Almost every educated human knows who Augustus Caesar was, but almost nobody knows who designed the aqueducts of Rome, even though piped water had far more real world impact on humans today than anything Augustus did.
I suppose this is because history is written for the powerful, and they don't have to haul their own water.
True heads recognize the Portuguese carrack as the most transformative invention in human history, as its development eventually led to the entire Colombian Exchange and the creation of the first truly global empire.
I would have thought that writing was up there, as it allows preservation and transmission of information on a much larger scale. Like "How to build a carrack in the privacy of your own backyard!"
Astoundingly, Portugal was barely semi-literate at that time. Much was conveyed with very simple diagrams and numbers to build those ships, and of course, verbal handoff of knowledge. What relatively few books existed were tax records, histories and treatises about religion, split roughly 50/50 between Latin and Galician-Portuguese.
I remember when there was a profusion of dumb books like "HOW THE IRISH/SCOTS CHANGED THE WORLD!" but poor, stupid, backwards, tiny Portugal really did it in the end. The Colombian Exchange was the most monumental occurrence in human history, and arguably, natural history as well, and it was all due to the Portuguese crown's resentment about being sea-locked.
Discovery of metalworking? Navigation by stars? (I read some fascinating stuff about how Polynesians managed long-distance navigation to small islands in the middle of the South Pacific).
Slow clap for indoor plumbing! The house where I grew up didn't have indoor plumbing until around 1970 and the pipes would freeze when I was a kid, which meant going to the outhouse in January with subzero temps. And that wasn't enough for me, so I was a PCV in El Salvador in a rural area with no indoor plumbing. The preventable disease (and death) was overwhelming, although the amoebas and daily 10 mile hikes in the mountains did leave me looking very fit and trim. As a result, I still smile when I pour a cold glass of water from the tap, which is wonderful ping in the middle of the onslaught of our days.
So, AI. Is there hope that these programs can crunch so many equations and possibilities and probabilities so quickly that there is some heightened potential for answering big technological questions? That gives me some hope, otherwise, I think we should ask these machines if the product they produce is worth the electricity consumed.
I'm still convinced that AI will be used mostly for getting us to buy more crap. It will know what we want before we do. And we will shell out our life-savings for the ability to have every remotely nifty whim of a 'want' on our doorstep before we're done with our morning coffee.
I think that's a safe bet (although I think the angle will not be reflective of our actual wants but effectively convincing us of what we should want). Remember the early 90s enthusiasm about the internet making us all smarter and more independent?
I'll counter by pointing out that tech companies already tried this with AI powered Smart Speakers, and it was a huge failure. People preferred looking at options on the Domino's app to telling their AI assistant to order them a pizza.
I think the only reason smart speakers are still around is that killing a prominent AI tech may spook investors.
Great post. I work designing services in digital government, but a lot of my job involves advising on the digital tools that can actually help people, based on a fairly long career in user-centred design.
There is a real rush of companies promising the earth via AI at the moment, and while I am open-minded, that same question of 'what does this do that we can't do already' just recurs for me. I literally was on a call a half-hour ago saying this.
What I've noticed is that new technology has a way of completely blinding and stultifying people, like to the point that I sometimes feel if you showed them a shovel that only had a handle on it, or a glass that didn't have a bottom, but said it was 'powered by AI', they wouldn't notice the lack of handle or the water falling through.
It's the same for digital services. Usually the suggestions are making extremely banal things seem futuristic, like 'the AI will serve up tailored information to the user' or whatever when it's doing nothing Google can't do, and in fact is worse, but there is more sinister stuff being proposed also, and again people's moral compass is sort of warped by the novelty.
For example, I've seen the idea proposed that you could use a chatbot on a government website to talk to depressed or suicidal kids. I've seen someone, a whole team of people, suggest this with a straight face.
Sadly, I think a lot of governments will, as they always have done, be hoodwinked by big tech firms, big five consultancies or whoever else into spending billions on AI magic beans.
Sure, some stuff may work, but the end result will be more broken services, more fragmentation, more redundancies, and a landscape of shit that doesn't work coherently cos it was all done at different times by different people, based on whatever the latest fad thinking was.
I suspect it's because for the public a lot of this stuff is magic. If the genie can pass the bar exam why can't it mop your floors and take your dog for a walk? Where there's no rigor there can be no discrimination.
By being blinded, I mean more the decision-makers in positions of power often fail to look at things in the most simple/critical way when there's new tech involved. I think a big problem also is public sector bodies like to cut the ribbon on big expensive things - being seen to do shit that helps often replaces actually doing shit that helps.
But that's a general problem with the non-technical public. You would think that the people in charge of multi-billion dollar corporations would do a little more due diligence when it comes time to spend money but they seem to be as susceptible to hype as everybody else.
How much of this is also not wanting to look like a dinosaur? No one wants to look like the type of person who thought electricity and cars were a passing fad, so it's easier in the medium-term to sign off on technologies that they don't fully understand.
For sure. I think especially if you never know how the existing thing works then the new thing is quite exciting. Doing stuff is hard, making good things is hard, agreeing to spend money is easy.
Have you read Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America? I’m reading now. It is revealing a lot to me about the culture of digital services in government, and adding so much nuance to my understanding of such things.
Thanks for the suggestion! I'm excited to read this book, having grown up in the DC govt tech scene. My dad has been on the same modernization project for the IRS since 2001, and it's just crazy how bad the govt is at getting code written.
Awesome! It's a great listen, too! I'm pretty sure she reads it herself, and she has a great voice. :) I'm learning a lot. Not sure what to do with all of this knowledge (like a Thanksgiving meal), but I am hoping that the mists will part once I'm done! So glad you're excited and so appreciate your dad's persistence!
You might have missed it when in 2023 the board of an eating disorder hotline fired their real-life counselors and used an AI chatbot named Tessa. Primarily to cut costs but was done under the guise of serving more people. Tessa went off the deep-end and was providing not-so-sage advice to callers. It was subsequently terminated.
>What I've noticed is that new technology has a way of completely blinding and stultifying people, like to the point that I sometimes feel if you showed them a shovel that only had a handle on it, or a glass that didn't have a bottom, but said it was 'powered by AI', they wouldn't notice the lack of handle or the water falling through.
During the dotcom boom, investors were throwing money at any startup which had ".com" in their name, even in some cases where the company didn't even have a website. A few years ago, every company was trying to market themselves as using "blockchain" - I was once at a job fair where two representatives of a company claimed they were a blockchain events management company. (Unsurprisingly, they were completely unable to articulate in what capacity they used the blockchain in order to manage events.) Now the trendy thing is AI, so every company is trying to pretend that they use AI as part of their business, even if they don't. (I mean, if you use ChatGPT to draft marketing emails, I suppose it's technically true that you "use AI" in your "business processes".) I wonder what the next big thing will be.
I absolutely share your skepticism of AI, though recently a sensible friend told me that LLM's are starting to learn to reason why things are *wrong*, rather than what's just most probable, which is a major step towards being useful in my book, successfully eliminating hallucinations being a major obstacle for LLM's trustworthiness.
However, I feel you're weak-manning the case. Sure, there are ridiculous commercials showing ridiculous things. But the pattern-recognition ability of AI has already been incredibly useful in science, from the search of extra-terrestrial planets to the diagnosis of tumors. And that means it actually can save lives.
Does that mean it's as useful as plumbing, the automobile or vaccines? No, absolutely not. But that doesn't mean that us skeptics have to make it seem dumber than it is. It's not necessary to make the same point.
" Sure, there are ridiculous commercials showing ridiculous things. But the pattern-recognition ability of AI has already been incredibly useful in science, from the search of extra-terrestrial planets to the diagnosis of tumors. "
It's ability to predict complex three dimensional molecular shapes based on amino acid sequence is already a game changer.
This is sound analysis, but also I think getting to the limitations of LLMs. LLMs really excel in consuming and analyzing massive amount of data.
That's very powerful, but it's certainly not everything. To use the allegedly "transformational" example of AI ordering you a pizza: this has been around since first gen Alexa debuted 7 years ago. But no one used it, because people prefer browsing a pizza menu to a chatbot summary.
Again, I would not judge a new thing by its weakest use, but its strongest. It's like saying cars are useless because drag racing exists.
I also think there are strong limits on what LLMs can achieve, which largely has to do with the nature of consciousness and creativity. But one of the best explanations for consciousness coming into existence I found in Surfing Uncertainty by Andy Clark. If I recall correctly, according to him, consciousness is pretty much an emergent property of an ever-growing stack of predictive processing, where the brain uses Bayesian reasoning to predict its surroundings (since actually perceiving everything would require constant neural power). Lower-level processes get referred to higher-level processes, and in some very intelligent animals consciousness emerged as a way of abstractly predicting and making sense of the world.
Obviously it's just philosophy, there's no truth there. But it could be an interesting way in which consciousness could emerge from a 'sea of data', to borrow a phrase from Ghost in the Shell. Stack enough analytical and consequently predictive processes on one another, and you might get something which starts predicting entirely new things into existence: creative consciousness.
My dad spent the first thirteen years of his life without an indoor toilet. When they first got one, he spent an entire hour just flushing it in awe, thankful to never again have to deal with poop detail—chopping down the mountain of accumulated shit—in the outhouse during an Alberta winter. AI may be able to help incompetent students fool incompetent teachers, but I feel like it’s creating more shit mountains than it is doing anything truly useful.
We live in a hyper-civilized world in which there is no need to understand where the necessities of life come from. Many of the greatest invention candidates you list fall into that category. But elimination of any would cause the vast majority of the list to become useless. Imagine if Maxwell and Tesla's work hadn't taken place and alternating current, displacement current and the transformer had never been invented. Just about everything we now experience as normal life wouldn't either.
As a working futurist, I've been encountering lists of "most transformative technologies" for decades. And all of them miss the one that's liberated half of humanity -- reliable contraception, without which women are forever tied to house, husband, and kids, never to realize their own economic and intellectual potential.
That one is up there with the wheel, fire, and the printing press in terms of its long-term effects on human civilization. It's going to take a couple of centuries to work through all the implications, which will touch every aspect of our lives. It's arguable that the global turn toward fundamentalism and fascism is, to a large degree, a backlash against the social and economic changes it's already wrought in family structures. This one's constantly underestimated (because it's just about women, so not important) -- but at a deep level, there isn't much going on in the world that can't be traced back to it somehow.
Ed Abbey, of all people (who would be considered a past-ist now, or at least one of those people for whom the future has no room, insofar as he's remembered) once made just such a list in one of his books, and contraception was among his top three. I want to say, aspirin was another, but that may be my fanatical attachment to aspirin.
It was the great hope of those who believed population growth must be slowed, if other species were not to lose *all* their niches on the planet. Contraception + education.
I don't know if contraception ever did take hold, around the world. People *stopped* talking about population, and I've not kept up with the subject.
But I do know from when I was paying attention, that the environmentalists/population worriers were confounded, back in the 70s/80s, because those Our World in Data type books would come out and invariably show that women surveyed in what was then called the Third World, reported having the number of children they wanted to have. Or, they wanted the number of children they'd had. Perhaps the question fails.
As soon as we get beyond 'transformative' into terms like 'important', there's a cost/benefit evaluation taking place which adds an asterisk to a few technologies, including that one.
Reliable contraception is deservedly seen as among the most transformative, but it's also the technology most directly responsible for the pending end of our civilization and its many other technologies (although one of those other technologies may beat reliable contraception to the task, or we may yet solve the problems created by reliable contraception within industrialized society).
I tend to view the under-population stance in a similar fashion to the over-population one - with a similar level of skepticism. People react to a scarcity of resources (in this case, time, money, housing, etc.) by having less babies. And I don't think there's a big reason to think people would not react to a scarcity of labor in the opposite way by having more babies.
I would say things that affect infertility or low sperm count would be much higher on the list of things we need to keep an eye on, rather than just preferring not to have kids.
I don't doubt that the societies that survive will be those that are willing to have enough babies to thrive. They just won't be part of our industrial civilization.
To date no industrial society has maintained a sufficient TFR after the advent of reliable contraception, and as TFR drops, the individual rewards for not having children are actually increasing - a positive feedback not headed for equilibrium, but collapse, likely through eventual de-industrialization.
The universality of this phenomenon across scores of societies points to the unlikeliness of a social choice solution, leaving technical solutions that would have to be at least as transformative as reliable contraception.
I have to admit, the thought of living in a de-industrial world is tempting to me...if we got to keep modern medicine that is.
More on topic, let's say your premise is accurate. It sounds to me like we might just need a crapton of droids running on clean energy to do all the 'industrial' work in that scenario. I have to say, keeping up a high birth rate just for the sake of filling in all those 'industrial' jobs sounds like a never-ending hellscape of an existence.
Or did you mean something else with the word 'industrial'?
Being 'industrial' doesn't mean you have to have a large population, you can have one without the other. Medical knowledge, expertise and research can certainly be done with a much smaller population, you just have a smaller pool of ideas to work with. Besides, this is one area where AI can start to do a lot of the heavy lifting as well.
You seem to have the idea I've seen lately that likes to point out a simple mathematical concept: more people = more ideas. Yeah okay...but more people also equals more resources and food and space required for all those people. You get to a point where the gain from more ideas from more people starts to get really offset by all the resources required for that high population. The practical efficiency from more people/more ideas is a bell curve, not a straight line.
Just like you don't want the population so low that the combined innovation and execution is too lacking, you also don't want it too high where the population is too taxing for the community, economy, and environment. There's a wide middle ground there that we should be shooting for, and not just unending pop growth for the sake of a few ideas we might miss out on with less people.
I forgot to mention that the drop in TFR is not due to a scarcity of resources.
Children going from an asset to a liability in industrial societies is why - with a delay - TFR dropped dramatically even as time, money and housing became more abundant.
Even if children suddenly became an asset today, because it takes decades to effect such large changes in TFR, most of today's industrial societies will be long gone by then.
I thought it dropped because of a demand problem - meaning all families didn't really 'need' to have kids anymore in order to either perpetuate the species, or continue the families' economic standard of living. I could be wrong, just spit-ballin' here.
On your second point, you make it sound like we're already past the point of no return. So what now?
In the industrial age, families don't need kids for prosperity. But they are for now still the only way to perpetuate the species.
Yes, most industrial societies have been below replacement rate for decades, and have reached the point of no return: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, Russia, most of Europe. The ratio of women in child-bearing years is far too small to avoid steep population decline. And steep population decline in an aging society makes it much harder to support having children, so there's a downward spiraling pressure on birth rates. Those societies will end late in this century or early next.
Exceptions include the US, France, Turkey, Mexico, India, Brazil, which have not had TFRs below 2.1 for long enough yet. Canada too, but only because of the highest of immigration rates, which others might try to imitate but which are unlikely to find cultural acceptance.
What now? I see three possibilities:
- lots of wars as populations decline and defence becomes difficult, including wars to gain (female) population. Societies collapse or are invaded.
- technological solutions such as artificial wombs and childcare robotics. It's not clear whether there's a population level big enough to invent the tech but small enough to make feasible at societal scale.
- financial re-engineering of society to the point that children are assets again. E.g. parents of 4+ retire from the workforce and/or receive supplements such that incomes average greater than childless couples.
I agree with your overall sentiment, but I would not say contraception 'just affects women', or that it's underestimated precisely because it 'only' affects women (or more precisely, their bodies).
I mean, of course women really carry the weight of this situation...literally. But it's not exactly a one-or-the-other predicament. Sure I'm a dude, and of course I would say such a thing... but I mean, contraception can and does affect fathers too.
If it's truly being underestimated in this regard, that's to all our detriment.
I’ll take indoor plumbing, electricity, the wheel, the bowl, and antibiotics any day over “reliable contraception.” Herbal contraceptives and abortifacients have existed in various forms for thousands of years and are still widely used today. As someone who gave birth just three days ago, I’m far more concerned about surviving labor—a process that remains one of the leading causes of death for women worldwide.
Existentially speaking, is avoiding reproduction truly more advantageous than the ability to create life? Imagine if we knew there would be no more life after the current generation. Even those who don’t have children, never want them, or are among the few remaining children would suddenly find their existence meaningless and futile.
Understandably, noble causes like women’s ability to access education and pursue lives beyond child-rearing would quickly become irrelevant. Without the ability to “reliably create life,” no cause, passion, invention, or purpose would matter, as there would be no future generation to reap the benefits. Whether we acknowledge it or not, every single person living a civil, productive life is able to do so because women are still creating enough life to make theirs worthwhile.
Possible counter on the whole thing: I suspect, but don’t know for sure, that there are significant populations in the developing world, for whom cell phone infrastructure is cheap but indoor plumbing would be expensive, who rely on the smartphone far more than they would rely on toilets to be a part of the world.
I’m wondering if some people wouldn’t choose the smart phone as necessary to participate in the local economy. “Cool, I would have plumbing, but wouldn’t have a job anymore.”
If you could promise that they’d still have a job, they’d take plumbing. But that gets more to my point that we rate importance by how they transform society, and right now I suspect for some people societies are so transformed that they need a smartphone to live.
(And I freely note that this is based on a general sense of life in these areas and that I don’t really have direct knowledge and could be totally, totally wrong.)
How essential are cel phones to the local economy? And which job pays more, doing whatever the cel phone allows you to do or laying down highways, putting in electricity, laying plumbing, and all the other assorted tasks associated with modern infrastructure.
For one example, In many cases, cell phones are how farmers in the developing know what price they should be getting for cash crops. They are how they can hold and transfer money somewhat securely, find out about work opportunities, get help from relatives, or go over the head of a local corrupt official, get news, books, and technical information. I'm sure I'm missing a ton of other things.
The point is that if you don't have all the accoutrements of an advanced civilization, the modern smartphone can fill enough of the gaps that people would be very reluctant to give it up, even for indoor plumbing.
Obviously your neighbors are much more useful than mine. Anyway, if you're one of these people, affording a smart phone is probably not that hard, while even a beater would be a stretch.
I'm not sure if this is a fair question, along the lines of that quote attributed to Henry Ford (although apparently he never said it) "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
We take indoor plumbing, potable water etc. for granted and can hardly imagine life without them. It's not so much of a stretch to think that there are parts of the world where they can't imagine life WITH them. To such a person, reliable mobile phone infrastructure might sound like an economic necessity, while a flushing toilet might sound like a luxury.
When designing stuff for people to use, that quote is often used as a critique of poor research. The thinking being that you find out people's needs, rather than asking them what they want.
That way you're not asking people to design a solution, but finding out what problems or needs they have.
Let's grant that the iPhone is not as important as indoor plumbing, or the automobile, or whatever else tickles your fancy.
So what? Are you arguing that smartphones were unimportant? That life hasn't changed in a significant way now that a huge portion of the population spends almost every waking moment on a screen?
Maybe it's silly to say that the iPhone is more important than those things. Okay, some people are silly. Again, so what? I don't understand the hostility and dismissiveness.
As you said in another comment, ChatGPT is not nearly as impactful as the automobile. Okay... where are the people making this argument?
Obviously, if AI was a mature technology and future iterations will only be moderate improvements, then AI will not be all that impactful. Who thinks this? On what basis?
It seems like you are arguing that since many people are overhyping the current generation of AI, all AI hype is totally unwarranted and nobody should pay any mind to the possibility of AGI in our lifetimes.
Do i really need to spell out why that argument is not a good one?
Part of the problem with that is the local societal expectations. Take India. Sanitation has never been up to western standards and so might not be as important. But being able to participate in a global economy, ie a farmer can check the rice prices in Japan or Malaysia in an instant and know when to sell.
So, they might fail the shitting in the backyard test, when they can make money.
how many weeks of stepping in shit, your friends stepping in shit, your kids stepping in shit, your dog rolling in shit ... everybody tracking shit everywhere before you're ready to ditch the cell phone for the pit toilet again?
I’m not speaking for me. I’m proposing/suggesting that people actually might need cell phones over toilets right now in certain parts of the world. Plumbing might be a luxury while cell phones might be a necessity the way the world is structured in some places.
I see your point, but reply: if you live in a place without indoor plumbing, you likely don't have electricity either. A cell phone may help you chat with a family member who has fled to the city, outside of that, a cell phone won't meaningfully change anything about your life.
I see someone without a cell phone as being a very small scale (perhaps) subsistence farmer. Someone who isn't growing 200 acres of grain with machinery. They're scratching 1 acre by hand, merely one step above the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Or perhaps the intermediary which I've seen in videos about India. Where a farmer grows 3 acres of wheat with a tractor that looks something like a riding lawnmower, or a Mad-Max rototiller. You have to consider how poor that guy really is. He doesn't have the best fertilizers, he maybe yields 5 tons per acre—which would be a vast step. That grain is only worth $300 per ton. So he earns $1,500 per year gross. After expenses (fuel, maintenance, seed, taxes, etc.), perhaps $1,000 ... a year. That's chump change. His son who is a programmer in Silicon Valley earns that much a day. Maybe he's growing in the Padma River floodplain. The local groundwater is high in arsenic, and its poisoning him. When the river comes up, he has to move all his stuff or lose it.
Thankfully its rapidly changing, I saw a chart the other day, less than 5 years ago, 80% of people in India were shitting on the open ground. Its home to about 1/3rd of global infant mortality. The death and disease resulting from that far outweighs the desire for a phone.
I actually wonder if there are places with electricity but not plumbing. Say, the favelas of Rio? That’s what I’ve had in the back of my mind; no real plumbing, a bunch of shacks, jerry-rigged electricity, but having a phone can still make life there much more doable?
I do take your larger point, and I’d have to put plumbing above smartphones for health reasons alone. HOWEVER, I think we are seeing this technology reshape our societies in some remarkable ways that, if not quite as important as plumbing, probably feel absolutely vital to some people’s livelihood, more vital than the annoyance of using an outhouse. So we shouldn’t sneer at it either.
Freddie conflates sanitation with indoor plumbing. Nearly everyone prefers sanitation, because it's deadly to live without in an urban area.
But indoor plumbing is not life or death, it's just more convenient, especially below freezing, than an outhouse or communal flushies. Many would prefer the convenience of cell phones (vs no phone service) over moving their toilet indoors.
For those of us who only experienced a spidery dark outhouse once or twice in our lives, it’s hard to imagine going back to that. In fact, it is readily understandable to me that people in other parts of the world have been slow to adopt even that. When I’m in a national park, I will typically climb off trail halfway up a mountain rather than use the chemical toilet.
Outhouses are luxury! I do a lot of wilderness tripping, and encountering a campsite with a thunderbox is a treat. Seriously.
They usually come with a trail to them too, which is easier than bushwhacking the requisite 70m from water and finding a place with enough soil to dig a hole of proper depth.
That said, I live in rattlesnake territory, and the most likely time to get bit is just after dark on the way to the loo.
One of my recently fav jump the shark moments was when Zoom was valued more than... Exxon. Climate politics aside, it was nuts to think Zoom was more important in any meaningful short and medium term lasting way than Exxon was in 2020.
Zoom's edge was make it easier to join a video call by clicking a link rather than installing a program, that's how they ate Skype's lunch, and it's also what should have made it extremely obvious that they have zero moat.
Fun fact: Skype actually ended up eating Zoom's lunch after Microsoft rebranded it as Teams and gave away free licenses to every company for the first few years.
More broadly, FdB occasionally pushes the idea that we can’t count new inventions as most important because they rely on old inventions. Well, that’s not a useful measure. The measure is, what inventions have caused the most change? The automobile is a fantastic one. It relied on a bunch of previous inventions, but there was a marked change between before and after.
And guess what! There was still material inequality and boredom and misery too. Apparently the automobile wasn’t important. Nothing is important. All is nihilism.
There’s good stuff in this piece, but it’s very confused in its overall thrust, making three arguments at once, none of which quite land. 3/5 stars
I agree that the automobile and cel phone are both "collections" of previously existing technology but that doesn't mean they've both had the same impact on humanity. You could make the argument that suburbs, for example, are a consequence of the automobile. And oil has made places like Saudi Arabia into regional powers with all of the attendant impacts on world affairs and geopolitics.
I see that both you and FdB misinterpreted me, which means I f***ed up. The automobile is clearly a transformative technology. But FdB slides between saying that inventions’ importance are because of their transformative power (good measure), whether they relied on other inventions (bad measure) or whether they lift us out of this vale of tears (extremely bad measure). I’m mocking the last one.
Plumbing relies on pre-existing technology so I'm not sure that's DeBoer's point. And I think the real questions wrt happiness is not whether invention X has eliminated unhappiness but whether you would be less happy in its absence.
A car is an interesting example because just about everyone experiences life without one at some point. I suspect most people would argue life improved significantly once you got your driver's license.
We can steelman the post and make some really good points, I’m sure. What I’m complaining about is that we actually do have to do some steelmanning to make it work. It’s kinda all over the place.
I mean it’s a blog, he’s a way better writer than I, etc, etc, but I heart-emoji a bunch of his posts too so I feel free to call out the ones that don’t land. ;)
[deleted my last comment, because Slaw pointed out that I wasn’t clear]
It depends: the automobile is clearly more transformative than ChatGPT and will likely always be so. But in terms of lifting us out of misery and into a sparkling world of joy, they’re pretty much equal. My point is that I can’t tell from your post which metric I’m supposed to be using, and ChatGPT is great for me putting funny graphics on throwaway PowerPoints.
ChatGPT lifts you out of misery? Since when? Everytime I've used it, even for some silly lark, I've felt depleted. It's the same feeling I get after dealing with the cable company or the DMV. Just overwhelmed talking to something that is mechanically following a script rather than actually listening.
This, like a bureaucracy, forces you to figure out your own script. "What is the exact wording I need to use to get this stupid thing to do what I need it to?" Often, there isn't a correct answer.
It’s more that no matter how bright and shiny my car or my AI chatbot is, as FdB pointed out, we are all destined to live, suffer, and die. So automobiles and LLMs are about equal.
Indeed, I hate every minute I have to drive someplace and moved to as walkable neighborhood as I can find in my city. Whereas I can make cute graphics with ChatGPT. Winning!
Yeah, I started with thinking the transistor was the most important, but then Freddie got onto ceramic bowls, and I thought ceramics which were the insulator of choice before plastics. Insulators being required for the study of electricity. The automobile ... Tesla, Volta, those guys were giants ... but all their work requires copper wire, so perhaps its wire, or metal working.
I think Feral Finster mentioned writing, which may be the ultimate root.
I really like this post, and agree that Freddie not only had 3 metrics with widely variable usefulness, but he applied them spottily (e.g. automobiles also relied heavily on previous inventions).
Slaw took that to mean that Freddie wasn't making the 'leans on previous tech' argument, but Freddie clearly was.
Personally, I see the original iPhone as fairly incremental over the Blackberry, but if we substitute iPhone with 'mobile phones', I would say it has been quite transformative.
"Personally, I see the original iPhone as fairly incremental over the Blackberry"
I think this leads to the question of what "tech" is anyway. When the first motion pictures came out the first movies were staged like plays, shot from the perspective of somebody sitting in the audience.
Then the innovators like DW Griffith arrived and did stuff like moving the camera, or taking close up shots, or having the actors walk towards the camera. Technically all of that stuff could have been done with the older movies but nobody thought of doing it.
Very true. There's consideration of the family of incremental improvements vs. individual incremental improvements.
But then there's also the problem of terminology or poor use of shorthand. The 'iPhone' in particular seems to be the go-to phrase that some people pick (lazily) when they're discussing this topic, and actually mean 'mobile phone' or perhaps 'smartphone'. Or they're just ignorant of previous smartphones or mobile phone tech, I don't know.
So I am working on a little piece on AI for my SS and it draws its inspiration from an old Heinlein quote: "When it comes time to railroad you can railroad, but not before".
I think RIM could have probably beaten the iPhone to market with a competitor but, like the old movie makers, they were stuck in the old mindset and couldn't embrace the new. A lot of "innovation", as James Burke and Heinlein pointed out, is just grabbing the existing technology and pointing it in a new direction. IIRC Heinlein's robotics pioneer builds the first housecleaning robots (and makes himself fantastically rich) by just ordering a bunch of parts through the mail and gluing them together.
The flip side is that the world needs to catch up before innovation can proceed. You need all of the industrial and technological backdrop to build motion picture cameras before somebody can jump to the next level and figure out what a close up is.
I live in a coastal NY town that was hit hard by Superstorm Sandy. We lost electricity and sewage treatment for a few weeks. It was hard! VERY hard. And scary. Awful diseases lurk in untreated waste water. I remember (like it was yesterday) driving into town one evening and seeing a sign with a message flashing: "You can flush toilets." People in town rejoiced. I was so happy I cried! I can't see myself crying for restoration of cell service. Spot on, Freddie.
If it was cell, landline, and internet service that I was without for a few weeks, I'd probably cry at the restoration. Being able to communicate with your loved ones who live far away is good and I'd miss if if it was gone.
Freddie conflated sanitation with indoor plumbing. If everyone had a back yard with an outhouse as a backup, and you still had a system to take care of grey water, it would have been a minor inconvenience vs. losing telephone and Internet.
OK, but what you’re complaining about is what most advertising does, which is turning out stupid little dramas that try to be funny, but fail at it, in order to make us feel good about the product and buy it. The quality of Apple advertising has gone down shockingly since the running woman with the sledgehammer, that’s certainly true. Thank heaven that the quality of their products themselves, like the iPad I’m writing this on, hasn’t.
But AI means that robots will finally become functional at general purpose tasks, which is going to change everything about labor, production, capital, and our day-to-day lives. And that's leaving aside everything it's on the brink of doing better than humans in terms of writing and communication work. Apple AI is kind of a strawman, it does almost nothing.
Maybe the next test should be: can a robot build indoor plumbing?
I don't think it's a given that AI can handle general purpose tasks. Certainly there is a long history of technical innovations that impress initially but, even if they're useful, are overhyped.
I mean sure, there's always unfounded hype in tech and maybe robots won't happen this year. But Waymo is driving cars without people in multiple cities and lots of companies have plausible paths to selling useful humanoid robots at scale by 2030. There no longer seems to be a technical obstacle in the way.
If you agree that electricity was a big deal, this critique of AI feels a little like criticizing electricity as overhyped at the moment when it all it was good for was telegraph, dim lightbulbs, and starting fires.
People have been hyping self driving cars for 20 years now, at least, and they're still restricted to places that don't snow and that have been mapped super thoroughly. Plus it doesn't look like self driving vehicles are anywhere close to being able to completely replace human drivers.
Historically, most transformative technologies take about 25 years to go from niche usefulness to wide-scale impact and productivity improvements. Autonomous vehicles seem to be following that path (ahem).
Yes, it was and remains entirely over-hyped in both usefulness and especially time-to-market. I'm actually surprised AVs have had their current success in warm urban environments so soon (but lots of capital helped).
I suspect super-mapping will be economical nearly everywhere that 95% of people want to drive, although rural areas will suffer higher accident rates from infrequent updates.
Snow on the other hand...
As an erstwhile winter rally driver, I'm scared when my wife drives in the snow. There's no way I will trust an AV with that in my lifetime.
Except it's not "warm urban environments". There are plenty of those and the vast majority lack self driving cars. The obvious correlation works out to those cities where these corporations are doing their testing. Plus it's autonomous vehicles offered in the context of a service rather than a vehicle that consumers can buy, hence the corresponding limitations on where you can travel.
In other words all of this stuff is still in the testing stage. If it's going to move to the mass market in a 30 year time frame it needs to hurry, not to mention the number of pessimists who believe that truly autonomous vehicles are decades away assuming they're even possible.
I was describing the characteristics of the places where these services are offered (warm, urban), not positing that the services are available in all such locales.
To be clear on what I expressed surprise about, it's that they have gotten this far in any urban environment.
There are less complex environments for automated navigation, such as segregated guideways, lower volume private spaces,, sidewalks etc., which I thought we'd see exploited more thoroughly before urban public road services would be reach their current stage of development.
The almighty buck. Billions have been spent on self driving cars by this point. The only way to justify the continuing outlay is by hypothesizing an even larger payoff. Navigation on sidewalks and malls doesn't have the same customer base.
Austin has been a testing ground for driverless cars for a couple years. First the white-and-orange Cruise cars were doing laps around my neighborhood starting around 10 in the evening. They disappeared and were replaced by Waymo, which will return to the same street parking spots so that they start to seem like neighborhood fixtures. I gotta say, I'm getting used to seeing unoccupied automobiles. The thought of being in one on the highway still gives me pause, but when they're just tooling around residential streets they seem unremarkable.
I'm thinking AI-Robots too. We can make machines move; we can make them avoid obstacles; but they're little more than trains running on tracks—even if we don't see the tracks.
Robots don't have the finesse and dexterity of human craftsmen, and likely never will. Some things robots will do better, but only within select domains. We will use these to accept a compromise. For instance everyone is ga-ga over 3D printing and 3D printed houses. Is this really the best solution for a house?—or is it the solution you're able to get with 3D.
Agree that it's inconsistent across domains. But the number of areas in which robots perform well is going to keep increasing, especially as AI gets fully incorporated over the next couple years. There will be hardly any humans in most factories and warehouses by 2030.
Almost every educated human knows who Augustus Caesar was, but almost nobody knows who designed the aqueducts of Rome, even though piped water had far more real world impact on humans today than anything Augustus did.
I suppose this is because history is written for the powerful, and they don't have to haul their own water.
like Freddie...Always enjoy reading your comments FF.
I had to look it up, it was Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa.
I knew of, but had forgotten Agrippa's name. Didn't forget Augustus'.
True heads recognize the Portuguese carrack as the most transformative invention in human history, as its development eventually led to the entire Colombian Exchange and the creation of the first truly global empire.
I would have thought that writing was up there, as it allows preservation and transmission of information on a much larger scale. Like "How to build a carrack in the privacy of your own backyard!"
Astoundingly, Portugal was barely semi-literate at that time. Much was conveyed with very simple diagrams and numbers to build those ships, and of course, verbal handoff of knowledge. What relatively few books existed were tax records, histories and treatises about religion, split roughly 50/50 between Latin and Galician-Portuguese.
I remember when there was a profusion of dumb books like "HOW THE IRISH/SCOTS CHANGED THE WORLD!" but poor, stupid, backwards, tiny Portugal really did it in the end. The Colombian Exchange was the most monumental occurrence in human history, and arguably, natural history as well, and it was all due to the Portuguese crown's resentment about being sea-locked.
You think it's bigger than agriculture?
Discovery of metalworking? Navigation by stars? (I read some fascinating stuff about how Polynesians managed long-distance navigation to small islands in the middle of the South Pacific).
Yes, the Colombian Exchange was even bigger than all that.
Slow clap for indoor plumbing! The house where I grew up didn't have indoor plumbing until around 1970 and the pipes would freeze when I was a kid, which meant going to the outhouse in January with subzero temps. And that wasn't enough for me, so I was a PCV in El Salvador in a rural area with no indoor plumbing. The preventable disease (and death) was overwhelming, although the amoebas and daily 10 mile hikes in the mountains did leave me looking very fit and trim. As a result, I still smile when I pour a cold glass of water from the tap, which is wonderful ping in the middle of the onslaught of our days.
So, AI. Is there hope that these programs can crunch so many equations and possibilities and probabilities so quickly that there is some heightened potential for answering big technological questions? That gives me some hope, otherwise, I think we should ask these machines if the product they produce is worth the electricity consumed.
I'm still convinced that AI will be used mostly for getting us to buy more crap. It will know what we want before we do. And we will shell out our life-savings for the ability to have every remotely nifty whim of a 'want' on our doorstep before we're done with our morning coffee.
The future is AI-bespoked consumerism.
I think that's a safe bet (although I think the angle will not be reflective of our actual wants but effectively convincing us of what we should want). Remember the early 90s enthusiasm about the internet making us all smarter and more independent?
Agree on all fronts.
That's certainly why Meta is spending $60B on AI this year. Better targeting of AI slop ads on social media. Wheee!
I'll counter by pointing out that tech companies already tried this with AI powered Smart Speakers, and it was a huge failure. People preferred looking at options on the Domino's app to telling their AI assistant to order them a pizza.
I think the only reason smart speakers are still around is that killing a prominent AI tech may spook investors.
I think it's because people still don't like talking to a small box thing.
Turn it into a hot robot house-assistant, and people will be ordering all their crap from AI Jack or Jill. ;-)
If you're a media hermit, they don't have a chance to drive the desire to buy shit you don't need.
Great post. I work designing services in digital government, but a lot of my job involves advising on the digital tools that can actually help people, based on a fairly long career in user-centred design.
There is a real rush of companies promising the earth via AI at the moment, and while I am open-minded, that same question of 'what does this do that we can't do already' just recurs for me. I literally was on a call a half-hour ago saying this.
What I've noticed is that new technology has a way of completely blinding and stultifying people, like to the point that I sometimes feel if you showed them a shovel that only had a handle on it, or a glass that didn't have a bottom, but said it was 'powered by AI', they wouldn't notice the lack of handle or the water falling through.
It's the same for digital services. Usually the suggestions are making extremely banal things seem futuristic, like 'the AI will serve up tailored information to the user' or whatever when it's doing nothing Google can't do, and in fact is worse, but there is more sinister stuff being proposed also, and again people's moral compass is sort of warped by the novelty.
For example, I've seen the idea proposed that you could use a chatbot on a government website to talk to depressed or suicidal kids. I've seen someone, a whole team of people, suggest this with a straight face.
Sadly, I think a lot of governments will, as they always have done, be hoodwinked by big tech firms, big five consultancies or whoever else into spending billions on AI magic beans.
Sure, some stuff may work, but the end result will be more broken services, more fragmentation, more redundancies, and a landscape of shit that doesn't work coherently cos it was all done at different times by different people, based on whatever the latest fad thinking was.
I suspect it's because for the public a lot of this stuff is magic. If the genie can pass the bar exam why can't it mop your floors and take your dog for a walk? Where there's no rigor there can be no discrimination.
By being blinded, I mean more the decision-makers in positions of power often fail to look at things in the most simple/critical way when there's new tech involved. I think a big problem also is public sector bodies like to cut the ribbon on big expensive things - being seen to do shit that helps often replaces actually doing shit that helps.
But that's a general problem with the non-technical public. You would think that the people in charge of multi-billion dollar corporations would do a little more due diligence when it comes time to spend money but they seem to be as susceptible to hype as everybody else.
How much of this is also not wanting to look like a dinosaur? No one wants to look like the type of person who thought electricity and cars were a passing fad, so it's easier in the medium-term to sign off on technologies that they don't fully understand.
For sure. I think especially if you never know how the existing thing works then the new thing is quite exciting. Doing stuff is hard, making good things is hard, agreeing to spend money is easy.
Yes. People are human. It’s really the explanation for more things than I could have fathomed.
Have you read Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America? I’m reading now. It is revealing a lot to me about the culture of digital services in government, and adding so much nuance to my understanding of such things.
I must give this a go, I'm living in Europe but I bet there are a lot of similar problems, based on talking to American friends.
I do think you will find much that is familiar.
I hope she gets to solutions b/c the problems are super thorny and yet so understandable the way she breaks it all down.
Thanks for the suggestion! I'm excited to read this book, having grown up in the DC govt tech scene. My dad has been on the same modernization project for the IRS since 2001, and it's just crazy how bad the govt is at getting code written.
Awesome! It's a great listen, too! I'm pretty sure she reads it herself, and she has a great voice. :) I'm learning a lot. Not sure what to do with all of this knowledge (like a Thanksgiving meal), but I am hoping that the mists will part once I'm done! So glad you're excited and so appreciate your dad's persistence!
You might have missed it when in 2023 the board of an eating disorder hotline fired their real-life counselors and used an AI chatbot named Tessa. Primarily to cut costs but was done under the guise of serving more people. Tessa went off the deep-end and was providing not-so-sage advice to callers. It was subsequently terminated.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2023/05/31/non-profit-helpline-fires-staff-shifts-to-chatbot-solution/
>What I've noticed is that new technology has a way of completely blinding and stultifying people, like to the point that I sometimes feel if you showed them a shovel that only had a handle on it, or a glass that didn't have a bottom, but said it was 'powered by AI', they wouldn't notice the lack of handle or the water falling through.
During the dotcom boom, investors were throwing money at any startup which had ".com" in their name, even in some cases where the company didn't even have a website. A few years ago, every company was trying to market themselves as using "blockchain" - I was once at a job fair where two representatives of a company claimed they were a blockchain events management company. (Unsurprisingly, they were completely unable to articulate in what capacity they used the blockchain in order to manage events.) Now the trendy thing is AI, so every company is trying to pretend that they use AI as part of their business, even if they don't. (I mean, if you use ChatGPT to draft marketing emails, I suppose it's technically true that you "use AI" in your "business processes".) I wonder what the next big thing will be.
I absolutely share your skepticism of AI, though recently a sensible friend told me that LLM's are starting to learn to reason why things are *wrong*, rather than what's just most probable, which is a major step towards being useful in my book, successfully eliminating hallucinations being a major obstacle for LLM's trustworthiness.
However, I feel you're weak-manning the case. Sure, there are ridiculous commercials showing ridiculous things. But the pattern-recognition ability of AI has already been incredibly useful in science, from the search of extra-terrestrial planets to the diagnosis of tumors. And that means it actually can save lives.
Does that mean it's as useful as plumbing, the automobile or vaccines? No, absolutely not. But that doesn't mean that us skeptics have to make it seem dumber than it is. It's not necessary to make the same point.
" Sure, there are ridiculous commercials showing ridiculous things. But the pattern-recognition ability of AI has already been incredibly useful in science, from the search of extra-terrestrial planets to the diagnosis of tumors. "
It's ability to predict complex three dimensional molecular shapes based on amino acid sequence is already a game changer.
This is sound analysis, but also I think getting to the limitations of LLMs. LLMs really excel in consuming and analyzing massive amount of data.
That's very powerful, but it's certainly not everything. To use the allegedly "transformational" example of AI ordering you a pizza: this has been around since first gen Alexa debuted 7 years ago. But no one used it, because people prefer browsing a pizza menu to a chatbot summary.
Again, I would not judge a new thing by its weakest use, but its strongest. It's like saying cars are useless because drag racing exists.
I also think there are strong limits on what LLMs can achieve, which largely has to do with the nature of consciousness and creativity. But one of the best explanations for consciousness coming into existence I found in Surfing Uncertainty by Andy Clark. If I recall correctly, according to him, consciousness is pretty much an emergent property of an ever-growing stack of predictive processing, where the brain uses Bayesian reasoning to predict its surroundings (since actually perceiving everything would require constant neural power). Lower-level processes get referred to higher-level processes, and in some very intelligent animals consciousness emerged as a way of abstractly predicting and making sense of the world.
Obviously it's just philosophy, there's no truth there. But it could be an interesting way in which consciousness could emerge from a 'sea of data', to borrow a phrase from Ghost in the Shell. Stack enough analytical and consequently predictive processes on one another, and you might get something which starts predicting entirely new things into existence: creative consciousness.
My dad spent the first thirteen years of his life without an indoor toilet. When they first got one, he spent an entire hour just flushing it in awe, thankful to never again have to deal with poop detail—chopping down the mountain of accumulated shit—in the outhouse during an Alberta winter. AI may be able to help incompetent students fool incompetent teachers, but I feel like it’s creating more shit mountains than it is doing anything truly useful.
We live in a hyper-civilized world in which there is no need to understand where the necessities of life come from. Many of the greatest invention candidates you list fall into that category. But elimination of any would cause the vast majority of the list to become useless. Imagine if Maxwell and Tesla's work hadn't taken place and alternating current, displacement current and the transformer had never been invented. Just about everything we now experience as normal life wouldn't either.
As a working futurist, I've been encountering lists of "most transformative technologies" for decades. And all of them miss the one that's liberated half of humanity -- reliable contraception, without which women are forever tied to house, husband, and kids, never to realize their own economic and intellectual potential.
That one is up there with the wheel, fire, and the printing press in terms of its long-term effects on human civilization. It's going to take a couple of centuries to work through all the implications, which will touch every aspect of our lives. It's arguable that the global turn toward fundamentalism and fascism is, to a large degree, a backlash against the social and economic changes it's already wrought in family structures. This one's constantly underestimated (because it's just about women, so not important) -- but at a deep level, there isn't much going on in the world that can't be traced back to it somehow.
Whenever these lists turn up, if it doesn't include reliable contraception, the flush toilet, and vaccines, I don't take them seriously.
Ed Abbey, of all people (who would be considered a past-ist now, or at least one of those people for whom the future has no room, insofar as he's remembered) once made just such a list in one of his books, and contraception was among his top three. I want to say, aspirin was another, but that may be my fanatical attachment to aspirin.
It was the great hope of those who believed population growth must be slowed, if other species were not to lose *all* their niches on the planet. Contraception + education.
I don't know if contraception ever did take hold, around the world. People *stopped* talking about population, and I've not kept up with the subject.
But I do know from when I was paying attention, that the environmentalists/population worriers were confounded, back in the 70s/80s, because those Our World in Data type books would come out and invariably show that women surveyed in what was then called the Third World, reported having the number of children they wanted to have. Or, they wanted the number of children they'd had. Perhaps the question fails.
As soon as we get beyond 'transformative' into terms like 'important', there's a cost/benefit evaluation taking place which adds an asterisk to a few technologies, including that one.
Reliable contraception is deservedly seen as among the most transformative, but it's also the technology most directly responsible for the pending end of our civilization and its many other technologies (although one of those other technologies may beat reliable contraception to the task, or we may yet solve the problems created by reliable contraception within industrialized society).
I tend to view the under-population stance in a similar fashion to the over-population one - with a similar level of skepticism. People react to a scarcity of resources (in this case, time, money, housing, etc.) by having less babies. And I don't think there's a big reason to think people would not react to a scarcity of labor in the opposite way by having more babies.
I would say things that affect infertility or low sperm count would be much higher on the list of things we need to keep an eye on, rather than just preferring not to have kids.
I don't doubt that the societies that survive will be those that are willing to have enough babies to thrive. They just won't be part of our industrial civilization.
To date no industrial society has maintained a sufficient TFR after the advent of reliable contraception, and as TFR drops, the individual rewards for not having children are actually increasing - a positive feedback not headed for equilibrium, but collapse, likely through eventual de-industrialization.
The universality of this phenomenon across scores of societies points to the unlikeliness of a social choice solution, leaving technical solutions that would have to be at least as transformative as reliable contraception.
I have to admit, the thought of living in a de-industrial world is tempting to me...if we got to keep modern medicine that is.
More on topic, let's say your premise is accurate. It sounds to me like we might just need a crapton of droids running on clean energy to do all the 'industrial' work in that scenario. I have to say, keeping up a high birth rate just for the sake of filling in all those 'industrial' jobs sounds like a never-ending hellscape of an existence.
Or did you mean something else with the word 'industrial'?
You don't get modern medicine without the industrial revolution, so you don't get to keep it.
By 'industrial', I refer to societies with economies that have industrialized, adopting the technologies of the last 300 years.
Being 'industrial' doesn't mean you have to have a large population, you can have one without the other. Medical knowledge, expertise and research can certainly be done with a much smaller population, you just have a smaller pool of ideas to work with. Besides, this is one area where AI can start to do a lot of the heavy lifting as well.
You seem to have the idea I've seen lately that likes to point out a simple mathematical concept: more people = more ideas. Yeah okay...but more people also equals more resources and food and space required for all those people. You get to a point where the gain from more ideas from more people starts to get really offset by all the resources required for that high population. The practical efficiency from more people/more ideas is a bell curve, not a straight line.
Just like you don't want the population so low that the combined innovation and execution is too lacking, you also don't want it too high where the population is too taxing for the community, economy, and environment. There's a wide middle ground there that we should be shooting for, and not just unending pop growth for the sake of a few ideas we might miss out on with less people.
I forgot to mention that the drop in TFR is not due to a scarcity of resources.
Children going from an asset to a liability in industrial societies is why - with a delay - TFR dropped dramatically even as time, money and housing became more abundant.
Even if children suddenly became an asset today, because it takes decades to effect such large changes in TFR, most of today's industrial societies will be long gone by then.
I thought it dropped because of a demand problem - meaning all families didn't really 'need' to have kids anymore in order to either perpetuate the species, or continue the families' economic standard of living. I could be wrong, just spit-ballin' here.
On your second point, you make it sound like we're already past the point of no return. So what now?
In the industrial age, families don't need kids for prosperity. But they are for now still the only way to perpetuate the species.
Yes, most industrial societies have been below replacement rate for decades, and have reached the point of no return: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, Russia, most of Europe. The ratio of women in child-bearing years is far too small to avoid steep population decline. And steep population decline in an aging society makes it much harder to support having children, so there's a downward spiraling pressure on birth rates. Those societies will end late in this century or early next.
Exceptions include the US, France, Turkey, Mexico, India, Brazil, which have not had TFRs below 2.1 for long enough yet. Canada too, but only because of the highest of immigration rates, which others might try to imitate but which are unlikely to find cultural acceptance.
What now? I see three possibilities:
- lots of wars as populations decline and defence becomes difficult, including wars to gain (female) population. Societies collapse or are invaded.
- technological solutions such as artificial wombs and childcare robotics. It's not clear whether there's a population level big enough to invent the tech but small enough to make feasible at societal scale.
- financial re-engineering of society to the point that children are assets again. E.g. parents of 4+ retire from the workforce and/or receive supplements such that incomes average greater than childless couples.
This is why it’s important to perpetuate good ideas, not horrific ones.
I completely agree.
I agree with your overall sentiment, but I would not say contraception 'just affects women', or that it's underestimated precisely because it 'only' affects women (or more precisely, their bodies).
I mean, of course women really carry the weight of this situation...literally. But it's not exactly a one-or-the-other predicament. Sure I'm a dude, and of course I would say such a thing... but I mean, contraception can and does affect fathers too.
If it's truly being underestimated in this regard, that's to all our detriment.
I’ll take indoor plumbing, electricity, the wheel, the bowl, and antibiotics any day over “reliable contraception.” Herbal contraceptives and abortifacients have existed in various forms for thousands of years and are still widely used today. As someone who gave birth just three days ago, I’m far more concerned about surviving labor—a process that remains one of the leading causes of death for women worldwide.
Existentially speaking, is avoiding reproduction truly more advantageous than the ability to create life? Imagine if we knew there would be no more life after the current generation. Even those who don’t have children, never want them, or are among the few remaining children would suddenly find their existence meaningless and futile.
Understandably, noble causes like women’s ability to access education and pursue lives beyond child-rearing would quickly become irrelevant. Without the ability to “reliably create life,” no cause, passion, invention, or purpose would matter, as there would be no future generation to reap the benefits. Whether we acknowledge it or not, every single person living a civil, productive life is able to do so because women are still creating enough life to make theirs worthwhile.
Possible counter on the whole thing: I suspect, but don’t know for sure, that there are significant populations in the developing world, for whom cell phone infrastructure is cheap but indoor plumbing would be expensive, who rely on the smartphone far more than they would rely on toilets to be a part of the world.
And so the question is, if they were offered a trade of one for the other, which would they choose?
I’m wondering if some people wouldn’t choose the smart phone as necessary to participate in the local economy. “Cool, I would have plumbing, but wouldn’t have a job anymore.”
If you could promise that they’d still have a job, they’d take plumbing. But that gets more to my point that we rate importance by how they transform society, and right now I suspect for some people societies are so transformed that they need a smartphone to live.
(And I freely note that this is based on a general sense of life in these areas and that I don’t really have direct knowledge and could be totally, totally wrong.)
How essential are cel phones to the local economy? And which job pays more, doing whatever the cel phone allows you to do or laying down highways, putting in electricity, laying plumbing, and all the other assorted tasks associated with modern infrastructure.
For one example, In many cases, cell phones are how farmers in the developing know what price they should be getting for cash crops. They are how they can hold and transfer money somewhat securely, find out about work opportunities, get help from relatives, or go over the head of a local corrupt official, get news, books, and technical information. I'm sure I'm missing a ton of other things.
The point is that if you don't have all the accoutrements of an advanced civilization, the modern smartphone can fill enough of the gaps that people would be very reluctant to give it up, even for indoor plumbing.
As compared to just asking their neighbors? Sure, it's a nice to have but is it anywhere close to the utility of having a car?
Isn't this just the OLPC nonsense all over again?
Obviously your neighbors are much more useful than mine. Anyway, if you're one of these people, affording a smart phone is probably not that hard, while even a beater would be a stretch.
I'm not sure if this is a fair question, along the lines of that quote attributed to Henry Ford (although apparently he never said it) "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
We take indoor plumbing, potable water etc. for granted and can hardly imagine life without them. It's not so much of a stretch to think that there are parts of the world where they can't imagine life WITH them. To such a person, reliable mobile phone infrastructure might sound like an economic necessity, while a flushing toilet might sound like a luxury.
One data point in favour: this village in rural India, where a communal toilet was treated like a shrine rather than used for its intended purpose (https://www.planetcustodian.com/indian-villagers-worshiping-newly-built-toilets-instead-of-using-them/7873/).
Yeahhhhhhh, are they actually worshipping it as some sort of shrine or is that just a christening ceremony akin to a ribbon cutting?
Per the article I linked, there really does seem to be an issue with getting people to change their habits.
That's fine, but it's a far cry from worshipping a toilet as a shrine.
In many of the photos the villagers in question do indeed appear to be treating it as a shrine.
When designing stuff for people to use, that quote is often used as a critique of poor research. The thinking being that you find out people's needs, rather than asking them what they want.
That way you're not asking people to design a solution, but finding out what problems or needs they have.
It's a great question.
I've frequently asked this question in the developing world, and by far most prefer their cell phone over getting indoor plumbing.
Bias alert: I live in the developed world, but put indoor plumbing far down the list below, say, the Internet.
It's potable water and sanitation that are valuable, not indoor plumbing.
What is the point of this line of thinking?
Let's grant that the iPhone is not as important as indoor plumbing, or the automobile, or whatever else tickles your fancy.
So what? Are you arguing that smartphones were unimportant? That life hasn't changed in a significant way now that a huge portion of the population spends almost every waking moment on a screen?
Maybe it's silly to say that the iPhone is more important than those things. Okay, some people are silly. Again, so what? I don't understand the hostility and dismissiveness.
As you said in another comment, ChatGPT is not nearly as impactful as the automobile. Okay... where are the people making this argument?
Obviously, if AI was a mature technology and future iterations will only be moderate improvements, then AI will not be all that impactful. Who thinks this? On what basis?
It seems like you are arguing that since many people are overhyping the current generation of AI, all AI hype is totally unwarranted and nobody should pay any mind to the possibility of AGI in our lifetimes.
Do i really need to spell out why that argument is not a good one?
Part of the problem with that is the local societal expectations. Take India. Sanitation has never been up to western standards and so might not be as important. But being able to participate in a global economy, ie a farmer can check the rice prices in Japan or Malaysia in an instant and know when to sell.
So, they might fail the shitting in the backyard test, when they can make money.
how many weeks of stepping in shit, your friends stepping in shit, your kids stepping in shit, your dog rolling in shit ... everybody tracking shit everywhere before you're ready to ditch the cell phone for the pit toilet again?
I’m not speaking for me. I’m proposing/suggesting that people actually might need cell phones over toilets right now in certain parts of the world. Plumbing might be a luxury while cell phones might be a necessity the way the world is structured in some places.
I see your point, but reply: if you live in a place without indoor plumbing, you likely don't have electricity either. A cell phone may help you chat with a family member who has fled to the city, outside of that, a cell phone won't meaningfully change anything about your life.
I see someone without a cell phone as being a very small scale (perhaps) subsistence farmer. Someone who isn't growing 200 acres of grain with machinery. They're scratching 1 acre by hand, merely one step above the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Or perhaps the intermediary which I've seen in videos about India. Where a farmer grows 3 acres of wheat with a tractor that looks something like a riding lawnmower, or a Mad-Max rototiller. You have to consider how poor that guy really is. He doesn't have the best fertilizers, he maybe yields 5 tons per acre—which would be a vast step. That grain is only worth $300 per ton. So he earns $1,500 per year gross. After expenses (fuel, maintenance, seed, taxes, etc.), perhaps $1,000 ... a year. That's chump change. His son who is a programmer in Silicon Valley earns that much a day. Maybe he's growing in the Padma River floodplain. The local groundwater is high in arsenic, and its poisoning him. When the river comes up, he has to move all his stuff or lose it.
Thankfully its rapidly changing, I saw a chart the other day, less than 5 years ago, 80% of people in India were shitting on the open ground. Its home to about 1/3rd of global infant mortality. The death and disease resulting from that far outweighs the desire for a phone.
I actually wonder if there are places with electricity but not plumbing. Say, the favelas of Rio? That’s what I’ve had in the back of my mind; no real plumbing, a bunch of shacks, jerry-rigged electricity, but having a phone can still make life there much more doable?
I do take your larger point, and I’d have to put plumbing above smartphones for health reasons alone. HOWEVER, I think we are seeing this technology reshape our societies in some remarkable ways that, if not quite as important as plumbing, probably feel absolutely vital to some people’s livelihood, more vital than the annoyance of using an outhouse. So we shouldn’t sneer at it either.
In Alaska its pretty common to have electricity but not plumbing. ‘Dry cabins’ are advertised on Craigslist.
Freddie conflates sanitation with indoor plumbing. Nearly everyone prefers sanitation, because it's deadly to live without in an urban area.
But indoor plumbing is not life or death, it's just more convenient, especially below freezing, than an outhouse or communal flushies. Many would prefer the convenience of cell phones (vs no phone service) over moving their toilet indoors.
For those of us who only experienced a spidery dark outhouse once or twice in our lives, it’s hard to imagine going back to that. In fact, it is readily understandable to me that people in other parts of the world have been slow to adopt even that. When I’m in a national park, I will typically climb off trail halfway up a mountain rather than use the chemical toilet.
Outhouses are luxury! I do a lot of wilderness tripping, and encountering a campsite with a thunderbox is a treat. Seriously.
They usually come with a trail to them too, which is easier than bushwhacking the requisite 70m from water and finding a place with enough soil to dig a hole of proper depth.
That said, I live in rattlesnake territory, and the most likely time to get bit is just after dark on the way to the loo.
One of my recently fav jump the shark moments was when Zoom was valued more than... Exxon. Climate politics aside, it was nuts to think Zoom was more important in any meaningful short and medium term lasting way than Exxon was in 2020.
Zoom's edge was make it easier to join a video call by clicking a link rather than installing a program, that's how they ate Skype's lunch, and it's also what should have made it extremely obvious that they have zero moat.
Fun fact: Skype actually ended up eating Zoom's lunch after Microsoft rebranded it as Teams and gave away free licenses to every company for the first few years.
The real loser is Webex.
"This guy ITs" haha
More broadly, FdB occasionally pushes the idea that we can’t count new inventions as most important because they rely on old inventions. Well, that’s not a useful measure. The measure is, what inventions have caused the most change? The automobile is a fantastic one. It relied on a bunch of previous inventions, but there was a marked change between before and after.
And guess what! There was still material inequality and boredom and misery too. Apparently the automobile wasn’t important. Nothing is important. All is nihilism.
There’s good stuff in this piece, but it’s very confused in its overall thrust, making three arguments at once, none of which quite land. 3/5 stars
I agree that the automobile and cel phone are both "collections" of previously existing technology but that doesn't mean they've both had the same impact on humanity. You could make the argument that suburbs, for example, are a consequence of the automobile. And oil has made places like Saudi Arabia into regional powers with all of the attendant impacts on world affairs and geopolitics.
I see that both you and FdB misinterpreted me, which means I f***ed up. The automobile is clearly a transformative technology. But FdB slides between saying that inventions’ importance are because of their transformative power (good measure), whether they relied on other inventions (bad measure) or whether they lift us out of this vale of tears (extremely bad measure). I’m mocking the last one.
Plumbing relies on pre-existing technology so I'm not sure that's DeBoer's point. And I think the real questions wrt happiness is not whether invention X has eliminated unhappiness but whether you would be less happy in its absence.
A car is an interesting example because just about everyone experiences life without one at some point. I suspect most people would argue life improved significantly once you got your driver's license.
We can steelman the post and make some really good points, I’m sure. What I’m complaining about is that we actually do have to do some steelmanning to make it work. It’s kinda all over the place.
I mean it’s a blog, he’s a way better writer than I, etc, etc, but I heart-emoji a bunch of his posts too so I feel free to call out the ones that don’t land. ;)
Tastes vary. I thought it was great. I thought the "Would you rather shit in the yard?" question was absolutely brilliant.
Which has a bigger influence on the world on a day to day basis, the automobile or ChatGPT?
[deleted my last comment, because Slaw pointed out that I wasn’t clear]
It depends: the automobile is clearly more transformative than ChatGPT and will likely always be so. But in terms of lifting us out of misery and into a sparkling world of joy, they’re pretty much equal. My point is that I can’t tell from your post which metric I’m supposed to be using, and ChatGPT is great for me putting funny graphics on throwaway PowerPoints.
Counterpoint: The Ambulance
ChatGPT lifts you out of misery? Since when? Everytime I've used it, even for some silly lark, I've felt depleted. It's the same feeling I get after dealing with the cable company or the DMV. Just overwhelmed talking to something that is mechanically following a script rather than actually listening.
This, like a bureaucracy, forces you to figure out your own script. "What is the exact wording I need to use to get this stupid thing to do what I need it to?" Often, there isn't a correct answer.
It’s more that no matter how bright and shiny my car or my AI chatbot is, as FdB pointed out, we are all destined to live, suffer, and die. So automobiles and LLMs are about equal.
Indeed, I hate every minute I have to drive someplace and moved to as walkable neighborhood as I can find in my city. Whereas I can make cute graphics with ChatGPT. Winning!
Slightly more directly, I’ve gotten ChatGPT to
1) Search whether I need the shingles vaccine even if I have had shingles (yes);
2) Give me a really in-depth, question-and-answer tutorial on quantum computing that seems right in general;
3) Calculate the g-forces I would encounter being flung by a trebuchet;
4) Help me brainstorm toppings for a burger topped with chimichurri.
Among others. Some searches work better than others.
Can’t stand it for writing, though.
Yeah, I started with thinking the transistor was the most important, but then Freddie got onto ceramic bowls, and I thought ceramics which were the insulator of choice before plastics. Insulators being required for the study of electricity. The automobile ... Tesla, Volta, those guys were giants ... but all their work requires copper wire, so perhaps its wire, or metal working.
I think Feral Finster mentioned writing, which may be the ultimate root.
I really like this post, and agree that Freddie not only had 3 metrics with widely variable usefulness, but he applied them spottily (e.g. automobiles also relied heavily on previous inventions).
Slaw took that to mean that Freddie wasn't making the 'leans on previous tech' argument, but Freddie clearly was.
Personally, I see the original iPhone as fairly incremental over the Blackberry, but if we substitute iPhone with 'mobile phones', I would say it has been quite transformative.
"Personally, I see the original iPhone as fairly incremental over the Blackberry"
I think this leads to the question of what "tech" is anyway. When the first motion pictures came out the first movies were staged like plays, shot from the perspective of somebody sitting in the audience.
Then the innovators like DW Griffith arrived and did stuff like moving the camera, or taking close up shots, or having the actors walk towards the camera. Technically all of that stuff could have been done with the older movies but nobody thought of doing it.
Very true. There's consideration of the family of incremental improvements vs. individual incremental improvements.
But then there's also the problem of terminology or poor use of shorthand. The 'iPhone' in particular seems to be the go-to phrase that some people pick (lazily) when they're discussing this topic, and actually mean 'mobile phone' or perhaps 'smartphone'. Or they're just ignorant of previous smartphones or mobile phone tech, I don't know.
So I am working on a little piece on AI for my SS and it draws its inspiration from an old Heinlein quote: "When it comes time to railroad you can railroad, but not before".
I think RIM could have probably beaten the iPhone to market with a competitor but, like the old movie makers, they were stuck in the old mindset and couldn't embrace the new. A lot of "innovation", as James Burke and Heinlein pointed out, is just grabbing the existing technology and pointing it in a new direction. IIRC Heinlein's robotics pioneer builds the first housecleaning robots (and makes himself fantastically rich) by just ordering a bunch of parts through the mail and gluing them together.
The flip side is that the world needs to catch up before innovation can proceed. You need all of the industrial and technological backdrop to build motion picture cameras before somebody can jump to the next level and figure out what a close up is.
I recommend the recent film Blackberry, if you haven't seen it.
I had no idea there was a movie. I'll look it up.
Freddie this article is one of your great ones.
It made my day. Best article I've read in weeks.
Thank you.
*so much depressing news...so much BS spin out there*
"We do not live in an age of wonders; we live in a disenchanted world, the Age of Comfortable Boredom."
Absolutely one of your best--and most quotable--posts, Freddie. And "snacktacular" gave me my biggest belly laugh of 2025. Thanks for that.
I'll be sharing this one far and wide.
I live in a coastal NY town that was hit hard by Superstorm Sandy. We lost electricity and sewage treatment for a few weeks. It was hard! VERY hard. And scary. Awful diseases lurk in untreated waste water. I remember (like it was yesterday) driving into town one evening and seeing a sign with a message flashing: "You can flush toilets." People in town rejoiced. I was so happy I cried! I can't see myself crying for restoration of cell service. Spot on, Freddie.
If it was cell, landline, and internet service that I was without for a few weeks, I'd probably cry at the restoration. Being able to communicate with your loved ones who live far away is good and I'd miss if if it was gone.
I got you, but for my money, clean running water and toilets that flush are priorities.
Freddie conflated sanitation with indoor plumbing. If everyone had a back yard with an outhouse as a backup, and you still had a system to take care of grey water, it would have been a minor inconvenience vs. losing telephone and Internet.
OK, but what you’re complaining about is what most advertising does, which is turning out stupid little dramas that try to be funny, but fail at it, in order to make us feel good about the product and buy it. The quality of Apple advertising has gone down shockingly since the running woman with the sledgehammer, that’s certainly true. Thank heaven that the quality of their products themselves, like the iPad I’m writing this on, hasn’t.
But AI means that robots will finally become functional at general purpose tasks, which is going to change everything about labor, production, capital, and our day-to-day lives. And that's leaving aside everything it's on the brink of doing better than humans in terms of writing and communication work. Apple AI is kind of a strawman, it does almost nothing.
Maybe the next test should be: can a robot build indoor plumbing?
I don't think it's a given that AI can handle general purpose tasks. Certainly there is a long history of technical innovations that impress initially but, even if they're useful, are overhyped.
Will?
I mean sure, there's always unfounded hype in tech and maybe robots won't happen this year. But Waymo is driving cars without people in multiple cities and lots of companies have plausible paths to selling useful humanoid robots at scale by 2030. There no longer seems to be a technical obstacle in the way.
If you agree that electricity was a big deal, this critique of AI feels a little like criticizing electricity as overhyped at the moment when it all it was good for was telegraph, dim lightbulbs, and starting fires.
People have been hyping self driving cars for 20 years now, at least, and they're still restricted to places that don't snow and that have been mapped super thoroughly. Plus it doesn't look like self driving vehicles are anywhere close to being able to completely replace human drivers.
Historically, most transformative technologies take about 25 years to go from niche usefulness to wide-scale impact and productivity improvements. Autonomous vehicles seem to be following that path (ahem).
Yes, it was and remains entirely over-hyped in both usefulness and especially time-to-market. I'm actually surprised AVs have had their current success in warm urban environments so soon (but lots of capital helped).
I suspect super-mapping will be economical nearly everywhere that 95% of people want to drive, although rural areas will suffer higher accident rates from infrequent updates.
Snow on the other hand...
As an erstwhile winter rally driver, I'm scared when my wife drives in the snow. There's no way I will trust an AV with that in my lifetime.
Except it's not "warm urban environments". There are plenty of those and the vast majority lack self driving cars. The obvious correlation works out to those cities where these corporations are doing their testing. Plus it's autonomous vehicles offered in the context of a service rather than a vehicle that consumers can buy, hence the corresponding limitations on where you can travel.
In other words all of this stuff is still in the testing stage. If it's going to move to the mass market in a 30 year time frame it needs to hurry, not to mention the number of pessimists who believe that truly autonomous vehicles are decades away assuming they're even possible.
I was describing the characteristics of the places where these services are offered (warm, urban), not positing that the services are available in all such locales.
To be clear on what I expressed surprise about, it's that they have gotten this far in any urban environment.
There are less complex environments for automated navigation, such as segregated guideways, lower volume private spaces,, sidewalks etc., which I thought we'd see exploited more thoroughly before urban public road services would be reach their current stage of development.
The almighty buck. Billions have been spent on self driving cars by this point. The only way to justify the continuing outlay is by hypothesizing an even larger payoff. Navigation on sidewalks and malls doesn't have the same customer base.
Austin has been a testing ground for driverless cars for a couple years. First the white-and-orange Cruise cars were doing laps around my neighborhood starting around 10 in the evening. They disappeared and were replaced by Waymo, which will return to the same street parking spots so that they start to seem like neighborhood fixtures. I gotta say, I'm getting used to seeing unoccupied automobiles. The thought of being in one on the highway still gives me pause, but when they're just tooling around residential streets they seem unremarkable.
So Austin, Phoenix, California--but what about Chicago or NY? It's a niche product right now and foe the foreseeable future.
I'm thinking AI-Robots too. We can make machines move; we can make them avoid obstacles; but they're little more than trains running on tracks—even if we don't see the tracks.
Robots don't have the finesse and dexterity of human craftsmen, and likely never will. Some things robots will do better, but only within select domains. We will use these to accept a compromise. For instance everyone is ga-ga over 3D printing and 3D printed houses. Is this really the best solution for a house?—or is it the solution you're able to get with 3D.
Agree that it's inconsistent across domains. But the number of areas in which robots perform well is going to keep increasing, especially as AI gets fully incorporated over the next couple years. There will be hardly any humans in most factories and warehouses by 2030.