[HN Gopher] The Death and Birth of Technological Revolutions
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The Death and Birth of Technological Revolutions
Author : oedmarap
Score : 78 points
Date : 2021-10-12 13:31 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| Chris2048 wrote:
| and what happens when "the singularity" spawns tech so fast that
| a new tech curve begins before a previous one achieves maturity?
| Pile curves on top of curves and different shapes will appear.
|
| When we start seeing "heirloom" laptops maybe, but right now the
| tech curves are defined by disposable, generational tech items.
| viksit wrote:
| > "capitalism really only becomes legitimate when the greed of
| some is for the benefit of the many."
|
| > "Crypto, though, is about the introduction of scarcity; its
| payoff is decentralization, at the cost, at least for now, of
| convenience and speed."
|
| ergo, crypto is,
|
| - decentralizing the "greed of some" away from centralized tech
| companies.
|
| - decentralizing the "benefits to many" away from centralized
| governments.
|
| if this is true, and this will lead the vanguard of the next
| revolution, then his closing point is that crypto is still in its
| installation period. and a turning point in ~10 years, and a
| widespread deployment in ~20 (if we follow the mac and mosaic
| timelines and shorten them by a bit).
|
| society in 20y has the potential to have ridiculously different
| distributions of wealth than we can imagine!
| viksit wrote:
| haha now i'm curious why this was downvoted
| WhisperingShiba wrote:
| You already know why, it just boggles the mind; that its
| really happening on this forum.
| magwa101 wrote:
| These curves are in a time of "free marketplace, anything goes"
| fever. The climate reckoning is here. These curves go out the
| window as we are forced to embrace technologies that improve
| lives and the environment. Climate change will pick the winners
| and losers, or we will all be losers.
| bsedlm wrote:
| I feel like this analysis do not take into account the true
| magnitude of computing in respect to language.
|
| Long ago we invented writing, so a literal tradition (as opposed
| to an oral tradition) was possible. But the transition took
| thousands of years.
|
| The transition from the law being what a monarch speaks (the
| scribes may use writing but what is written is only the law
| because of who spoke it) to a state governed not by some
| monarch's speech but by a written document.
|
| Walter J. Ong made a career studying the impact of technology on
| language and culture.
|
| Thus, IMHO computing is an evolution of language on the same
| league as the transition from oral cultures to literal cultures.
| It's reasonable to expect this transformation to take hundreds of
| years (at least). And so this analysis is incomplete; it does not
| take into account the magnitude of this transition.
| ajuc wrote:
| > The transition from the law being what a monarch speaks (the
| scribes may use writing but what is written is only the law
| because of who spoke it) to a state governed not by some
| monarch's speech but by a written document.
|
| I don't think this is related. There were illiterate
| communities where law was communal not autocratic and the
| leaders were elected. In fact autocracy often came to these
| places bundled with writing system and one flavor of
| christianity or another.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Yes, "computers that do the stuff", and "communication method
| that can be verified up to self-consistency" are best not
| conflated.
|
| I like thinking about https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-
| and-the-stream-a-te... and https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/
|
| Historically, desk jobs meant producing and computing streams
| of documents, and the integration was mostly informal, in our
| heads. Now, we can collaborate directly rather than shitting
| out the derivative of what we actually want. This is a huge new
| capability to enable way better collaboration.
|
| We've seen in programming, but seeing it in an existing
| discipline like (pure) math would better demonstrate it's
| ability to _supercede_ existing methods rather than just live
| along side them as the weird new thing. From pure math, I hope
| it hits applied math and the sciences next, bridging the
| shitty-python--LaTeX--thinking divide and getting us more
| reproducible and trustworthy experimental analysis. Many cool
| things after that.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Good read. I think this age's "turning point" is going to last
| quite a while, many decades probably. Trust in governments is at
| an all-time low; they no longer work for the people and for the
| betterment of society anymore, rather they are actively against
| the people. And the people have little to no recourse. Something
| has to change with governance before the technology is of benefit
| to society. Or people need to have a mass awakening with how
| technology is being actively used to erode our society. Not
| hopeful about either.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Trust in governments is at an all-time low;
|
| Isn't it the opposite? The progressives are in power, and they
| believe every problem has a government solution.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| And people who say political flames like this surely don't
| trust the government, right?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Isn't it the opposite?
|
| No. While "Trust in governments is at all time low" is
| probably unsupportable hyperbole, the opposite isn't true
| either.
|
| > The progressives are in power
|
| No, they aren't, in the US at least. A liberal/progressive
| coalition holds effective legislative power in the House, a
| majority capable of only exceptional legislation in the
| Senate (because of the filibuster rule, and because a couple
| moderates that make up the balance of a majority vote with
| the coalition on most things but oppose any movement in the
| rules which prevent it from exercising general legislative
| power in the Senate), with a liberal holding the Presidency.
|
| > and they believe every problem has a government solution.
|
| No, that's not what either progressives _or_ the liberals
| they are in a working coalition with believe. (They tend to
| believe that government has solutions to some things that the
| Right doesn 't trust government to do, at the same time
| they'd generally exclude government from some functions the
| Right loves to interpose it into.)
| chrchang523 wrote:
| Source for "Trust in governments is at an all-time low"? I
| looked at the G7 numbers for 2006-2020 at
| https://data.oecd.org/gga/trust-in-government.htm , and they do
| not seem consistent with this claim.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Arguably the turning point in the 1800s lasted a while,
| potentially from 1848 (the year of revolution) to 1871 (end of
| the Franco-Prussian war and the creation of the German Empire).
| Some of us might have to live our entire lives in what turned
| out later to be a turning point.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The next technological revolution will be biotech. The mRNA
| vaccines are the vanguard of that. The key technology is now in
| place - being able to design a gene letter by letter, and
| inserting that into the genome.
|
| We don't know how that will play out, just like we didn't know
| how the microprocessor would play out (scifi fell flat on its
| face there). But it will change everything.
| burlesona wrote:
| I agree with this. I think there's also a great parallel
| analogy in the recent past:
|
| In the 1960's we were at the top of the curve for
| transportation technology, with space travel happening for the
| first time. In one lifetime people had gone from steam trains +
| horses to jet aircraft and humans landing on the moon. So if
| you look at the narratives of the time, it was that we would
| soon have flying cars, moon colonies, the future would be "the
| Jetsons." Meanwhile people did not anticipate the
| telecommunication and computing revolutions that were just over
| the horizon. Watch 2001 and one of the characters takes a
| commercial flight to the moon on a Pan-Am spaceship, but then
| makes a (video) phone call from a pay phone booth on the ship.
| WOW!
|
| I think today we are in the same space on the computer
| revolution. Our sci-fi stores today tend toward either magical
| or dystopian AI, androids, etc. Ready Player One, etc. But
| really, the next great surge is biotech. What if we could
| develop biological products in the same way we develop
| electronic products? Who can even imagine what good and bad
| things that would bring about, and how profoundly the world
| around us could change?
|
| I think there's a great chance that young adults today will
| have a life experience much like people born around 1900 did -
| that someday our grandchildren will ask us what life was like
| and our childhood without (biotech revolution) will sound as
| impossibly antiquated to them as life without cell phones and
| the internet sounds to children today.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > But really, the next great surge is biotech.
|
| totally agree > Who can even imagine what
| good and bad things that would bring about, and how
| profoundly the world around us could change?
|
| i always thought it would be amazing if you could pick fresh
| chicken breasts (sealed in some kind of sterilized sack) off
| a tree just like apples and pears... just buy some seeds from
| the local store and boom, chicken dinners for everyone lol
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm still sometimes amazed that I'm in a video conference
| with people from 4 continents. Just today I was interviewed
| for a couple hours by an outfit in Uzbekistan. When I grew up
| people were cut off from each other if more than an hour's
| drive away.
| thewarrior wrote:
| Imagine a programming language where changing a few
| instructions gives you anything from a bacteria to an elephant
| to a vaccine.
|
| This is a form of programming that makes what we currently do
| look like bashing rocks together.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| that reminds me of "Summa technologiae" by Stanislaw Lem, and how
| he juxtaposes the evolutions: biological, technological,
| social... How all grows and grows and then dies out, giving way
| to smaller-and-mobiler forms (lizards...dinosaurs -> mammals;
| baloons...dirigibles -> airplanes)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Technologiae
| teddyh wrote:
| Computers, mainframes, client-server, PC revolution.
|
| E-mail, blogs, LiveJournal, MySpace, FaceBook... ?
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| This still feels to "tech exogenous to the economy" for me.
| Society changed faster when we had fuller employment, as
| automation gets more investment when workers are scares,
| expensive, and unruly. Crazy population growth in the 19th
| century would prop up aggregate demand even when there wasn't
| that much individual consumption going on (by modern standards).
|
| To avoid stagnation, I see 3 options:
|
| - Raise labor costs by collective decision
|
| - Reduce working hours per person by collective decision
|
| - Do more fiscal policy to boost demand (and avoid cooking
| ourselves)
|
| Ideally, some of each. Otherwise, no one will need us
| programmers: labor is too damn cheap, especially once the climate
| refuges start pouring in.
| imtringued wrote:
| I fully agree. The real question is whether we can keep this
| "full employment" culture.
|
| If you have "everything" you truly want and you keep working
| then what exactly are you working for? You're losing time and
| getting nothing you truly want in return. Really, the only
| thing you can do is to prepare for the future. People try to
| prepare by saving money but saving money is a zero sum game.
| When you save, someone else has to borrow for there to be a net
| 0 impact to the economy.
|
| If people really insisted on working full time 40 hours per
| week then they would have to spend that time building long
| lasting projects. Climate change comes to mind. CO2 reductions
| are basically permanent. Given enough reductions we will never
| hit 1.5Cdeg of warming.
|
| If we do away with the full employment culture then we still
| need to figure out a way to make supply and demand balance out
| on an individual level. A reduction in work hours per week is
| better than nothing but there are always people with high
| enough demand that it makes sense for them to work more. "you
| eat less, you work less" and "you eat more, you work more" on
| an individual level.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| :) nice to read all that
|
| > If people really insisted on working full time 40 hours per
| week then they would have to spend that time building long
| lasting projects. Climate change comes to mind. CO2
| reductions are basically permanent. Given enough reductions
| we will never hit 1.5Cdeg of warming.
|
| In some sense, because the problems are so abstract, it's
| good to think about extrinsic vs intrinsic rewards. I cannot
| empathize with the victims of 40 year out ecofashism, but I
| can nonetheless get a warm fuzzy feeling from whatever I'm
| doing right now.
|
| https://vebaccount.substack.com/p/under-full-employment-
| your... is relevant.
|
| > If we do away with the full employment culture then we
| still need to figure out a way to make supply and demand
| balance out on an individual level. A reduction in work hours
| per week is better than nothing but there are always people
| with high enough demand that it makes sense for them to work
| more. "you eat less, you work less" and "you eat more, you
| work more" on an individual level.
|
| Absolutely. The idea that we suffering because "all carrot"
| won't suffice is, frankly ludicrous. Ironically, an all-
| carrot labor market would probably make it act in a more
| simplistic Econ 101 fashion than today.
|
| Certainly there won't be an aggregate supply shortfall, as
| the fearmongers allege.
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