I appreciate you bringing up the connection between technology and human ideals, principles and values. Technology has had an outsized impact on values, and on empathy itself, most of which occurred when we weren’t looking.
Just pretty much exactly the kind of thinking that I'm rejecting - absolutely no serious people think that asteroid mining will be economically viable to the point that it's anything more than a gimmick in the next 50 or however many years. The fact that a technology is DESCRIBABLE does not make it PLAUSIBLE, let alone pragmatically viable compared to the present reality. It's really really expensive to send large tonnage from space to earth! Unless there's some vibranium in those asteroids there's not going to be any advantage beyond "this seems cool and futuristic" there for a long time.
For me the biggest example of all smoke with no fire has been the tablet. It surprises me how many people will argue with me about it. To me, it’s a classic example of consumers being persuaded that we need The New Thing. It’s midway between a phone and a laptop, and does neither thing well. But the hype, oh the hype. I taught in a school board that gave an IPad to every student. It went as you would expect.
Both of my girls in college use tablets extensively. Most young musicians use tablets instead of paper music. That's not world changing by any means...but it's change.
I suspect we won't know the "Big Change" until later when we can look at it in the rearview mirror.
Yep, there are certain very specific things that tablets are great for: sheet music and digital books are the big ones. But it's true that they aren't universal game changers. My wife has a phone, a tablet, and a laptop, each for their own purposes. The phone gets the vast majority of her use-per-day minutes.
Definitely. I was speculating with my husband yesterday about whether or not we would even know it was game changing technology until fifty to a hundred years went by.
I think a technology that has profound consequences that rarely gets a mention is effective available birth control. After anti-biotics, immunization and public sanitation allowed human population to explode, we now are able to control the number of children we have. The decoupling of sex and childbearing has radically changed the role of women in society.
Just think of what's going on in paternalistic Asian societies right now. Women are on strike in the baby making department. I just read a Foreign Affairs article that Xi is trying to get women to have more babies by making it harder for them to get a divorce. Now that's going to be effective!! Who is going to want to get married if you can't leave an abusive asshole?
With birth control, people can vote with their fertility if they like the way their lives are turning out.
My two cents: I don't give a fuck about AI but its less glamorous cousin language translate technology will change the world. Just the dumb old Google translate app is already good enough that you can communicate with anyone on earth. Yeah sometimes it mistranslates "street" into "horse" or whatever but then it's really funny when you try to suss mistranslations. There's also tech where you can attach a translator to your phone and it operates even without internet, but that's still too expensive.
I think it's beyond like "I can order in French on my leisurely vacation." As an example I went to a refugee camp of Syrians. I don't speak a word of Arabic, they barely had any English, but we talked and made friends and talk regularly on the phone now, and now I'm obsessed with their cause because we made that connection. Also, Venezuelan refugees in New York too don't speak a word of English. As the world is dead set on creating refugee crisis after refugee crisis, better communication between humans who speak different languages is I think world changing.
Since the 1960s the real revolution has been more social and cultural rather than technological. Mid-20th century technology has spread across the world in a great act of levelling, and falling costs for transportation and communication have created a global culture with a global lingua franca. Our species has spent the past 60 years sharing the wealth, as it were, rather than pushing out the frontier. That's why I'm skeptical when some such as Gordon paint the current age as one of stagnation. Technologically, yes we have stagnated. But socially and culturally we have progressed incredibly.
As a child I often wondered if war would become obsolete, and the answer to that question in my mind hinged on whether humans melded into a single culture before dispersing beyond earth, or if we dispersed before unifying thus preserving the divisions of the past. It appears we are on the former path.
I want fusion. But look how badly we fucked up with fission. The fact the world isn’t currently powered by nuclear makes me highly doubtful that we’d even do much with fusion when it arrives.
Plus, take a look at your next electricity bill. It likely breaks down the cost into components. Actual generation often isn’t the majority of it.
This may be true (and I share your skepticism about a lot of this stuff, particularly VR) - but it also reminds me of discourse at the end of the 19th century:
- Philip Von Jolly, Planck's teacher, told him to not go into physics as "a highly developed, almost fully mature science which, now that the discovery of energy has crowned it, so to speak, will soon reach its final stability would have taken shape."
- The head of the US patent office wrote in 1902 "In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold."
Like I said, I'm skeptical about VR, AI, and so forth - but I'm more skeptical of promises of the end of history, or the end of technological growth. I think it's very tempting to look at something like space travel and say "a world where that happens is indistinguishable from a world where it doesn’t, for the average person." This isn't a new criticism of space travel; people have said this for the last 60 years. But communications satellites, GPS, etc. *have* been enormously significant inventions that have improved the lives of the average person, not just through direct use, but also through, e.g. allowing better automation of farm equipment which increases ag productivity.
Yes and no! High-density LEO satellites like Starlink are really different than traditional geosynchronous satellites - vastly improved throughput and latency, which is why they can deliver rural broadband at a price & performance not too much worse than terrestrial internet.
But I think the other half of this is, in 1965 you probably wouldn't have predicted, like, a combine that uses Starlink and GPS to autonomously harvest a field. How this technology gets used depends on so many things - economics & scalability of production, complementary technologies, novel use cases arising from technological advancements in other fields or environmental changes, etc.
I really love VR, but I can definitely see why other people don’t like it: there are few truly great games out there, and the wonkiness of wearing a headset and the need for enough space to use it make it a bit cumbersome to use regularly. Half Life: Alyx just isn’t enough to persuade the average gamer to buy in. Technology may be moving slower on truly life-changing applications and inventions, but so what? Living in the Big Boring is pretty damned interesting to me, and if it truly is the Forever Now, that makes me feel pretty good about things. Big change can mean big problems for small people, so maybe incremental change is the safe bet for the future.
This is a topic that a number of tech industry commentators, most notably including _Peter Thiel_ of all people, have been pushing on for a long time: revolutions in information technology, while nice, simply do not have the same level of impact as revolutions in the material world. Coal and steam power, the railroad, the assembly line -- these all had far more impact to everyday wealth and prosperity than the Internet ever will.
We're definitely seen a slowdown in innovation and change in the physical world. My understanding is people who study this see two big reasons for this:
1. We've simply run out of easy scientific advances and applications in the physical world; the low hanging fruit have all been plucked.
2. Changes to regulations, safetyism and a general aversion to changing the physical environment has made large scale improvements to the physical world much harder than previously.
My POV is that as a combination of 1 and 2, the _return on investment_ of innovation in physical devices is much lower than the ROI in software, and as a consequence our entire technology culture focuses exclusively on software. Everything else follows from that.
I don't know about India, but I believe you can cross China of that list. It is currently looking ever more inward and grows ever more distrustful of foreigners. When the highest aspiration one has is to work for government, that's not the recipe for bold innovation.
The catch is that it's easy to see when we're on the second flat part of a past S-curve, but it's nigh-impossible to tell if we're on the first flat part of a coming one. For now, it looks like all the low-hanging fruit have been picked, but some new breakthrough or swerve may come along and produce a whole new bumper crop of such fruit. There's really no way of knowing either way, so there's not much point in either optimism or pessimism. Best to just acknowledge the uncertainty and live with it.
"I know I’m never going to convince most people that AI is not coming to rescue them from boredom and disappointment and let them live forever and bring back their beloved childhood dog Rusty and allow them to get kinky on the Holodeck. "
LOL. Well done.
I think homesteaders are going to be the new upper class by then end of this century. The global order started after WWII by the US and maintained by the US since then... the one that provided the world such marvelous advancement, peace and prosperity... the one that those same classroom kids and their older peers are demanding be expanded and destroyed at the same time... well it is coming to an end.
It is simply breathtaking the benefit and harm dichotomy of this common human tendency to always want more. My mother, God rest her soul, after being raised a poor country bumpkin that bought her clothing at Montgomery Wards and suffering a terrible first marriage with a man that could not keep a job, marries an enterprising second husband who provides an upper-class lifestyle for her. I remember her being so upset that her housekeeper was quitting (after all they had done for her) because she would have to do house work until she trained another. The poor housekeeping girl had to go back to Mexico to care for her sick mother. I remember being so disappointed in my mother at that point for becoming one of them. Thankfully it was only a temporary moment of her weakness... she was 95% above all the classism.
But everyone eventually has to rewrite the chapters of their life book to match their new reality. They eventually get pissed and resentful getting stuck in a chapter... they always want to turn the page. One problem is when their obsession to turn the page overwhelms their good judgement (they feel the need to do something different, and pick something bad). Another problem is that they forget the path they took to get where they are, and the lack of perspective makes them waste historical wisdom and thus repeat unnecessary mistakes.
I hire young people to work for me. I have been astounded that I have to teach them how to handle a cordless drill.... how to change a toilet paper role, and how to handle constructive criticism. Yes, they are witty, brilliant, educated and quick. They can communicate in binary semi-language and images with their peers in ways never seen before. But they are hugely ignorant in common sense and everyday life-skills. They are probably the least prepared generations for dealing with the coming collapse.
After listening to Elon Musk's early November appearance on the JRE, I'm now convinced that we in the West are completely screwed because we no longer know how to manufacture 'stuff.' He just could not emphasize how difficult manufacturing is. I think his best example was that the weakest part in the manufacturing process dictates the overall speed of manufacture; so 9,999 parts can be made and installed with ease, but that last part that's troublesome threatens to destroy the operation.
Anyone can point to the Tesla gigafactory or the Seattle Boeing factory, but only 8.4% of workers are directly employed in manufacturing. This is catastrophic for America. It's not really about knowing how to "make" things per se, it's more about the collective knowledge society gains by having a wide swath of manufacturing knowledge in the country. We are fucked.
I'm 42. My generation wanted to move past dirty and labor-intensive manufacturing into a service-based economy. Good job, we did it 🎉🎉 and now we collectively don't know shit about making phones, or clothes, or TVs, or rockets, or cars, or books, or frankly anything.
That trend is reversing somewhat, but it will never reach the point it once was. A much smaller portion of the population has been prepared to work in mfring.
People will abandon themselves to tech. It will make every major decision for them, from when to change jobs to what to eat for dinner. There will be explicitly AI controlled cults where members pool their incomes and the machines divvy it up.
People will stop asking their phones for directions and instead start asking them for permission.
The literal tech won't have to progress much further than it already has. The main change will be how we think about it.
This is a reasonable argument about the current state of consumer tech—and your description of AI aligns broadly with what most actual AI engineers and researchers think (I touched on this a little yesterday in https://dansitu.substack.com/p/power-technology-and-love).
But most technology isn't consumer tech, it's boring stuff that makes other things work better. The "Green Revolution" was an accumulation of fairly boring incremental improvements to agriculture that happened over the course of the 20th Century. Together they produced an astonishing increase in yields, especially in the developing world, that has enabled literally billions of additional human lives.
The same dull incrementalism has borne multiple agricultural and industrial revolutions that have taken human beings from a tiny ecological niche to a space-faring species. And the pace of incremental improvement is increasing. Minor improvements in manufacturing yields, cost-reduction, and supply chain technologies really add up. At a fundamental level, technology IS incrementalism—and though things may seem flat from the perspective of a lifetime, we've been living on an ultra-steep gradient for the past few hundred years.
While I do think some amazing consumer tech is in the pipeline (https://dansitu.substack.com/p/furby-is-the-future-of-ai), consumer gadgets have always been pretty unimportant compared to our shunting around of matter and energy with ever-increasing skill.
A surprising number I think! In my experience, the pseudo-financial weirdness of VC pitch decks makes it much easier to pitch an incremental efficiency improvement than a genuinely revolutionary approach (% efficiency gains translate to savings for customers, which translate to available margin for the product or service).
A lot of investment also goes towards general tools and platforms that make it easier to design efficiency-improving techniques for specific industries. It’s a bit obfuscated, but it’s very significant.
This hasn’t been my experience in the slightest. Every single VC will respond with “I don’t see how this can be a billion dollar business” when shown some incremental idea. It’s a meme at this point, and one they happily acknowledge.
Big businesses on the other hand... they are continuously investing billions in incremental improvements.
It has to be applicable at scale, otherwise it doesn’t make sense. For example, Flexport is a nice dull company: their platform for efficiently routing shipping containers allows them to charge 60% less per container than their competition (https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/21/container-full-of-cash/).
Vast numbers of containers are shipped each day, so this adds up to a lot of money. There are tons of companies like this, chipping away at costs in some small way that adds up at scale.
"Space-faring species" may be technically true, but the wording sounds like quite the optimistic stretch to me for a species that struggles to get anything into space without huge cost, and that can't do much more other than put some small structures and lots of rubbish in orbit, along with some flags on our moon every now and then.
We are not very competent at manipulating matter or energy. Nuclear fusion has so far gone nowhere outside of experiments, for example, and how else are we going to make any serious advancements in energy production? As far as I know, there is no better way to produce energy than fusion according to the laws of physics apart from direct conversion of mass to energy through antimatter annihilation which is impossible for us to even think of right now, and may not be possible at all in our current understanding.
Our manipulation of matter is not much better than it ever was; for one, we can't even operate much on smaller scales like the nanoscale and have made little advancements in terms of manufacturing or engineering for decades that I'm aware of, apart from carbon nanotubes which rather than being used the way they were imagined for e.g a space elevator, are used mostly to reinforce sports equipment like hockey sticks instead (also, it turns out medieval damascus steel had carbon nanotubes in it made through forging processes anyway).
Two, even if we do have nanomaterials and computers with 3nm semiconductor nodes, this is fundamentally no different from working with stone tools because you are manipulating the micro scale at the macro scale which is inefficient; the manipulation of smaller scales than the nanoscale like the femtoscale are unimaginable to us to even attempt.
Physics has slowed to a crawl and particle accelerators have made few meaningful discoveries with mostly null results, which are of course themselves meaningful, although it may take time for them to have an effect given all the careers at stake built on string theory and whatnot. Decades of research have failed to make much if any advancement on the biggest mysteries.
Optimism, however, always prevails over pessimism in science and thus scientists with optimistic outlooks will always receive undue attention over pessimists, of which there are many but few whose thoughts are given consideration. E.g., the physicists who believe quantum computing is impossible (practically speaking, in a way that's useful over conventional computing) are largely ignored completely compared to when someone at Microsoft or wherever wants to hype up the discovery of anyons and the idea of building a topographical quantum computer in two-dimensional space through braiding the particles that exist in lower dimensional space, which is a much more exciting idea (the fact we don't know enough about one-dimensional physics to know if it'd even theoretically work is less so).
I think all that is true—but on the timescale of human history we’re still very close to the moment when nuclear physics was first discovered, only a couple lifetimes ago.
It may feel day to day like we’re in a lull, but it’s more likely a local minima on an explosively steep hill. The problems are harder these days, but there’s a hell of a lot more human minds trying to solve them :)
Tech could probably eliminate violent crime over the next few decades via better surveillance and forensics tech, but we’ll probably leave that set of innovations on the table
We’re bad at implementing them. Some countries have had no problem at all using tech to solve crime. Walking around places like Singapore make this evident.
"I know I’m a pessimist but I genuinely can’t think of any actually plausible new capabilities that smartphones might have in three years that they don’t have now." I actually feel that this is wildly optimistic. Maybe once these shitty avenues for the expression of creativity have run out, people will explore deeper wells of creativity and value creation.
I appreciate you bringing up the connection between technology and human ideals, principles and values. Technology has had an outsized impact on values, and on empathy itself, most of which occurred when we weren’t looking.
Just pretty much exactly the kind of thinking that I'm rejecting - absolutely no serious people think that asteroid mining will be economically viable to the point that it's anything more than a gimmick in the next 50 or however many years. The fact that a technology is DESCRIBABLE does not make it PLAUSIBLE, let alone pragmatically viable compared to the present reality. It's really really expensive to send large tonnage from space to earth! Unless there's some vibranium in those asteroids there's not going to be any advantage beyond "this seems cool and futuristic" there for a long time.
OK
Sounds like you are describing the Expanse!
For me the biggest example of all smoke with no fire has been the tablet. It surprises me how many people will argue with me about it. To me, it’s a classic example of consumers being persuaded that we need The New Thing. It’s midway between a phone and a laptop, and does neither thing well. But the hype, oh the hype. I taught in a school board that gave an IPad to every student. It went as you would expect.
Both of my girls in college use tablets extensively. Most young musicians use tablets instead of paper music. That's not world changing by any means...but it's change.
I suspect we won't know the "Big Change" until later when we can look at it in the rearview mirror.
Yep, there are certain very specific things that tablets are great for: sheet music and digital books are the big ones. But it's true that they aren't universal game changers. My wife has a phone, a tablet, and a laptop, each for their own purposes. The phone gets the vast majority of her use-per-day minutes.
Definitely. I was speculating with my husband yesterday about whether or not we would even know it was game changing technology until fifty to a hundred years went by.
I think a technology that has profound consequences that rarely gets a mention is effective available birth control. After anti-biotics, immunization and public sanitation allowed human population to explode, we now are able to control the number of children we have. The decoupling of sex and childbearing has radically changed the role of women in society.
Just think of what's going on in paternalistic Asian societies right now. Women are on strike in the baby making department. I just read a Foreign Affairs article that Xi is trying to get women to have more babies by making it harder for them to get a divorce. Now that's going to be effective!! Who is going to want to get married if you can't leave an abusive asshole?
With birth control, people can vote with their fertility if they like the way their lives are turning out.
My two cents: I don't give a fuck about AI but its less glamorous cousin language translate technology will change the world. Just the dumb old Google translate app is already good enough that you can communicate with anyone on earth. Yeah sometimes it mistranslates "street" into "horse" or whatever but then it's really funny when you try to suss mistranslations. There's also tech where you can attach a translator to your phone and it operates even without internet, but that's still too expensive.
This is great if you’re into international travel but how is it going to change the world?
I think it's beyond like "I can order in French on my leisurely vacation." As an example I went to a refugee camp of Syrians. I don't speak a word of Arabic, they barely had any English, but we talked and made friends and talk regularly on the phone now, and now I'm obsessed with their cause because we made that connection. Also, Venezuelan refugees in New York too don't speak a word of English. As the world is dead set on creating refugee crisis after refugee crisis, better communication between humans who speak different languages is I think world changing.
Since the 1960s the real revolution has been more social and cultural rather than technological. Mid-20th century technology has spread across the world in a great act of levelling, and falling costs for transportation and communication have created a global culture with a global lingua franca. Our species has spent the past 60 years sharing the wealth, as it were, rather than pushing out the frontier. That's why I'm skeptical when some such as Gordon paint the current age as one of stagnation. Technologically, yes we have stagnated. But socially and culturally we have progressed incredibly.
As a child I often wondered if war would become obsolete, and the answer to that question in my mind hinged on whether humans melded into a single culture before dispersing beyond earth, or if we dispersed before unifying thus preserving the divisions of the past. It appears we are on the former path.
Wearables
What about fusion ignition? Seems like that could be a new societal game changer.
I want fusion. But look how badly we fucked up with fission. The fact the world isn’t currently powered by nuclear makes me highly doubtful that we’d even do much with fusion when it arrives.
Plus, take a look at your next electricity bill. It likely breaks down the cost into components. Actual generation often isn’t the majority of it.
This may be true (and I share your skepticism about a lot of this stuff, particularly VR) - but it also reminds me of discourse at the end of the 19th century:
- Lord Kelvin on the "Utter Impracticability of Aeronautics" (https://zapatopi.net/kelvin/papers/interview_aeronautics_and_wireless.html).
- Philip Von Jolly, Planck's teacher, told him to not go into physics as "a highly developed, almost fully mature science which, now that the discovery of energy has crowned it, so to speak, will soon reach its final stability would have taken shape."
- The head of the US patent office wrote in 1902 "In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold."
Like I said, I'm skeptical about VR, AI, and so forth - but I'm more skeptical of promises of the end of history, or the end of technological growth. I think it's very tempting to look at something like space travel and say "a world where that happens is indistinguishable from a world where it doesn’t, for the average person." This isn't a new criticism of space travel; people have said this for the last 60 years. But communications satellites, GPS, etc. *have* been enormously significant inventions that have improved the lives of the average person, not just through direct use, but also through, e.g. allowing better automation of farm equipment which increases ag productivity.
Yes, but has the satellite revolution not already happened?
Yes and no! High-density LEO satellites like Starlink are really different than traditional geosynchronous satellites - vastly improved throughput and latency, which is why they can deliver rural broadband at a price & performance not too much worse than terrestrial internet.
But I think the other half of this is, in 1965 you probably wouldn't have predicted, like, a combine that uses Starlink and GPS to autonomously harvest a field. How this technology gets used depends on so many things - economics & scalability of production, complementary technologies, novel use cases arising from technological advancements in other fields or environmental changes, etc.
Well thanks Freddie. Now I need to go put on Everbody Hurts, curl up in a corner with my cat, and have a good cry.
I really love VR, but I can definitely see why other people don’t like it: there are few truly great games out there, and the wonkiness of wearing a headset and the need for enough space to use it make it a bit cumbersome to use regularly. Half Life: Alyx just isn’t enough to persuade the average gamer to buy in. Technology may be moving slower on truly life-changing applications and inventions, but so what? Living in the Big Boring is pretty damned interesting to me, and if it truly is the Forever Now, that makes me feel pretty good about things. Big change can mean big problems for small people, so maybe incremental change is the safe bet for the future.
This is a topic that a number of tech industry commentators, most notably including _Peter Thiel_ of all people, have been pushing on for a long time: revolutions in information technology, while nice, simply do not have the same level of impact as revolutions in the material world. Coal and steam power, the railroad, the assembly line -- these all had far more impact to everyday wealth and prosperity than the Internet ever will.
We're definitely seen a slowdown in innovation and change in the physical world. My understanding is people who study this see two big reasons for this:
1. We've simply run out of easy scientific advances and applications in the physical world; the low hanging fruit have all been plucked.
2. Changes to regulations, safetyism and a general aversion to changing the physical environment has made large scale improvements to the physical world much harder than previously.
My POV is that as a combination of 1 and 2, the _return on investment_ of innovation in physical devices is much lower than the ROI in software, and as a consequence our entire technology culture focuses exclusively on software. Everything else follows from that.
If it’s #2, countries without these impediments (China, mainly) will move innovation forward.
To some extent they have been. For example, they are building modern nuclear while the west isn’t. China has other problems though.
Singapore and Taiwan would be better examples.
I don't know about India, but I believe you can cross China of that list. It is currently looking ever more inward and grows ever more distrustful of foreigners. When the highest aspiration one has is to work for government, that's not the recipe for bold innovation.
The catch is that it's easy to see when we're on the second flat part of a past S-curve, but it's nigh-impossible to tell if we're on the first flat part of a coming one. For now, it looks like all the low-hanging fruit have been picked, but some new breakthrough or swerve may come along and produce a whole new bumper crop of such fruit. There's really no way of knowing either way, so there's not much point in either optimism or pessimism. Best to just acknowledge the uncertainty and live with it.
"I know I’m never going to convince most people that AI is not coming to rescue them from boredom and disappointment and let them live forever and bring back their beloved childhood dog Rusty and allow them to get kinky on the Holodeck. "
LOL. Well done.
I think homesteaders are going to be the new upper class by then end of this century. The global order started after WWII by the US and maintained by the US since then... the one that provided the world such marvelous advancement, peace and prosperity... the one that those same classroom kids and their older peers are demanding be expanded and destroyed at the same time... well it is coming to an end.
It is simply breathtaking the benefit and harm dichotomy of this common human tendency to always want more. My mother, God rest her soul, after being raised a poor country bumpkin that bought her clothing at Montgomery Wards and suffering a terrible first marriage with a man that could not keep a job, marries an enterprising second husband who provides an upper-class lifestyle for her. I remember her being so upset that her housekeeper was quitting (after all they had done for her) because she would have to do house work until she trained another. The poor housekeeping girl had to go back to Mexico to care for her sick mother. I remember being so disappointed in my mother at that point for becoming one of them. Thankfully it was only a temporary moment of her weakness... she was 95% above all the classism.
But everyone eventually has to rewrite the chapters of their life book to match their new reality. They eventually get pissed and resentful getting stuck in a chapter... they always want to turn the page. One problem is when their obsession to turn the page overwhelms their good judgement (they feel the need to do something different, and pick something bad). Another problem is that they forget the path they took to get where they are, and the lack of perspective makes them waste historical wisdom and thus repeat unnecessary mistakes.
I hire young people to work for me. I have been astounded that I have to teach them how to handle a cordless drill.... how to change a toilet paper role, and how to handle constructive criticism. Yes, they are witty, brilliant, educated and quick. They can communicate in binary semi-language and images with their peers in ways never seen before. But they are hugely ignorant in common sense and everyday life-skills. They are probably the least prepared generations for dealing with the coming collapse.
Not my kids though... I made sure.
After listening to Elon Musk's early November appearance on the JRE, I'm now convinced that we in the West are completely screwed because we no longer know how to manufacture 'stuff.' He just could not emphasize how difficult manufacturing is. I think his best example was that the weakest part in the manufacturing process dictates the overall speed of manufacture; so 9,999 parts can be made and installed with ease, but that last part that's troublesome threatens to destroy the operation.
Anyone can point to the Tesla gigafactory or the Seattle Boeing factory, but only 8.4% of workers are directly employed in manufacturing. This is catastrophic for America. It's not really about knowing how to "make" things per se, it's more about the collective knowledge society gains by having a wide swath of manufacturing knowledge in the country. We are fucked.
I'm 42. My generation wanted to move past dirty and labor-intensive manufacturing into a service-based economy. Good job, we did it 🎉🎉 and now we collectively don't know shit about making phones, or clothes, or TVs, or rockets, or cars, or books, or frankly anything.
Agree completely.
That trend is reversing somewhat, but it will never reach the point it once was. A much smaller portion of the population has been prepared to work in mfring.
People will abandon themselves to tech. It will make every major decision for them, from when to change jobs to what to eat for dinner. There will be explicitly AI controlled cults where members pool their incomes and the machines divvy it up.
People will stop asking their phones for directions and instead start asking them for permission.
The literal tech won't have to progress much further than it already has. The main change will be how we think about it.
Not life changing...but I love my plant and bug identification apps
My wife does, too. It comes in quite handy at the oddest of times.
This is a reasonable argument about the current state of consumer tech—and your description of AI aligns broadly with what most actual AI engineers and researchers think (I touched on this a little yesterday in https://dansitu.substack.com/p/power-technology-and-love).
But most technology isn't consumer tech, it's boring stuff that makes other things work better. The "Green Revolution" was an accumulation of fairly boring incremental improvements to agriculture that happened over the course of the 20th Century. Together they produced an astonishing increase in yields, especially in the developing world, that has enabled literally billions of additional human lives.
The same dull incrementalism has borne multiple agricultural and industrial revolutions that have taken human beings from a tiny ecological niche to a space-faring species. And the pace of incremental improvement is increasing. Minor improvements in manufacturing yields, cost-reduction, and supply chain technologies really add up. At a fundamental level, technology IS incrementalism—and though things may seem flat from the perspective of a lifetime, we've been living on an ultra-steep gradient for the past few hundred years.
While I do think some amazing consumer tech is in the pipeline (https://dansitu.substack.com/p/furby-is-the-future-of-ai), consumer gadgets have always been pretty unimportant compared to our shunting around of matter and energy with ever-increasing skill.
Yeah but which VCs are desperate to fund dull incrementalism
A surprising number I think! In my experience, the pseudo-financial weirdness of VC pitch decks makes it much easier to pitch an incremental efficiency improvement than a genuinely revolutionary approach (% efficiency gains translate to savings for customers, which translate to available margin for the product or service).
A lot of investment also goes towards general tools and platforms that make it easier to design efficiency-improving techniques for specific industries. It’s a bit obfuscated, but it’s very significant.
This hasn’t been my experience in the slightest. Every single VC will respond with “I don’t see how this can be a billion dollar business” when shown some incremental idea. It’s a meme at this point, and one they happily acknowledge.
Big businesses on the other hand... they are continuously investing billions in incremental improvements.
It has to be applicable at scale, otherwise it doesn’t make sense. For example, Flexport is a nice dull company: their platform for efficiently routing shipping containers allows them to charge 60% less per container than their competition (https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/21/container-full-of-cash/).
Vast numbers of containers are shipped each day, so this adds up to a lot of money. There are tons of companies like this, chipping away at costs in some small way that adds up at scale.
"Space-faring species" may be technically true, but the wording sounds like quite the optimistic stretch to me for a species that struggles to get anything into space without huge cost, and that can't do much more other than put some small structures and lots of rubbish in orbit, along with some flags on our moon every now and then.
We are not very competent at manipulating matter or energy. Nuclear fusion has so far gone nowhere outside of experiments, for example, and how else are we going to make any serious advancements in energy production? As far as I know, there is no better way to produce energy than fusion according to the laws of physics apart from direct conversion of mass to energy through antimatter annihilation which is impossible for us to even think of right now, and may not be possible at all in our current understanding.
Our manipulation of matter is not much better than it ever was; for one, we can't even operate much on smaller scales like the nanoscale and have made little advancements in terms of manufacturing or engineering for decades that I'm aware of, apart from carbon nanotubes which rather than being used the way they were imagined for e.g a space elevator, are used mostly to reinforce sports equipment like hockey sticks instead (also, it turns out medieval damascus steel had carbon nanotubes in it made through forging processes anyway).
Two, even if we do have nanomaterials and computers with 3nm semiconductor nodes, this is fundamentally no different from working with stone tools because you are manipulating the micro scale at the macro scale which is inefficient; the manipulation of smaller scales than the nanoscale like the femtoscale are unimaginable to us to even attempt.
Physics has slowed to a crawl and particle accelerators have made few meaningful discoveries with mostly null results, which are of course themselves meaningful, although it may take time for them to have an effect given all the careers at stake built on string theory and whatnot. Decades of research have failed to make much if any advancement on the biggest mysteries.
Optimism, however, always prevails over pessimism in science and thus scientists with optimistic outlooks will always receive undue attention over pessimists, of which there are many but few whose thoughts are given consideration. E.g., the physicists who believe quantum computing is impossible (practically speaking, in a way that's useful over conventional computing) are largely ignored completely compared to when someone at Microsoft or wherever wants to hype up the discovery of anyons and the idea of building a topographical quantum computer in two-dimensional space through braiding the particles that exist in lower dimensional space, which is a much more exciting idea (the fact we don't know enough about one-dimensional physics to know if it'd even theoretically work is less so).
I think all that is true—but on the timescale of human history we’re still very close to the moment when nuclear physics was first discovered, only a couple lifetimes ago.
It may feel day to day like we’re in a lull, but it’s more likely a local minima on an explosively steep hill. The problems are harder these days, but there’s a hell of a lot more human minds trying to solve them :)
Tech could probably eliminate violent crime over the next few decades via better surveillance and forensics tech, but we’ll probably leave that set of innovations on the table
Maybe? But they made that exact prediction literally Victorian England. We're just really bad at those kinds of predictions.
We’re bad at implementing them. Some countries have had no problem at all using tech to solve crime. Walking around places like Singapore make this evident.
"I know I’m a pessimist but I genuinely can’t think of any actually plausible new capabilities that smartphones might have in three years that they don’t have now." I actually feel that this is wildly optimistic. Maybe once these shitty avenues for the expression of creativity have run out, people will explore deeper wells of creativity and value creation.