One of my favorite concepts in evolutionary biology is carcinization, a theory that describes how various unrelated species have all converged on the basic shape we know as a crab. The meme version of carcinization is basically “all roads lead to crab.”
Like evolution’s odd predilection with the crab, almost all of tech’s innovative might has converged upon a seemingly unbreakable formula: screen, battery, system on a chip. We have reached an evolutionary terminus. Whether packaged as the familiar smartphone, tablet, smartwatch, laptop, VR headset, eReader-that-is-definitely-just-a-phone, handheld game console, or some third wave hipster AI nonsense dongle, we are now just building effectively the same gadget, but a little different. This is not to say that all aforementioned gadgets are bad gadgets. Some of the gadgets are very good gadgets! But most take an old idea and repackage it as the aforementioned screen-battery-SoC Gadget SuperCrab. Even our cars are now just, effectively, very big versions of smartphones. The Gadget SuperCrab has eaten the world, and so we now live in the age of the Gadget SuperCrab. The age of the True Gadget — of a flowering ecosystem constantly trying and failing and trying relentlessly again to branch out that evolutionary tree — is over.
How did we get here? Smartphones. As the little black internet rectangles proliferated in quantities previously unthinkable across the planet, they scaled ecosystems and supply chains in the extreme. The number of ARM chipsets produced annually dwarfs x86 chips by an order of magnitude. The Android operating system is now found in so many packages and versions and permutations that it is easier to ask now what gadget doesn’t use Android. Screens, batteries, wireless components, and literal gadget factories can be spun up and produced to specification so quickly that it is effectively possible to dropship a new gadget with no full-time engineers. But what many tech luminaries look proudly upon as the world answering the call for an unprecedented wave of innovation has become an engine of unstoppable homogenization. The smartphone was innovative at the peak of its growth cycle, certainly, but its complete domination of economies of scale has turned everything into a variation on that basic design — that of the Gadget SuperCrab. The thing is: The Gadget SuperCrab won out for a reason. It’s economical, it’s easy to package, and it’s optimal for a bewildering variety of use cases. It’s not that the Gadget SuperCrab has stifled other, superior branches of our silicon natural selection: It’s that it has demonstrably dominated other approaches on the merits. We built the End Stage Gadget.
For evidence that we’ve reached the end of this Cambrian Explosion, we should look not only at the gadgets themselves, but also the wider technology biome. Perhaps my favorite example is the sudden, often overlooked decline in demand for wireless network innovation. Aside from reaching farther and achieving greater capacity (for throughput and density), there is no immediately obvious reason we needed 5G, let alone will “need” 6G. 4G (aka LTE) accomplished everything we fundamentally demand of our networks today over a decade ago, and deployment of 5G’s most ambitious technical features globally has been far lower than initially anticipated. The reason? No new use case is driving the need for further major overhauls of our wireless infrastructure. We have, on the whole, achieved what we need to — we’re in the saturation and optimization stage, and will seemingly remain there for the foreseeable future. Similarly, the ecosystem for gadget software has plainly stagnated. Android is now more concerned with pushing Google products, fencing in its platforms, and driving revenue from partners with services than enabling new form factors, and I suspect Google’s investment in its Android unit will recede into a maintenance pattern in the coming years. There are no meaningful opportunities for Android to upend the world again; those days are long gone. Another case study: Smart assistants and voice interaction. While LLM may marginally improve voice assistants in the coming years, there is no evidence of an imminent paradigm shift. Smart speaker shipments have tanked. The smart home, too, appears to have become a vastly de-scaled vision of the future. What was once a fully-integrated “software ecosystem” rethink of the single family home is now a heavily commoditized and fragmented marketplace of light bulbs, outlet adapters, and thermostats. Does anyone truly believe we’re on the edge of a Home Robotics Explosion? I think anyone with eight brain cells can see that grift for what it is. And don’t even get me started on VR.
It’s easy to look at the above and say I’m trying to paint some kind of myopic dystopia — that innovation happens seemingly slowly at first, and then seemingly very suddenly, and that very few people successfully predict the moment that shift occurs. I merely lack faith and am ignoring many historically relevant examples. VR people (and I know and love several VR people) are among the first to point this out, being enthusiasts of an experiential computing revolution that has been just out of reach for… several decades. But what I believe is not that major technological innovation is at an end, not at all. But I do believe that major technological innovation enabled by this Gadget SuperCrab formula is at an end. We’ve seen where this road goes: We have wearables, we have the Internet of Things, we have connected cars, and above all else, we have the smartphone. The idea that we are just on the edge of some secondary gadget tsunami — if only the batteries lasted longer, if only the chips were smaller, if only the screens were thinner / brighter / denser — is more wishful technomanifestation than inevitable eventuality. We will continue to improve these things, certainly, but those improvements appear destined to remain marginal, and quite possibly with severely diminishing return on investment.
What I suggest is that the Gadget SuperCrab has, on the contrary, blinded many of us to the possibility that the next major technological breakthrough seems much more likely to come from somewhere else. Somewhere outside the Gadget SuperCrab framework that so dominates our current discourse. Perhaps that is in the space of energy generation — a hugely important field for humanity’s continued viability on this planet. Perhaps it is in synthetic materials and fabrication — 3D printing finally seems to be taking off. Maybe it is in the realm of health and wellness signals and sensors, that we are on some unseen edge of a truly predictive (perhaps even diagnostic) suite of technologies to revolutionize healthcare. Could it be the way we feed the world, the ability to effectively eliminate global hunger with synthetic foods no longer requiring intensive agriculture? Such breakthroughs would not be mutually exclusive or at the expense of the Gadget SuperCrab by default, but they would almost certainly shift our collective attention away from it. Something new would matter. Right now, generative AI is trying to do that (and, I would argue, failing very publicly and miserably), but my real point is that the very thought of taking our eye off the gadget “ball” feels almost unthinkable right now, because it’s been the big new thing for well over a decade at this point.
There will always be gadgets. Gadgets will, probably for the rest of our lives, be a relatively important thing. But the idea that they will be the most important thing, the thing that takes up so much of the collective capital, cultural oxygen, and conscious consideration they do today 15 or 20 years from now would be a failure of imagination on our part. There will come a day, I promise you, that you will look back on The Gadget Age and say “how quaint that we believed this was the most incredible thing to ever happen.” Because something far more incredible is waiting for us, and whatever it is, a screen and a microprocessor won’t be what makes it so incredible.