Calling SEO adriadnology is pretty cool. I read Summa Technologae a long time ago in German translation. It wasn't easy to read, but had many interesting idea

Calling SEO adriadnology is pretty cool. I read Summa Technologae a long time ago in German translation. It wasn't easy to read, but had many interesting ideas. Two concepts I still remember and think of occasionally: - the concept of "technology evolution" and especially that technologies that soon get replaced with something else often develop "bizarre", e.g. very large, forms shortly before extinction. Lem extrapolated that from dinosaurs (although I think it showed a weak grasp of natural history because for dinosaurs size was not correlated with their extinction). Lem's technological example were steam train engines, which developed some bizarre forms shortly before they were replaced with Diesel and electric engines. It's interesting to think how this observation applies to our current technology. For example the monster die GPUs that Nvidia is building now for deep learning could be the last flowering before being replaced with far smaller and more efficient neuromorphic chips. - Another interesting observation was the cost of technology. He had the example of fighter planes in the first world war roughly being the cost of a car, in the 2nd world war 10 cars and now getting many orders of magnitudes more expensive. In the 60ies this trend was only beginning, but it's clear it's continuing. The prediction was that at some point even super powers would only be able to afford a few planes each, and it's already true if you consider the costs of the American B2 (until manned planes get replaced by far cheaper drones) We see similar trends with chip production. Originally even small companies could set up a computer chip fab, but now even very large companies like Intel or Samsung or TSMC can only afford a few and the costs are still growing quickly. - (the full book has many more of course, but it's hard to remember them all. Lem's books in general have a lot of ideas per page)