The Death and Birth of Technological Revolutions
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 1.5C° 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.
> 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 1.5C° 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.
The information revolution started with the invention of paper in China, combined with movable type, and the screw press. Gutenberg is one key figure in this story, but not the only one, as it is still ongoing.
The rapid spread and democratization of publishing resulted in books such as Gregorius Agricola's "De Re Metallica", one of the first practical handbooks on the mining, refining, and crafting of metals.
This along with the freedom of inquiry that resulted from the fracturing of the Holy Roman Empire, and the financial innovations from the Dutch and others, led to a new entrepreneurial spirit.
The threads from this point are diverse, and can be woven into an almost infinite number of tapestries, of course Jacquard's idea to weave using data stored on a chain of linked cards would go on to be another theme.
Those cards became the basis of Hollerith cards, and the true industrialized information explosion of the 1890s.
... and you see how it keeps going, and going... it's all one revolution, the information revolution ... and we're nowhere near done yet.
Isn't it the opposite? The progressives are in power, and they believe every problem has a government solution.
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.)
E-mail, blogs, LiveJournal, MySpace, FaceBook… ?
When we start seeing "heirloom" laptops maybe, but right now the tech curves are defined by disposable, generational tech items.
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.
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.
> But really, the next great surge is biotech.
> Who can even imagine what good and bad things that would bring about, and how profoundly the world around us could change?
The immediate potential for biotech is in disease prevention and cure, and to a limited degree, lifespan extension. Cures for diabetes, obesity, dementia, hypertension, COPD, cardiovascular disease, congenital and genetic disorders, various cancers. Possibly even regrowing organs.
Cures (and better management) of any or all of these would be life-changing for the sufferers. Of course it has to be attempted.
The macro effect on society would be to increase lifespan, and therefore the proportion of old people. Old people tend to be socially conservative, they have all the money, and they vote more than younger people do. Wealthy people obsess about loss and risk avoidance.
I foresee an ossification, rule by methuselahs. So life would change less quickly than it does now. NIMBY on steroids.
There would be huge shortages of nursing homes, care workers, early bird dinner spots, seniors cruises, etc. (sorry, had to throw some jokes in there). Social security benefits would collapse. Retirement age would absolutely have to change, or we'd simply have massive unemployment (imagine if people lived to 120 but couldn't find work for the last 50-60 years of their life).
Thinking about voting preferences is really just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Society would either collapse or see massive shifts simply due to physical needs, well before voting preferences became the dominant factor.
For example, vastly more efficient food production. Imagine meat being grown in a petri dish. It would use far, far less resources. The nutritional value could be enhanced. It could taste like the best beef.
This is a form of programming that makes what we currently do look like bashing rocks together.
> “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!