John Markoff on slow pace of automation, shorter term bets from VCs and government, future of transportation, AR as the next big platform, more
The Next Wave — A Conversation With John Markoff — This can't be the end of human evolution. We have to go someplace else. — It's quite remarkable. Tweets: @philiped , @bigdata , @dangillmor , @cdixon , @hunterwalk , @johnolilly and @digiphile Tweets: Philip Elmer-DeWitt / @philiped : “It's remarkable and sad at the same time” John Markoff on the future of technology. Spooky. http://edge.org/... Ben Lorica / @bigdata : We haven't made any breakthroughs in planning & thinking: Great @edge conversation w/ @markoff http://edge.org/... http://twitter.com/... Dan Gillmor / @dangillmor : Read this to see why @markoff is still the best journalist in explaining how technology changes our world: http://edge.org/... Chris Dixon / @cdixon : “I'm fascinated to see what the next platform is going to be. It's totally up in the air” -@markoff http://edge.org/... Hunter Walk / @hunterwalk : Questions & analysis on “What is Next?” in our tech future from @markoff is quite good -> http://edge.org/... John Lilly / @johnolilly : Very very few who are as thoughtful about technology as @markoff. I'm going to read this one a couple of times. http://edge.org/... Alex Howard / @digiphile : “The notion of #science for science's sake is under assault."-@Markoff http://edge.org/... Cf. https://t.co/7fGsxhgCD2
Context & Ripple Effects
This Edge conversation lands near the end of John Markoff's run as a New York Times technology reporter — he would leave the paper the following year after twenty-eight years, so it reads as one of his fuller public statements on where computing goes next. His core claims cut against the era's hype: the pace of automation is slow, and both venture capitalists and governments are placing shorter-term bets than that slow pace implies.
Why it matters now: the tension Markoff identifies — multi-year physical-world deployment versus impatient capital — is exactly what later coverage keeps circling. Ben Shneiderman's subsequent argument against full robotic automation offers the augmentation path that shorter capital cycles can actually fund, while the industrial-revolution framing of today's AI shift confirms the years-not-centuries tempo Markoff described.
First-order effects
- Markoff's own observation puts VCs and governments on the wrong side of the timeline he sketches: if automation in areas like transportation advances slowly, shorter-term bets systematically underfund the long-cycle work that matters most.
- His claim that augmented reality could be the next major platform reframes where the next platform fight happens — away from the screen-based ecosystems that absorbed the last cycle and toward overlaying computation on the physical world.
Second-order effects
- Ben Lorica's response to the conversation — that no breakthroughs have arrived in planning and thinking — locates the binding constraint: capital chases applications faster than the cognitive foundations they depend on mature, widening the gap between funded demos and deployable automation.
- Shneiderman's human-in-the-loop position gives funders a cheaper alternative to full autonomy: augmentation projects fit shorter investment horizons, pulling money away from the replace-the-human end of the spectrum.
Third-order effects
- If Markoff's slow-automation read holds across cycles, displacement debates give way to design questions — who stays responsible, who supervises, who is liable — pushing regulators and ethicists toward augmentation-first frameworks rather than bans or acceleration.
- A persistent mismatch between decade-scale deployment and short-horizon capital would leave physical automation dependent on whoever can hold a longer clock — governments, strategic investors, or incumbent operators — reshaping who owns the automation layer itself.
The trend: Automation deploys on decade-long timescales while venture and government capital keep shortening their horizons, and that gap — not the technology itself — sets the real pace of the transition.