[top256]

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.

[jasode]

>Using your IC example: they became cheap because of massive government investment in the space program and military procurement, not natural law.

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.

[top256]

I agree that physical and economic constraints matter, but the point I’m making is that cost curves themselves are contingent on human choices. ICs didn’t suddenly become cheap on their own; they became cheap because governments and corporations poured billions into scaling them. That’s not denying the underlying advantage, but showing how rhetoric of inevitability erases the political and economic decisions that actually drive those curves.

[naasking]

> 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.

Yes, history would be different, but that doesn't mean ICs and PCs weren't inevitable. As technology improves the capital required to innovate drops. At some point hobbyists can start making ICs at home. I think something like this happened with 3D printing.

> 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?).

I disagree. Inevitability means that something will manifest at some point on a long enough timeline, not that it will necessarily manifest nearly concurrently on that timeline. Concurrent invention happens a lot and is a strong argument for inevitability, but isn't strictly necessary for inevitability.

For example, death is inevitable, even if we solve aging; we know you won't involuntarily die of old age in such a world, but you will die of something else, even if it's the heat death of the universe.

[MengerSponge]

An interesting counterpoint to the inevitability of ICs: Consider East Germany's semiconductor industry. They had state backing and proof of viability but they still couldn't generate a competitive product.

Making things is _hard_, and embodied expertise is critical.

[top256]

Great example. Thanks a lot! Can I add it my essay?

[efsavage]

I think the concepts are inevitable, not so much the specific implementations. PCs were an inevitable stop on the fairly standard adoption path from many workers to one machine (Mainframes), 1:1 (PCs), many machines to one worker (I have at least 10 computers within arms reach right now). IBM/Windows/Apple weren't inevitable, they were just manifestations of that. ICs weren't inevitable, but commoditized computer parts were. TCP wasn't inevitable, but a lingua franca for networks was. LLMs weren't inevitable, but AI is.

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.

[Animats]

> 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.

Not really. While all the Government-funded stuff was going on, International Business Machines was slowly advancing their business machines. There was a long path from the IBM 601 (1931, mechanical multiplication, plugboard programmed), the IBM 602 (1946, mechanical division), the IBM 602A ("a 602 that worked"), the IBM 603 (1946, multiplication and division with vacuum tubes, but still plugboard programmed), the IBM 604 (1948, with 1,250 tubes), and finally the IBM 650 (1954, true stored program, tube logic, drum main memory, Knuth's first computer.) The government-funded machines were more advanced but very low volume. All of the 600 series machines were mass-produced and had long operating careers making businesses go.

Transistors had to progress more before IBM business computers became transistorized. The IBM 1401. (1959, all transistor, 12,000 built) launched business computing in a big way. From then on, the business side, rather than the government side, drove the technology. All that would have happened without WWII. WWII held up the IBM 603 electronic multiplier by several years; IBM was trying out electronic arithmetic in the late 1930s.

[top256]

That distinction is really useful. My critique is aimed at how often “inevitability talk” blurs those two levels together. It’s one thing to say “networks need a lingua franca,” it’s another to say “TCP/IP was inevitable.” When people collapse the concept into the specific implementation, that’s when the rhetoric becomes persuasive but misleading.

[BinaryIgor]

You examples with human cloning and some chemicals/drugs plus potentially nuclear energy being first favored then disfavored (now seems to be getting back to favors) are telling; it shows that outside the pure properties of technology itself, a lot depends on a given society/civilization value systems and who gets to decide what's important and allowed and what's not

[bluefirebrand]

> The counterfactual test: if these were truly inevitable, we'd see simultaneous independent invention everywhere

I don't think there is any reason to think that " a technology was inevitable" implies that the technology would be invented simultaneously in multiple places