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 contain the explosion of an IC engine, and many people started making them.
- 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.
- Radio - inevitable. Once something with gain and something that rectifies were invented, radio was something many people could work upon.
- Steel - interesting case. Steel is thousands of years old, but mass production of steel only dates to 1880. It took considerable metallurgical research to get it right, with about 10,000 tries before the Bessemer converter worked reliably. No one had done that before, and one person did it.
- "AI", via the machine learning route - inevitable. The concepts date from the 1960s, but it took half a century of IC development to make them feasible.
Looking at the issue in this way moves it from rhetoric to reality.
Note that none of the inevitable technologies have a "moat".
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 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.
- 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")
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.
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
After reading “The Making Of The Atomic Bomb” I came away with the impression that development of nuclear bombs was 100% inevitable after 1938 when the German scientists proved splitting uranium isotope could sustain a chain reaction. All of the top physicists in the world instantly knew this could be used to create a super weapon. Every power in WWII had a nuclear program but only 1 had the resources to execute on it. Being the only country with a nuke is basically a checkmate on the world order and game theory demands it be created once it was known it was possible
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.
> 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.
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 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.
"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.
> In fact, increasingly, hype is the only thing that counts, as larger and larger chunk of investment money is chasing it – to the detriment of everything else that happens not to bolt the hyped tech onto its unrelated but otherwise solid product or service.
> This reminds me of a similar article that might have been posted on here about tech now focusing on hype as the product.
It kind of reminds me of the money-manking strategy where someone buys a business with a good reputation, debases its products, then profits from the (temporary) price premium it can still charge due to is prior reputation.
These people are well on the way to ruining tech's reputation, but they don't care because they hope to get rich(er) in the process.
You're absolutely right that predictions exist on a probability spectrum. I focused on the binary for rhetorical clarity, but you're correct that some predictions are more likely than others.
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."
Interesting, beautifully written; I especially like the ending:
"Inevitability is rhetoric, not truth. Predictions aren’t laws of nature, they are acts of persuasion. And because no one can ever know how much is determined and how much is open, the only rational stance is to live as agents. Supersonic flight once looked inevitable until people stopped it. You, too, have already reshaped the world once; you can do it again. Don’t give away your power."
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?
Manifestations of the inevitable are older than what sillyvalley is cooking with (or coked up on), even older than the Manifest Destiny. Some pin it to the Renaissance, as opposed to the "dark ages" prior. Tagging the prior age dark (dark... that must be bad, right? We don't want to be on the bad team, right?) of course is a rhetorical move.
> 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?
> TINA (as characterized by explicit use of "there is no alternative" and declarations of necessity, inevitability, and irrefutability of certain policies) can be considered a political strategy in both democratic and autocratic regimes. Its rhetoric allows politicians to reduce the scope of available policy choices, limiting the expectations of their electorate and avoiding the blame for bad, but "unescapable" policies.
> TINA allows decisions to appear not as a political choice, but as a matter of adherence to universal truth and common sense. Due to the switch from public deliberations to following the expert opinions, debates are shortened, and therefore input of an individual voter is diminished, so TINA is politically paternalistic.
Tech salesmen want you to think you have no choice but buy what they are selling and that you cannot resist a world where they sell more.
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.
Animats|5 months ago
- 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 contain the explosion of an IC engine, and many people started making them.
- 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.
- Radio - inevitable. Once something with gain and something that rectifies were invented, radio was something many people could work upon.
- Steel - interesting case. Steel is thousands of years old, but mass production of steel only dates to 1880. It took considerable metallurgical research to get it right, with about 10,000 tries before the Bessemer converter worked reliably. No one had done that before, and one person did it.
- "AI", via the machine learning route - inevitable. The concepts date from the 1960s, but it took half a century of IC development to make them feasible.
Looking at the issue in this way moves it from rhetoric to reality.
Note that none of the inevitable technologies have a "moat".
top256|5 months ago
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.
ttoinou|5 months ago
worldsayshi|5 months ago
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.
conception|5 months ago
myfavoritetings|5 months ago
lesuorac|5 months ago
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.
CGMthrowaway|5 months ago
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
Joker_vD|5 months ago
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.
philipkglass|5 months ago
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-...
marcosdumay|5 months ago
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.
bonoboTP|5 months ago
top256|5 months ago
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.
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
datadrivenangel|5 months ago
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.
top256|5 months ago
avelis|5 months ago
https://rys.io/en/180.html#hype-is-the-product
> In fact, increasingly, hype is the only thing that counts, as larger and larger chunk of investment money is chasing it – to the detriment of everything else that happens not to bolt the hyped tech onto its unrelated but otherwise solid product or service.
> The bubble grows. The line goes up.
> Because the hype is the product.
palmotea|5 months ago
It kind of reminds me of the money-manking strategy where someone buys a business with a good reputation, debases its products, then profits from the (temporary) price premium it can still charge due to is prior reputation.
These people are well on the way to ruining tech's reputation, but they don't care because they hope to get rich(er) in the process.
GMoromisato|5 months ago
> ... 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.
top256|5 months ago
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."
BinaryIgor|5 months ago
"Inevitability is rhetoric, not truth. Predictions aren’t laws of nature, they are acts of persuasion. And because no one can ever know how much is determined and how much is open, the only rational stance is to live as agents. Supersonic flight once looked inevitable until people stopped it. You, too, have already reshaped the world once; you can do it again. Don’t give away your power."
top256|5 months ago
arscan|5 months ago
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
cadamsdotcom|5 months ago
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?
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
top256|5 months ago
tolciho|5 months ago
palmotea|5 months ago
This essay?
You are right. And I'd bet Silicon Valley is aping this bit of neoliberal rhetoric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative.
> TINA (as characterized by explicit use of "there is no alternative" and declarations of necessity, inevitability, and irrefutability of certain policies) can be considered a political strategy in both democratic and autocratic regimes. Its rhetoric allows politicians to reduce the scope of available policy choices, limiting the expectations of their electorate and avoiding the blame for bad, but "unescapable" policies.
> TINA allows decisions to appear not as a political choice, but as a matter of adherence to universal truth and common sense. Due to the switch from public deliberations to following the expert opinions, debates are shortened, and therefore input of an individual voter is diminished, so TINA is politically paternalistic.
Tech salesmen want you to think you have no choice but buy what they are selling and that you cannot resist a world where they sell more.
snvzz|5 months ago
e.g. RISC-V is inevitable.
partomniscient|5 months ago
RaAsC|5 months ago
top256|5 months ago
ath3nd|5 months ago
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.
top256|5 months ago
I wrote this essay to convince "unbelievers" that's why I tried to be as rigorous as I could
unfitted2545|5 months ago
vin92997|5 months ago