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This is the logic flaw that got my attention.
If you’re told something’s inevitable, ask who’s claiming that and why.
Are they trying to beat you to the punch?
Do they want you to give in and buy their thing?
I wrote an essay critiquing Silicon Valley’s obsession with calling technologies “inevitable.” I argue that inevitability isn’t a fact but a rhetorical move that erases agency and responsibility. What if we treated predictions not as destiny, but as challenges?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My point isn't that coordination is easy - it's that treating it as impossible becomes self-fulfilling. 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…
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I think there's a misunderstanding (maybe my text wasn't clear. If so please point out where so I can fix it). We actually agree: even if the probability of successful coordination is only 10%, accepting inevitability makes it 0%. That difference matters enormously given the stakes. My argument isn't "coordination is definitely possible" but rather "believing it's impossible guara…
No, they're describing reality. As I posted in another comment, progress in technology drops capital requirements for innovation. Even if there's global coordination to stop AGI development right now, progress in tech means that in 30 years someone in their basement could do what OpenAI is doing right now but with commodity hardware. Preventing this would require an oppressive regime controlling basic information technology and knowledge to an extent that isn't palatable to anyone.
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…
There is an underlying natural law to IC's being cheap without any government involvement because printing out circuits with chemicals and light like a photocopier is inherently cheaper than the alternatives of vacuum tubes or discrete components mounted on a board. (For non-trivial circuits where the count/complexity of components exceed the capital cost of lithography etc equipment.)
The privately funded researchers of Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor already knew integrated circuits would be more cost-effective before the inventions were finally solved. Eliminating the rising labor costs of wiring up old-style discrete components was the motivation to invent integrated circuits.
Therefore, it's not realistic to ponder an alternate history where a government bureaucrat in charge of military spending would have ignored the intrinsic physical properties of ICs and kept choosing vacuum tubes for 1970s F-15 and F-16 fighter jets because he believed "ICs are not inevitable because I have agency to make them not inevitable". Every other rational military on the globe would have chosen ICs which would make American equipment uncompetitive.
What government military contracts did was take intrinsically cheaper technology and fund more iterations to help make it even cheaper.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I think there's a misunderstanding (maybe my text wasn't clear. If so please point out where so I can fix it). We actually agree: even if the probability of successful coordination is only 10%, accepting inevitability makes it 0%. That difference matters enormously given the stakes. My argument isn't "coordination is definitely possible" but rather "believing it's impossible guara…
> When tech leaders say "AGI is inevitable," they're not describing reality; they're shaping it by discouraging attempts to coordinate. No, they're describing reality. As I posted in another comment, progress in technology drops capital requirements for innovation. Even if there's global coordination to stop AGI development right now, progress in tech means that in 30 years someone in their basement could do what Ope…
As for "oppressive regime", we already do this for nuclear and biotech, and most people find it quite palatable! Nuclear materials are tightly controlled globally. Cloning humans is illegal almost everywhere. We've had the knowledge for both for decades, yet basement nukes and basement human clones aren't happening.
I'm not saying we should make it illegal, I'm just saying there are more gray areas than what's generally accounted for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I think there's a misunderstanding (maybe my text wasn't clear. If so please point out where so I can fix it). We actually agree: even if the probability of successful coordination is only 10%, accepting inevitability makes it 0%. That difference matters enormously given the stakes. My argument isn't "coordination is definitely possible" but rather "believing it's impossible guara…
> When tech leaders say "AGI is inevitable," they're not describing reality; they're shaping it by discouraging attempts to coordinate. No, they're describing reality. As I posted in another comment, progress in technology drops capital requirements for innovation. Even if there's global coordination to stop AGI development right now, progress in tech means that in 30 years someone in their basement could do what Ope…
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…
To your overall point though, and to the contrary of the type of thinking you're critiquing, the timing of these things is not inevitable. Computers didn't have to happen in the 50s, they could easily have waited 50 or 100 years if we didn't have things like wars or other technological breakthroughs that enabled them. For AI we might be stuck on incremental improvements on LLMs for a generation, or they might be obsolete in 5 years. They will be replaced by something better at some point, but confusing (intentionally or not) inevitable with soon is where the hype proves itself hollow.
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
You seem to link cars and ICEs, while ICEs predated cars by a century.
So the ice car wasn't inevitable. It was the car that we could build at that time given the technology we had. So it was only inevitable given the context. Change the context, change the outcome.