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Why Tech Inevitability is Self-Defeating

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Re: Why Tech Inevitability is Self-Defeating

#11

Post by marcosdumay »

Joker_vD wrote: post #6

> You’ll say, “They got lucky, it had to happen, if not them someone else. Well. If you look at the previous examples of sudden technological breakthroughs, it's kind of amazing how many things were suddenly invented almost simultaneously yet independently. But then, of course, some things just straight up failed to be invented e.g. Chinese-style wheelbarrow in the West.

Yes. The probability of people inventing something seems to vary widely from "everybody can sustain that problem for centuries until somebody has a good idea" to "the moment people know the requirements, everybody will invent this".

And it's very unlikely that we can know where any invention falls on that distribution before it's made. We may not even be certain about some after they are made.

Anybody talking about tech inevitability or some universal version of the Great Men theory (in support or rejection) is wrong.

Re: Why Tech Inevitability is Self-Defeating

#12

Post by korse »

philipkglass wrote: post #8
Joker_vD wrote: post #6

> You’ll say, “They got lucky, it had to happen, if not them someone else. Well. If you look at the previous examples of sudden technological breakthroughs, it's kind of amazing how many things were suddenly invented almost simultaneously yet independently. But then, of course, some things just straight up failed to be invented e.g. Chinese-style wheelbarrow in the West.

But then, of course, some things just straight up failed to be invented e.g. Chinese-style wheelbarrow in the West. Thanks for this remark. This was really interesting: "How to Downsize a Transport Network: The Chinese Wheelbarrow" https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/how-to-downsize-a-...

Excellent link! Thank you.

Re: Why Tech Inevitability is Self-Defeating

#13

Post by ath3nd »

There is also a great article about the same subject from Tom Renner: https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/

Sam, Elon, Zuck are conmen, husks of people, empty inside and not knowing what to do with themselves but hoard money. In their pointless quest to become the proverbial dragon on a mountain of gold, they are trying to control, bully and manipulate the world to their vision of how it should be.

We know how this goes:

- Facebook contributed to multiple atrocities and genocides, actively promoted warlords and dictators

- Twitter after being acquired from Musk is just an echo chamber of fascism and white supremacy and misinformation

- Sam...is just..a slimy dude. He made a coup in something that was supposed to be free and open, and made it ugly and about money and profits, riding on the work of idealists and forgetting all his pledges and manifestos just in the pursuit of money

Those people rising to power and prominence is not inevitable. If only they had childhood validation, I think they might have turned out to be normal people and done less harm to the world. Sadly, they were probably neglected as children or dropped on their head repeatedly. I blame the parents.

Re: Why Tech Inevitability is Self-Defeating

#15

Post by ttoinou »

Animats wrote: post #10

Technology is inevitable if a lot of people can independently do it without huge resources, and the result is useful. - Personal computing - inevitable. Once ICs became cheap, it started happening, with no one effort dominating. - Moon landing - not inevitable. Huge resource commitment required, and not repeated since. - Internal combustion engine - inevitable. Once fuels and steel were available, it was possible to…

  - Nuclear weapons - not inevitable. Uranium separation is so hard that somebody had to spend billions to get it to work at all. It wasn't clear that fission could be made to work.
The mainstream explanation is that the threat that someone else could be researching and investing is enough of push to try yourself

  Looking at the issue in this way moves it from rhetoric to reality.
I would say moving from rhetoric to a simple 3 parameters model ("how many people can research this, how much resources it takes, how useful the promised result it")

Re: Why Tech Inevitability is Self-Defeating

#16

Post by CGMthrowaway »

Animats wrote: post #10

Technology is inevitable if a lot of people can independently do it without huge resources, and the result is useful. - Personal computing - inevitable. Once ICs became cheap, it started happening, with no one effort dominating. - Moon landing - not inevitable. Huge resource commitment required, and not repeated since. - Internal combustion engine - inevitable. Once fuels and steel were available, it was possible to…

>Note that none of the inevitable technologies have a "moat".

Ironically, despite not having a moat, the inevitable technologies have been however far more lucrative.

With a few more examples I can make the point stronger.

Inevitable: printing press, vaccines, refrigeration, social media Not inevitable: reusable rockets, CRISPR, GPS, high speed rail

Re: Why Tech Inevitability is Self-Defeating

#17

Post by GMoromisato »

The premise of the article hinges on the fact that it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future:

> ... it’s impossible for us to know if a prediction is inevitable or not.

But I think that ignores that some predictions are more likely to happen than others. For example, here are two predictions:

1. ASI will be achieved in the next ten years.

2. LLMs will have a large impact on the economy in the next ten years.

I'm sure it's debatable, but I think prediction #2 is very likely to be true--I would say it's almost inevitable. But I don't think #1 is inevitable.

Re: Why Tech Inevitability is Self-Defeating

#18

Post by worldsayshi »

Animats wrote: post #10

Technology is inevitable if a lot of people can independently do it without huge resources, and the result is useful. - Personal computing - inevitable. Once ICs became cheap, it started happening, with no one effort dominating. - Moon landing - not inevitable. Huge resource commitment required, and not repeated since. - Internal combustion engine - inevitable. Once fuels and steel were available, it was possible to…

> Internal combustion engine - inevitable

This fails to account for competing technologies. If batteries were good enough at the time when we sought to build cars we might've skipped ICE entirely and gone all in on electric cars.

At any point in time there are multiple possible outcomes. The one that ends up being dominant seems so in retrospect because it has been refined and we can follow all the events leading up to it. But we don't see all the paths that failed selection because they weren't competitive enough at that point in time compared to the alternative.

Re: Why Tech Inevitability is Self-Defeating

#20

Post by conception »

Animats wrote: post #10

Technology is inevitable if a lot of people can independently do it without huge resources, and the result is useful. - Personal computing - inevitable. Once ICs became cheap, it started happening, with no one effort dominating. - Moon landing - not inevitable. Huge resource commitment required, and not repeated since. - Internal combustion engine - inevitable. Once fuels and steel were available, it was possible to…

I would only note that having fuel available was not inevitable and we just happen to be lucky that we have lots of plant matter that got changed into easily accessible oil. This is one of the reasons why humanity is kind of cooked if there is a major war or collapse of civilization. That easy energy is gone
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