G disruption failed. was because of implementation, right? It was just not easy to implement. The autonomous driving disruption failed. It was because the approach was an issue. It was an approach issue. And if I have to point my finger at something, Web3, blockchain and crypto's disruption failed, it is because of use case. There was no good use case. Right. Which brings us to the next big thing that's happening right now. Generative AI. Like we have talked a lot about crypto in this podcast, we have talked a lot about generative AI. And still, generative AI, I think, is struggling with all three things. Right? So first of all, if we talk about implementation, it's struggling with it. Where to implement it? At the software level, at the hardware level. It's just an app on your phone. It's getting into your Chrome browser. So far, AI GPT, your Gemini, or chat GPT, hasn't figured out a good way to integrate or implement into the existing tech we use. And Microsoft is trying to get their Copilot PC out. They've literally put an AI button on their new laptops. And on the other hand, Apple is also trying to integrate with Siri. There are massive implementation issues. Because a lot of people don't like AI and they don't want to be bothered by yet another smart system in their product. So this is an implementation challenge of disruption. Again, as I said, the tech is disruptive, but it's having a hard time causing a disruption. Then if you talk about the Marge approach, then that too... There is a big issue here because as it stands, we are about to reach the limit of what a transformer model can do. And we have discussed the transformer model in detail in the second episode. But basically, what is happening at the backend is that whenever you use something like chatgpt, all it's doing is predicting the next word. that's gonna happen, right? He has a data set, he is running a prediction engine, he is running a statistical analysis and he is just predicting what should be the next word after this word. And he makes a whole sentence, a whole paragraph, a whole output. The issue is this approach, as you can imagine, is very resource intensive. It needs a lot of processing power. And the reason why Chad GPT is doing everything openly is because he has got 10 billion credits from Azure. That's why there's little competition in this space and a lot of money is required. And the money of VCs that was thrown on AI startups. that just to pay for that processing cost, what does it remind you of? Crypto and NFT. One of the biggest failure of crypto and NFT was that we need GPUs, we need processing power, there are whole warehouse where crypto farms used to run and ice would melt from the top because they used to generate so much heat. That is exactly where we're heading to with the transformer generative AI model. It's reaching its limit when it comes to how much processing is feasible to generate. Write me a poem in the voice of Imran Khan's prompt. So what will happen eventually when people run out of free VC money or OpenAI runs out of Ager free, they will start charging a lot of money for every little thing that has AI slapped on it. And it's already happening. I use a tool for this podcast to transcribe, called Turboscribe. Right? It's a really nice tool and it like does a good job of translating all these podcasts in Urdu to English and then I add subtitles to it. But if I go to Byert's premium plan, now look at the scene. I'm taking $20 a month. I take 2-3 episodes a month and how can I justify$20 per month for that? Right? But because AI is being used, they are asking for $20. And that is with every AI startup. You use any AI tool, any AI product, $10-$20 has become a joke. And the existing tools like Notion or Slack or whatever, who have used AI, they have also extra $5-$6 for their existing subscription because it is just that expensive processing wise. The AI feature is so much more expensive than we used to have before. Because machine learning was happening before. This transcription work was happening before and there were many tools that were doing it. I used other tools in the past, but now this chart GPT and transformer model have become popular. Every company got a free trump card that you can charge 20 dollars per month. And lastly, which is most important, use case. So far, AI GPT has got many use cases, especially in professional workflows. But for a common person, the average consumer, there is no use case yet. Right? Because the good thing is that OpenAI and Microsoft have been trying for so long to get AI to reach the common man. And to be honest, I think the most successful company is Meta. Why? Because they had WhatsApp. or got angry in the middle. Let's talk to him. Talking to him is the same thing as gimmick. How long will you talk to him? How many times will you talk to him? Will you come to one point and leave him? There has not been a good use case of generative AI or transformer model yet. So if I have to predict that, what are the things that can minimize the load of processing, that can improve the implementation of GPT and then will be a good use case for the common man. As funny as it sounds, I think generative AI should become the replacement for Google search. And it's kind of ironic that we came to this point because when the new transformer came out, two years ago, we used to make fun of it that it's a fancy Google search. And the funny thing is that two years later, exactly this is what is going to happen. I think that GPT announced last week that they're going to release something called GPT search. And I think that is the road ahead that's going to be nice for these services. Because what's in that search? You already have the data available on the net. Searching is way lighter processing wise than figuring out how to write the next 500 word essay and tools like Perplexity do an excellent job of searching already. And they give you like reference material also. By the way, this is all my summary, but if you want to go and read it yourself, then see all these links. So in my opinion, I think that's the same thing. Search is going to be the main. use case for generative AI moving ahead. Because search is easy to add into everything. Like look at the example of Meta, why is it so successful now? Because it's put into WhatsApp search or Instagram search. Similarly, if this AI feature comes in your search everywhere, I think it will be the most useful to the average person to improve their search query. Yes, there will be some growing pains. Yes, at the beginning, he will hit the bulls and say, put glue on your pizza. But the use case that is made, frankly speaking, for the average person, that is what is made, that it is an improved search. Because the Google search has been fired. Search anything, what happens these days? First 4 ads come, then Google's recommended things come, then snippets come, then organic results come somewhere. Then all those organic results, all the game ones, SEO people made listicles, like top 10, they stopped 5 that. It's horrible. Google search experience right now is frankly so bad that people are using TikTok for search. Two years ago, an article came that young people are using TikTok as their primary search engine to search for new things. And as funny as it sounds, it is because Google search has become pretty trash these days. Because big companies like CNN and Forbes are abusing SEO. They are not behind their micro sites where they are selling SEO spam articles, affiliate links. And an episode will come on affiliate links. Stay tuned. Because of which your search has been completely ruined. Like right now, go search for top leggings to buy something like that. Just search that top leggings to buy or best leggings to buy. And why are CNN, Forbes and these things coming at the top? You guys are covering business, terrorism, politics, why are you telling me which leggings you are buying? And that tells you what's happening with Google search. SEO abuse is going on and the small website like my website, I run a website, I have about 100-800 pages on my website. We have no chance against these big companies because I have 10 writers sitting with me writing all day and night. And that's why independent support is really important. And I try to explain this to people that it's not necessary to subscribe. If you watch this, that is way more than anything else I can ask for. But that does help us not rely on search and algorithms and all that. Then when we push content, you get it. Like. Okay, there's a link for subscription. just send your email to the website. That way, whenever an episode launches, you will get to know directly in the email inbox. You don't have to go search for it. But in conclusion, if you have to talk about everything, see, this concept of progressive versus disruptive technology is very important to understand. You have to understand that, okay, this technology is progressing, it is going towards disruption, and then whether its disruption will be successful or not, how to judge it, you see, is it easy to implement, what is its processing or cost or resource requirement, and then third, is there any actual use case which will be for the common man or not. If it's mostly on the common man, then it will become a successful disruption. Only if it's used by business or cloud, then it won't be a disruption per se. It can be very successful. It can be billions of dollars. But I won't consider it as disruption. Disruption is only when it's impact is on a common man. You can see the internet, you can see the smartphone, you can see things like cloud computing, which sounds very fancy, but it has an impact on every person. If cloud computing wasn't there, many services wouldn't be running. So yeah, that is the whole idea. understand the difference. Whenever you hear these technical fads that this is a new thing and this is the hot new thing. Figure out what it is because you can end up paying a lot more for something you will never make use of. And if you're not, the one who is with you, at least save that. Anyway, at the end of the episode, I have some things to say. So usually, we have started a new venture on these TechMateFun episodes that with each episode, we write a small, or sometimes a very long article in which we write more... deeper dive or try to give a different perspective from a research point of view with references and all that. So that article is usually linked in the description. You can go check it out and read it also at your convenience. Basically, the topic area will be the same, but there will be a different coverage. Here, because I try to explain everything in simple words and simple explanations, the purpose of that article is to give a deeper dive, be a little more technical and go point by point through everything and hopefully give you a more holistic understanding of the topic at hand. right? So its link will be in the description, you can go and check it out. Then I have a question for you. If you got to this point, see, as I said, I have been growing up in tech for 10-20 years, so I have become very jaded. And I have become a little negative because I have seen scams and fads again and again and I am tired. But are you tired of this also or am I just old or am I really old? And do they still excite you? Whenever you see a new tech disruption or progression, does it still make you happy? Yes, you are always on a little bit of doubt. No, not now. It will take me some time to trust it. Then we have some follow up. Sometimes follow up comes. If you leave a comment, you might get some also. In the last video, A guy commented that, thanks, now I got trust issues with Smart TV. Basically the concept was that I covered this in the after show that, the smart TV takes so much access from the account and basically can snope in everything that is in my data. And the response I want to give is that, you need to have trust issues with everything. If you take the example of last week. A big company like Crowdstrike, which has 90-100 lakh computers running, or more than that, I'm sure, all of that has gone down because of a faulty update, right? And thousands of flights will be cancelled in the world, the loss of billions of rupees has happened, and again, this will be an episode. So stay tuned for that. And basically the purpose of saying this is that even if there is a trustworthy brand or you trust for example Apple, let's say, still go and verify your stuff. Still go make sure that you're following the best practices. Never blindly trust any company, any technology or anything in general. Because at the end of the day, mistakes can happen to anyone, right? Even if no one intends to do it, mistakes can happen to anyone. That being said, as always, thank you for listening. Please send any questions or feedback to podcast at sknexus.com. And as I mentioned, companion articles are now part of Nexus. The link will be in the description. You can go and read it and subscribe to the website to get all the latest updates in your inbox. Okay, after show, Tech K Tot K. So recently I came across a very beautiful thing I wanted to share. I haven't started taking advantage of it yet, but I'm sure I'll sign up pretty soon for it. And which is the digital library offered by British Consul. Okay, I don't want to be political on this show and I don't want to say that culture is ingrained or hacking is going on or whatever. Screw all that. All I know is that there are very few opportunities in Pakistan. There are very few options in Pakistan. So if there is a good option, I want to present it to you. from that perspective. So if you go to britishconsole.pk slash library slash digital library, link description me hoga. You can get access to like hazaaro ebooks and audiobooks, comics, graphic novels, even film TV and magazine note. Aur pata nahi kya unki library me available hai. For only, I think four to five thousand rupees per year. Saal ka, maine ka nahi, saal ka. And that's such a good deal, yaar. Like if you understand. Look, free content is great and all, even this podcast is free and there is a lot of free content on YouTube and on the internet and all that. Sometimes paid content is important, right? Especially when we talk about deeper dives or technical dives. Look, I am a guy sitting in a room, recording a podcast. I don't have access to like Intel factory and how its chipsets are being made or how Tesla's car is being made. I can't afford that access. But big companies like Economist or Wired or The Verge, they have access to that kind of stuff and they cover that kind of stuff in their paid formats or magazines and all that. But they are very expensive. And that's why journalism is very important and journalism will always be there. People will say that social media is here, journalism is dead. No, no, that won't happen. monetized differently than it used to, but it will always exist because these deeper dives or the advanced level of access is not in the hands of a common man. So even though we are shifting towards individual journalism and people are going to become good journalists, it is still harder for us individuals to cover things in larger or deeper detail. We can only give our perspective on it. So where there is that limitation, I do suggest people to keep some paid formats in your knowledge dike. And this thing, the British Consul Library, like you are paying 4-5 thousand rupees a year, okay. And you go and there are thousands of magazines, audio books, ebooks, there's so much knowledge there. And it is easy to access. I think it functions like a library. You can take any book up to a certain limit, read it, return it. So yeah, like do support paid stuff also. Where possible, avoid piracy. Because that's the thing, right? Like I am very against piracy in the sense. that if an option is available, especially price parity option is available because I am in Pakistan, right? My income is different, my cost is different, so if I am getting a net worth of 50 dollars per month, then I won't buy it. But if I am getting a net worth of 5 dollars per month, then I might buy it. It's a different thing, I don't buy it because I don't get 5 dollars per month. But the point is that pricing parity is very important. So if you have an option, always try to pay as much as possible because these things are hard to make, right? These things are not free for all and the free content can only go so far. So when it's an option like digital library where all the ebooks and audio books are read, it's a paid option. You are also getting magazines. Just pay 4000 rupees. Okay. That is not going to make them money, but that at least helps you be morally in the right ground. See, I am not pirating content. I am accessing through the official channel. and try to access most of the content through official channels as much as possible. That's just the ethos I want you to live by. And yes, there are a lot of categories where we still don't have content or availability and unfortunately we have to pirate. But slowly, slowly that will change, right? It's a mindset to have. As long as you can pay and there is an option and it is feasible for you, go for that option. If there is no option, then piracy is alive and it will always be alive.
