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"Supersonic flight once looked inevitable until people stopped it." Things only happen if we make them happen. Game theory can make it hard to keep everyone from taking some action, but we can change the rules of the game to punish defectors more.
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…
You're using hindsight to define inevitability, which is exactly the circular reasoning my essay critiques. "It happened widely, therefore it was inevitable" isn't a useful framework, it's survivorship bias.
Using your IC example: they became cheap because of massive government investment in the space program and military procurement, not natural law. The Apollo Guidance Computer alone drove early IC demand. Different policy choices = different outcome.
Personal computing almost died multiple times. Xerox PARC had it all in 1973 but management killed it. IBM thought the market was ~5 computers total. The Homebrew Computer Club was nearly shut down for copyright infringement. Any of these inflection points going differently changes history.
Your "no moat" observation is telling - you're really describing business strategy (technologies that spread can't be monopolized) not philosophical inevitability. But even that's questionable: TCP/IP could have lost to OSI, the Web to Gopher or AOL's walled garden.
The counterfactual test: if these were truly inevitable, we'd see simultaneous independent invention everywhere. Instead we see: singular inventors, path dependence, and technologies that almost weren't (or actually weren't: where's our supersonic passenger travel?).
Calling only successes "inevitable" while ignoring what didn't happen or was actively prevented (nuclear proliferation, human cloning, various chemicals/drugs) demonstrates the selection bias in this thinking.
This is shallow. Game theory and coordination is the answer. Otherwise it's the same depth level as "if only the soldiers just stopped shooting at each other, the war would end".
That being said, regarding game theory and coordination: Wars DO end when people change the game's parameters. WWI's Christmas Truce happened despite every incentive against it. Catalonia chose not to pursue independence despite having voted for it. The Montreal Protocol solved ozone depletion despite classic tragedy of the commons dynamics.
My point isn't that coordination is easy - it's that treating it as impossible becomes self-fulfilling. When tech leaders invoke inevitability via game theory, they're choosing to accept those constraints rather than working to change them.
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…
Thank you for the comment and engaging with my thinking. You're using hindsight to define inevitability, which is exactly the circular reasoning my essay critiques. "It happened widely, therefore it was inevitable" isn't a useful framework, it's survivorship bias. Using your IC example: they became cheap because of massive government investment in the space program and military procurement, not natural law. The Apoll…
Making things is _hard_, and embodied expertise is critical.
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…
There's a reason Norway makes a lot of money from oil while Greenland doesn't. I'm not sure why the word moat doesn't apply here?
Sure, with enough money you can overcome any moat but to me that's the whole argument behind a moat. We have something right now that a competitor would need to spend a lot to reach and during that time we can just get ahead of them.
If you have an existing iron mine and coal, to me you have a moat over generic competitor in creating steel because you already have suppliers for your steel mill lined up. Although some may argue that those are actually anchors and that you could import both of them for cheaper and then supply your mill that way.
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 te…
That being said, it doesn't change my point about agency. Your prediction #2 (LLMs impacting the economy) seems "almost inevitable" precisely because thousands of people are actively working to make it true. If everyone stopped tomorrow - if OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc., all pivoted to other projects - would it still be inevitable?
The appearance of inevitability comes from observing massive coordinated human effort toward a goal, then mistaking that effort for natural law. It's like watching a thousand people pushing a boulder uphill and concluding "that boulder inevitably goes up."
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 h…
I wrote this essay to convince "unbelievers" that's why I tried to be as rigorous as I could
This is shallow. Game theory and coordination is the answer. Otherwise it's the same depth level as "if only the soldiers just stopped shooting at each other, the war would end".
Thanks for engaging. I think you meant it's obvious rather than shallow? If so, yes I agree but a lot of my friends disagree so I wrote this as rigorously as possible to explain why this is obvious. That being said, regarding game theory and coordination: Wars DO end when people change the game's parameters. WWI's Christmas Truce happened despite every incentive against it. Catalonia chose not to pursue independence…
While I see what you are getting at, and I think its super important we come up with philosophical frameworks to push back on the central idea in question (ie, the moral hazard of "its gonna happen anyway so why not pour a little more into the river").... I think your writing/responses miss the central point.
As I see it, the fundamental issue with this essay, and your responses, is you keep conflating impossible with probability zero. People are saying "this is inevitable" to mean this has probability 1 of occurring, with basic game theory reasoning (its a giant iterative prisoners dilemna), and your response "but it's possible". Yes, with measure zero.
Telling us that such a path surely exists isn't useful. If you want to push back on "inevitability" you need to find a credible path with probability > 0 (which is not the same as impossible).