[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.