What is distinctive to me about Zoom is that the technology was:
Mature
Cost no money
Was widely available and fairly intuitive for the average person to use
Had no regulatory barriers or moral issues
Can be used in full form by mutual agreement among one or a few people (technically, you can approval vote on anything with your friends, but the central use case is for elections and so it would not count for this criteria)
Saved a lot of money and time
Had an immediate payoff
Played relatively well with the existing format of meetings
Appealing largely to people in the developed world with high access to information about useful new products and services
Potential daily users in the hundreds of millions
I think your analysis is correct that it really was just a cultural normalization step that was preventing us from adopting it at mass scale.
I also think that technologies with all these properties are very rare. In fact, I am about 75% confident that no other equivalently long-neglected technology or product exists that also has all these properties. In other words, my one-word answer is “None.”
I am a poor recent grad, so I can’t stake a lot of money on this. But just to make it fun, I’ll donate $10 to the Against Malaria Foundation if anybody can propose a technology that is “like Zoom pre-COVID” in terms of being neglected while having all the attractive properties I list above (by my lights, but I’ll be somewhat generous in interpreting proposals—digging up technologies that are fairly compatible with this framework is more important to me than hanging on to my $10).
I’m not counting checklists or landfills because they are already mentioned here and because I think the benefit to the average person probably still isn’t that great in most cases.
Electric bikes are vastly under-utilized even in European cities where they are safe and effective to use:
Mature: bike more than 100 years old, electric motors and batteries also mature.
Cost no money: saves a ton on money over a car
Was widely available and fairly intuitive for the average person to use: everyone can bike
Had no regulatory barriers or moral issues: clearly not illegal nor immoral to ride a bike.
Saved a lot of money and time: saves also time because there is no need for separate exercise.
Had an immediate payoff: you gain from day 1
Played relatively well with the existing format of meetings transportation
Appealing largely to people in the developed world with high access to information about useful new products and services: high traffic congestion is common there
Potential daily users in the hundreds of millions: even more, around a third of all persons are potential daily users
The only barriers are perceived risk (not clear if the risk of an accident is higher than the benefit from physical exercise in my opinion, it could well be net positive depending on where you live) and that you look “childish” and kind of weird if you bike to work.
I think electric bikes are a pretty good candidate! I own one and it was transformative for biking around Seattle.
The ability to trivially climb a hill to get a block away from the main arterial and bike on a little-trafficked road was a huge safety enhancement
It deals with even Seattle’s huge hills with ease
You can go 20 mph, which is often faster than cars, especially during rush hour
They are no riskier than a regular bike, and given my point about getting off busy roads, they can even be safer if used well
On reflection, I think my reason for thinking they are not quite comparable to zoom is the following:
E-bikes can be two things: a replacement for a car or bus, or a replacement for a manual bike. As a car/bus replacement, there is a clear tradeoff: they are a whole extra vehicle you must purchase, they are less safe, they are slower in many cases. As a bike replacement, there is also a tradeoff: they are more expensive than many manual bikes, they are very heavy, they become much worse than a manual bike if the battery dies, and they may at least be perceived as riskier or having fewer health benefits.
If I ask a bike-user or a car-user “why don’t you use an e-bike for the things an e-bike is perfect for,” I expect that a lot of them would refuse not on “it would be weird” grounds, but on “I don’t need to do that enough to justify the expense” grounds, or on “I don’t like the tradeoffs of replacing my car or my bike with an e-bike.” In fact, I think that would be the main objection.
Zoom, since it costs no money and slots in for little-no money with established ways of having meetings, truly offers a straight-up value add while requiring virtually no extra investment to start using it. And yet people weren’t doing it! Which is the crazy part!
However, I like the proposal and I think it’s pushing the conversation in the direction I want it to go, so I am going to say this motivates a $3 donation to AMF. Proposals that fit my criterion even better can earn the other $7.
I also asked ChatGPT, here are the six best ideas that it had (excluding electric bikes, as it was already my idea ;P) (cherry picked by me over 21):
Online education: Online education platforms like Coursera and Khan Academy were mature, widely available, intuitive, and cost no money for basic usage. They also had no regulatory barriers or moral issues and could be used by mutual agreement among one or a few people. Online education also saved a lot of time and played relatively well with the existing format of learning and education.
Digital wallets: Digital wallet technologies like Apple Pay and Google Pay were mature, widely available, intuitive, and cost no money for basic usage. They also had no regulatory barriers or moral issues and could be used by mutual agreement among one or a few people. Digital wallets also saved a lot of time and played relatively well with the existing format of financial transactions and management.
Wearable health monitoring devices: These devices, such as Fitbit and Apple Watch, are mature, widely available, intuitive, and cost no money for basic usage. They also have no regulatory barriers or moral issues and can be used by mutual agreement among one or a few people. They save time and money by allowing users to track their health metrics and stay motivated to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Online language learning platforms: Platforms like Duolingo and Rosetta Stone are mature, widely available, intuitive, and cost no money for basic usage. They have no regulatory barriers or moral issues and can be used by mutual agreement among one or a few people. They save time and money by providing an accessible and effective way to learn a new language.
Home energy management systems: Devices like Nest Thermostat and Sense Home Energy Monitor are mature, widely available, intuitive, and cost no money for basic usage. They have no regulatory barriers or moral issues and can be used by mutual agreement among one or a few people. They save money and energy by providing users with insights into their home energy usage and allowing them to make informed decisions about energy conservation.
Collaborative writing and editing tools: Platforms like Google Docs and Microsoft Teams are mature, widely available, intuitive, and cost no money for basic usage. They have no regulatory barriers or moral issues and can be used by mutual agreement among one or a few people. They save time and make collaboration more efficient and effective, whether for school projects, business proposals, or creative writing.
Both of them are very reasonable, online education is accessible, almost free, and makes it possible to study even while holding a full time job, from a quick glance a great deal of your requirements are satisfied.
Digital wallets I am less sure about, I never used one, but they look really convenient and easy to use, but I would need more info on how secure they are before starting to use them.
Overall, I think all of these ideas kind of fit your point.
This is a nice use case for ChatGPT! In most of these cases, I think that where they don’t quite meet my criteria is in terms of the cost-benefit issue or the neglectedness part.
Online education is pretty widely used by individuals, exactly as we would hope. It’s neglected as a way to signal educational attainment, but that’s a problem that can only be handled at the level of corporate or university governance by recognizing Coursera certificates on CVs or building a university around online offerings. Digital wallets seem to have taken off pretty much in step with awareness and size of the user base. Wearable health and home energy management systems don’t seem neglected and they face cost-benefit questions. Collaborative writing and editing are already widely used, as are online language learning platforms.
I’ll throw in another $1 for creative brainstorming for a total of $4 awarded and $6 to go, but I want to save the rest for ideas more stringently meeting my criteria if any can be found.
In my opinion Wearable health is highly neglected because older people are less tech savy than young people, so they use it less than younger people, but they would also benefit much more from the technology. If a 20 year old wears a smart watch that measures and records heart-rate it is almost only for fun, if a 60 year old does it, it could prevent and inform about important issues, but the 20 year old is much more likely to actually use it than the 60 year old.
I think that’s a pretty good point, and it tracks with Steven Byrnes’ insight about bedwetting alarms.
Zoom costs no money, but the most it saves is time and annoyance. It might save lives occasionally, but there’s potential for wearable health to save lots of lives and prevent many disabilities. The cost-benefit ratio might be better than zoom’s, and yet people may neglect it excessively because it’s socially weird to do things like monitor your heartrate—or, when it’s available, your blood glucose—routinely using consumer electronics. As with the bedwetting alarm, we have this idea that we should only be using “interventions” like these when there’s already a clear problem, rather than as a way to prevent a problem or hasten a solution, and that seems to stem from social norms (“is this really such an emergency?”) rather than a rational judgment about costs and benefits.
That said, one of my criteria was “Had an immediate payoff,” and I think that neither the bedwetting alarm nor wearable healthy typically do have an immediate payoff (unless you were replacing an existing invasive glucose monitor with an Apple Watch noninvasive monitor, once that tech becomes available).
With zoom, all people were missing was the suggestion “why don’t we have this meeting on zoom” and the perception that “if we do, it will be seen as normal by all participants.” With wearable health, you have the added component of “I’m not even sure all this fuss and self-monitoring will even pay off in the long run in terms of better health outcomes, but I have to pay the money and attention costs right now.”
The delayed and uncertain cost-benefit analysis in individual cases is the reason that wearable health doesn’t meet my higher “stringency bar” for being comparable to zoom, even though I agree with you that there are probably a lot of users who’d benefit from it and who are neglecting it primarily for the reason that it’s not normalized.
I upvoted for karma but downvoted for agreement. Regarding Zoom, the reasons I had not used it more extensively before COVID were:
1. Tech related: from experience with Skype in the early days of video conferencing when broadband internet was just starting to roll out, video conferencing could be finnicky to get to work. Latency, buffering, dropped connections, taking minutes to start a skype call (usually I would call relatives on my regular phone first to get the Skype call set up, and then we’d hang up our regular phones once the video call was started. Early video calls were not a straight-up improvement on audio calls, but had benefits and drawbacks and had a narrow use-case for when you specifically wanted to see the grandkids’ faces on the other side of the country or something.
I don’t think this was necessarily Skype’s fault. It was more the fault of poor internet connections and unfamiliarity with the tech. But in any case, my preconception about Zoom circa 2019, even despite widespread broadband internet, was that it would be the same sort of hassle to set up meetings. I remember being blown away when my first Zoom calls just worked effortlessly. Possibly an example of premature roll-out of a tech before it is technically mature leading to counter-productive results? This would kind of be like, if you fiddled around with GPT-1, got the impression that LLM chatbots were “meh,” and then forgot about or mentally discounted the tech until GPT-5.
2. Social/cultural related: as a history instructor, my preconceptions about scheduling video calls, or doing lectures over video calls, was that students would simply not attend or would not pay attention, and thus video calls would not be a suitable replacement for in-person meetings and lectures. While I still don’t think video calls get you 100% of the way there towards replacing the in-person experience (students definitely do goof-off or ghost during video lectures way more than in-person, I think it is more like 80% rather than the 50% or so that I had assumed before being forced to try it out on a mass scale during COVID.
These are good points. Regarding lectures, insofar as Zoom was a risky gamble that worked out better than expected, I still think an appeal to social norms is appropriate. In a world full of meetings, lectures and conferences, why wasn’t there enough experimentation to figure out that Zoom was an acceptable 80% solution rather than an unacceptable 50% solution without COVID to force the issue?
Your point about tech is a reasonable explanation, although it would turn the OP on its head. If Zoom was maturing as a technology right when COVID hit, then it might not have been “stuck” on early adoption, just made to appear that way by coincidence. We remember the sudden surge of demand, but forget that only a year or two before, video conferencing was much worse. Maybe we’d still have seen Zoomification of lectures and meetings even if there had never been COVID as Zoom’s technology matured in 2019.
This would fit with my fundamental perception that it’s extremely rare for a potentially world-changing technology to be stuck long term on early adoption due exclusively to social norms. Usually there’s a collection of issues: high costs, governance problems, moral qualms, technological shortcomings, a small market, and so on.
Why wasn’t there enough experimentation to figure out that Zoom was an acceptable & cheaper/more convenient 80% replacement to in-person instruction rather than an unacceptable 50% simulacra of teaching? Because experimentation takes effort and entails risk.
Most experiments don’t pan out (don’t yield value). Every semester I try out a few new things (maybe I come up with a new activity, or a new set of discussion questions for one lesson, or I try out a new type of assignment), and only about 10% of these experiments are unambiguous improvements. I used to do even more experiments when I started teaching because I knew that I had no clue what I was doing, and there was a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick to improve my teaching. As I approach 10 years of teaching, I notice that I am hitting diminishing returns, and while I still try out new things, it is only a couple of new things each semester. If I was paid according to actual time put into a course (including non-contact hours), then I might have more incentive to be constantly revolutionizing my instruction. But I get paid per-course, so I think it is inevitable if I (and other adjuncts, especially) operate more as education satisficers rather than education maximizers. Considering that rewards are rarely given out for outstanding teaching even for tenured faculty (research is instead the main focus), they probably don’t have much incentive to experiment either.
I do know that some departments at my college were already experimenting with “hybrid” courses pre-COVID. In these courses, lectures were delivered online via pre-recorded video, but then the class met once a week for in-person discussion. I still think that is a great idea, and I’d be totally open to trying it out myself if my department were to float the idea. So why am I still not banging down the door of my department head demanding the chance to try it out myself? “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” “Don’t rock the boat,” there are a number of (probably irrational, I’ll admit) heuristics that dissuade me against being “the one” to push for it. What if it doesn’t pan-out well? What if my students hate it? It would be different if my department chair suggested it, though. Then more of the “blame” would be on the department chair if it didn’t work out. If that sounds like cowardice, then so be it. Someone with an adjunct’s lack of job security learns to be a coward as a survival tactic.
What is distinctive to me about Zoom is that the technology was:
Mature
Cost no money
Was widely available and fairly intuitive for the average person to use
Had no regulatory barriers or moral issues
Can be used in full form by mutual agreement among one or a few people (technically, you can approval vote on anything with your friends, but the central use case is for elections and so it would not count for this criteria)
Saved a lot of money and time
Had an immediate payoff
Played relatively well with the existing format of meetings
Appealing largely to people in the developed world with high access to information about useful new products and services
Potential daily users in the hundreds of millions
I think your analysis is correct that it really was just a cultural normalization step that was preventing us from adopting it at mass scale.
I also think that technologies with all these properties are very rare. In fact, I am about 75% confident that no other equivalently long-neglected technology or product exists that also has all these properties. In other words, my one-word answer is “None.”
I am a poor recent grad, so I can’t stake a lot of money on this. But just to make it fun, I’ll donate $10 to the Against Malaria Foundation if anybody can propose a technology that is “like Zoom pre-COVID” in terms of being neglected while having all the attractive properties I list above (by my lights, but I’ll be somewhat generous in interpreting proposals—digging up technologies that are fairly compatible with this framework is more important to me than hanging on to my $10).
I’m not counting checklists or landfills because they are already mentioned here and because I think the benefit to the average person probably still isn’t that great in most cases.
Electric bikes are vastly under-utilized even in European cities where they are safe and effective to use:
Mature: bike more than 100 years old, electric motors and batteries also mature.
Cost no money: saves a ton on money over a car
Was widely available and fairly intuitive for the average person to use: everyone can bike
Had no regulatory barriers or moral issues: clearly not illegal nor immoral to ride a bike.
Saved a lot of money and time: saves also time because there is no need for separate exercise.
Had an immediate payoff: you gain from day 1
Played relatively well with the existing format of
meetingstransportationAppealing largely to people in the developed world with high access to information about useful new products and services: high traffic congestion is common there
Potential daily users in the hundreds of millions: even more, around a third of all persons are potential daily users
The only barriers are perceived risk (not clear if the risk of an accident is higher than the benefit from physical exercise in my opinion, it could well be net positive depending on where you live) and that you look “childish” and kind of weird if you bike to work.
I think electric bikes are a pretty good candidate! I own one and it was transformative for biking around Seattle.
The ability to trivially climb a hill to get a block away from the main arterial and bike on a little-trafficked road was a huge safety enhancement
It deals with even Seattle’s huge hills with ease
You can go 20 mph, which is often faster than cars, especially during rush hour
They are no riskier than a regular bike, and given my point about getting off busy roads, they can even be safer if used well
On reflection, I think my reason for thinking they are not quite comparable to zoom is the following:
E-bikes can be two things: a replacement for a car or bus, or a replacement for a manual bike. As a car/bus replacement, there is a clear tradeoff: they are a whole extra vehicle you must purchase, they are less safe, they are slower in many cases. As a bike replacement, there is also a tradeoff: they are more expensive than many manual bikes, they are very heavy, they become much worse than a manual bike if the battery dies, and they may at least be perceived as riskier or having fewer health benefits.
If I ask a bike-user or a car-user “why don’t you use an e-bike for the things an e-bike is perfect for,” I expect that a lot of them would refuse not on “it would be weird” grounds, but on “I don’t need to do that enough to justify the expense” grounds, or on “I don’t like the tradeoffs of replacing my car or my bike with an e-bike.” In fact, I think that would be the main objection.
Zoom, since it costs no money and slots in for little-no money with established ways of having meetings, truly offers a straight-up value add while requiring virtually no extra investment to start using it. And yet people weren’t doing it! Which is the crazy part!
However, I like the proposal and I think it’s pushing the conversation in the direction I want it to go, so I am going to say this motivates a $3 donation to AMF. Proposals that fit my criterion even better can earn the other $7.
I also asked ChatGPT, here are the six best ideas that it had (excluding electric bikes, as it was already my idea ;P) (cherry picked by me over 21):
Both of them are very reasonable, online education is accessible, almost free, and makes it possible to study even while holding a full time job, from a quick glance a great deal of your requirements are satisfied.
Digital wallets I am less sure about, I never used one, but they look really convenient and easy to use, but I would need more info on how secure they are before starting to use them.
Overall, I think all of these ideas kind of fit your point.
This is a nice use case for ChatGPT! In most of these cases, I think that where they don’t quite meet my criteria is in terms of the cost-benefit issue or the neglectedness part.
Online education is pretty widely used by individuals, exactly as we would hope. It’s neglected as a way to signal educational attainment, but that’s a problem that can only be handled at the level of corporate or university governance by recognizing Coursera certificates on CVs or building a university around online offerings. Digital wallets seem to have taken off pretty much in step with awareness and size of the user base. Wearable health and home energy management systems don’t seem neglected and they face cost-benefit questions. Collaborative writing and editing are already widely used, as are online language learning platforms.
I’ll throw in another $1 for creative brainstorming for a total of $4 awarded and $6 to go, but I want to save the rest for ideas more stringently meeting my criteria if any can be found.
In my opinion Wearable health is highly neglected because older people are less tech savy than young people, so they use it less than younger people, but they would also benefit much more from the technology. If a 20 year old wears a smart watch that measures and records heart-rate it is almost only for fun, if a 60 year old does it, it could prevent and inform about important issues, but the 20 year old is much more likely to actually use it than the 60 year old.
I think that’s a pretty good point, and it tracks with Steven Byrnes’ insight about bedwetting alarms.
Zoom costs no money, but the most it saves is time and annoyance. It might save lives occasionally, but there’s potential for wearable health to save lots of lives and prevent many disabilities. The cost-benefit ratio might be better than zoom’s, and yet people may neglect it excessively because it’s socially weird to do things like monitor your heartrate—or, when it’s available, your blood glucose—routinely using consumer electronics. As with the bedwetting alarm, we have this idea that we should only be using “interventions” like these when there’s already a clear problem, rather than as a way to prevent a problem or hasten a solution, and that seems to stem from social norms (“is this really such an emergency?”) rather than a rational judgment about costs and benefits.
That said, one of my criteria was “Had an immediate payoff,” and I think that neither the bedwetting alarm nor wearable healthy typically do have an immediate payoff (unless you were replacing an existing invasive glucose monitor with an Apple Watch noninvasive monitor, once that tech becomes available).
With zoom, all people were missing was the suggestion “why don’t we have this meeting on zoom” and the perception that “if we do, it will be seen as normal by all participants.” With wearable health, you have the added component of “I’m not even sure all this fuss and self-monitoring will even pay off in the long run in terms of better health outcomes, but I have to pay the money and attention costs right now.”
The delayed and uncertain cost-benefit analysis in individual cases is the reason that wearable health doesn’t meet my higher “stringency bar” for being comparable to zoom, even though I agree with you that there are probably a lot of users who’d benefit from it and who are neglecting it primarily for the reason that it’s not normalized.
I believe this in some domains applies to micro-mobility in general.
I upvoted for karma but downvoted for agreement. Regarding Zoom, the reasons I had not used it more extensively before COVID were:
1. Tech related: from experience with Skype in the early days of video conferencing when broadband internet was just starting to roll out, video conferencing could be finnicky to get to work. Latency, buffering, dropped connections, taking minutes to start a skype call (usually I would call relatives on my regular phone first to get the Skype call set up, and then we’d hang up our regular phones once the video call was started. Early video calls were not a straight-up improvement on audio calls, but had benefits and drawbacks and had a narrow use-case for when you specifically wanted to see the grandkids’ faces on the other side of the country or something.
I don’t think this was necessarily Skype’s fault. It was more the fault of poor internet connections and unfamiliarity with the tech. But in any case, my preconception about Zoom circa 2019, even despite widespread broadband internet, was that it would be the same sort of hassle to set up meetings. I remember being blown away when my first Zoom calls just worked effortlessly. Possibly an example of premature roll-out of a tech before it is technically mature leading to counter-productive results? This would kind of be like, if you fiddled around with GPT-1, got the impression that LLM chatbots were “meh,” and then forgot about or mentally discounted the tech until GPT-5.
2. Social/cultural related: as a history instructor, my preconceptions about scheduling video calls, or doing lectures over video calls, was that students would simply not attend or would not pay attention, and thus video calls would not be a suitable replacement for in-person meetings and lectures. While I still don’t think video calls get you 100% of the way there towards replacing the in-person experience (students definitely do goof-off or ghost during video lectures way more than in-person, I think it is more like 80% rather than the 50% or so that I had assumed before being forced to try it out on a mass scale during COVID.
These are good points. Regarding lectures, insofar as Zoom was a risky gamble that worked out better than expected, I still think an appeal to social norms is appropriate. In a world full of meetings, lectures and conferences, why wasn’t there enough experimentation to figure out that Zoom was an acceptable 80% solution rather than an unacceptable 50% solution without COVID to force the issue?
Your point about tech is a reasonable explanation, although it would turn the OP on its head. If Zoom was maturing as a technology right when COVID hit, then it might not have been “stuck” on early adoption, just made to appear that way by coincidence. We remember the sudden surge of demand, but forget that only a year or two before, video conferencing was much worse. Maybe we’d still have seen Zoomification of lectures and meetings even if there had never been COVID as Zoom’s technology matured in 2019.
This would fit with my fundamental perception that it’s extremely rare for a potentially world-changing technology to be stuck long term on early adoption due exclusively to social norms. Usually there’s a collection of issues: high costs, governance problems, moral qualms, technological shortcomings, a small market, and so on.
Why wasn’t there enough experimentation to figure out that Zoom was an acceptable & cheaper/more convenient 80% replacement to in-person instruction rather than an unacceptable 50% simulacra of teaching? Because experimentation takes effort and entails risk.
Most experiments don’t pan out (don’t yield value). Every semester I try out a few new things (maybe I come up with a new activity, or a new set of discussion questions for one lesson, or I try out a new type of assignment), and only about 10% of these experiments are unambiguous improvements. I used to do even more experiments when I started teaching because I knew that I had no clue what I was doing, and there was a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick to improve my teaching. As I approach 10 years of teaching, I notice that I am hitting diminishing returns, and while I still try out new things, it is only a couple of new things each semester. If I was paid according to actual time put into a course (including non-contact hours), then I might have more incentive to be constantly revolutionizing my instruction. But I get paid per-course, so I think it is inevitable if I (and other adjuncts, especially) operate more as education satisficers rather than education maximizers. Considering that rewards are rarely given out for outstanding teaching even for tenured faculty (research is instead the main focus), they probably don’t have much incentive to experiment either.
I do know that some departments at my college were already experimenting with “hybrid” courses pre-COVID. In these courses, lectures were delivered online via pre-recorded video, but then the class met once a week for in-person discussion. I still think that is a great idea, and I’d be totally open to trying it out myself if my department were to float the idea. So why am I still not banging down the door of my department head demanding the chance to try it out myself? “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” “Don’t rock the boat,” there are a number of (probably irrational, I’ll admit) heuristics that dissuade me against being “the one” to push for it. What if it doesn’t pan-out well? What if my students hate it? It would be different if my department chair suggested it, though. Then more of the “blame” would be on the department chair if it didn’t work out. If that sounds like cowardice, then so be it. Someone with an adjunct’s lack of job security learns to be a coward as a survival tactic.